I'd love to have a conversation with you about something that I think um stoicism is missed oh uh oh let's hear it yeah how dare you just got thick here didn't it is the way that we work with emotions okay and so there is an um there's an ordering in stoicism about thoughts get your thoughts right sure you know work from that place and I go yeah thoughts are Upstream we know from best-in-class modern science that it is bir directional thoughts influence emotions emotions influence thoughts and then in between we've got feelings which is our
subjective interpretation of the raw data of emotions so feelings are like private and they're internal and emotions are public and observable sure so heart pounding is an emotion yeah and then how you label it is your feeling okay so I think we need more compassion I think we need to work from emotion because we've numb them for so long and we've been afraid of them for so long and I do think at the time of stoicism um it made perfect sense not to be run over by emotions and not look if you're going to be
over emotional you can't do and make the hard decisions I can't count on you because we've got hard decisions to make I need to kill 100,000 people yeah or or I could you could be killed at any moment your kid could die of some terrible disease at any moment and if you panic and you're overrun by emotion then then you can't make the clear decision because we do know that emotions Cloud judgment judgment yeah okay that's a brain structure type of thing okay now but if you have a If You Can Dance well with emotion
and you can dance well with thoughts and you can play there just a little bit more I think the world is calling for not an uncontrollable emotional human but a thoughtful compassionate dare I say person that is working to make something better that's where purpose is so important yeah because purpose tends to be about something that's bigger than you sure right and that tends to be about the planet or other people or animals or something right agreed so so I I would love so I'm caught in and I've been looking forward to talking to you
about this because I think you'll have a point of view here that I'm missing well there's this stereotype of the stoics being totally emotionless being robotic sort of stuffing it all down uh you know suppressing it or being somehow getting to some monk-like Transcendent state where you no longer feel emotions or anything at all which I think totally misses it so I did this book a few years ago called lives of the stoks where instead of sort of really like diving into what the stok said I just tried to write these biographies of who they
were now the stoics got married the stoics had kids the stoics made works of art the stoics played Sports the stoics fought for political causes there there was this whole generation of stoics called the stoic opposition which was basically a series of resistance fighters who gave their lives in in many cases against the tyranny of like the several bad Emperors in a row including Nero so and there's even one sto there's there's a sto named cus who died of laughter like he just laughing so hard he was old he probably had a heart attack and
died so so I think when we actually look at who they were in practice it's very different than maybe what comes off in the page and so my my sort of take and maybe this is a modern interpretation which I'm also okay with like they're dead they can't they can't get mad at me for changing things but my interpretation is that the stoics were not about the suppression of the emotion but about understanding and processing and then hopefully making fewer decisions on those emotions so I like your distinction between having the emotion and the feel
like like being angry and punching someone because you're angry are different things right so to me stoicism is the uh stopping yourself before you throw the punch as opposed to stopping yourself before you get upset that someone called you a terrible name yeah and then the thing that I'm I wrestle with and I just like I said early on like stoicism is awesome and I've been attracted to it and I wouldn't have thought this probably five years ago that wait we need more compassion AG so I and then if you square it with relationship based
okay so that's where that at finding Mastery that's we're using that in our culture to be a relationship based organization as well and to be in a relationship based organization I need to know not only your thoughts that's good I need to know your history I need to know the way you feel about your future and your history and it's the feelings that allows for uh the deeper knowing and so I'm just I just want to ring the bell a little bit here about compassion is a really good thing in a world that is thrashing
of course and there's a vulnerability to be compassionate and so the Cardinal stoic virtues are courage which I think people associate with The Stokes then there's discipline which people associate with the Stokes then there's wisdom which people associate with the Stokes but the fourth one or which I guess it would be the third is the one I'm writing about now which I think is less discussed sort of skipped over is the virtue of Justice which is where I would put things like compassion and empathy and fairness and kindness and caring about the world and trying
to have a positive impact interesting so it's like it's not like it was this minor afterthought like a a core pillar like one of the four pillars is this idea of justice and to me one of the ways I've thought about this is like okay stoicism in what I control says like Hey try not to go around being offended all the time try not to be overwhelmed by your emotions Etc but that doesn't change the fact that other people get offended and other people have emotions and so I don't see there's anything contradictory about caring
about that right so stoicism isn't it's funny there was this case a few years ago where this guy was just a real at his job and he gets fired for being an and he says act he he ends up suing I think this is in the UK he sues the employer for discriminating against him and his religion which he said was stoicism and his stoicism said that he didn't have to care about other people he could dress how he wanted he didn't have to B he it was basically like he was saying stoicism allowed him
to be a jerk which I think is totally missing the point right I don't I don't think there's any contradiction uh about empathy in stoicism it's saying hey you should probably go around and you you yourself should probably not be an open wound that's horribly offended by other what other people say all the time but the that doesn't mean that you get to hold other people to that standard and say yeah look I just call it like I see it radical trans radical cander here I like uh I I I don't I'm not polite you
know so so for me I I I don't I I think we're probably more in a here than people might think and one of the things that actually gets me upset and I find myself pushing back on it again to go to our point about not caring what the audience thinks like I know if I talk about Courage the audience the stoic audience likes it if I talk about self-discipline the audience likes it talk about wisdom and how to learn and Get Smart the audience likes it but if I talk about Justice then people get
upset right and I can see people unsubscribe I see them get mad well if I if I present stoicism as here's a recipe for being a better more productive sociopath that finds a larger audience and is less is less uh upsetting than if I go hey um it's important that you give a about other people and it's important that you give a about the planet and the ethics matter like so I I I talk about those things at significant expense to myself because I think they're important I think it's a really important part of stoicism
and I think it's it's why when you look at the lives of the stoics you see that they they got involved in politics and they participated and they uh they served their country they served like they they were involved there wasn't there we have this understanding of philosophy as something that withdraws you from the world which is what the epicurian did right The epicurian Retreat to this garden and they they work on sort of perfecting their own development and stoicism I think at its core says that's not right somebody has to be involved because if
you see the field somebody else takes over and so um long story short I I do think there is a place for emotion particularly compassion and socialism and I think caring and participating is is not just like a part of it but like a key obligation of the philosophy
