TRIGGERnometry - Stoicism： Get Better at Life with Massimo Pigliucci

00:00:00.000 The problem with empathy is that it's easily manipulated.

00:00:05.000 Because it's mostly an emotional response, you can easily fool yourself that you're actually in somebody else's shoes while in fact you're not.

00:00:16.560 So sympathy means that you are trying to be helpful to other people.

00:00:22.940 You're trying to understand how other people might be going through, let's say, a tough time and how you might be helpful.

00:00:28.920 But at the same time, you realize you're not them.

00:00:32.320 You're not in that situation.

00:00:34.300 The case of social media, it turns out they're not neutral platforms.

00:00:39.380 It's not just a matter of how you use it.

00:00:43.080 There's something structurally built into the system that biases behaviors of many people, not everybody necessarily, but a lot of people, in a direction that I think is destructive.

00:00:54.360 And so my response was, I'm done.

00:00:56.920 I'm out of it.

00:00:57.740 It is the rise of social media that has made Trump possible, but also has made the outrage culture possible, the easily offended culture possible, et cetera, et cetera.

00:01:08.680 I mean, you know, I don't know whether social media is the beginning or the end of civilization.

00:01:12.760 I certainly hope not.

00:01:14.180 But it is a problem.

00:01:15.420 And we really ought to fight back against it.

00:01:17.740 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:31.240 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:32.580 I'm Constantin Kissen.

00:01:33.780 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:38.980 Our brilliant guest today is a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York.

00:01:43.840 He also has a PhD in evolutionary biology, and he's the author of 16 books.

00:01:48.240 Massimo Piuci, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:50.320 Thanks.

00:01:50.740 It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:52.220 It's really great to have you on the show.

00:01:53.840 We're going to get into all the philosophy, the stoicism, how to live a good life, all that great stuff in a second.

00:01:59.320 Before that, just tell everybody who are you?

00:02:01.740 How are you where you are?

00:02:02.680 What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:02:07.280 Oh, sure.

00:02:07.760 That's a short question.

00:02:08.940 Let's see.

00:02:10.200 I am a professor of philosophy of science, actually, at the City College of New York.

00:02:15.540 But before that, I was an evolutionary biologist for about 20 years.

00:02:19.480 And how I got here, it's a complicated journey that started in West Africa, where I was born,

00:02:25.960 moved to Rome, where I grew up, and then eventually over to the United States for my biology career,

00:02:32.180 and then finally in the New York area as a philosopher.

00:02:35.820 I was just about to say you look very African.

00:02:39.940 Welcome to the show.

00:02:41.100 It's really great to have you on.

00:02:42.340 And one of the fascinating things about you is you combine evolutionary biology,

00:02:46.180 and we've had a number of evolutionary biologists on the show, with the philosophy,

00:02:52.160 which seems to me actually very complementary skill sets.

00:02:55.240 Is that fair to say?

00:02:56.820 I think that's fair.

00:02:57.840 I mean, one of the advantages that I have in this field is that I'm one of those rare philosophers

00:03:03.520 who have actually been scientists and actually have been in the lab and doing experiments,

00:03:08.780 have practical experience, you know, hands-on experience of how you actually do science.

00:03:13.120 And at the same time, I'm one of those scientists, rare in my experience, scientists,

00:03:18.260 who actually have the luxury of stepping back and looking at things from a broader perspective

00:03:23.460 and say, oh, okay, so this is what we're doing and why we're doing it.

00:03:27.860 Fantastic.

00:03:28.680 So you were an evolutionary biologist.

00:03:31.100 You segued into philosophy.

00:03:33.480 Very quickly, how does that affect the way that you approach philosophy,

00:03:40.320 the way that you approach your practice, the fact that you were an evolutionary biologist?

00:03:44.460 Does that influence you in any shape or form?

00:03:47.740 Yeah, better, I think.

00:03:50.120 The whole notion of science in general, but of biology in particular,

00:03:54.440 is that whatever you're interested in, let's say in this particular case,

00:03:58.660 I've been spending the last few years, as you know, in sort of what they call practical philosophy.

00:04:03.080 Yeah, but it helps having some understanding of how the world actually works,

00:04:07.180 because after all, we're trying to navigate the world as it is,

00:04:11.540 not as we would like it to be or as it would be in an idealized form.

00:04:16.200 So, yes, having an understanding, particularly of biology,

00:04:19.760 because it helps you position human beings as a species in a broader context,

00:04:25.660 having an understanding of where we came from, more or less, and what we are all about.

00:04:30.980 So that certainly is going to give perspective,

00:04:33.460 even when it comes to tackling everyday problems, like, oh, I have this urge.

00:04:40.600 Maybe that's because, and then you tell yourself a story that makes more sense of what's happening to you.

00:04:47.340 And that leads us very neatly into Stoicism and the beliefs around Stoicism.

00:04:53.100 So as somebody who has never studied philosophy and who is an absolute layman,

00:04:57.380 as will be most of our viewers and listeners, what is Stoicism?

00:05:01.920 Stoicism is an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy that has the goal of helping us to find a happy life.

00:05:09.380 In some respects, I think of it as the Western equivalent of Buddhism.

00:05:14.500 And in fact, there are a lot of similarities between the two approaches in terms of ethics,

00:05:19.380 that is, in terms of how to lead your life.

00:05:21.600 They're very different in terms of their metaphysics,

00:05:24.020 that is, in terms of how they see how the world works.

00:05:27.440 But fundamentally, Stoicism is about giving you a compass,

00:05:31.940 a moral compass to navigate your life in the best possible way.

00:05:35.280 And that compass is based on four cardinal virtues.

00:05:39.260 Virtues are character traits.

00:05:41.100 They're behavioral tendencies or dispositions.

00:05:44.900 And there is a number of them that have been named and studied over the millennia, literally,

00:05:50.880 both in the Western traditions and in Eastern traditions.

00:05:53.900 But the Stoics focus on four.

00:05:56.260 Practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.

00:05:59.460 Practical wisdom is the knowledge of what is good and what is not good,

00:06:03.500 which you think is fundamental.

00:06:05.300 If you don't have an idea of what you should be pursuing and what you should be staying away from,

00:06:09.660 then you're really in trouble.

00:06:10.680 Nothing else really matters.

00:06:13.160 Once you settle that one,

00:06:15.160 and we might talk about a little bit more about how the Stoics actually settled that one,

00:06:19.520 then the other three come in.

00:06:21.360 And as I said, they are courage.

00:06:22.740 Courage is the notion that you want to do things that are the right things,

00:06:28.580 even though it might cost you at a personal level.

00:06:32.300 Justice is the notion that you should be treating other people fairly with respect,

00:06:37.120 just in the way which you would want to be treated.

00:06:39.960 And temperance is the idea that you need to do things in right measure,

00:06:43.180 neither too much nor too little.

00:06:45.140 And so as a Stoic, you constantly ask yourself,

00:06:47.460 OK, what am I thinking of doing here or my course of action?

00:06:52.740 Does it fit the four cardinal virtues?

00:06:55.140 If the answer is yes, you do it.

00:06:56.640 If the answer is no, you don't.

00:06:59.740 And as an evolutionary biologist,

00:07:02.040 one of the things you'll be very familiar with is the fact that

00:07:04.420 people evolved to act in the way that they act quite often.

00:07:08.960 And how does any philosophy really,

00:07:12.240 but particularly this one,

00:07:13.200 which seems quite intellectual,

00:07:15.720 reckon with the fact that human beings,

00:07:18.020 you know, we've had Dr. Robert Plowman on the show

00:07:20.640 talked about how much of our behavior is genetically predefined.

00:07:24.480 How does one reckon with the fact that quite often

00:07:27.140 you have a genetic predisposition to do or not do certain things

00:07:30.320 that may or may not be practically wise,

00:07:32.320 courageous, just, and temperate?

00:07:35.560 Well, there's two responses there.

00:07:37.820 First of all, actually,

00:07:38.660 my area of interest in biology was gene-environment interactions,

00:07:42.740 that is, nature-nurture.

00:07:43.700 And I am always skeptical of any claim of this human behavior

00:07:49.340 is largely genetically determined or is not largely determined.

00:07:54.200 We really don't know.

00:07:55.440 Because most of the times we can't do the proper experiments.

00:07:58.500 In order to actually figure out how genes and environments interact,

00:08:03.200 you will need to start out with a specific breeding program

00:08:07.300 so that you get a set of offspring that are obtained in a certain way.

00:08:12.280 Then you have to be able to grow those offspring

00:08:14.800 under contrasting environments in a controlled condition.

00:08:17.680 You can't do anything like that in human beings,

00:08:19.940 both for practical reasons.

00:08:21.260 We have a long lifespan,

00:08:23.220 so it would take 25 years at least to do that experiment.

00:08:26.260 And also, more importantly, perhaps, for ethical reasons.

00:08:30.000 You know, you can't keep just going out and breeding people

00:08:32.500 in the way you like them

00:08:34.260 and then growing them under controlled conditions.

00:08:36.660 So we do know something about gene-environment interactions

00:08:40.120 in human beings, but nowhere near as much as we would want to,

00:08:44.140 which means that as far as these kind of practical discussions are concerned,

00:08:48.560 I think we should be agnostic.

00:08:49.720 We really don't know how much any specific behavior

00:08:52.340 is in fact genetically influenced or not.

00:08:56.740 That said, no matter what the behavior here is,

00:09:00.400 there is pretty good evidence in animal studies in general

00:09:04.520 that almost any behavior,

00:09:07.020 especially in complex animals like mammals,

00:09:10.360 is subject to, even when it is,

00:09:12.780 when there is indication that there is a strong genetic component,

00:09:15.620 it's still subject to plasticity,

00:09:17.740 what is called plasticity,

00:09:18.900 that is flexibility.

00:09:20.380 It can still be altered within certain range, of course.

00:09:24.080 I mean, it's how we can start flying all of a sudden.

00:09:27.040 And we're not genetically capable of flying,

00:09:29.500 so we're not going to do that.

00:09:30.520 So the focus for these discussions in terms of practical philosophy

00:09:34.620 should really be on,

00:09:36.740 well, can we in fact alter our character?

00:09:40.600 Can we in fact alter our behavioral dispositions?

00:09:44.220 And to what extent?

00:09:45.620 And the answer to the first question is clearly yes.

00:09:48.400 There's plenty of evidence from cognitive science

00:09:50.480 that yes, we can alter,

00:09:51.600 even though we certainly do have dispositions,

00:09:55.120 we can alter them.

00:09:56.620 We can work on them consciously.

00:09:57.920 I mean, one of the things, the interesting things about human beings

00:10:01.100 is that unlike, as far as we can tell,

00:10:04.780 most other animal species,

00:10:06.720 we can actually reflect critically on our own behavior

00:10:09.220 and say, no, this is not acceptable.

00:10:10.640 I'm not going to do it.

00:10:11.980 We all have, for instance, a very strong instinct for survival,

00:10:15.020 which is certainly natural and certainly genetically determined.

00:10:18.300 I mean, there's no,

00:10:19.080 I don't think there is much of a question about it.

00:10:20.740 We share it with pretty much every other animal species.

00:10:23.700 And yet, we can sacrifice willingly our life

00:10:27.260 if we think that there is a good enough reason

00:10:29.560 or at least put ourselves in potentially mortal danger

00:10:34.020 if we think that there is enough of a good reason.

00:10:36.760 So we can act, I think, in certain respects

00:10:42.460 in a way that overrides our genetic instance.

00:10:46.460 I still remember even a fairly strong evolutionary psychologist

00:10:50.880 like Steven Pinker years ago,

00:10:53.500 he wrote that, you know,

00:10:54.900 he made a decision in his life not to have children

00:10:57.160 and instead to devote himself to science and writing.

00:11:00.360 And his comment was,

00:11:01.980 and if my genes don't like it,

00:11:04.080 they can go jump into the lake.

00:11:05.880 So if a strong evolutionary psychologist like Steven can say that,

00:11:09.800 I think we're on good grounds.

00:11:11.880 We're okay.

00:11:12.140 Maybe he doesn't like kids though.

00:11:13.700 No, it could be.

00:11:14.380 It could be as simple as that.

00:11:16.600 But Massimo, so that being the case,

00:11:19.060 we've established that to some extent

00:11:20.840 we are in control of our own behavior and our choices.

00:11:24.800 Practical wisdom strikes me as fundamental

00:11:27.880 to all human life, really.

00:11:31.660 So how do you become practically wise?

00:11:37.580 Practice, practice, practice.

00:11:39.200 So it turns out that this discussion about,

00:11:42.340 you know, can you teach virtue?

00:11:43.660 Can you learn virtue to be more virtuous?

00:11:45.960 It's been going on for literally two and a half millennia.

00:11:48.280 It was studied by Socrates back in Athens in the 5th century BCE.

00:11:53.960 And the general emerging answer is that

00:11:57.160 wisdom or virtue is a practical skill,

00:12:02.300 like what the Greeks called a technet.

00:12:04.700 So it's similar to let's say learning a language or learning how to play a musical instrument.

00:12:10.700 Now, how do you learn to play a musical instrument?

00:12:13.200 You need ideally three components other than the instrument itself.

00:12:18.500 Number one, you need a little bit of theory.

00:12:21.140 You want to know something about notation, musical notations and how the notes relate to each other,

00:12:25.920 because otherwise you're kind of going blind.

00:12:27.580 You have no idea what you're doing.

00:12:28.840 You also want a good teacher, if you can get a hold of one,

00:12:33.460 because the teacher cannot obviously learn the thing for you,

00:12:36.740 but it can point to places where you might improve,

00:12:40.060 places where you're making mistakes, that sort of stuff.

00:12:42.940 And then mostly you do practice, practice, practice, practice every day.

00:12:47.320 Those little simple scales first and the more complex scales after,

00:12:51.080 and then simple tunes, more complex tunes, etc.

00:12:53.300 It's the same, arguably, with virtue.

00:12:57.580 This has been something that's pretty much been settled since Aristotle,

00:13:01.300 and there is modern evidence from modern cognitive science that this is a good way to think about it.

00:13:06.640 So what do you want?

00:13:07.660 You want the theory.

00:13:08.860 For instance, the practical, the four cardinal virtues that I mentioned earlier are part of the theory.

00:13:14.280 If you subscribe to a philosophy like Stoicism or variations thereof,

00:13:21.260 then you think, okay, that's a good way to think about it in general.

00:13:25.840 Ideally, you need a good teacher.

00:13:27.420 I don't see a lot of Socrates around, unfortunately,

00:13:29.820 but, you know, there are people that can help you simply because they're more advanced than you are.

00:13:35.200 They have been practicing for longer than you are.

00:13:38.260 In the case of Stoicism, for instance, there are large online communities

00:13:42.080 and a number of smaller in-person communities scattered throughout the world

00:13:47.180 where you can show up and say, hey, I need some help for the practice.

00:13:50.620 But mostly it is a matter of practice.

00:13:53.260 Now, we all understand how to practice a musical instrument or a language.

00:13:57.800 It's a little bit more counterintuitive to say, well, yeah, but how do I practice virtue exactly?

00:14:03.140 And so let me give you a couple of examples.

00:14:04.920 Let's say that you figured that you need to improve your temperance, for instance, right?

00:14:09.400 Your self-control.

00:14:10.140 Then one simple way to do that is to be mindful about a number of situations where you know from experience

00:14:18.860 that you have trouble in terms of temperance.

00:14:21.320 For instance, every time you sit at the dinner table, you know, you eat too much or you drink too much

00:14:26.340 or you have a tendency to go overboard and things.

00:14:29.840 Well, if you do it in a mindful way, in other words, before you sit down to dinner,

00:14:34.460 you remind yourself, sometimes in writing actually, of, okay, here's what I want to do tonight.

00:14:40.060 Here's how I'm going to handle the situation.

00:14:42.020 For instance, let's say you're going out to a restaurant with friends.

00:14:45.860 So there is the chances that you're going to be pushed into, you know, by social conventions to eat more and drink more.

00:14:53.280 You can tell yourself, you can set yourself rules.

00:14:56.260 You can say, okay, whatever the waiter is going to put on my plate, I'm going to eat half of that.

00:15:01.180 And I'm going to stop at two glasses of wine or something like that.

00:15:05.080 Once you do that, then you basically, it becomes a challenge with yourself.

00:15:09.240 You can basically keep scores.

00:15:11.300 You've got to kind of gamify the situation.

00:15:14.380 And there is very good evidence, again, from modern science that this actually works.

00:15:18.340 If you go ahead in a situation like this, mindfully, so knowing what might happen and having decided ahead of time how to behave,

00:15:27.100 your chances of actually behaving in a temperate fashion are much higher than there would have been otherwise.

00:15:33.320 Or let's say that you say, well, you know, I realize that I'm not really generous enough.

00:15:39.360 Generosity is something I need to work on.

00:15:41.300 Okay, well, then you can come up with an exercise on, let's say, once a week or twice a week where you do something like before leaving your house,

00:15:51.560 you put some pocket, you know, change in your pockets, and then you give it to the first homeless person that you encounter.

00:15:57.420 No questions asked.

00:15:58.880 Now, initially, this is going to look a little awkward.

00:16:02.420 Like, really, do I need to go to dinner and write down ahead of time what I'm going to eat?

00:16:06.540 Or do I really need to do this thing about the homeless?

00:16:09.420 But with time, it becomes habit.

00:16:13.440 It's like, as I said, learning a musical instrument.

00:16:15.840 Initially, you have to pay attention to every single move of your fingers, let's say, on an alto sax, which is something that I try to master.

00:16:24.660 But eventually, you see your fingers just going on their own.

00:16:28.060 You know, you don't have to actually think about it explicitly, consciously.

00:16:32.260 They'll just do it.

00:16:33.620 And that's the same idea with altering your behavior.

00:16:37.280 Initially, it takes mindful attention, but then eventually it becomes automatic.

00:16:43.080 Well, does that make sense?

00:16:44.100 Sorry, Francis, I just want to finish this point.

00:16:45.960 That makes sense in terms of temperance and generosity and many other traits that you can practice.

00:16:51.460 And it's something I've focused on a lot in my life and forced myself to behave in different ways and build healthier patterns and so on.

00:17:00.240 I totally get that.

00:17:01.000 But the reason I asked you about practical wisdom is that that, to me, seems quite different because when I look around at the world and I look at my own behavior at certain points, I think that is a much harder skill to gamify.

00:17:15.700 It is a much harder skill to learn consciously because you don't know that you're making mistakes sometimes.

00:17:24.280 And you certainly don't know at the time quite often.

00:17:27.360 And especially, you know, one of the things I hear out of what you're saying is the importance of being present.

00:17:31.760 Because if you're not present, you won't even notice, A, that you are overeating or making a bad decision or whatever. 0.95

00:17:39.400 But also, if you're not present, then life sort of happens to you and you never go, well, what was the decision that brought me to the point that I'm at now that I can actually learn from and not be as stupid next time in terms of the bad decision that I've made?

00:17:53.900 So how do you gamify and how do you practice practical wisdom?

00:17:58.680 That's the interesting thing to me.

00:18:00.140 Yeah, that's a very good point.

00:18:02.200 The thing about paying attention is, for instance, something that the second century Stoic philosopher Epictetus really emphasizes.

00:18:09.820 He says, nothing ever got done better by not paying attention.

00:18:13.860 If you get distracted from something, you're not going to do it better.

00:18:16.860 But yes, the question about practical wisdom is a good one.

00:18:20.280 There is a fundamental technique in Stoicism that is also adopted by modern cognitive behavioral therapists.

00:18:27.620 And the Stoics refer to it as philosophical journaling.

00:18:31.820 The CBT practitioner has probably used some other term for it, but it's the same basic idea.

00:18:37.340 So this is a notion that goes back at least 2,000 years.

00:18:41.980 A good example of it is Marcus Aurelius' meditations.

00:18:45.560 Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, and he wrote this book, The Meditations, which is essentially a personal diary.

00:18:54.120 It's a philosophical diary where he asks himself, keeps track of his progress.

00:18:59.180 He asks himself what you should do and so on.

00:19:02.120 In fact, it was not meant for publication.

00:19:03.820 It was his personal thing.

00:19:05.120 Then eventually somebody got a hold of it and published it.

00:19:09.440 So here's the basic idea.

00:19:10.860 There's many – there's different ways of doing philosophical journaling.

00:19:13.860 But the one that is most common, arguably, is this.

00:19:18.200 Every night before going to bed, you take about five or ten minutes.

00:19:22.780 Get yourself into an area of your house that is quiet.

00:19:27.100 If you live with somebody else, ask for five or ten minutes of peace.

00:19:31.940 And open up your laptop, your tablet, or, you know, Zeus forbid, your actual diary and where you're going to write in handwriting.

00:19:42.660 And then for the day, think about anything that happened that might have been problematic, that might have been ethically salient, where you might have made a mistake or you might have done better, et cetera.

00:19:55.920 And ask yourself three questions and answer them in writing.

00:20:00.200 One, what did I do wrong?

00:20:02.340 Two, what did I do right?

00:20:05.480 Three, what could I do better if something like this happens again?

00:20:10.280 Here's the point.

00:20:11.160 But asking yourself why – what you did that was wrong is not about, you know, self-flagellation and regret and all that because the Stoics think that, you know, whatever you did, it's in the past.

00:20:23.100 You cannot change it.

00:20:23.960 It's out of your control.

00:20:24.980 So it's like it's done.

00:20:26.320 But you do want to learn from your mistakes.

00:20:28.040 And writing down, thinking, reflecting critically about your mistakes and writing them down helps fixing them literally on paper and in your mind.

00:20:38.100 It's like, okay, I need to pay attention to this.

00:20:41.380 You also want, conversely, to write about what you did right.

00:20:45.800 Why?

00:20:46.120 Because now you've established two points of reference.

00:20:49.320 What you want to get away from, your mistakes, and what you're going to work toward more, the stuff that actually you've done right.

00:20:58.400 And then the third question in my mind is the most crucial one actually.

00:21:02.080 What is it that I could do better the next time around if something like this happens?

00:21:06.160 You know, we tend to think of our lives or perhaps some people think of their lives as incredibly varied.

00:21:12.360 Oh, you know, the same thing is never going to happen again.

00:21:14.700 But in fact, you know, we pretty much get up in the morning during the week and go to work and see the same people and do the same things and then come home and see the same people and do the same things.

00:21:24.180 And then during the weekend, we see friends, et cetera, et cetera.

00:21:26.960 Our lives are actually far more stable typically than we might necessarily think.

00:21:32.660 So the notion is that, therefore, whatever situation you made a mistake in today, let's say one of your colleagues did something, you got really upset, you got angry in a disproportionate fashion, you overreacted or something like that, or your partner.

00:21:46.780 How did you know?

00:21:48.200 Yeah, exactly.

00:21:49.440 Or your partner or your children, you know, whatever it is, that's likely going to happen again.

00:21:55.280 And so what you write in your diary is, okay, here was the situation.

00:21:59.240 Now, let me think the next time around, I'm going to be better prepared because I know the symptoms.

00:22:04.900 I know what's coming.

00:22:05.840 I have an idea of what might happen.

00:22:08.120 And therefore, I know how I need to react.

00:22:11.500 That doesn't mean that you're going to be doing it perfectly the second time around, but you are going to be, again, it's about paying attention.

00:22:17.500 It's about mindfulness in that sense.

00:22:19.200 And so there is actually fairly good evidence, again, from cognitive behavioral therapy and similar approaches to psychotherapy that this thing really does work.

00:22:29.680 But, of course, you have to do it regularly.

00:22:31.740 I do it every night, but at least several times a week.

00:22:35.680 And you have to do it over a prolonged period of time.

00:22:37.920 It's like going to the gym.

00:22:40.140 You don't just go there, look around at the machines and wait, pick up a couple, and then say, okay, I'm done.

00:22:44.880 I'm ready for the Olympics, right?

00:22:46.360 It doesn't work that way.

00:22:47.440 Hey, Francis, do you like locals?

00:22:50.960 I live in London, mate, so obviously not.

00:22:53.520 The only pleasure I get from the locals is when we share an intimate moment as we watch a Japanese tourist get trapped in a tube door.

00:23:02.200 That is good.

00:23:03.520 But I wasn't talking about the locals.

00:23:06.100 I was talking about our community on locals.

00:23:09.180 You mean the one where you get phenomenal behind-the-scenes content when you...

00:23:13.560 Thank you, space, space, space, space, space.

00:23:15.360 Where you get to ask incredible guests like Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Bill Burr, Sam Harris, Adam Carolla, Heather Hying, and others your questions?

00:23:29.000 Not just that, you can get supporter-only benefits like trigonometry mugs, monthly calls with other top supporters, and even a regular meal with me and Francis.

00:23:38.560 You also get phenomenal behind-the-scenes footage of our trip to America where we met a whole host of incredible guests and gave ourselves terminal indigestion.

00:23:50.440 We're also starting to do monthly giveaways for locals only.

00:23:53.980 The first one will be signed copies of Andrew Doyle's new book.

00:23:57.700 Plus, you get access to an incredible community of like-minded people who share memes, have fun conversations, and most importantly, you get to make new friends.

00:24:09.860 You can support us with as little as $7 or about £5 a month, or give us more for the higher tier benefits.

00:24:16.580 Go to trigonometry.locals.com.

00:24:19.380 Go to trigonometry.locals.com and support the show.

00:24:25.340 And Massimo, I've heard you talk about this on several podcasts, and it's very interesting.

00:24:30.640 And to me, I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of these great philosophers were also teachers,

00:24:37.720 because these are the lessons that we should be teaching our children.

00:24:40.960 And in fact, we're teaching them things that aren't going to help them in life, whereas very important skills like these, we don't teach.

00:24:50.060 Oh, I couldn't agree more.

00:24:51.800 It's one of the baffling things.

00:24:53.540 In my latest book, The Quest for Character, I emphasize that point.

00:24:57.740 There's one thing that we ought to be doing, which is teaching character and virtue to our kids.

00:25:03.180 And that is the one thing that arguably we almost never do.

00:25:06.360 In fact, it's so rare that recently I've seen a documentary that was done focused on one of the exceptions to this general rule.

00:25:16.180 The documentary is called Young Plato.

00:25:18.220 And it's about the principal of an elementary school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, who decides that it's going to be a good thing to teach his kids, these elementary school kids, to teach philosophy, practical philosophy.

00:25:34.960 And mostly Socrates and the Stoics, although it varies a little bit.

00:25:39.620 And the movie is incredible.

00:25:41.080 It's a documentary.

00:25:41.920 It's incredible because you can see how much practical impact that kind of teaching has on the kids.

00:25:49.000 The kids experience things like bullying, for instance, and now they have to figure out how to react to it, how to handle the situation.

00:25:56.620 It's Belfast.

00:25:57.600 So these kids are growing up in a culture that is still marked in violence and, you know, religious strife and stuff like that.

00:26:04.740 And so the principal sits them down and gives them a lesson on anger management from Seneca, for instance.

00:26:14.700 Of course, done at the level of understanding of, you know, a kid of that age.

00:26:20.740 But that kind of approach is so rare that in 2022 we have a movie made about it.

00:26:27.520 So it's not the kind of thing that is very common.

00:26:30.400 And in my mind, I think it's really bizarre.

00:26:33.980 It really ought to be the standard approach, not only in school, but at home, of course.

00:26:40.320 And Massimo, it also ties into biology as well, because it's also just like learning a language or like learning a musical instrument.

00:26:48.500 These things are so much easier to do when you're young.

00:26:53.000 Exactly.

00:26:53.700 In fact, again, the analogy is an apt one. 0.98

00:26:57.440 Yes, you can learn a language or musical instrument as an adult, but it takes a lot of effort, a lot of dedication.

00:27:03.220 And you're not going to get likely as good as if you studied as a kid.

00:27:07.940 And the same goes for virtue and for behavioral modification, character modification.

00:27:12.820 Yes, you can certainly work on it as an adult, but it's going to take you a long time and it's going to yield a little bit of improvement.

00:27:19.620 If you start, on the other hand, with kids of elementary school level, then things are very different.

00:27:25.960 And, you know, this has been known for a while.

00:27:28.280 The ancient Romans talked about the age of reason, which was about seven to eight years old.

00:27:32.980 And that's when fathers and teachers started talking to their kids about virtue and character, et cetera, et cetera.

00:27:41.420 During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Jesuits among the Catholics used to say, give me a child of seven and I will give you a man of 14.

00:27:54.560 Because they realized that's the window.

00:27:57.480 Now, modern science actually tells us there's some good news there that the window is even a little longer than that.

00:28:03.120 But it does start around seven years old, six to seven years old.

00:28:06.740 That's the time when kids begin to appreciate, you know, abstract reasoning and engage in more abstract reasoning.

00:28:14.100 It's about six, seven, eight years old, depending on the kid.

00:28:17.360 But actually, that window is extended, according to modern neuroscience, until your early 20s.

00:28:23.220 Because that is when your brain finally settles down, basically, and it becomes pretty much what it stays with you for the rest of your life.

00:28:29.760 The human brain is still very plastic, so that's why you can keep learning and improving things.

00:28:35.700 But the broad scenario is pretty much set by the early 20s.

00:28:41.160 Earlier in women, in girls than in boys, which explains why boys mature later than girls, as most of us realize.

00:28:52.940 If you have a daughter or a son, you'll realize that that is the case.

00:28:56.220 There is a gap of about three or four years.

00:28:58.380 But that only means that you have three or four extra years to work on boys.

00:29:04.000 And so, Massimo, let me ask you a provocative question.

00:29:08.300 Sure.

00:29:09.440 If stoicism, and I actually do think this is true, and it's something I've implemented in my own life.

00:29:17.200 But if stoicism is so good, and if it makes your life so much better, when I look around at the world right now, when I look at politics or culture, or Francis and I are both former stand-up comedians, I don't see a lot of stoicism going on.

00:29:34.680 Instead, I see a lot of people being taught to constantly criticize and complain about things that are outside of their control, to not act in a temperate way, to not seek justice, and not to seek to treat other people the way they'd want to be treated but to punish.

00:29:52.660 You know, we don't teach a lot of practical wisdom, and so on and so forth.

00:29:57.840 And particularly in recent years, it seems to me, you know, in politics, which we talk about a lot on both sides of the political spectrum, there is – we like to be victims a lot.

00:30:09.500 It's something that we crave, actually.

00:30:11.620 And we've – there are people who now make this into an identity.

00:30:14.880 So how do you explain all of this?

00:30:16.120 Well, for one thing, yes, you're right.

00:30:19.000 You don't see a lot of stoics these days, although you do see now many more than you would have seen 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

00:30:25.840 Stoicism is definitely on the rise.

00:30:27.600 And, of course, stoicism, again, is not the only philosophical approach that is useful in this case.

00:30:34.000 Yeah, I mean the values of stoicism rather than stoicism itself.

00:30:37.160 Exactly.

00:30:37.400 So, for instance, as I said before, stoicism is very similar to Buddhism, and there is a pretty good number of Buddhist practitioners around the world.

00:30:44.920 But you're absolutely right.

00:30:47.780 We are in a – we find ourselves in a society where all the incentives seem to go exactly in the opposite direction.

00:30:55.780 And the stoics did notice that.

00:30:58.620 I mean the ancient Rome was actually fairly similar to our society today.

00:31:03.020 Yeah, there was no Facebook or Twitter.

00:31:05.200 But nevertheless, it was still a society that was pretty much engaged into disruptive and destructive politics.

00:31:12.920 It was all about how much money or stuff you had and et cetera, et cetera.

00:31:17.180 So, it sounds very familiar.

00:31:19.020 The stoics, of course, blamed culture for it. 1.00

00:31:23.340 Their distinction was – their point was that, look, naturally, we are cooperative animals.

00:31:30.040 We're social animals.

00:31:31.040 And so, if we're not talking – of course, they didn't know anything about evolution, but a modern primatologist would agree that we have very strong pro-social instincts because our survival depends on it.

00:31:44.260 That doesn't mean we're always altruistic or it doesn't mean that we don't do things that are good for ourselves.

00:31:48.980 Of course, we do.

00:31:49.480 But broadly speaking, human beings are naturally pro-social.

00:31:53.600 They're naturally cooperative, et cetera, et cetera.

00:31:56.240 That's what the stoics meant when they said that we should live in accordance to nature or in agreement with nature.

00:32:03.700 We should take seriously the kind of species that human beings are.

00:32:08.440 And there are, according to the stoics, at least two fundamental characteristics that differentiate us from most other animal species.

00:32:14.760 One, we're incredibly, as I said, highly social, and the other thing, of course, is we're capable of reason at a very high degree, much higher than any other animal species.

00:32:25.100 So, for a stoic to live according to nature, it means to use reason to solve your problems and to be social, pro-social, cooperative.

00:32:33.380 But they observed the same thing that you just pointed out.

00:32:36.480 That is, yeah, but majority of people don't do that.

00:32:38.720 So, what happens?

00:32:39.640 And their answer was they're corrupted by the culture in which they grew up.

00:32:44.760 Human beings are also very plastic in terms of behavior.

00:32:48.880 We absorb whatever culture we grew up with.

00:32:52.460 And therefore, the problem, as we would put it today, is structural.

00:32:57.320 That is, unless we've changed the structure of society, the incentives at a societal level, our value judgments, our objectives, and the things that we think are good to pursue are not good,

00:33:09.100 then we're going to always have an uphill battle.

00:33:11.780 Now, stoicism, of course, is a personal philosophy of life, just like Buddhism or Christianity or stuff like that.

00:33:17.940 So, it is meant to help those people who realize that, hell, this is not a good thing.

00:33:23.260 The kind of values that society shares are not good.

00:33:27.260 So, I'm going to need a different framework, a different way of thinking about it.

00:33:32.280 And therefore, stoicism is useful in that sense.

00:33:34.960 But if we're talking about change in society at large, then we need structural changes.

00:33:39.060 And that's a whole different conversation because structural changes are far more difficult to implement than individual ones.

00:33:47.220 There is an obvious, at least to me, and again, provocative, but I hope you don't take this personally.

00:33:53.300 As a stoic, I know you'll deal with it.

00:33:54.680 But there's an obvious flaw in that argument, which is, yes, human beings absolutely are incredibly cooperative.

00:34:03.240 But if we look at the history of human beings, which is the best way to analyze how people behave, I think,

00:34:09.400 then what we would conclude is human beings are incredibly cooperative while also being incredibly tribal.

00:34:15.380 And most of the cooperation happens within the tribe, and a lot of the cooperation frequently happens in order to allow that tribe to defeat another tribe or allow that tribe to get more resources than another tribe.

00:34:28.580 So, isn't the problem with all of this that actually human beings are driven also by the tribal instinct, which doesn't really get taken into account by these great virtues?

00:34:40.940 You're absolutely right, except for the very last part.

00:34:43.660 Again, the Stoics were very aware of this.

00:34:46.600 I mean, they lived, you know, Stoicism started in ancient Greece, in Athens, around, you know, the 4th century, the end of the 4th century BCE.

00:34:55.760 And at the time, the Greek cities were always warning against each other, right? 0.59

00:35:00.720 So, Athens versus Sparta versus Corinth versus this versus the other.

00:35:04.740 So, they were very aware of this notion that people are prone to cooperate and to help each other within group,

00:35:12.780 but on the other hand, they're just as equally prone to, you know, beat the crap out of other groups.

00:35:20.120 That is why the Stoic notion is that nature gives us, as they put it, the beginnings of wisdom.

00:35:26.680 In other words, it provides us with a basic pro-social instinct.

00:35:30.120 But by nature, we apply that instinct.

00:35:33.500 And in fact, there is an interesting passage in Cicero where he summarizes the Stoic argument.

00:35:38.780 He says that by nature, we apply this instinct of cooperation to our caretakers, you know, our parents, typically, our siblings.

00:35:48.400 And then, eventually, we start expanding it to our friends.

00:35:53.020 And then, eventually, we expand it to our acquaintances and to people that live with us in our general community.

00:36:00.340 And the Stoic point is that's what nature gives you.

00:36:03.440 That's where nature stops.

00:36:05.480 Then reason comes in and says, yeah, but wait a minute.

00:36:09.060 The people that live in Sparta are not different from me.

00:36:11.640 The people that live on the other side of the planet are not different from me.

00:36:14.620 So, I ought to strive to expand further those circles of concerns.

00:36:21.100 This is a notion that modern utilitarians also subscribe to, like Peter Singer, for instance.

00:36:27.700 He has this idea of the expanding circles of concerns.

00:36:31.100 But interestingly, the first time that we know in Western history that image of expanding circles of concern show that the larger circle is humanity itself.

00:36:42.540 The first time we find that image is in Aherocles, who was a second-century Stoic philosopher.

00:36:49.580 So, yeah, these people have been thinking about it.

00:36:51.680 But they also realize that the idea of what they call cosmopolitanism, the notion that we should be thinking of humanity as a big family where we're all brothers and sisters or whatever other gender you subscribe to, it's difficult.

00:37:06.540 It doesn't come natural.

00:37:08.980 It needs a combination of your natural instinct, which then is expanded on the basis of reason.

00:37:16.640 Now, the question is, is this possible?

00:37:18.860 I think it is.

00:37:20.020 And I'll give you one argument for it.

00:37:22.420 Massimo, may I interrupt before you give me that?

00:37:24.860 I'm just – sorry, Francis.

00:37:25.960 I just want to kind of get to the bottom of this.

00:37:28.160 But if a – I don't know if it's a troop of chimps or whatever the word is, a group of chimps, a tribe of chimps, whatever, lives on a certain piece of land and another tribe of chimps shows up.

00:37:40.000 I imagine they don't go, you know, let's embrace each other as friends and brothers and sisters.

00:37:44.720 No, they don't.

00:37:45.580 They go to war, right?

00:37:47.000 So nature also gives us that too, doesn't it?

00:37:49.880 And so it's not culture that makes us tribal and competitive and warlike and willing to kill each other.

00:37:56.780 It's also our nature.

00:37:58.580 Wouldn't that be true?

00:38:00.160 To an extent.

00:38:01.280 It's certainly true for chimps, who, however, are, of course, different from human beings because they don't actually think about what they're doing. 0.98

00:38:08.320 They go by instinctively.

00:38:10.260 But here's what I was – you're absolutely right.

00:38:13.040 But there is an important point here.

00:38:16.840 What is the tribe?

00:38:18.000 We tend to think of a tribe today as a fairly large group.

00:38:23.660 My tribe is, you know, New York City.

00:38:25.700 I'm naturally more sympathetic to people in New York than to people outside of New York.

00:38:31.080 Or my tribe could be the United States.

00:38:33.280 That's a large tribe.

00:38:34.320 It's 350 million people, right?

00:38:36.140 There is the World Cup is going on right now.

00:38:38.720 And, you know, we all go USA.

00:38:40.560 What does that mean?

00:38:41.620 That's a very large tribe.

00:38:43.420 That's not the evolutionary tribe.

00:38:45.080 During most of our evolutionary history, our tribe was about 60, 80, 100 people at most.

00:38:53.400 And we're all relatives.

00:38:55.420 Most of them were relatives, cousins, aunts, uncles, stuff like that.

00:38:59.520 So our instincts are not actually tailored for things like cities or nations or anything like that.

00:39:06.380 They're tailored for a very, very small group of mostly relatives.

00:39:10.540 That is what nature gives us.

00:39:12.660 So by culture, we've already expanded the tribe dramatically.

00:39:17.300 Now we're talking about tribes of millions or hundreds of millions of people.

00:39:21.080 So we're already on the trajectory, the Stoics would argue, toward cosmopolitanism.

00:39:25.380 All we need to do is to go from hundreds of millions to a few billions, and then you're good.

00:39:30.880 You're set.

00:39:32.140 That's going to be difficult.

00:39:33.240 I'm not suggesting that it's going to be something that happens tomorrow.

00:39:35.820 But what I'm saying is actually the historical trajectory seems to be going in that direction.

00:39:40.760 Our tribes are getting larger and larger and larger.

00:39:44.480 Eventually, we might spill over onto other planets. 0.76

00:39:46.860 And then I guarantee you, as soon as we start colonizing, let's say, Mars, we're going to have the Earthlings versus the Martians. 1.00

00:39:55.100 And, you know, that's going to be another tribe.

00:39:56.620 But at that point, it's a planetary tribe, right?

00:39:59.280 And so on.

00:39:59.940 The process can keep going.

00:40:01.860 So I think that that is a very good objection, but it's already something that actually has been happening.

00:40:07.960 Our culture has started to take over or to redirect our instincts about 12,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution.

00:40:17.660 Once we started, we invented agriculture.

00:40:20.140 We started settling down and creating large settlements, much larger than the typical, you know, group or band that was featured during the Pleistocene.

00:40:32.220 And that's when our culture started messing around with our biology.

00:40:36.880 And then the notion is, OK, we want to realign the two as much as possible.

00:40:42.440 And Massimo, you talk a lot about sympathy and empathy.

00:40:46.340 Let's have a look at that.

00:40:48.620 The differences between sympathy and empathy and why the Stoics actually had far more sympathy, shall we say, for one particular value than another.

00:40:59.200 Yeah.

00:40:59.800 Yeah. So part of the problem with sympathy and empathy is that actually there are different and sometimes contrasting definitions of the two terms.

00:41:10.500 But for the purposes of this discussion, let's define them this way, if you don't mind.

00:41:15.820 Empathy is the idea that you want to somehow put yourself in the shoes, in somebody else's shoes.

00:41:22.760 You want to try to feel what that other person is feeling.

00:41:25.800 You want to try to, so it's an emotional response.

00:41:28.760 Sympathy, on the other hand, it's a little bit more, it also has to do with emotions, but it's a little bit more intellectual because it's the notion that, well, I might not be able to put myself in another person's shoes, but I am a human being.

00:41:42.580 He or she is a human being.

00:41:44.040 So I can imagine that she might not feel OK with this or she might feel, you know, angry or something like that.

00:41:51.360 So sympathy is a little bit more detached, but also broader than empathy.

00:41:58.380 The Stoics are certainly about cultivating sympathy, but they're wary of empathy.

00:42:04.300 And some modern psychologists are as well.

00:42:06.900 There was an interesting book that came out a few years ago called Against, Literally Against Empathy by Paul Bloom, who is a psychologist at Yale University.

00:42:15.300 And why would you be against empathy?

00:42:18.700 Empathy, you cannot avoid empathy.

00:42:20.700 And it's a basic natural human instinct.

00:42:23.640 And in fact, arguably, you don't want to eliminate it because otherwise you turn us into a bunch of psychopaths.

00:42:29.580 And that's not what we want.

00:42:31.380 But the problem with empathy is that it's easily manipulated.

00:42:35.300 Because it's mostly an emotional response, you can easily fool yourself that you're actually in the, you know, in somebody else's shoes.

00:42:46.760 Well, yeah, in fact, you're not.

00:42:48.020 And it's even pretentious for you to think that you might be because they have very different experiences.

00:42:54.260 And also, it's very easy to manipulate externally.

00:42:57.800 For instance, I don't know if you remember, but the first Iraq, when the first Iraq war was about to start,

00:43:04.200 one of the things that happened was that we were bombarded with news of the Iraqi soldiers going into hospitals and throwing babies out of incubators on the floor and stuff like that.

00:43:18.500 And we all felt empathy for that situation.

00:43:22.820 In fact, we felt outrage for that situation.

00:43:25.540 Too bad it was entirely made up.

00:43:27.640 It was, you know, completely fake news before fake news was a thing.

00:43:33.680 So, it's easy to manipulate somebody emotionally.

00:43:37.360 The idea with sympathy, on the other hand, is that your cognition kicks in.

00:43:42.540 The Stoic model is that emotions and cognition and reason are not separate.

00:43:47.880 They are two aspects of the same thing.

00:43:49.680 They are very deeply interconnected so that you can talk to your emotions, in a sense, and reason with your emotions, come to terms with your emotions.

00:43:58.580 So, sympathy means that you are trying to be helpful to other people.

00:44:05.360 You're trying to understand how other people might be going through, let's say, a tough time and how you might be helpful.

00:44:11.640 But at the same time, you realize you're not them.

00:44:14.680 You're not in that situation.

00:44:16.660 And that puts you in a different, you know, different, from a different standpoint.

00:44:21.220 You're looking at things from a different standpoint.

00:44:22.660 So, yeah, the Stoics were very wary of emotional responses or motion-driven responses, especially anger or fear or things like that.

00:44:33.540 But they were, on the other hand, very much into practicing sympathy because practicing sympathy is precisely what allows you to expand those circles of concern that we were talking about earlier.

00:44:46.700 I cannot be empathetic with a billion people.

00:44:49.880 It's just not humanly possible.

00:44:51.440 But I can sympathize with, let's say, hundreds of thousands of people who might be going through the results or, you know, dealing with the results of a flood on the other side of the world or something like that.

00:45:03.140 And therefore, I can help.

00:45:04.820 I can do my part.

00:45:06.100 I can send money, let's say, to some organization that is helpful out of sympathy, but not empathy.

00:45:11.940 It's not my experience.

00:45:13.560 I've never been exposed to a flood.

00:45:15.300 I'm not on the other side of the world.

00:45:16.820 It would be pretentious of me to say, oh, yeah, I empathize with people in Bangladesh.

00:45:22.740 It's like, I don't know anything about people in Bangladesh other than their people.

00:45:26.700 And that's enough to trigger my sympathy.

00:45:28.900 Hey, Francis, what do you think is the best way to advertise a business?

00:45:34.500 That's easy.

00:45:35.700 All you need to do is spend shed loads of cash on an advert that's going to be promoted on a dying medium like TV.

00:45:42.420 Then simply sit back and watch all your hard-earned money disappear down the toilet.

00:45:47.540 What about advertising with trigonometry?

00:45:49.220 Why would I do that when I can advertise on ITV3 for the measly sum of 20 grand and be watched by six people?

00:45:58.140 Because trigonometry now has over 350,000 subscribers across the different platforms and gets 2 million views and downloads a month.

00:46:05.420 That's right.

00:46:06.300 You can place an advert with us and we'll promote your brand on one of our episodes.

00:46:10.980 Your advert will be written by two professional comedians.

00:46:13.880 Yeah, that's right.

00:46:14.640 We're hiring two professional comedians.

00:46:16.820 Where we make our ads funny and engaging to the point where some people say the ads are their favourite parts of the show.

00:46:24.840 Yeah, we probably shouldn't admit that, mate.

00:46:26.840 All you need to do is contact us on marketing at triggerpod.co.uk.

00:46:32.200 That's marketing at triggerpod.co.uk.

00:46:35.940 Advertise with us and we'll get your business cancelled.

00:46:40.220 Massimo, do you think that at the moment we have a society that is too empathetic?

00:46:44.780 Where we essentially, we allow our feelings to override our logic and our reasoning.

00:46:52.280 That makes us less stoical.

00:46:54.120 And that therefore means that we make ourselves vulnerable to be manipulated by certain people seeking victim status forever, for instance, as a way to raise their status.

00:47:04.700 Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

00:47:06.800 On this one, I'm with Paul Bloom that I mentioned before.

00:47:10.340 That's exactly the argument that it makes against empathy.

00:47:15.300 Yes, I think one of the negative turning points of contemporary civilization, for instance, was Facebook's invention of the angry button, which was not by chance at all.

00:47:25.940 It was a result of, you know, careful research into what is it that can maximize the number of hits on a particular page so that I can maximize my revenues from advertisements.

00:47:36.660 And Facebook researchers discovered that the angry button got eight times more responses than a like button.

00:47:43.800 People like to be angry.

00:47:45.680 People really fall for that sort of stuff.

00:47:48.700 And now that is an interesting example of structural change.

00:47:54.100 You know, because the introduction of that button, as I said, was not random.

00:47:58.680 It was very much on purpose.

00:48:01.100 And it was on purpose to, of course, pursue the goals of the corporation that is behind Facebook, not to be helpful to humanity in general or to be helpful even to the individual user.

00:48:13.440 So that is one example of how structural changes can hijack natural tendencies and bring us in a direction that we don't necessarily want to go.

00:48:25.240 Now, how would you react to that?

00:48:26.960 Well, I'll tell you how I reacted to that.

00:48:28.820 I quit Facebook.

00:48:30.940 So because I used to think naively, as it turns out, that, you know, technologies are neutral.

00:48:36.920 It depends on how you use them.

00:48:39.060 You can, you know, nuclear energy.

00:48:40.660 Yes, you can certainly build atomic bombs, but you can also, you know, power entire cities out as a result of it.

00:48:48.040 So it's neutral.

00:48:49.180 It depends on how you use it.

00:48:50.940 That is true for some technologies, but it's definitely not the case for other technologies.

00:48:56.860 Right.

00:48:57.140 And the case of social media, it turns out, it's definitely not the case.

00:49:02.760 They're not neutral, neutral platforms.

00:49:04.820 They're not.

00:49:05.140 It's not just a matter of how you use it.

00:49:07.980 It's it's there's something structurally built into the system that biases behaviors of many people.

00:49:15.220 Well, not everybody necessarily, but a lot of people in a direction that I think is destructive.

00:49:19.900 And so my response was, I'm done.

00:49:22.440 I'm out of it.

00:49:23.280 And you must have experienced this as well, being a university professor on campus where you see empathy, in inverted commas, getting weaponized.

00:49:32.260 Empathy is a means to shut down somebody who disagrees with you.

00:49:36.760 Empathy being used as a way to like, well, we're not.

00:49:39.460 I don't want you to say this because this is offensive.

00:49:41.820 This could harm this particular person.

00:49:44.980 I mean, that's another aspect of this, isn't it?

00:49:47.160 It is.

00:49:48.280 I have not honestly seen that much of that particular phenomenon on the campus at City College.

00:49:55.300 But, yes, I've heard from colleagues who certainly have experienced something like that.

00:49:59.300 And I'm wary of a lot of terms that have been become very popular recently, such as safe spaces and, you know, oh, that's hurtful and so on and so forth.

00:50:10.840 Well, there are situations where a safe space is, in fact, a good idea, meaning a space where somebody knows that they are not going to be physically assaulted, for instance.

00:50:20.720 That's definitely a good use of a safe space.

00:50:23.560 But on a university campus, if by safe space you mean a space where you can present your opinions but not subject to criticism, that seems to me to run exactly counter the whole point of a university.

00:50:36.220 Well said.

00:50:37.120 I mean, some time ago I read one of my favorite writers from two or three decades ago was Neil Postman, who was a professor at Columbia University.

00:50:48.340 And he wrote a great book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

00:50:53.680 And his point was that if you don't make your students uncomfortable at least several times during the semester, you're just not doing your job.

00:51:02.600 You're not doing the right thing.

00:51:04.400 And so, yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm really not concerned with making my students uncomfortable.

00:51:10.440 And they know it.

00:51:11.200 I tell them in the beginning of the semester, it's like, you know, this is a philosophy class.

00:51:14.980 The point of it is to make you think about stuff that you don't want to think about.

00:51:18.940 And moving on to the idea of leadership, a lot of stoicism was focused on producing good leaders.

00:51:27.200 Now, there's a particular example that you talk about where it didn't produce a good leader.

00:51:33.760 I can't remember, I can't actually pronounce the name of the person, but I'm sure you'll be able to explain who he was.

00:51:39.100 So how do we get better leaders and how do we learn from the mistakes of the civilizations in the past and the empires that have crumbled?

00:51:49.460 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:51:50.840 So in the quest for character, I have two chapters where I go through two different sets of examples.

00:51:56.500 One group is philosophers trying to teach leaders and statesmen about virtue and good behavior, so to speak.

00:52:03.940 And those are almost invariably a failure, almost invariably.

00:52:09.560 Plato tried twice with two different, you know, statesmen in Syracuse, Dionysus I and Dionysus II, and he almost lost his life in both cases.

00:52:19.280 It didn't work.

00:52:20.540 Seneca tried with the Roman emperor Nero, failure, complete failure.

00:52:25.200 I mean, that was a pretty significant failure, Massimo.

00:52:27.280 Definitely.

00:52:28.800 Now, Aristotle did much better with Alexander the Great.

00:52:32.740 As it turns out, I tell the story in some detail in the book.

00:52:36.040 That was actually one of the success stories.

00:52:38.500 But by and large, when philosophers try to come into politics and tell politicians how to do things, it's a disaster.

00:52:48.200 The second group, however, is much better.

00:52:50.540 These are statesmen themselves, politicians themselves, who realize they want to do the right thing, and therefore they ask the advice and the support of philosophers.

00:53:01.140 We have Marcus Aurelius, for instance, who had, you know, Junius Rusticus, who was a Stoic teacher, who influenced him very much.

00:53:10.700 We have Plato succeeded on a third attempt with his student Dion, who in turn did become a leader in Syracuse and worked out much better.

00:53:22.060 But that's because Dion sought Plato, not the other way around.

00:53:27.680 Cato the Younger, who was a Roman senator during the period of the Republic, that also worked very well.

00:53:35.220 And Seneca himself, for one thing, because he was also a senator.

00:53:38.760 So what do these examples tell you?

00:53:42.960 That you can teach virtue to somebody, but you cannot learn it for that person, which, frankly, doesn't come as a surprise to any teacher.

00:53:51.960 I mean, you know, when I occasionally get pissed off at my students because I think they're not doing, you know, making enough of an effort, that's exactly what I tell them.

00:53:59.280 I can teach you guys, but I cannot learn for you.

00:54:02.180 You have to make the effort.

00:54:03.240 It's, again, going back to the analogy that we were making in the beginning of, you know, learning a musical instrument.

00:54:09.660 You can have the best musical teacher in the world, but if you don't practice every day, and if you don't want to practice every day in a mindful fashion, you're not going anywhere.

00:54:19.440 And you're certainly not going to Carnegie Hall.

00:54:22.000 So that's what we need.

00:54:23.740 Now, therefore, what do we do in terms of our leaders?

00:54:27.680 Well, I think we do two things.

00:54:29.200 First, we get rid of most of the current leaders because most of the current leaders are simply not interested in virtual character and stuff like that.

00:54:38.020 They have their own agenda, and they're pursuing it in ways that are, I think, largely destructive for the rest of us.

00:54:46.300 Now, you said, but that's a tall order.

00:54:49.840 It is.

00:54:50.400 But if we're talking about a more or less democratic society like most Western countries are, let's not forget, the buck does stop with us.

00:54:59.880 We are the people that elect those people.

00:55:01.740 It's very easy and even satisfying to complain about the politicians, right?

00:55:08.780 It's like politicians are – like Congress in the United States has a rating, a favorable rating that is barely above that of rapists as a class.

00:55:21.280 So it's like, you know, it's an approval rate of like 10 percent or something like that because it's very easy to complain about politicians.

00:55:29.220 But who the hell voted these people in there in the first place?

00:55:32.540 And I understand that things are not that easy because there are – again, there are two structural problems.

00:55:37.380 There's – especially in American politics, there's a lot of money that comes from large corporations.

00:55:42.180 Basically, a lot of our politicians are simply bought by large corporations.

00:55:46.420 So it's complicated.

00:55:47.760 But ultimately, we are the ones that cast the vote. 0.99

00:55:50.160 And so it's our own damn fault. 0.95

00:55:51.580 So before starting complaining about the politician, ask yourself, well, who did you vote for last time around? 0.97

00:55:57.620 So that's step number one, getting rid of the people that are there now.

00:56:00.280 Step number two is the long-term one, and that's the one that I was talking about earlier when I mentioned the documentary Young Plato.

00:56:07.960 We need to work on our children.

00:56:10.260 We're not going to get a new generation of people who want to act on behalf of society and do the right thing if we don't teach our children, if we don't bother teaching our children, if we put our children in front of an iPad so that we don't have to bother, you know, being concerned with them.

00:56:27.400 I see a lot of parents here in Brooklyn, New York, going around with their children.

00:56:33.640 Allegedly, they're having their time with their children.

00:56:35.480 But in fact, what happens is that the parent is on a cell phone and the child is doing something else.

00:56:40.600 There's no interaction.

00:56:41.700 There is no coming together at all because we're all busy doing other things, most of those things being completely irrelevant anyway.

00:56:50.200 So those are the two things we need to change.

00:56:53.140 We need to think much more carefully about who we elect, especially at a local level, because, you know, I understand the national, like my vote in a national election counts for close to nothing, especially in New York, where there is such a majority of, in this particular case, Democratic voters that it doesn't matter who I vote for.

00:57:13.600 It's the Democrats usually get elected.

00:57:16.440 The opposite happens, of course, in other states in the country.

00:57:21.100 But at the local level, that's a whole different matter because at the local level, you know, elections are won on a basis of hundreds or thousands of votes.

00:57:29.480 And so not only one vote counts, but one person who contacts a politician and donates, you know, gives money, but wants to have some conversation.

00:57:38.520 Those are actually, those actually make a difference.

00:57:40.920 And before one becomes a national politician, usually, often, they start at a local level.

00:57:48.280 So, again, it's up to us, but we need to do it in a concerted way, not just one time.

00:57:55.260 We just need to make it a priority.

00:57:57.420 Massimo, isn't there another dimension to this problem, which is that I agree with you that we're responsible, but I think the way that we're responsible is actually less about politics.

00:58:08.200 And I've written about this, about the decline of, we used to call them the big beasts of politics here in the UK.

00:58:15.260 There are not as many big beasts anymore.

00:58:17.220 And I think one of the reasons is you talk about social media and the 24-hour news cycle and whatever.

00:58:22.700 We've got to a point where quite a lot of politicians who would have made it in the past.

00:58:27.380 You know, a Winston Churchill, I don't imagine, would get through the current political system because he had too many, the wrong views.

00:58:35.460 He drank too much.

00:58:36.900 He did this.

00:58:37.820 He did that.

00:58:38.520 And he had these character flaws that we might think of.

00:58:41.580 And so when we find out that somebody said the wrong word or was a bit insensitive or did this or did that, we filter them out or the media filter them out for us.

00:58:52.460 There's a massive outrage on social media.

00:58:54.460 People get upset about this person said this or did this or whatever.

00:58:58.240 And so you're kind of left with the only people who you're left with are the people who are pretending to be perfect, even though we know that people aren't perfect.

00:59:05.640 But it's more about you're not getting anything wrong as opposed to actually having virtue.

00:59:10.700 Yes and no.

00:59:11.900 Yeah, I totally agree with you.

00:59:13.200 The Churchill probably wouldn't make it.

00:59:14.620 In fact, it's kind of funny that you mentioned this because I'm just reading his biography and because I wanted to get a much better understanding not only of the man but of his times.

00:59:23.320 I was in London recently with my wife and we went to the war rooms and the Churchill Museum.

00:59:27.840 So it was a great, great experience.

00:59:29.760 Yeah, I think you're right in that department.

00:59:31.960 But at the same time, at least in the United States, and my understanding is possibly in the UK, certainly in Italy, of which I have more of a direct experience, the situation is actually very asymmetrical between the right and the left at this point.

00:59:49.360 What you are, what you're pointing, the problem you're pointing out, it's certainly the case in the left, on the left.

00:59:53.900 You know, in the United States here, if a left-leaning politician says anything wrong and manages to somehow insult somebody at whatever level, they're out.

01:00:03.360 There's no way.

01:00:05.360 On the right, it's exactly the opposite.

01:00:07.080 The more outrageous and insulting you are, the more you get ahead.

01:00:10.280 I mean, you know, do I need to mention Trump or Boris?

01:00:14.200 I think it's not on all of the right, but yes, I know what you mean.

01:00:17.700 It's never all the right, not even all the left.

01:00:19.680 By the way, it's not because I want to argue with you, but just to disagree.

01:00:24.840 We've had a conservative government for the last 12 years.

01:00:28.460 A lot of the damage done to the conservative party and their government has been because somebody has said the wrong thing or had the party in the wrong place or was caught doing this or that.

01:00:38.200 So, your point about Trump is absolutely right.

01:00:43.200 Trump is a unique individual in that way, I think.

01:00:47.440 There may be examples elsewhere of people who, on the populist right, will go out and say something outrageous and that will help them in the eyes of some people.

01:00:56.000 I would also maybe argue that, you know, Donald Trump probably lost the last election because of how obnoxious people felt he was too, right?

01:01:04.940 Certainly.

01:01:05.380 Well, I don't know about – certainly it's a little too strong.

01:01:08.660 Probably.

01:01:09.940 Yeah.

01:01:10.640 But Trump is not – unfortunately, from my perspective, it's not an unusual situation.

01:01:17.500 I mean, he certainly is the most egregious example.

01:01:20.140 But he has started something, at least here in the United States, so that now we have like more than half of Congress that represents that kind of ethos.

01:01:28.520 And that's damaging to the fabric of society.

01:01:32.800 So, I see a difference there.

01:01:35.360 As I said, I'm less familiar with the UK situation.

01:01:38.480 But, you know, there are – even there, there are limits to what we should, in fact, accept from a politician, right?

01:01:46.500 So, the question isn't one of, well, you have to be careful what you say.

01:01:51.720 You should be careful what you say, especially if you're a politician.

01:01:54.360 The question is what kinds of things get you disqualified.

01:01:57.180 Right.

01:01:57.920 Right?

01:01:58.360 So, if what gets you disqualified is to express a perfectly reasonable opinion that happens to insult or whatever, rail up a group of people, that really should not be grounds for disqualification.

01:02:15.180 But, if what gets you disqualified is the fact that, you know, you pass laws for the country to behave in one way and then you do exactly the opposite in your private life, well, then you should be disqualified.

01:02:26.420 Of course.

01:02:26.740 Then, you know, that's a good reason for it.

01:02:28.420 So, it gets – it's complicated.

01:02:30.160 But, certainly, what you're talking about is there, it's present, and it is one of the many problems that we've had.

01:02:38.240 And, you know, you probably know Jonathan Haidt, who is a –

01:02:42.900 Yes.

01:02:43.440 Yes.

01:02:43.860 Social psychologist here at NYU, at New York University.

01:02:47.720 Jonathan and I usually don't see hide or eye, and we've had these agreements even in print over the years.

01:02:54.340 But, recently, he has been pushing this notion that a major source of our contemporary problems is, in fact, the rise of social media.

01:03:04.960 Because it is the rise of social media that has made Trump possible, but also has made the outrage culture possible, the easily offended culture possible, et cetera, et cetera.

01:03:16.080 And, I think he has a point.

01:03:17.640 I mean, you know, I don't know whether social media is the beginning or the end of civilization.

01:03:21.620 I certainly hope not.

01:03:23.060 But, it is a problem.

01:03:24.180 And, we really ought to fight back against it.

01:03:27.440 Now, fortunately, Elon Musk is doing part of the work for us because he's making such a mess of Twitter that, you know, a lot of people are actually leaving the platform.

01:03:37.000 But, the problem is what is the alternative, right?

01:03:41.260 So, people are now beginning to throw around ideas about, oh, there's this alternative social platform, et cetera.

01:03:47.740 Yeah, but we need to be careful about considering whether the problem isn't the very notion of social media.

01:03:54.180 And, not the specifics of Twitter or Facebook or something.

01:03:57.940 Yeah, I don't think you're going to put that toothpaste back in the tube, I'm afraid.

01:04:02.940 And, actually, I disagree with you.

01:04:04.440 I mean, I know that some people are leaving Twitter because they think Musk is making a mess of it.

01:04:08.740 But, I think he's doing his best to try and improve it.

01:04:11.360 Now, some people won't like it.

01:04:13.360 But, I think the attempt to improve it is better than what we had before, which was no attempt to improve it at all.

01:04:20.160 Oh, we could have a whole separate show about how just bad Elon Musk is.

01:04:24.500 Yes, we definitely could.

01:04:27.580 We're actually on the hour.

01:04:29.360 So, we'll ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see.

01:04:35.000 But, we do, as always, have a final question for you that we ask all of our guests.

01:04:38.840 Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be making?

01:04:43.020 Don't say Elon Musk.

01:04:44.040 No, I think we're, it's not that we're not talking enough about it, but, sorry, not talking at all about it, but we're definitely not talking enough about it.

01:04:55.100 And, I'm sorry, but it does have to do with Musk, not him personally.

01:04:58.080 I think we're not talking enough about just how much of our alleged democracies are actually plutocracies.

01:05:05.160 That is, how much money there is in politics and basically buys elections.

01:05:09.620 One of my favorite examples is a few years ago, the federal government was after Microsoft for an antitrust issue. 0.96

01:05:19.580 And, what Microsoft responded, the way Microsoft responded was simply to literally buy a senator who introduced legislation, which was written by Microsoft, to cover Microsoft's ass and worked.

01:05:32.680 So, if you can do that now, you and I cannot do that.

01:05:35.400 We don't have enough millions of dollars to do that sort of stuff.

01:05:38.620 That undermines democracy in a really serious fashion, and I think we're not talking enough about that.

01:05:46.840 Well said.

01:05:47.480 Well, guys, if you've enjoyed this, make sure to subscribe to our locals so that one day we could buy a politician.

01:05:53.960 But you're, I'm asking, I'm only joking, but you're absolutely right.

01:05:56.920 I mean, look at this, what's this guy, SBF or whatever his name is?

01:06:00.220 Yeah.

01:06:00.420 I mean, he was spending a crap ton of money trying to influence politicians to basically implement the laws that would benefit his company.

01:06:08.340 We actually don't have that problem nearly as much in the UK because you can't really donate in the same way to political parties and political candidates quite in the same way.

01:06:18.820 So, I couldn't agree with you more on that.

01:06:22.040 Before we let you go, though, tell everybody where to find your books, where to find your work, and how to access other things that you do.

01:06:31.160 The books, of course, can be found anywhere you get books, online or in person.

01:06:36.260 For everything else, massimopiliucci.org.

01:06:39.280 You'll find all my interviews, podcasts, videos, links to books and essays, everything you want.

01:06:47.680 Fantastic stuff.

01:06:48.540 Well, thank you for coming on the show.

01:06:50.160 We'll ask you a couple of questions for our locals in a second.

01:06:52.840 And thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:06:54.980 We will see you very soon with another fantastic episode like this one or our show.

01:06:59.840 All of them go at 7 p.m. UK time.

01:07:01.520 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:07:06.200 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:07:09.280 How does a good Stoic manage to care enough to want to be virtuous, but not so much that they become overwhelmed by all the things there are to care about?

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TRIGGERnometry - December 19, 2022

Stoicism： Get Better at Life with Massimo Pigliucci

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