#170: TKP Insights: Philosophy
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Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out. To do that, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover the useful lessons that you can learn and apply in life and business. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, hand-edited transcripts,

and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link.

Over the last five years, I've been lucky enough to speak with some of the most incredible people in the world. And when I listen to past episodes, one thing that stands out to me is how well the insights from these conversations stand the test of time. They're as relevant and insightful today as they were when they were originally recorded. And in a world that encourages a treadmill of perishable information, it's worth revisiting wisdom that doesn't expire.

So a few times a year, we'll go back to earlier episodes, some of which you may have missed, some of which you may have forgotten, and pull out some gems around a single theme. The theme for this episode is philosophy.

You'll hear Ryan Holiday explain how most mistakes are rooted in anger and learn stoic practices to resist those temptations. Then Emily Belchettis talks about the perception reality gap and how what you choose to see and focus on in life can actually be used to increase productivity in your world and life. I've used this and it's a massive game changer.

Then Neil Pasricha will teach you the three elements of happiness and how practicing gratitude may be the best habit to cultivate in your life. Nancy Sherman will chime in with the three layers of emotion according to the Stoics and explain how Stoic philosophy is much deeper than just embracing the sock, which is the common wisdom and having your emotions under control.

Then Derek Sivers, one of my favorite guests, one of my favorite people, will talk about the importance of ignoring the noise of information and focusing on personal directives in life. And finally, Ed Latimore will teach you about the most important element for creating happiness and self-development that almost everyone gets wrong and explains how happiness isn't a rate, but a rate of change. It's time to listen and learn. ♪

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From episode 128, here is Ryan Holiday. Going on to the next sort of topic, how can we learn to manage our anger? I was thinking about this with a course that we made for Daily Stoic. I was saying that like, just because you don't have an anger problem doesn't mean that anger is not a problem for you.

Right. Like when I look at most of the mistakes that I made, most of the things that I regret, most of the things that I wish I could undo, usually anger is a pretty big part of that.

Anger was a driving factor in why I wrote the email and sent it. It was why I chose not to do X, Y, or Z. It's why I was speaking this way or that way. So I think the question about anger is like, does it actually make you better at what you do? It may in the short term, right? And to go to our point earlier about sustainability, it

Is it fuel that can get you where you want to go over the long term? Or is it really corrosive? And usually I tend to find that it's pretty corrosive fuel. So I think if we just start with like,

let me make sure I'm not lying to myself about my temper, right? Because a lot of us tell ourselves like, oh, it's because I really care or it's what drives me. I'm not as bad as my boss or my dad or whatever. But like, if you really step back and you said like, what is this actually adding and what are the costs that it's coming at? It usually becomes pretty illustrative that it's not a positive force in our lives.

What are the other sources of mistakes when you find yourself making mistakes? Are there other sort of like common themes to those that you can pull out? Well, the Stoics talk about the passions, right? And, you know, today, obviously, we talk about passion being a good thing. But I would say at the root of most mistakes, both personally and sort of historically, it's one of the passions, right? Envy, lust, anger, fear, you know, pain, worry.

worry, you know, those sort of

emotional states that take us out of the rational part of ourselves and into some sort of frenzied or flurried or consumed part. You know what I mean? Yeah. The way that I think about that is they sort of like, they nudge us against reason, right? So they make us more instinctive and less reasoning at the same time. And those are the very moments that humans, unlike any other sort of

Like any other animal can actually like, no, I'm going to put a two second pause on this. And I'm going to think before I instinctively respond, because those instincts might have served me really well in the Savannah, but they're not necessarily going to serve me well here because I'm about to do something that can't be unsaid or can't be undone. Or I remember reading about this in Lives of the Stoic, which I have right here about the, well, I think it was the emperor who stabbed the guy with his pen.

in the eye, right? In a fit of rage. And then he couldn't undo it. Yes. No, and it's often precisely the situations in which we are overcome by passion, we have the slimmest margin for error. It's like, I've talked to people about this, about anger specifically, let's say like politically, especially right now.

There's no question, like what's happening in the world is appalling and frustrating and in some cases like downright evil. So you have to ask yourself, okay, like, so you're looking at this person who's in the way of what you see as progress. So either...

Let's say it's an individual person. We're talking about vaccines or masks, or it's some politician who's, you know, stymieing some important bit of legislation. Either they mean well and are massively misinformed, right? In which case anger, let's say, is not going to convince them. Yeah. Or they are pathologically evil, in which case you can't afford to be angry because they're not angry.

They're pathologically evil or a narcissist or toxic or whatever. And so the idea that you can afford not to be hyper rational and strategic and in control of all of your faculties, you're in really bad shape. I think you could argue that.

What Trump does, and I don't think this has to get political, what Trump does is, I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them and is so the opposite of what they have experience dealing with.

that it's almost like a self-protective bubble, right? Because it's like he's inside the loop of the opponent. And because they're not thinking rationally, patiently, strategically, they're just like, ah! Yeah, he's hacked your operating system, right? Like he's literally just hacked your brain and he's making you respond in a way that's advantageous to him and disadvantageous to you. How do we overcome that? Like how in the moment,

Do you like is there any stoic advice or anything that you've learned where it's like, do you take I think there's one quote about sort of like reciting the alphabet before you respond. Yeah, there's all these practical tips that we've learned as adults, like, don't send the email, leave it as a draft, read it again in the morning. What's funny, one of the advisors to the Emperor Octavian is this stoic Athena Doris.

And he actually says this. He's like, look, as the emperor, you will be provoked. You will be angry. He's like, but I want you to recite the letter of every letter of the alphabet before you do anything. And I love that that's like 2000 year old piece of advice that you would also give your seven year old. And yet the most powerful man in the world needs it, too. The idea of the pause, I think, is super important in all things. Right. Because like very rarely are are.

Is that immediate solution the right one? I think we talked about Kennedy earlier. Think about the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, he was able to string out a nuclear standoff over 13 days, but it was only by stretching it out, by using the time, by talking about it, by talking through it, that

that he allows not just his own advisors to sort of see things in a better light, but he allows his opponent to come to their senses too. And I don't think that would have been possible compressed into three days. George Washington, one of his favorite expressions, it actually comes from a line about the Stoic Cato. He says, I want to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophies.

And I think that's being rational, that's being empathetic, that's being not frantic or rushed. And I think it's important to point out, like people who knew George Washington were like, he has a horrible temper. You know, he is an impulsive, deeply passionate human being.

But it's that he got control of those things because his positions demanded it. So this isn't a like, oh, I just have a good temperament kind of thing. It's like you have to cultivate that temperament.

Particularly if you're in some position of leadership or responsibility. And you can't practice it in the moment where it's the most difficult, right? Like you have to practice it in these little, somebody slights you, you know, almost on the playground, you're like, whatever. Like these are the moments where you practice your response because when it's large, when you're on the stage, when the lights are on and when everybody's watching you, that's not when you want to practice.

You want to have that instinctive response. It's like if you haven't practiced it in the little areas, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to do it. Like when the game is on the line or your career is on the line or like the eyes of the world are upon you. Totally. From episode number 154, here is Emily Belchettis.

Certain people see the world in a certain way and maybe something looks easier to them than it does to somebody else where we can hack this. Talk to me a little bit about maybe the relationship between what we see and maybe what we accomplish or our motivation to do it.

Yeah, so that question that you're asking really is at the heart of one of our longstanding lines of research is one trying to understand, well, what are sources of problems as people are trying to get stuff done in this world? The goals that they care most about

you know, as a motivation psychologist, which I am also, you know, a lot of work has been done trying to understand, well, maybe people just really don't care. You know, maybe they actually aren't as motivated on the things that they're working towards than they should be. So let's increase motivation. Yeah, that's part of it. Maybe they are doing themselves a disservice. They're talking to themselves in ways that aren't helpful. Like,

you know, they're putting themselves down or they don't really believe in themselves enough to be able to get the job done. We're our own worst enemy when it comes to self-sabotaging kinds of language. Yeah, that's part of it. And we can change those things, but those changes

don't help enough to push people in some cases, literally over the finish line, if we're talking about the context of exercise. So we were taking that idea that I had said 20 years ago, I was so naive to think I had discovered and applied it to the context of exercise and tried to think, okay, maybe there's something about exercise that not everybody sees it the same way. Of course, we don't all think about exercise the same way. I like exercising. My husband hates it.

He's a very fit person, which is annoying that he can hate exercise and yet still be quite fit. He burns his calories when he sleeps. It's so weird. And he's so lucky. But that's because it's not fun, right? So like we all know those kinds of examples where we think about exercise in different ways. But maybe there is something about the visual experience when exercising that is helpful for some people and might be part of the problem for others who are struggling to do it at the level that they want.

So that's one of the questions that motivated a big line of work that we've been engaged in is trying to think, okay, when it comes to exercise, distance perception is something that really matters. That, you know, we have to assess how much energy do I have? How much motivation do I have? And how far do I need to go? And trying to regulate that, get those two in sync with one another.

So one of the first places that we started looking was, you know, how do people perceive distance and is it related to something about their bodies or about their motivation? We spent a long time looking through the literature to see how do people study distance perception, coming up with our own measures as well as using those from the past to see not just what do people think about distance, but how are they really seeing distances?

And some of the things that we found, regardless of what measures we were using, was that people who weigh more, we index this by waist to hip ratio and by BMI, two metrics that the medical community uses to index people's weight status or to diagnose weight status.

And we found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or lower BMI. Those distances literally look farther to people that for whom it might be harder to make it to that finish line to navigate that space.

We also found that that's the case with motivation, that when people are more motivated to exercise or to make it to that finish line, that motivation can, in a sense, compensate for that effect of their body on their perception of distance. So that even highly motivated people

People who are highly motivated, even if they have a higher waist to hip ratio, might see the distance in a way that suggests it's just as short as people who have a lower waist to hip ratio. So motivation can change our visual experience and align people to experience a world that looks more like a person who'd have an easier time navigating it.

So those were like, you know, two initial findings that sets of findings that that suggested our visual experiences are not just reflective of the world that's out there. But instead, it has to do with what is our body capable of doing and what is our brain capable of supplementing our own motivational states and physical states of our body are working together to shift what it is that we're seeing in the world out there.

Now you couple that with like around this time, I had the opportunity to talk with some amazing athletes, some Olympic athletes, some of the world's fastest runners, like the fastest guy out of Trinidad, someone else who's trained against Hussein Lightning Bolt. Like these are amazing, accomplished athletes.

And I was wondering, well, what are they doing? What's happening with their eyes as they are running? And I have no expectation that if I just interview them and adopt what they say that I'll be able to do what they have done. Of course not. But I just wanted to get some insight from some really accomplished people.

Now, my intuition going into these conversations was that they would say that they have like amazing powers of perception. They could see in front of them, on the sides, behind them. You know, I know that's not physically possible, but that's just what I thought would happen, that they knew exactly where they were relative to their competition, that they could do something with their peripheral vision that maybe I couldn't do. But that's not at all. I was totally wrong.

They said they had this sort of hyper focus that, you know, for shorter runs that they just focused on the finish line as if there was, you know, a spotlight shining just on that finish line and that they weren't paying any attention at all to their peripheral vision.

When it was longer runs that they would choose a target up ahead and focus on that till they hit it and then they would choose another target. And that seemed to resonate with other sort of memoirs that I was reading about accomplished athletes as well like marathon runners would take that approach.

So then I thought, okay, visual experience does seem to be implicated in how they're moving their body at these amazing paces. And what they're talking about is something that we can teach other people to do. We're not going to be able to take somebody who is really struggling to be in shape and turn them into a gold medalist. That's not the point here. That's not most people's goal. But can we improve their experience in some way?

by teaching them to do with their eyes what these Olympic athletes are doing? The answer is yes. You can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target. Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it. Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery, almost as if you have like blinders on, right? So don't pay attention to those distractors. People can do that. We have them talk to us about like, well, what is it that you're focused on? What's catching your attention right now? Those are easy instructions to understand and it's easy to make your eyes do it.

What's important, though, is that that's not what their eyes do naturally. When they're walking or when they're running, people do take a sort of wider perspective. They broaden their scope of attention relative to what these instructions are having them do. And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that

They moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up. From the start line to the finish line, it was always exactly the same distance. And we were using our stopwatches to see how fast did they move. They moved 23% faster and they said it hurt 17% less, right? So exactly the same actual experience, but subjectively it was easier and they performed better. They increased the efficiency of this particular exercise.

Now, of course, that's not going to make people, you know, one bout of efficient exercise isn't going to change people's body composition or help that won't have them meet a health goal. They need to do this over time. But what we also found is that if we taught them that strategy and tested its impact right here in front of us when we're watching and then tell them, now go out and exercise over the course of the next week. And do you mind if we check out your fitness tracking app?

What we find is that people who have been trained in that narrowed focus of attention go out for more walks. They take more steps and they walk faster in each walk. So we've improved the efficiency of their exercise, even when we're not there to monitor what they're doing. And even when they're like compensation isn't contingent on what they're doing. It's just like, hey, if you could go, you know, go for some walks and go for some or some runs and then let us see how it's going for you using the strategy that we talked to you about.

Now, why does that happen? I think that's pretty amazing that that does happen because it's not magic. It's about changing people's psychology. Yes, we're changing what their eyes are doing. That's changing their visual experience of the landscape. But that then has psychological consequences.

People, when they see that, when they experience that finish line is closer or the stop sign that they've focused on or the building that they've always hoped that they could walk to, that they're focused their attention on is closer, that changes their mindset. Now it doesn't seem so hard because now it looks close. It looks closer to me. They believe in themselves. They have a sense of self-efficacy that is higher now. The task doesn't seem so difficult. They believe they have the resources to take on this challenge.

There's a host of cascading sort of psychological effects that comes from that misperception of proximity, that visual illusion of greater proximity changes their psychology. That then is what translates into the improved performance.

So here really to understand like, you know, how do we get people to exercise better one is that we want to induce that perception reality gap it's not something to be afraid of or to think is a deficiency it's an opportunity, actually it's an opportunity.

for some sort of self-trickery, self-deception here that can work to our advantage. Once we know we are capable of changing our eyes, that can change our psychology, that can change our performance, why not embrace this perception reality gap and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity? From episode number 72, here is Neil Pasricha.

You've written broadly on three topics. So gratitude, happiness and resilience. Yes. We've talked a lot about resilience. Walk me through how these fit together and why these three particular topics, how they came to be. Sure. And let's sort of go through gratitude and happiness, too. Sure. Yeah.

So my wife left me. My best friend took his own life. I started a blog called 1000awesomethings.com. For a thousand straight days, I wrote about one simple pleasure in life. Things like wearing warm underwear from out of the dryer.

Getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, which is huge at an Indian wedding because there's 500 tables. You know, hitting a string of green lights when you're late for work. Just little things. I expand on them in 500-word essays-ish. And for 1,000 straight days I posted it. The blog went viral. It took off. It turned into my first book, which is The Book of Awesome. That book, therefore, is all about gratitude. It isn't one of these academic— And that book became a New York Times bestseller. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I sold a million copies. And it was number one, I think, for 100 straight weeks on the Globe and Mail bestseller list. Why do you think it was number one? Why do you think it resonated so much with people? The weirdest advice or the weirdest compliment I ever got. Two things. Two, you know how people say stuff about your own work and then sometimes they say stuff that helps you see it in a different way? Yeah.

Mark Manson once said this to me on my podcast. He's like, you know, when someone wrote this about my subtle art of not giving a fuck, it made me realize what I was doing, right? So two compliments stuck out for me, Shane. One is this is the only self-help book I've ever bought that doesn't tell me what to do. It shows me how to do it.

Like, I'm not saying, oh, sit around your dinner table every night and write down this stuff on a piece of paper. I don't say that once. I'm talking about the virtues of getting a mutter paneer before it's all out of paneer. You know what I mean? I have, so then you can start to see your own life that way. And the second compliment I got that resonated with me was my eight-year-old son,

"No, never reads anything, but he read your book." And so I think there's something to reading and books in general that I'm always scratching at, which is I'm trying to expand the size of the pie.

My writing veers slightly different than yours. Like I'm aiming for the big fat mass. I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market. And when I get non-readers to read, that to me is a sign of the book's success. Non-readers reading is kind of one of my big ultimate goals.

And it's a topic that's enduring. Like, we're all taught sort of awareness of gratitude and then that we should have gratitude. And nobody's sort of like, I don't know, maybe I can't say nobody. I mean, I am trying to think of how I model that for my kids. It just seems so cheesy and hokey when you hear about it these days. You know, it's like, yeah, Oprah's gratitude journal and like write down five things on your bedside table before you go to bed. And like, I mean, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Right.

But it's when you do it as a practice, when you go, I always say to people, the best way to do it, quickest way to do it is go around your dinner table at night and do rose, rose, thorn, bud. Have you heard about this? No. So you say a rose from your day. That's something that was a highlight for you, a gratitude. Then say your son says one. Okay. Your other son says one, whatever. Then another rose.

Then a thorn, which is something that did not go well because you want to get it off your chest. You need to vent and the other people need to show you empathy. Okay. And then a bud, B-U-D, which is something you are looking forward to tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever. That little exercise helps you get all the gratitudes in that the science says really work.

M and Zimicola, 10 weeks to five gratitudes a week makes you not only happier, but physically healthier after 10 weeks. So we know it's a powerful punch to your brain to do that, but it puts it in a little around the table dinner exercise. That's just quite like simple and easy to do. Why is that effective though? I have a theory on this. So my theory, and you're going to prove me wrong here in a second is that

Because I was thinking about this, researching, speaking with you, and also like the things that I do at home. And I'm like, oh, these little moments of joy are actually really awesome. But why are they awesome? And then I think a lot of it is just adding perspective, right? So you get almost like this flashlight with a narrow beam. And then you start, oh, look, I'm going to find something that's really nice. So you widen it a little bit more. And then it's that perspective that causes people

you just see things in a new way, but to get the perspective, you're actually reflecting and it's the reflection. I think there's something to do with that reflection that actually drives this sort of drives the response. I don't know. Your brain is much bigger than mine. So I, I'm my, my instinct is to say you're right. No, no, can I add in, can I sprinkle some salt on that with a little bit of evolutionary biology stuff?

200,000 years we've been around-ish, right? Our species. And plus or minus, you know, whenever they can backdate the carbon dating of the first human body or whatever. And for the first 199,900 of those years, we had to fight for survival.

Luckily, there's something in our brain called our amygdala. It secretes a fight or flight hormone. And when you see a saber tooth tiger, you know, I got to fight that thing to the death with a stick or I got to run the hell away. Right. And that served us very well. We went from a few scattered hundreds on the African savanna to the most populous mammal on the planet. We took over this spaceship. We won. We eat all the other ones for dinner. Literally like we they used to eat us.

But we eat them now, you know, and we won. We took it over. In the last 100 years, we no longer need that 199,900 years of evolutionary biology that has programmed us into thinking, if it doesn't kill me, I got to kill it and I got to run.

We now live in an era of abundance and that abundance is only skyrocketing. Think about it. That model I said, you can press a button and a car picks you up. Press another button and you got dinner. Press another button and you got entertainment. Like we just press buttons now.

So we don't need that fight or flight hormone as much, yet it's still there. That is not, well, you're not just going to evolve away your amygdala. You know, what are you going to do? So you're going to naturally have all the neural pathways to see negative stuff first. That is why it bleeds at leads. People always say to me, why isn't there a good news newspaper? I'm like, no one would watch it.

They want to watch the fire. We want the race car crash. We want the hard hit in football. We want that stuff that we want. They're like, oh, everyone's rubbernecking on the highway. It's like, of course, everyone wants to see the accident. We instinctively, biologically, evolutionarily want to see it.

So this gratitude stuff is actually practicing to develop a whole new muscle, carving totally different neural pathways to see how awesome it is to be alive. You got 30,000 days on this planet. You will never be as young as you are right now. And if you don't watch for all these tiny little pleasurable moments, it'll slip away and you won't see them. And life is awesome.

And the gratitude stuff works because then you're like, whoa, I'm so happy to see you today, Shane. I can't wait to shake your hand and thank you for your time. I love seeing the Farm Street offices. Wow, I can't wait to soak in your bookshelf on the way out. It's beautiful. I want to soak that in because if I don't, life's over and I missed it.

Life is so brief and so fragile, right? We think we naturally just sort of think, oh, life expectancy is sort of say 80 or something. And I'm this old. So I have like all this time left in the future. But recently, I mean, I've seen a lot of people that I know become sick or sort of suffer some sort of catastrophic injury or

And life isn't long. Life is super short and fragile. And we always think that we'll put off living until...

We're older when we retire. We're going to talk about retirement a little bit, but we always think we can put this off until we're in a better place or we have more time. But life, there's this quote by Mary Angelou that I love, which is, it's on the wall in my living room, actually. And it says, life loves the liver of it. Ooh, that's good. And I think it's so deep on multiple levels and it's so easily accessible too, right? Because every day you wake up,

It's like this is your your day, right? You can live your best life today. And so one of the routines we're talking about sort of like routines for gratitude or perspective. One of the things that I taught my kids to do was.

which I encourage all parents of young children to do if they're so inclined, is when your kids get out of bed in the morning, a lot of people send them downstairs, like go watch cartoons because parents are a little slower to wake up than kids. I don't know if everybody's kids are like mine, like they're up and out of bed and like full bore in like 30 seconds, right? Like I'm dressed. At like 5 a.m. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, you can't get out of your bed till 7. Like here's the rules sort of, right? Like at 7, you can come in my bed and we're going to cuddle.

And this is how we're going to start the day. And they're still doing it. They're 10 and 9, although it's gone from like 30 minutes to maybe 5 to 8 now. But we sort of talk about like what we're looking forward to today. Like if there was any lesson from yesterday from sort of an educational perspective, I did this and I got this outcome, but that wasn't what I wanted. So I would do it differently. We just sort of like do this spaced repetition on, oh, remember what happened yesterday? Yeah.

if you've encountered this situation today, like how would you respond to that? And then it's like, what are you looking forward to today? And we just spend a few minutes talking and cuddling. Wow.

What an incredible practice. I'm very jealous. I want to do that now. Like, I don't do that with my kids. You can't come in my bed and cuddle with me. I particularly want to cuddle with you. But I think that's amazing. And it's about pausing. And that's partly why I always say life's been in days. I never refer to it as years. I always refer to it as days. I'm a big fan of the Kevin Kelly death clock idea.

Oh, I haven't heard of that. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, keeps a clock on his desktop that has expected lifespan, subtracts his current age, measured in days. So if the average lifespan, which it is in North America, is 30,000 days, and he happens to have lived 21,500 of them, that thing will say, quick, Neil, do the math, 8,500. And then tomorrow it'll say 8,499. And that...

literally is the number of days he has left. A lot of people find that too dark or too, too like, well, man, I think it's empowering, right? It gives you information that it's like, you know what? I really don't want to spend my time this way.

From episode number 126, here is Nancy Sherman. So what does being Stoic mean? Because I mean, at a high level, it's sort of like it does appear to be embrace the suck. So what does that mean? How does it differentiate from that? How do we go deeper? So Stoicism came to have a little s in a way that really you don't see with many philosophies. I don't know. We don't talk about Aristotle with a little s or maybe Platonic.

So with stoic, the one that has come to us is kind of almost through the British, stiff upper lip. Right. Passionless. Maybe the monarchy best reflects it. You saw it in all the British tabloids when Prince Philip died. Was the queen stoic enough? That kind of is one strand of stoicism, which is try to manage your debilitating emotions. But it's not the only, because if you really read

More deeply, the Stoics with a big S have the most sophisticated emotion theory there is in the ancient world. There are three levels at least of emotions. What are those three levels? They have emotional skin in the game, as I say, in these three ways. One is that you have these pre-emotions or proto-emotions. You know, you shape starts and startles.

You hear a loud sound and your body jumps a little bit. Or Seneca gives these great examples. If you're general, you could be the bravest, most

stoic general, but your knees knock a little bit when you hear the clarion call to start marching, or you turn green if you're in a shipwreck, you know, even if you're a sage, your body's talking, maybe not your mind, it's your body talking. And you can feel all those, and they're probably very adaptive. Someone like Joseph Ledoux, who's a neurobiologist,

at NYU and studies all the different levels of the brain, you know, refers to that as a, the sort of the low road emotions, the your amygdala, the limbic system, flight fight, we sometimes say, or autonomic arousals. They have so many descriptions of them. They're really prescient in this regard. They're very forward thinking. The next step are ones that can get you into trouble. This is the second layer. And these are the ones many of us

So we, the way Seneca puts it, so he's now, we're talking now a Roman statesman and writer and spin doctor, speech writer for Nero. He essentially says that you can overstep reason a little bit. You can, once started, these are hard to stop.

And so they're the, as if they're the proto emotions that you give a scent to, that's their word. You endorse them. Is that like anger and fear? Yeah. Anger and fear, full-throated anger and fear and resentment and revenge. And also grief that won't go away, you know, sort of the depression. We would, might call it chronic grief these days. We might call it chronic grief syndromes that just won't go away. So you, um,

You endorse those first fleeting impulses that have come in from the body talking and you run with them and you run with them in a way where you can't stop fear, desire, pleasure, distress. And under those four impulses,

everything falls essentially and they get the body going as well as the mind and essentially and they're essentially belief theorists about emotion so they're cognitivists which means it's not only an impulse that you give rise to but it's a kind of belief that guy was out to hurt me and I'm going to be angry at him and your response to that to that ego bruise is

I'm going to fight back in some way. So these are all the emotions that if you let them run amok, they can derail you. Now, the Stoics are developmentalists. So in this regard, again, they're really forward thinking. They're into moral development of the emotions because that's where they think you really can

If you recalibrate your values, it has to be also with your emotions lining up to what you believe to be the right values. So they think you should start trying to cultivate a good kind of fear. And they actually have a name for it, which is cautiousness.

They think you should start cultivating a good kind of desire and they give it a name. And this is the third layer. We're into the third layer. Absolutely, Shane. In this third layer is a kind of rational desire. So you're not going after something with sticky acquisitiveness.

Or kind of sticky attachment. So you're reasoning, you're not reacting. You're reacting a bit, but your reaction is filtered through your reason.

And it's slowed down a little bit. You've had a chance to sort of press the pause button a bit. I mean, you may not get fully there. This is in some ideal way, but this is what you're after. You're kind of trying to slow down the response so that what you now come to think is the right way to react and the right way to see that thing outside that so bruised your ego before that.

isn't necessarily as an insult. Maybe the person was deluded. Maybe move on. Don't get pissed off by it or something of that sort. I think of it as you're not stuck on the object of anger. You're not stuck on the object of desire. You're not stuck on the threat out there. You have a kind of healthy aversion to threat. You have a healthy approach to things that you want. And you have a healthy...

Well, they also give you one for joy, a healthy pleasure. That's maybe, you know, this is their word, rational exuberance, but you get the idea. It's actually our word for charity. The Greek word is chara and ch, and it turns into charity. So it's a kind of charitable disposition of pleasurableness that comes along with doing things. So they're all calm, equitable, serene kinds of emotions. Do we get there?

Most of us, not fully. Should we aspire to get there? Yeah. And so that third layer is the one that you kind of want to keep in mind as you try to

stem some of the more debilitating emotions that are hard to manage. How do we do that though? So a lot of that sounds like that moment of pause between the second and third layer, between feeling anger and then how do you teach yourself not to reason, but to give yourself a pause so that you can reason, right? And now your reason can take control of your emotions. Like how do we regain control of that?

So the way they think about it is pretty graphic. They're thinking that you have some time. Now, we know we don't always have time, but they're reconstructing it as if you have time. So you get this charged impulse that comes in. He's insulting me. And then you get hot and heavy. I'm going to get pissed off. I'm going to get angry. So they think that you can monitor your time.

impression. We call it an observing ego. You watch yourself a little bit. You watch how you're reacting or responding to the impulse or to that affront. And they even have ways of doing it. They're not going to sit you down in a therapist's office, but they are going to tell you at the end of the day that

to do some journaling. This is what Seneca says, "The night's quiet. My wife is asleep. She knows my habits." That's exactly what he says. And he says, "I got a little bit too angry at the doorman at the building who didn't recognize me and didn't let me in." Very pedestrian kind of response.

I wasn't seated at the head table at the banquet where all the dignitaries were. I thought I should be. Well, maybe I'm a little too puffed up about that. So the pause is sometimes built in in reflective moments. And, you know, that is what psychotherapy is about. And they called themselves therapists of the psyche. The Greek word is therapists.

of the soul or the psyche, but it's themselves with themselves, whether in letter writing or these meditations, they're called meditations. They're very discursive. It's not like Eastern meditation.

So why does that work? Why does writing, why is writing so effective? I mean, my hypothesis is sort of like, it helps us reflect. It helps us clarify our thinking. It helps us see our thinking. It puts a visual to it, but not only that, it sort of like makes sense of our experience to ourselves. It's that process for us. If you put words on your thought and you actually articulate them a bit and you drill that articulation into your head,

They have actual practices. You know, they're not just meditate at the end of the day, but think in advance, pre-rehearse some of the bad things that could happen to you at the end, you know, during this day, and that will get you set up for it. So they're very much about emotions get their power by having words attached to them, by being discursive, by being thought that is articulated. We know there's a gap.

between what you think and say and what you actually do. There's not a perfect go-to there at all. And some of my more radical colleagues in philosophy might say, we need moral enhancement drugs. And they'll go in for bioenhancement that closes the gap between cold cognition and hot emotion.

So that we can really bring in line what it means to kill that many people with that drone strike. You may be able to say it in your head, but do you really know what that feels like? So we have to visualize and imagine in order to give meaning to the emotional empowerment and reality.

Sometimes it's not really just discourse, I think, or just words. They're the beginning psychotherapists, as I say. They're in the tradition of any kind of Freudian or whoever follows Freud. Words, chatting, putting words to your thought helps to do some chimney sweeping. But we may also just have to calm ourselves down.

right? We know that. We know that some of the sped up emotions really result from our ticking too fast, and we need to cool down the autonomic system a little bit. And are there ways to do that, that we can use? I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind. One is stoic, and then one isn't. One of the stoic ideas is

You press the pause button or you insert some space between the initial input and the reaction. And so they give you some time, they think. You can buy yourself some time between, say, well, you know, all the biases we carry in our head that lead to pretty unreflective responses.

whether we're talking about police brutality or sectarian violence, or they think that if you can kind of slow down the initial impulse a little bit, you buy yourself a little bit of time. Now, you may have to have some of those responses stored up from another time, you know, and that would be when your journaling comes in. The other side of this is to turn to Eastern practices, which really are not about

chatting away in your head, but rather the opposite, not chatting in your head, kind of emptying it. So various kinds of mindful practices where you, you know, a mantra may be the thing that allows you to empty your head. From episode number 88, Derek Sivers. And is that where you come up with your directives? Oh, the directives. The directives, I think, came from

Sorry, everybody listening. Shane's talking about something that I've blogged about a few times, which is this idea of taking an idea and turning it into a directive, which is meaning telling you to do an action.

If you go to my site, if you go to Sivers.org, or if you read anything I've written, or even the TED Talks I've put out into the world or whatever, you might notice that I like being very succinct. Maybe not in conversation with Shane right now, but when I put something out into writing, I like being very, very, very succinct. I like chopping out every possible word, leaving only the words that need to be there. So I noticed that as I was learning about certain things,

I felt like most books use way too many words. And I came to this idea that probably the most succinct way to communicate an idea is to focus on the action itself.

Like if you command the action, then the action like a seed, I think there's like a nature metaphor in here somewhere, that the action has the seed of the idea in it, that the action carries the idea along with it. You can talk for 400 pages about calories and this kind of fat versus that kind of fat and protein versus that.

But instead you could just tell somebody, eat this, don't eat that. Those actions would carry that 200 pages of information in the actions. And so therefore the succinct directives, the actions, please my minimalist, ruthless editor sensibilities more. I want to talk about directives a little bit more. And what's interesting to me when I think about directives is that

They're great if you can get them from other people, but they're different. Again, going back to this imitation versus like knowing and understanding. So you're coming up with these directives. Like you're doing the work, the mental work. Like you have an experience, you're reflecting on it. That experience can be yours or it can be from reading a book or somebody else's story, but you're doing the mental work of reflecting, integrating, digesting. And then you're coming up with these directives. Like so much of life today is like,

just give me the directive and we haven't done the work. In spaced repetition, like Anki SRS flashcards, a lot of people say, yeah, just give me somebody's deck so I can learn JavaScript or whatever. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like the whole point of flashcards and memorization is like, after you've learned this thing, you make the flashcard to help your future self remember it. Like the flashcard is not the moment of learning. Right.

So yeah, I feel the same way about the directives. Although there are different subjects in life where I want to know more about this or not. So actually the example that I gave about this kind of fat versus that kind of fat and these calories versus those calories, I don't care about that subject so much. So I would not want to read a 400-page book about

about nutrition and diet. That's an example where I just want somebody to tell me what to do. Tell me, you know, eat this, don't eat that. That's all. I don't need the details. And so because I feel that way about nutrition, I can imagine somebody else feeling that way about, say, technology or stoicism or language learning or whatever it may be. Like, no, I don't want

to talk around this subject for 300 pages. Just, can you tell me what to do in one page? And then I'll just do that. And I think this comes down to trust. If you trust the source, then you don't need all of the supporting evidence. I would add one caveat to that, which is I think, and the environment's not changing rapidly, right? So the source came up with these

In a certain environment. And you just have to make sure that that environment still exists. Because if it changes rapidly, then the source is likely to be right, but right at the time or right for that particular environment. And then you won't know what happened. Why would you be thinking of that in April 2020, Shane? Let's do a deep dive on directives. Why don't you give me some of your categories and like go through some? I don't want to put you on the spot, but...

Oh, sure. I don't mind. Like how to be anti-fragile or thriving in an unknowable world. This is like you're a talk show host and you say, hey, why don't you perform one of your songs for us? Sure. I'll be glad to do that. No, really, I don't mind. All right, hold on. Let me pull up. We all like the anti-fragile concept. It's particularly apt right now, too.

Exactly. How to thrive in an unknowable future. And again, to give context, this is where I've read a bunch of books on this subject. I took a bunch of these book notes, lots of paragraphs, and kind of condensed them down into these, what is it, six directives. One, prepare for the worst.

Since you have no idea what the future may bring, be open to the best and the worst. But the best case scenario doesn't need your preparation or your attention. So, mentally and financially prepare for the worst case instead. Like insurance, don't obsess on it. Just prepare, then carry on appreciating the good times. How to thrive in an unknowable future. Number two, expect disaster.

Every biography of a successful person has that line, "And then things took a turn for the worse." So fully expect that disaster to come to you at any time. Completely assume it's going to happen and make your plans accordingly. Not just money, but health, family, freedom. Expect all of it to disappear. Besides, you appreciate things more when you know that this may be your last time seeing them. Three, own as little as possible.

Depend on even less. The less you own, the less you're affected by disaster. Four, and this is straight out of Anti-Fragile, choose opportunity, not loyalty. Have no loyalty to location, corporation, or your past public statements. Be an absolute opportunist, doing whatever's best for the future in the current situation, unbound by the past.

Have loyalty for only your most important human relationships. Number five, choose the plan with the most options. I got that one from Kevin Kelly. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans. For example, renting a house is buying the option to move at any time without losing money in a changing market. And number six, avoid planning.

For maximum options, don't plan at all. Since you have no idea how the situation or your mood may change in the future, wait until the last possible moment to make each decision. Funny thing is, I posted that in 2016 on my site.

And I just like last month in March 2020, in the middle of quarantine and all that, like went back and read it just kind of smiling and nodding like, yep, prepare for the worst, expect disaster. Yep.

Dude, this is like gold. I just want to sit here and listen to you keep going on this stuff. What are the ones that stand out? We've got to do the Munger one. You and I are both... Hey, actually, Shane, have you heard of Charlie Munger? I think you would know. Vaguely. I mean, I think I remember coming across him in a headline somewhere. So you and I are both Munger fans. So I'll just do this one more that is totally a...

Not a rip off, but Charlie Munger's idea, I think it was in Poor Charlie's Almanac, one of his speeches to one of the schools where he did the reversing it, like how to stop- Prescriptions for misery, guaranteed prescriptions for misery. How did you just happen to know that? Guaranteed, yeah, thank you. That was it. And I just, I loved that format. And so, yeah, I tried my own version of that, which was how to stop being rich and happy.

Number one, prioritize lifestyle design. You've made it, so it's all about you now. Make your dreams come true. Shape your surroundings to please your every desire. Make your immediate gratification the most important thing. How to stop being rich and happy. Number two, chase that comparison moment. This is from the book, Stumbling on Happiness.

You have the old thing. You want the new thing. Yes, do it. Be happy for a week. Ignore the fact that the happiness only comes from the moment of comparison between the old and new. Once you've had your new thing for a week and it becomes the new norm, just go seek happiness from another new thing. Number three, buy, not rent.

Why rent a house, a castle, a boat, or a car when you can buy? It's not about the thing. It's about identity. This shows who you are now. Number four, internalize your new status. You worked hard to get here. Celebrate. Relax. Admit that you're in a different class of people now with different needs. Understand there is no going back.

Number five, how to stop being rich and happy. Be a connoisseur. Learn what others say is the finest. Insist on only the finest. You will now be unhappy with anything but the finest.

Number six, get to know your possessions. Now that you own the best, it's time to focus on what you've got. Learn all about the features of your new possessions. Spend more time getting your surround sound and your heated floor just right. Work out the whole solar panel charging of your Tesla car. This is important. And lastly, number seven, how to stop being rich and happy. Acclimate to comfort.

Eliminate every discomfort from your life. Blame others when the world seems hard and is not living up to your standards. That's so beautiful and so true. From episode number 21, Ed Latimore. What's your philosophy of happiness and what that means and how to achieve it? Happiness is...

Happiness is not an average rate, man. It's a rate of change. There I go thinking in calculus again, right? If a person is sitting still, no matter where they're at, whether they have a bunch of money, a person has a bunch of money or no money. They just sit still and do nothing in their life. They're going to be unhappy. We tend to think of people being rich as happy. But no, there's nothing that pushes them, nothing that makes them grow and change.

You can be miserable being poor. You can be miserable being rich. You can be miserable in a relationship. You can be miserable single. What are you doing to push yourself? All happiness is, in my opinion, is a person pushing towards something.

Not the avoidance part. That struggle is this weird type of intertwined duality. You're pushing towards something. Pain is part of it. Happiness is like the other part. And they all kind of work together. And if you rest on your laurels too long, you'll become unhappy. But you always have to push towards something. And if a person wants to have a happy life, they must always have a challenge to push towards something.

This is why I think the people I observe who are great parents are not even great parents or good parents. There's a general, I don't want to call it lightness because that's not correct. Levity, maybe? I don't know. They feel that every day has a purpose.

Because the purpose is raising this little person. And because there's purpose, there are goals. Maybe not explicitly stated, but certainly outcomes that one is trying to achieve. Processes they're trying to enjoy. And I think that's why having kids does such a thing for a person. They say having kids makes you grow, makes you mature, whatever. I think what it really does is it makes you focus on what's going to make you happy. And you got to make it happen in that process. And you quickly realize that happiness is not...

It's easy to have a temporary boost of happiness with a material thing, but all it is is a change in position. There's that rate of change. Once the change doesn't happen anymore, you're back to being unhappy. So your whole life, if you want to be happy, you got to push towards something. It doesn't matter what you push towards. It doesn't matter what you want to be, what you're trying to become, but you got to be trying to become, you have to try to become something. You have an interesting philosophy on that too. You said don't tell people what you're trying to become.

Just talk about what you have become. Yeah, man. Social media age, right? We are infected with this disease of self-promotion, but we're not self-promoting what we've done. We're self-promoting what we plan to do. And then we get a bunch of people to go, oh, man, good luck. Go for it. You go, girl. Whatever you see, go.

And your brain, and this, I mean, this is true. There's a lot of research on this. Your brain goes, holy shit, look at all this approval. We must already did it. Why are we going to keep doing work now? We're going to stack off. There's just no benefit to talking about what you've done. At best case scenario, you do it, right? Which is what you were trying to do. Worst case, you don't. And if you don't, now you've told all these people that you are going to, but there's nothing to show.

So now what do you do? You hop on what they call the dopamine treadmill. You get back on and you talk about the newest goal. I mean, I don't know. I don't think I've seen you on Facebook at all, but I'm sure there's some version that's on Twitter. Twitter tends to skew kind of different in terms of the activity that goes on amongst the users.

You see every someone goes, I'm trying to lose this amount of weight. I want to do this. I'm going to start this. And people go, there's a bunch of likes and there's a big rally behind it. And in three months, same shit. They're in the same spot. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. Why? Because they get all the validation you bring. Look, I'm never going to be the guy that says motivation doesn't count.

for a thing. And motivation is important, but it's a finite resource and it will exhaust itself. And when that falls off, you got to rely on maybe habits, system and necessity, all kinds of things to get you through. But because that system is in place, it can be hijacked. And one of the ways we hijack it is we go and we get all this false recognition. Look man,

I've gotten a reasonable amount of recognition in my life for things that I have done. I'll tell you what, it's a lot... It feels a lot better and it's a lot less nerve-wracking when a person congratulates me for something and then they can also go look it up independently online and go, oh, okay, right? He really did that, yeah. But if a person... But if I chime in, like when a buddy tells me he wants to do something, I go, cool, man. I never ask about it again because...

I don't want to stress them out. I know they ain't do it. Otherwise, they'd be all over it. I wouldn't hear all about it, right? But you don't hear the result. You talked about habits and systems there. What's one habit you've changed recently that's made a profound impact on you? This is silly, man. This is real silly, but it's true. I wash the dishes as soon as I'm done eating.

How has that impacted you? All right. So I don't know if you... When I was growing up, my mom used to do that like right away. You'd be like eating your last bite and she'd be grabbing the plate and... Yeah. So I used to make that bed up immediately when I got out of it every morning. But I didn't. And I switched it to the dishes. What does this do? First of all, it establishes some like regularity. Two, I got to do the dishes anyway. If I'm already up and moving around...

Man, I'm telling you, this is the best part about studying sciences, right? Not like the knowledge, but the analogies you can make. Man, inertia is real. The minute you sit down, you do not want to get up. And if you keep moving, you don't want to stop. That's all inertia is, right? And objects, you know, resistance to a change of acceleration, right?

If you, if I'm already moving around, putting dishes in it, and I just, while I'm standing there, I go, all right, man, let me do these dishes right now. Now I don't have to think about it. It's already taken care of. And when I sit down to go do something else, I don't have to worry about doing work.

Or rather, I don't have to worry about interrupting my work to do that. I don't have to worry about going there and the kitchen smelling funny. I don't have to worry about the cats creeping out. I don't have to worry about my girl going wild cooked when one of them dishes is going to get done. You know, I don't have to worry about anything. I have, all I've done, it's a small thing, but I've relieved so much. And maybe that, maybe that is a sign of how cool life is these days that like that little hijack makes such a big difference.

But I think the bigger lesson is that if you can take advantage of inertia,

And just do things when you're already moving so you don't have to stop, restart, stop, restart. Your life will be a lot easier. You don't have to think about motivation to do your dishes or clean your room or do your homework or whatever you got to do or go running. It's why I get out of bed. My secret to getting up early is just to start moving. You don't have to have to do anything. Just don't sit down for 15 minutes. You'll be surprised by how awake you are on minute 16, you know.

Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog slash podcast, or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.