The Daily Stoic - Brad Stulberg On Mastering Change With Science And Stoicism

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Ryan speaks with Brad Stulberg about his new book Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You, the scientific basis for humanity’s need for change, why all ancient wisdom traditions agree that the most effective way to deal with change is through skillful action, the Case For Tragic Optimism, why it is healthy to think of death, and more. Brad Stulberg is a writer, success coach, speaker, and entrepreneur whose work focuses on exploring the principles of mental health and mastery. His books Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success and The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul have sold more than 350,000 copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and TIME. He also co-created The Growth Equation, an online platform dedicated to exploring, defining, and realizing peak performance. Brad’s work can be found at bradstulberg.com and on Instagram @bradstulberg and Twitter @BStulberg.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

But it's good to be competitive. It's good to be driven, it's good to want to be the best at what you do. The problem is life is not exactly like sports in the sense that there's a winner and a loser, it's zero sum. So I think when people are competitive, in my industry friends and say writing books, you're seeing something similar to what you do as a competitor, friends and say writing books, you're seeing someone who does something similar to what you do as a competitor, as opposed to an ally, as opposed to fellow traveler, as opposed to appear. And so one of the reasons I've tried to push that

out of my mind is that I'm always surprised when I get to know someone, uniform in a similar space, is how much we have in common, how much we can learn from each other. And now we're better off helping each other than the alternative. I got to know Brad Stolberg, actually don't know when,

right around me the time his first book came out, Pete Performance, which is a great book. He wrote that with Steve Magnus, who was on the podcast recently talking about doing hard things, another great book. Then he wrote the passion paradox and the practice of groundedness. We carry both the practice of groundedness and people performance here at the Pain and Porch.

Two great books, you should definitely check out. But Brad and I have connected over a bunch of stuff. I don't want to share, but similar struggles, similar issues, similar, say pain points during the pandemic and come someone I text quite a bit we talk share things and it's been wonderful to see his career develop we are briefly both at Portfolio Penguin that's where he wrote the practice of groundedness this new book just came out master of change how to excel when everything is changing, including you. But

you've probably seen his work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Forbes, and many places. He's got an undergrad and a graduate degree from the University of Michigan, he's on the faculty of University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health. And this new book, Master of Change, is I think a very stoic idea, the idea of the world's constantly changing, that nothing is constant. And that's why we open just talking about some of the meditations on change in meditations. We had a great conversation. Brad was in LA to do rituals podcast, mutual friend of both of ours.

Again, the idea of peers is supposed to competitors, all helping each other. And then he swung by the painted porch and we did this interview in the new studio, which is almost complete construction is wrapping up. And I'm glad he came by in person. It was much better than doing it remote. You can follow him on Instagram at Brad Stolberg on Twitter at B Stolberg. You can go to his podcast, the growth EQ. Go to his website, thegrowtheq.com slash master of change. And yeah, check it out. As I've said before, my thing is I do something hard every single day. I run, I bike, or I swim. The problem here in Texas is either when it gets really cold, when it rains really, really hard, or when it gets extremely hot.

That's what I have a Peloton 4. We use it all the time. You probably know Peloton as the people who make bikes's what I have a Peloton 4. We'll use it all the time. You probably know Peloton as the people who make bikes, but they also have Peloton tread, Peloton row, or even the Peloton app, which you can now access for free, which has classes like yoga, strength training, high intensity cardio, boxing, which you can do wherever, whenever, and Peloton's classes don't feel like regular workout classes. They're entertainment, they're great music, instructors are awesome. If this sounds beyond your price point, you have to remember that the app is free. It's the best value and fitness because people actually

stick with the workouts once they try them ready to give it a try, get started and download the free peloton app today. The peloton app is available through free tier or paid subscription paid membership start at 16.99 per month. Welcome to New Brunswick, Canada. Welcome to wide open spaces and glistening waters, welcoming faces and natural opportunities to soothe mind, body and soul. Come on over and meditate on the world's highest tides. Explore ancient rock formations as you walk the ocean floor, relax and unspoiled woodlands with plenty of opportunities for easygoing adventure.

Sure, it's a little off the beaten path, but that's what makes it the perfect place to unwind new Brunswick, always inviting. Visit turrismnewbrunswick.ca So, I thought I would open with, given that your book is about change, there's probably no theme that Marcus talks about in meditations more than change. I'll read you some and we'll riff on them. How does that sound? That sounds good.

All right. So what do I want? 18 in book two. All right. He says, if it doesn't hurt the individual elements to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It's a natural thing and nothing natural is evil. And then he says in 30, let's see, 32, he says, the world is nothing but change.

Our life is only perception. And then this is my favorite one. This is what I think it'll like. He says, constant awareness that everything is born from change, the knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and to make new things like it. All that exists is a seed that will emerge from it.

You think that the only seeds are the ones that make plants and children, you must go deeper. And then, actually, let's do one more. Two more actually. I wrote down a bunch. Yeah, I wrote down a bunch. Alright, some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone.

Change and flux constantly remake the world just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. We find ourselves in a river, which of the thing around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? Like an attachment to a sparrow, we glimpse it and it's gone. And then this is the last one. It's the last one.

And there's more. I just search change in meditations to pull them all up, because I know there's so many. The world will cover us all and then be transformed in turn, and that too will change, add infinitum, and that as well, add infinitum. Think about them. The waves of change and alteration endlessly breaking, and see our brief mortality for what it is. The design of the world is like a flood sweeping all before it. The foolishness of them, little men busy with states, with affairs of state, with philosophy or what they think of philosophy, nothing but flam

and mucus. Whoo! So it does see... He knows what's up. He does. Like, the one constant is change. That's right. That's right. Yeah, impermanence. It is like the fundamental rule of the universe. Yes. Yet it's something that so many of us resist or deny or engage in magical thinking about all the time. Yeah, I was thinking about this like basically everything good in my life has come from change, right?

And yet what do I fear the most or spend the most of most of my time trying to do? It's to keep things as they are. So we have this sense that we come from disruption and change and creation, and yet we have this strange status quo bias. That's right. We crave stability. And to get into the science of this just for a moment, because I think it's a helpful grounding for the conversation and like why we have this bias.

So for the last 150 plus years, the prevailing model of change is homeostasis, which says that systems crave stability, change or disorder disruption happens, and then the system tries to get back to where it was. Yeah, it needs stability all the time. So it's order, disorder, back to order. And like I said, for over the last 150 years,

the prevailing wisdom across the entire scientific community was that homeostasis governs life. Yeah. About 20 years ago, a pair of scientists said, no, no, no, like this isn't how it works. This is inaccurate. It's a poor fit model. Actually, when you look at really healthy thriving systems,

whether it's an individual all the way up to a society, yes, they crave stability, but that stability is constantly in flux. And they coin this allostasis, which says that a system starts its stability. There's some sort of change or disruption disorder. And then it gets back to stability, but that's stability somewhere new. It's reorder. So whereas homeostasis is order, disorder, order, Alice Stasis is order, disorder, reorder. And when you look at the etymology of the words, it tells the whole story, right? Homeo means same, Stasis means standing.

So it's, we crave the same standing. We resist change, we avoid change. This is our counter to change narrative. Aloe means variable, stasis means standing, it literally translates to stability through change. So the way that we achieve any kind of grounding is by being able to change. Yeah, and it seems like the last couple of years

we're illustrative of this and that people kept talking about when things go back to normal as if pandemics and plagues are not normal, as if demagogues are not normal, as if political unrest is abnormal, as if fires and a change in climate, not to make light of any of these issues, but as if when one studies history, they don't see this thing happening over and over again. Fears of that thing pervasive over reactions, under reactions like this is exactly as it's been and as it will always be. And the sort of, that's what I think is so interesting when you read meditations is like very little in here that is not imminently relatable and has its analogs to our own time. And yet we know that so much has changed over the intervening 20th century.

So it's like everything is changing and also everything is staying the same at the same time. Yeah, to quote our mutual friend Dave Epstein, he says that we're the same people, we just wear different clothes. And whenever I read whether it's the Stoics, Meditations, Epictetus, Seneca, whether it's the Polycanin from Buddhism, whether it's Old Judeo-Christian text, they're both, as you said, old and completely timely, timeless and timely. Yeah, we have this sense too that like, I was writing about this recently that like,

I was reading this interview about David McCullough and he was talking about one of the things that a biographer has to understand. He says is that people weren't living in the past. They were living in the present. So to them, that was the present, right? So we think of the past as having a kind of homeostasis because it's very difficult for us to conceive

of someone a thousand or two thousand or five thousand years ago living in the future, but it was. They were living in, not just the present, but they were living on the cutting edge of things. Things felt new, they felt fresh, they felt different, things had just been invented, whether they're talking about the wheel or a glass mirror or something, right?

These are all technology, every era that's ever existed was an era in which technology was disrupting and changing and altering things. That's right. Like the funny thing is the Stoics Cato, he's this guy who's trying to preserve the Moss Morium or the old ways. So like in what we think of as ancient Rome, he's thinking of this radically changed present that he doesn't like and he's trying to go back. And so like change has been this thing that human beings have sort of been impotently struggling against for as long as there's been human beings. That's right. And in that to go on too much of a segue here, but when you were talking about like how we think

of the past is static, I also wonder if that's why there's so much resistance to re-evaluating some of the historical narratives that have been told. Because to us, like, you know, it's the one thing that we can cling on to. It's like our history, our narrative. For God for this way. You change that, then it's like we really have no grounding.

So that's really interesting. But yeah, to your point about new technologies, it feels, and I think this is why studying history and reading history is so important, because it can feel so urgent and unprecedented when you're in it. But then you realize that it is not at all. I remember at the start of the pandemic, crap, you'll probably know the book about the Spanish flu. Yeah, the great influenza by John and Barry.

Yeah, so I was reading that book and it's the same. Like down to the freaking masking, like all of it is the same. And on the one hand, it's kind of comforting. And on the other hand, it's mind-boggling. Yeah, actually, I just read this other book. I'm forgetting the title myself now, but it was about the race to invent the polio vaccine.

Mm-hmm. And so it's like 100 years ago, there's this nice symmetry between the Spanish flu and COVID. You go 100 years, same thing happened. And then it was like, oh, actually 50 years, like right in the middle, there was this other thing. And like I'm, so I'm reading this book about the invention of the polio vaccine, there's all these doubts. And then this, this newspaper columnist, and radio columnist,

his name was Walter Winchell. He was like the biggest person in the world at this time. He is a real piece of shit. But anyways, he had published this column that was what we would now call like anti-vax. And it had this huge impact on people's willingness or their views on this experimental vaccine. And so you're just like, yeah, look, humans have always been on the cusp of some new scary thing. Some people are more scared of it than others. The same questions always come up.

The same sort of issues, whether you're talking about privacy or freedom. Like, we're always wrestling with the same things. And so, it's easy to sort of be glib about this idea that the only constant is change. But there is something kind of philosophically beautiful and paradoxical about that little saying that change is constant.

And as you said, like there is kind of a stability in change. In fact, it's the only stability. It's the only stability. Exactly. And you know, that was an interesting part of the research for the Master of Change was just seeing throughout history. How whenever there are periods of accelerated or punctuated change,

there are always demagogues and grifters. And this just prays on people's homeostatic mindset and natural inclination to be scared of change and to want to cling to the old stability or the stability that they have. And that opens up the door for demagogues to come in and say, make insert line great again. Like go back to the past, don't lose your stain. Make these people go away, you know, cling to your old normal because there's a comfort in that. Yet like evolution, the grandest change of all time

shows us that clinging to the old normal is how a species gets selected out. Yeah, it is interesting. Like I think when you see, and we don't have to get too much into it, but with the pandemic or other issues, like so much of one side of the issue, and it's not necessarily a right or left thing,

but there's always like a set of objections that when you really boil them down, or you try to take them seriously, and then the next one comes up, the next one comes up, it's like what it really, truly boils down to is I wish this wasn't true, I wish this could go away, right? And I'm scared probably on it.

And you mentioned sort of magical thinking earlier, but there's this kind of wishful thinking of like, well, my view is that we can ignore it or my view is I can just I I will listen to the person who instead of telling me that the change is inevitable, inevitable that the facts are unpleasant, but here's how we're going to deal with them. I want to listen to the person that tells me that it doesn't have to be this way, that it magically can go away, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. And I think that we see this most frequently in the media, in particularly on social media, where when there are periods of, again, intense punctuated change, there's these two extremes that people fall into. And it does tend to split right and left on each of these extremes, but not always. So one extreme is what you're saying. It's kind of the berry my head in the sand.

Pretend it doesn't exist, wish it away, or even like takes on a tinge of toxic positivity. Like, well, my life's fine. You know, I go to the grocery store, don't make me do anything different, and just pretend that it's not there and it doesn't happen. And that tends to be the track of broadly speaking and painting and way too large swaps the right.

But then there's this other track, which is despair and nihilism, which is everything sucks. Don't, how dare you be positive, how dare you smile, how dare you even try to talk about fixing this problem because we're all part of the problem. Yeah. And that tends to be like the more intellectual track of the left. And I think both of these are the ultimate cop-outs because they absolve you of doing anything.

Right. If you're bearing your head in the sand and everything is fine, there's no need to engage, there's no need to work on it. But if you're in despair and nihilism and this is so beyond the pale that we can't fix it, that also Kind of absolves you of the need to do anything And I think like there's this large chasm in the middle where yes change is hard Yes, sometimes change breaks us and in breaks the things that we care about but if we're gonna Try to fix a broken world or broken things like we can't become broken people. So we can't deny it, but we also can't fall into this other camp of over-intellectualized

despair. Sure. Yeah, the Stokes have this great word, Ascent, not like Ascent Up a Mountain, but AS-S-E-N-T, which I sort of take as the first step in life is acceptance, right? So any change, any, you know, piece of news, any unpleasant reality, the first step is acceptance. If you don't accept it, then you can't do anything about it. But if all you do is accept it, you know, that doesn't make, that doesn't make a better future either, right? So it's the first step is like, this is how things are. This is the thing that's been invented, you know, this is the news we've just gotten about the asteroid coming towards Earth.

And then once you accept it, then it's like, okay, what are you going to do about it? What's what's the what's the opportunity here? And it's not that the opportunity is going to necessarily be a chance to radically improve things, but it could be a chance to mitigate things only slightly or to slow them down or only slightly. And so the sort of acceptance, I think people sometimes think as resignation, but if acceptance is paired with a kind of action or a response, then it's not only like a way forward, but it may, it's like the only way forward. It's the only thing you can do. That's right. I mean, I think like the way that I think of it

is productive action or skillful action. Okay. So something happens and you can either fall into wishing it away or despairing or you can then react to it and take an unskillful action, like out of rage out of panic. And I think whether it's the Stoics, whether to the East, it's the Buddhists, like all of these ancient wisdom traditions

are all pointing towards the same truth, which is the way to skillfully navigate impermanence is to accept it, and then to take skillful actions in its midst. And I think that like that, that it sounds so easy, it's obviously extremely hard to do. Yeah, you talked about in the book, basically the core premise of stoicism or the, the first exercise in stoicism, which is the dichotomy of control. So what is that?

Yeah, so the dichotomy of control is, I believe it was epic teedis that used that exact term, but basically all kinds of stuff in life is going to happen. And some of it is within your control, but lots of it is outside of your control. But what you can control is how you respond when those things happen. And it makes the most sense to focus there. And what's fascinating is around the same time, completely as far as we know, independently of Epic Tetis' dichotomy of control, and the Polycanon, the Buddhist philosophers, were writing about what they called the second arrow. And the first arrow is an event that happens internal,

like an illness or external, some new technology of pandemic, and you can't control the first arrow. But the second arrow is denial, delusion, reaction, and you can control the second arrow. And you don't want to let the arrow hit you twice because it's often the second arrow that hurts worse. Yeah, and it's important, I think, when we're thinking about change, to go like, some change is up to us. Sometimes people are going, do you want to do this or do you want to do that, right?

And so if you have a choice, then great, you should exercise that choice. The dichotomy of control to me is primarily about making that distinction. Is this thing that's happening or going to happen? Do I have some say in it? If so, that's exercise that's say. And if I don't, let's exercise acceptance and then focus on what I'm gonna do next. Exactly. And I do think that we tend to have, again, like back to the polar extremes, right? I want extreme, there is, you can solve all your problems,

you can fix things, control, and on the other extreme is, you know, completely let go. And for 99.99% of things, we generally have some agency. Is it alluded to earlier? It's not always a lot, but there's generally something that we can do to respond skillfully to a change to a situation that's brought upon us. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's Epic Titus. It might have been Socrates. Sorry, I might have been Seneca, but they were saying that, you know what it actually was. Okay. So one of the things Epic Titus is saying is he says, you know what it actually was. Okay, so one of the things that Pectitis is saying is he says, you know, philosopher is like a ball player that, you know, you throw them the ball and they throw it back and you throw it back and they throw it back. And he says, you know, a schoolful ball player doesn't label your throw good or bad.

They just catch it and throw it back. And he sort of labels Socrates as the ultimate ball player. He sort of deals with everything that handles, hands him with this sort of a plum and vigor. And I like that idea of, I like that idea applied to change, which is like life is throwing stuff at you. And you catch it and throw it back and you catch it and throw it back and that's sort of the game. Like that you have agency over how you play, but you don't have agency over how other people are playing. You don't have agency over the rules,

be that gravity or mortality or the law. That's right. And this idea that you're in a fixed system, but you have agency inside the fixed system and how well you exploit your role or the ability, your ability to excel within the small confines that you have control, that's what makes a great athlete. That's what the great champions are is people who've really figured the hell out of their position. That's right. In, inherent to that back and forth

or that game of catch is it's not something that's happening to you, it's something that you're in conversation with or you're dancing with. And I think that is like the most important mindset shift to make around change is that we think that change is something that happens to us instead of something that we're always in conversation with.

And once you flip that, once you're in conversation with it, you might not have a straight line to home play, but there's generally a move that you can make. Yeah, there's kind of two ways to think about it. One, I think sometimes helpful way is like, it's not happening to you, it's happening for you. I can feel a little glib, but there's something to that. And then the other way to think about it, I think, is also important, is that it's not happening to you or anyone, it's just fucking happening. Right? Like, it just is. Like, the pandemic

doesn't care about you. The economy doesn't care about you. Like, the market is not a bull market or a bear market. It doesn't even exist. These are just words that we make up to apply to a loose collection of sort of natural forces. And so one of the things that makes change harder, it's already hard, but one of the things that makes it harder is taking it personally, or sort of lamenting whether it's fair or unfair, as opposed to whether it is real or not real.

Or urgent or not urgent, is it happening right now, or is it happening later? Like there are distinctions you can make when it comes to change, but most of the distinctions we make are really not, they're not helpful and they're not conducive to doing anything about it.

Exactly. And I wanna hone in on something that you said, which is taking it personally. And I think that that is probably why the changes that tend to be the hardest for people to navigate, all of us, myself included, are changes to our identity. Yeah. So the most personal changes that there are, aging, illness, a career change, a job that you get laid off from, a divorce, kids that move out of the house

that you were the primary parent for. So like, we're talking about these external changes, which we tend to personalize, but then there's the truly personal changes. And those are the ones that really most people, at least according to the research, those are the ones that we struggle with, even more than a pandemic,

are the changes to our sense of self and our identity. Because, you know, trying to tie some of these threads together, you mentioned like narratives and history and how we think that they're static. Well, when our personal narrative changes, that can really throw us through a loop. Yeah, it's like, we know changes happening all the time, all over the world, to other people, to industries. It's like, if you're not a journalist, you don't care that newspapers are getting disrupted. But if you work in a factory and then the robots roll in, suddenly technological change feels very different to you. But things are not changing any more or less

than they were before. It's just moved into your quarter of the woods. Exactly. Exactly. And this is true with death, right? It's like people are dying every day, but it's not until someone you know or cares about dies. Like your friend got divorced and you were like, Oh, I'm sorry. But then you get divorced. And now it's a tragedy of epic

proportions. This is just the same thing happening that's always been happening. But now your number is up. That's right. And the key term here is something derived from Victor Frankl. So you've got his books next door in the book shop. And most people know Frankl for his book Man Search for Meaning. I'm gonna assume 90% of listeners are familiar with Frankl for the 10 who aren't and is briefly as possible. Holocaust survivors, psychoanalyst,

has written remarkable books about how to make meaning out of suffering, if suffering, excuse me, and endure. Frankl following Mancèrge for meeting wrote this essay that is very little known called the case for tragic optimism. And Frankl defines tragic optimism as an acceptance of suffering in life. And in a very stoic sense, he says that suffering is inevitable for a few reasons. The first is that we're made a flesh and bone. And when you're made in flesh and bone, you are going to experience physical pain. The second is because we have some agency and we can make plans, certain plans that we make will fail to work out.

And we will feel guilt and shame and we will question why they didn't work out. And then the third is that everything we love, including ourselves, is constantly changing and eventually going to go away. So that is the inevitable tragedy of life. And what Frankl did is he took this tragedy, and he said the work is maintaining optimism throughout that tragedy, which Frank, so elegantly writes as not a kind of toxic positivity pretending it doesn't exist, but trudging forward with a positive attitude nonetheless, in the midst of all that tragedy. He says it's saying yes to life in spite of everything.

That's right. And he has a book, yes to life, that I think is really... But the subtle tiles were so important then. In spite of everything. Yes. That's right. And he has a book, yes to life, that I think is really like a book that he builds. But the South is what's so important then. In spite of everything. Yes. Yeah. And I think that this kind of tragic optimism is just so different from what we in the

West are fed, which is just optimism without any acceptance of the tragedy. Yes. And you can buy yourself out of tragedy, you can consume yourself out of tragedy, you can consume yourself out of tragedy, you can use yourself out of tragedy, instead of just coming to terms with it, and then doing the hard work of being optimistic nonetheless. Yeah, I think there is this perception, for instance, that the Stoics are pessimistic or depressive or realistic.

That's sad. And I think that says more of our view of them that way says more about us than it does about them. Because when I think of say Marcus Aurelis is like, this is a guy who loses his father very young. He's thrust into power even though it's not what he wants to do with his life. He buries six children.

Maybe his wife cheats on him. He's betrayed in this coup. He has to spend a good chunk of his time at war. There's a plague, there's floods. It's like sort of one disaster after another. What I find remarkable is that it's not what he writes, but that he gets out of bed every morning. That's right.

It's like so tragic optimism is less something that you say, right? It's like your worldview is less like what did you say? And it's more like what did you do? Like as life kicks the shit out of you, as it breaks your heart, as things that shouldn't happen, do happen, as unfair things, you know, sort of come your way. Does that make you bitter and broken? Do you quit? You know, do you take it personally or do you just sort of keep going? And again, there's this idea like the still looks like, you know, they didn't care about anything. They're nihilistic. If you're not attached to results, what does that mean? And it's like they wrote books,

they raised families, they tried to make things better, they went to work every day. A truly sort of depressed, resigned, hopeless person doesn't do any of that. And so I think that's also the idea and Victor Franco's work. It's again not just that he had these beliefs, but that he comes out of the Holocaust and continues to say, yes, like, he doesn't kill himself. He doesn't drink himself to death. He just wakes up every day, tries to do meaningful work, tries to be a good person, tries to help other is. That's right. Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape and found me Rob Briden on my podcast.

In this series of Briden and I talk to among others Harry Hill Ben Elton Charlotte Church Steve Cougan and Dame Harriet Walter and that's just a few. We tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour never longer. It's terrific conversation, reminiscent, sweat appropriate and exchange of anecdotes. So do join me Rob Briden, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of Briden and are available early and ad-free on Amazon Music, or by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. I'm Anna, and I'm Emily, and we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes

you behind the velvet rope and inside the lives of our most iconic stars. This season, we're gonna spice up your life, diving into the world of Victoria Beckham. From her disastrous first Spice Girls audition to her fateful meeting with a certain footballer, say you'll be there, listen us. Okay, that's enough. You're going to want to be listening. Stop that immediately. Listen to terribly famous early and ad-free on Wondering Plus. T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t- back to making meaning from like really dramatic big changes. I think that once you can accept

the tragedy of life, I think it opens you up as well to an appreciation for philosophy, writing, art that falls into the category of what the writer Susan King calls bitter sweet, which is my favorite kind of music. So I love Jason Ispel. And it's great. But Jason Ispel's music is so fucking tragic. But there's also this kind of optimism to it, right? It's like this is what connects us as humans. This is what makes us feel.

This is what gives our life texture is the fact that we know it's impermanent. And we know that this terrible stuff's gonna come for us. And how can we connect to each other and like a brotherly and sisterly love despite of it all? And I do think that there's like, but there's a reason that Jason Ispel is not mainstream, right? Like it's easier to just love the positive,

but I think what makes great art is people that can go and take the tragedy and make it relatable and like, why do we love bittersweet classical music for the same reason? So that's just like an, it's a very interesting observation. Now to your point about tragic optimism and Victor Frankl continuing to get up, I think this has also been a little bit bastardized recently, which is this notion that, like, whenever something bad happens to you, you should grow from that and use it as an opportunity for growth, and you should have a challenge mindset.

And what the literature shows really clearly is that for about 90% of changes, so let's call them lowercase T-traumas, positive changes. You get married, you have kids like good stuff. It still throws our stress systems for a loop. It is very beneficial to go into those things with a growth mindset. To view them as a challenge and to say, you know, this is a big change. This is going to be really hard, but I'm going to grow from it. I'm going to become a better person. But every once in a while shit happens where telling someone that, oh, like at least you'll grow from this is the worst thing you could possibly say.

When someone loses a child, you don't say, oh, at least you'll grow from this. You'll be more compassionate. Like fuck off if someone says that to you. So there are capital T traumas where the only thing that matters is just trying to get through and get to the other side of those drastic big life changes. And putting extra pressure on yourself to say that, well, all the self-help books tell me I need to be optimistic or I need to grow from this.

That is just firing second, third, fourth arrows at yourself. And there's guilty. Because I don't feel guilty. You're like, I can't, you know, not only is this terrible thing happening in my life, but like I can't even find meaning in it. Or I can't have a positive response to it. Clinical depression is another example. By definition, the disease doesn't allow you to do that.

So telling yourself that like, oh, I'm gonna grow from this. Now this doesn't say that we should just cycle into nihilism and despair. But what the research shows so unequivocally is that following these massive destructive big changes to our lives, uniformly, people experience downward trajectory. And it's after about six months that most people then start to climb out of it. And when we look back on these things, we tend to find meaning and growth in them, but one more in the middle of experiencing them, trying to search for that and trying to

contrive that just gets in our way. And like the sole work is showing up and getting through. Are there tools that you can use to show up and get through? Of course, but I think it's just such an important message. If people are going through something where they feel like it's impossible to be grateful for this, I don't care what Marcus Aurelia said, like, I cannot physically find any meaning. Sometimes the world is just cruel and pain is just pain. And if we get to the other side of those things then when we look back on them,

that's when we make meaning. Yeah, it's important. Obviously, I wrote this book, The Opsicles Away, which is about how you take these sort of lower-case T traumas, obstacles, difficulties, and you find a way to move forward from them to use it to your advantage. The computer eats your manuscript, that's a chance for you to redo it and do it. That's a perfect example. Which is really fucking hard, is someone that's had that happen. In the moment, it can feel like capital T trauma, but that is, and that's 90%, 95%, maybe 98% of the stuff that we face is in that bucket.

Yeah. But then, you know, your company being stolen from you, a personal bankruptcy, from some medical crisis, losing a child, these are the formula that the obstacle is the way that everything is an opportunity to practice virtue. It still holds true, just not in this sort of glib way that you make this the best thing that ever happened to you, that surviving enduring. That is the way.

Yes. Not being broken by it, not becoming cruel and mean because of it, right? Learning something ultimately from it that allows you to help another person with that same trauma 20 years from now. That's what the opportunity is. It's not an opportunity that you would choose. It's not at all worth the trade-offs. I think about coming out of the pandemic changes I've made in my life,

in my routine, prospective shifts that I got that are all beneficial. If in no way do they compensate for the millions of people who died and the billions and trillions of lost dollars and opportunities and time will never get back. So it's not that you go into it and you go, this is so wonderful, but you go that everything that's happening to you, there is the opportunity for growth or for maybe greatness is a better word than growth, right? There's the opportunity to be like what life is demanding of you in this moment and almost never is what life demanding you from you in this moment that you quit and give up and do nothing, right? And so I think that it's important that we see

there's sort of this quick way that the obstacle is the way and then there's the way that try to find one thing in your life that years later, you're not retroactively, if not grateful for at least appreciative of how it contributed to where you ended up. Yeah, that's right. And time slows down when we're in the midst of these really tremendous challenges, which is part of what makes it so hard, because it's so hard to envision what a year or a decade would look like. And I think in these circumstances, the consolation

is to just know that what feels like forever now won't feel like forever a year from now, a decade from now. So my job is just to wake up and get through. And that's it. And let that be a nut for a really growth oriented, optimistic person, the biggest personal growth accomplishment in a situation like this is to release from the need to grow and just to let getting through be enough. In the reason time slows down, I think this is really fascinating, is just 100% our evolutionary inheritance.

So when we feel like we're under threat, when we feel like we're facing a lot of change, it's very important for our survival to have a really acute perception. We want to know exactly where that snake is moving towards us. So our brain, which normally processes life, is this kind of continuous movie, starts to view it frame by frame because it's worried. We need to see everything with like exacting detail. So when we view things frame by frame, our perception of time slows way down, which is in complete opposite to when we're in flow, where when things are going great in time flies.

And I have to share this experiment because I think you'll find it fascinating. It's one of the most clever experimental designs ever. There's a neuroscientist named David Eagelman. And what he did was he took people to this ride called the SCAD. And it is this 150 foot, basically just drop. I don't even know how the fuck this is safe,

but like you're adhered to a mattress and the mattress just drops. And he had people, participants of the study, ride the scad and predict how long it took them to fall. And then he had those same people watch others ride the scad and ask how long it took them to fall. Okay. When they were watching, they nailed it.

They said it took like a half a second. When they were on the ride, they said it took them to fall. Okay. When they were watching, they nailed it. They said it took like a half a second. When they were on the ride, they said it took them three seconds to fall. Wow. Isn't that like a, just like such an easy, like a experimental design, but that's like a 250% increase or whatever.

Yeah. And the point that he's making is when we are under threat, when like in that case, true like physical instability is happening to us. Our perception of time slow is way down. And there's not much that we can do to speed it up, but I think what we can do is know that that's happening. And hopefully that provides us some solace.

Whenever I'm in conversation with anyone that's experiencing a clinical depression, I pass on something that when I was very depressed, a psychiatrist told to me, which is this is a 9-in-ing game. And you want to be in the bottom of the eighth, but you're in the top of the first, and when I was very depressed, a psychiatrist told to me, which is this is a nine inning game, and you wanna be in the bottom of the eighth, but you're in the top of the first, and these are gonna be really slow innings. I buckle up. Buckle up, but you will get to the ninth inning,

and then when you look back on the game, you're gonna be like, oh, that was just a game. That was just a chapter of my life, but when you're in it, it feels like it's forever. And just knowing that is so important when you're traversing really dark times. Yeah, I think one way to get better at this stuff is to go through it before, right?

So that's the best way. If you're like, if you get through it, yes. Yes, so when you have been through, like the first breakup that you go through or the first public humiliation or the first business mistake, it feels like it's the end of the world. You don't know if you're going to get through it. And you don't have the perspective to know, oh, yeah, this is the middle of the second inning.

You don't even know how many innings there are, right? And so when you've been through stuff before, you can draw on that experience going forward, right? And so that is one thing I sort of tell myself when I'm going through stuff, especially if it's stuff that I haven't been through before, as I go like, I'm learning how this goes, right? And I think one thing that's nice about having gone through a lot of change over the last handful of years is that it should prepare us for a future where there is similar such change, right?

And so to go, hey, I'm learning how to do this. I'm getting experience in this kind of uncertainty. That's one benefit here. That's right. And when we're in those situations, the best things that we can do, because we also, we always have some agency, is social support, so lean on others, ideally others that are going through it,

or others that have been there before, because they have that active. Yeah, that's exactly others. And those others can be 2,000 years old in books. I mean, you talk about this all the time. If there is some sort of routine or ritual that you can have in your life, that is a source of stability just for your brain. A constant. You're morning run, you're morning coffee, whatever it is, that constant serves as an

anchor, is you take your nervous system out into the unregulated chaos of the world. take your nervous system out into the unregulated chaos of the world. Sure. Those are the most helpful things that one can do when they're in these situations. And that really is. I mean, as you said, the last five years, that was why I wanted to write this book. I mean, in my own life, let's see, within a span of five years, I became a parent for the first time, then again. I had major orthopedic surgery on my leg

that took me out of a sport that had been an enormous part of my identity for most of my adult life. A really painful family estrangement occurred that was completely unpredictable and something I never experienced. I moved across the country from a really big urban place to somewhere that's not as big or urban. Sure.

I mean, there's countless others, right? Like I stopped doing any contract work with big organizations, because I really just wanted to write books. So I was going through all of these changes and like there's no playbook and it felt really unstable. And then the pandemic comes

and like there's all this social change. And I write the books that I write mainly for myself Mm-hmm. And it was like well how like what are the tools and how come this feels so so unnatural to me? And then I think the part that is is to me the most interesting and also the hardest is just how we conceive of our so the our sense of self over time. Because when we're talking about big external changes happening around us, there's an us,

there's an eye at the center of that that we kind of take for granted is stable. And we cling to that stability. And I think that's like, you know, change management 101, 201, but I think the real advanced course is then to realize that even the you and the center of that isn't stable.

Yeah. Like you are constantly changing. You are aging. Key components of your identity will no longer be key components of your identity later on. If you fuse your identity way too closely to any given thing, you're setting yourself up for all kinds of pain because eventually that thing will change. And I think what was happening in my life, and maybe this is just what happens to all of us as we enter like middle mature adulthood, is that there was all this change around me, pandemic economy, job, and then there was all this change within me, my family, physical illness,

and both those things were happening at the same time. So there was truly really no real rudder. And that's what ultimately led me into, how do we make sense of this? Yeah, if you think about someone who's born in the mid to late 1800s, so they live 70 to 90 years. So they go from Calvary charges to atomic weapons, to space to the Beatles, like in the course of One Life, and you go, how could they make sense,

like how could they go from here to there, right? And the answer is there was daily change, like there was, change wasn't this thing that happened once, it wasn't this one big change where they went from riding around on horses to launching astronauts into space. There was so many day-to-day changes, or year-to-year or decade-to-decade changes, and that made them resilient and flexible,

and there was never this constant where they were like, this is the way the world is. I don't want it to be this new way, because it was always coming in and out of being. And if if we can see our own life that way, as this, like I think about my life, so I'm born in the the 1980s, communism still exists. It falls, then, then, then, you know, history is supposedly over. But in fact, it's not remotely over. There's tech booms and there's terrorism. There's forever wars, which actually aren't forever. There's all the, there's pandemics. There's

all, my life has been an unending series of changes that would have been incomprehensible to me when I was three years old or 10 years old or 20 years old, but actually not incomprehensible because none of it was actually immediately transformed. Even you look at something like AI, which is supposedly this radical new re-emat, but it's like that's also the thing that's making grammatical suggestions on my computer or suggesting what I might want to search on Google. So it's only a marginal improvement on what's already existed. Nothing actually comes and changes everything like that. It's always much more gradual. And so if you understand your life as a series of a sense,

acceptance coming to terms with integrating these new things, you just kind of see it as this incremental journey, even if it is exponentially increasing as it goes. Yeah, that's beautiful. I couldn't have said it better myself. The term I use for this is rugged flexibility. And I think like that is the essential way to frame our individual identities and sense of self over time. So we want to be rugged, we want to have something it means to be Brad, to be Ryan. And then whatever those essential attributes are, I like to use the language of core values, like the things that we really aspire to that make us who we are. Those are the things that we want to hold on to tightly. But we need to be so flexible

in how we apply them over time. And again, you look at the greatest, most intense, traumatic sweeping change there is to learn from, which is evolution. And species that have a long run, they have both ruggedness and flexibility. So they have these core attributes that make them what they are. And if those things change, they would be unrecognizable.

They'd be chameleons. But in addition to those core attributes, they have this dramatic sense of flexibility where they can constantly adapt to their changing environment. And I think conceiving of ourselves in the same way is so beneficial. So like what are the rugged, essential things that make you who you are? But then how can you flexibly apply those

across the span of your life? And this goes from taking something like, I write books, which can be taken away from you at any given time, to I'm a creative person, which you can apply very flexibly. Where I am a writer, as opposed to I am an author of books, that's just a slightly more expansive definition. Or yeah, I'm a person who comes up with big ideas.

You know, I'm a big picture thinker because then you're not wedded to a singular medium, a singular function or form, you can go, yeah, sure, I can take this skill set and apply it to social media or podcasts or speaking, I can do all these other things that are really just offshoots of this main thing, which perhaps was in demand and then isn't in demand

and maybe in demand again in the future, but I'm able to find opportunities to apply my broader set of skills, whatever the environment is. That's right. I like to think of identity as kind of like a house. Okay. And you wanna have multiple of like a house. Okay. And you want to have multiple rooms in your house. Yeah. And then in each room, you want to have different ways of doing the thing. So maybe you have the creative room or the writer room.

You have the dad room. You have the husband, the partner room. You have the athlete room. Yeah. And what's nice about that is when shit hits the fan in one of those rooms, you have other rooms to lean on. Yeah. And then within each room, you also have different things you can explore. So in the athlete room, like there's the runner room. Sure. And that's going great until you blow out your knee and then you can't run.

So then maybe there's the, oh, I'm going to try lifting weights or I'm going to get into rowing. Yeah. You're still in the athlete room. So, like diversifying your sense of self, basically, and not thinking of identity as, I am this one thing, I do this one thing, but more, I have these essential qualities, this ruggedness that makes me who I am, and I have a couple of them. And then within each of those domains, I can apply it very flexibly. And I think like an evolutionary biologist would say, yeah, that's how species survives over time. So, of course, it will

apply to us throughout our own lifespan. Yeah, I've always loved that the 40 laws of power, which is a sort of book of yeah, rubber Greens book, right? Yeah. Do this. Don't do this. Always do this. Always do that. The last law, the 48th law on the 40 laws of power is assume formalismists. And it's this idea that rigidity is much more vulnerable than flexibility. And the ability to adapt and adjust to all circumstances that in fact, sometimes you do this

and sometimes you do that. And then actually I think the other thing you learn when you read the book multiple times is embedded at the, you really, it really strikes you and embedded at the bottom of each law is the reversal of the law. And the only law that doesn't have a reversal is for this.

Because ultimately flexibility is what resilience is, the ability to go, I know how to comport myself in any and all situations. There's a line from Epic Titus, one of his students comes to him and he says, tell me what to do. And he says, that's the wrong request. He says, you should say, make me adaptable to circumstances. And that's what great teachers and great ideas and great

philosophical frameworks and spiritual teachings do, is they don't give you a list of behaviors to do or a way to be, you know, in every individual circumstance, they give you a broad scope of values that can apply anywhere to anything. That's right. The metaphor that I like is to think of it as a river, you know, Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher. You can't step in the same river twice. I am and I am not.

And yes, we are fluid and yes, we are formless and yes, we're kind of like this river that's flowing and that's what allows us to flow around obstacles and over things and be like water brusly, right? All the way to the modern philosopher. But what often isn't mentioned is that without banks, a river is just random water. Yeah, sure.

And what channels a river, what channels, its process where it goes are its banks. And I think those banks are, in our identity, like those are our core values. Like these are the hills that we are gonna die on. And the banks can change and it can open up and go into a tributary, but we've gotta have something to channel our river.

You also have to have gravity, and you have to have a slight incline. Yeah, which I think, but I think that slight incline is aging, and I think gravity, like, you know, if we all experience gravity, so I think it's marrying this notion

of like formlessness and flexibility with something to channel that flow. And- Right, otherwise you're a puddle or a puddle. Exactly, you're random water. Or maybe in like very certain spiritual context, you're completely enlightened, but more likely than not, you're experiencing psychosis.

Like no bounds around yourself is a pretty telltale sign of psychosis and that's not a place most people want to be. So we do need some bounds, but those bounds have to be flexible, they have to be held loosely. There's also this just wonderful teaching that again, you know, Stoicism better than anyone alive probably right now. I tend to know more about Buddhism and I just find the parallel also fascinating where Vaggy Chota, the wanderer, finds the Buddha. And this is a very commonly discussed passage

in scholars debate what it means. And he goes to the Buddha and he says, like, blessed one, blessed one, your teachings, and I'm gonna get the translate, I'm gonna translate for modern times, I'm gonna get a little bit wrong. But your teachings lead me to believe there is no such thing as a self.

If there's no such thing as a self, then how am I here? Then he says, is there a self in the Buddha remains silent? And then he says, is there no self in the Buddha remains silent? And what the Buddha is basically saying is yes to both. Like there is no self in there is a self. And scholars have debated this for the longest time. And there are a self. And scholars have debated this for the longest time, and there are different perspectives, but the one that resonates most with me

is that what the Buddha was trying to teach Vagacota was what modern physics would just say is factual, which is on the one hand, we have these ultimate selves that are connected to everything. People are gonna listen to this conversation, hopefully they're gonna change something, do something different, they might read a book, they might come to your bookstore, whatever it is, and

then they'll share it with their friends and it's the butterfly effect. So we are formless. Our identity is truly as vast as the universe. And when you're at a red light and it turns green, there's got to be a self that like hits the gas and goes through that red light. So we have both what a Buddhist thinker would call a historical self, which is the south that's right here and having this conversation, and then the ultimate south, which is completely formless. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field

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On the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen to sports explains the world early and add free on Wondery Plus. So you said that aging is the gravity that sort of pulls the river forward. I do think that is a very stoic idea in that sort of the ultimate change or the change that most of the passages that I open with from Arxiris ultimately come back around to is death, right? The final change or the ultimate change,

like whatever you want to call it, but the idea is something, something, or in some way, we were brought into being, and that's change number one, and then change number X is the one where you go out of being. That's right. And I think that all these ancient wisdom traditions

at their heart are helping us prepare for that. Yeah. I think that's like the foremost reason to read these. Yeah. And, you know, I think what I write in the book about this idea of the ultimate versus the conventional self or the historical self is, you know, when you're in traffic or when you're trying to qualify for the Olympics or write a book, like it's really good to identify with your historical self. The self that exists in the moment that is within your skin and skull that can get stuff done. But when you're on your deathbed, it's probably if you have a way to identify with that more ultimate self

that is part of a lineage of ancestors that might have spawned ancestors or if you don't have kids connected with other people and that will live on through them. I mean, I'm still gonna be terrified to die, but I think I'll be a little bit less terrified if I can practice that mindset heading up to it so that this historical self will be ending, but the work will live on.

And even if, I you know, I think that you've written about this or spoken about this often, like, short of Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Marcus, Aralius, most names are for like, you're lucky if you get a hundred years of people remembering you. But that, even that, like remembering you, like, that's very ego-driven in small self. Not that you'll enjoy it. But what you, right, exactly. But what you do get is a very empirically true sense that the impact that you had on people will be passed down. You won't be able to trace it directly to yourself and it won't be in a megalomaniac way. But I think that my very non-wooboo spirituality is just like we're all just waves in this big ocean. And eventually I'm gonna go back to the water

where I came from, but while I'm here, like to the extent that I can affect some water around me then I've lived a good life. One of the ways that the Stoics and the Epicurians talked about death, I actually think is a nice analogy for change in general, but they basically said like, you don't have any thoughts about who you

were before you were born. You were nothing, right? And they go, that's what death is. That you are just returning to a state that you once were, and that you changed out of that state, and then you change back into that state. And so if we can think of death as that kind of change, it kind of turns down the volume on it. And I think just the idea of, yeah, you didn't have strong thoughts on the situation before it was the way that it was. The problem is, you now that it is the way that it is, you want to keep it that way. That's right. That fundamental irrational attitude about change is what causes us so much distress and suffering. It's trying to keep things a way that they are, even though they came that way from change

and it's inevitable that it would leave that change at some point or change again. Yeah, and we get life gives us lots of practice, right? We have the death of our youth. If you're an athlete, you have the death of your peak. If you're a parent, you have the death of your kids wanting to snuggle with you before bad and living in your house. And these are all really, really hard to why I listen to Jason Ispel. Because I need that to get through it, to have a good cry every once in a while. But we're constantly experiencing these deaths. And then we get to the ultimate one. Like before you had kids, you wouldn't be worried about your kids leaving the house. But then when you had kids, you wouldn't be worried about your kids leaving the house.

But then when you have kids and you realize what that means and how much you love them, then suddenly that becomes really hard. Right. And I think that's the thing with life is that the reason that it is still hard to imagine not having it is because there is so much that's good and it is like we're so lucky to be here.

Like it's this great accident that you and I are existing to have this conversation. And it's only we're so lucky to be here. Like it's this great accident that you and I are existing to have this conversation. And it's only human, I think, to want to cling on to that and hold on to that. But if we hold on to it way too tightly, then we suffer. And especially for the smaller things that we want to hold on to way too tightly. Yes, Enicus says it's wrong to think of death

as something that happens in the future or something that happens once, right? That he says, we're not moving towards death, but actually that death is happening all the time. He says, we're dying every day. Every time the present moment recycles. Yeah, so if you see it that way that, hey, yeah, I died, the one year old me died,

and the two year old me died, and the three year old me died, and the teenage me died, and the middle age me dies. And so ultimately, whenever it is that you happen to go and you die for this sort of final time, it's actually not, one of the reasons death is potentially scary is it feels like the one thing that we haven't done before. But it's kind of eye-opening and it shifts your perspective to understand that actually you're dying all the time. And that of the time that has passed is dead. And so we fear all sorts of change because we think that that's the big change.

That's the one that's got, and in fact, every moment of every day of your life has been filled with both death and change. You are very experienced and very familiar with this thing. You just don't think about it that way. Yeah, I mean, to live is to lose. I mean, it's like a very cliche saying, but it's so true. And that gets back to tragic optimism and Victor Frankl. I'm forgetting what it's called, Catherine Schultz recently wrote a beautiful memoir that circled around this topic. I think you might have had her on the podcast, right? Yeah.

It's about the loss of her father or father. But then just like it's a memoir about like the loss of her childhood and her innocence and all of these things. And yeah, the work is like, all right, this is going to happen. And bearing our head in the sands as we know is like not a great answer. Falling into despair is not a great answer. So how do we navigate it and how do we go on our path? How do we go on our path forward? And again, there's so many opportunities for practice. And I think that that's where people can really

like flex that rugged, flexible muscles. So if you're super interested in a specific element of your career, well, then how can you're super interested in a specific element of your career, well, then how can you diversify that so that when that changes, it doesn't come for you? If it's parenting, how can you make sure that your marriage is strong enough that when the kids leave, you'll still find joy in your house. It will be different.

And this isn't about being the same, but it's about kind of allowing that sadness but going on nonetheless. And maybe that's what a good life is, is that sadness, but going on nonetheless. And maybe that's what a good life is. It's like allowing that sadness and going on nonetheless. Yeah, you mentioned parenting earlier. There's this Thompson grubbit that I love where he says,

you know, people go, having kids changes you. And he says, that's not true. He says, having kids should change you. Mm. Because there is, there are things that are changing us all the time. There's these life events. And then there are some people that despite the necessity and all the nudging to the contrary decide to continue to be the same person. They don't adjust their habits or their mindsets or, you know what I mean, there is this change is a constant and unavoidable and so is denial

of that change, resistance of that change, persisting despite the old way no longer working. Yeah, I mean, how could having kids not change you? Well, we'll nerd out maybe, you know, daily dad plug on being dads, but I am like a completely different person. But I mean, I know people that so travel the amount, that travel the same amount, they're still the same amount selfish, you know, like they have kids, but they did not become parents. Yeah, I mean, that's unimaginable for me. I mean, I would say it's very common.

Very common. What, and I'm curious, because our kids are similar ages. Yours are a little bit older. I think we have like one in, how old are your kids? Six and four. Yeah, so Lyle is only eight months. So she's very young, but Theo's almost six.

Yeah. And like, I just didn't know that I could love sure thing as much as Theo. Yeah. I didn't know that I could be driving him to preschool. And maybe he's tired, maybe he's a little sad, but whatever that look on his face is, I know, because I was kind of a sad kid. And just feel that in my heart.

And I feel so blessed to become a parent. If you choose not to become a parent, that's total, it's not a values thing. But for me, talk about a change that has like really, it feels like infiltrated every cell of my body. I think some people are. It's being a dead. I think some people are afraid of those emotions

so they don't put themselves in the position for those things to happen, right? It's like, oh, I'm doing this for my family, which I never see. And part of the reason they never see the family is because of what it opens up or what it challenges or what it forces them to see about themselves. Yeah, and in our line of work, I think that's very easy.

Of course. Because you can always say yes to more things and you can always do more. Yeah. You know, we had tacos once. I think it was, I was giving a talk on obsession and more. Yeah. You know, we had tacos once. I think it was, I was giving a talk on obsession and passion, right? To like some group of NHL strength coaches. And we had tacos after and I distinctly remember this would have been Theo was me, was

Theo even born or was your kid one? I don't know. We were either both dads or I was about to become a dad and you had just become a dad. And you told me something that like I really obviously took to heart because it's not the sole reason that we moved, but it's certainly one of them, which is basically like go to a place where you can do the work that you wanna do

and then have an easier time, let your environment be conducive to you shutting off so that you can then shift into family mode if that's what you want, because you can say that's what you want. But if you live in a place where there's just endless intellectual candy and there's also an hour and a half commute and the private schools that you have to send your kids to

because the public schools are no good, cost $50,000, it's very easy to have this path dependency where what you think parenting would be and what you desperately want is just impossible. And again, it's not the only reason that we moved to Western North Carolina, but like that was in the back of my mind the whole time. No, no, I definitely, that, that,

that's not my reason. Do you remember that at all or no? I do, no, I've given that advice before. It's funny, we just spent, we just spent a month in LA like living a very different life. Like our kids went to this sort of summer school thing that was like a mile from where we lived. Everything was walkable or deliverable and it was like a very, like we were just renting this house. So it wasn't expensive for us, but it was like, yeah, incredibly expensive.

And you're like, oh, I actually get what these people are paying millions of dollars for and what they're paying all this money to these kids. I was like, this is, this was a very different life. There was easier in a bunch of other ways. Now, maybe it wasn't totally aligned with the values that I wanted and maybe it's not sustainable to have kept the sort of bubble that I have as a writer and creative person. And I couldn't have this bookstore and these other things.

So it wouldn't ultimately work, but it was also just another glimpse. I think people, in the same way that you have to set up your pantry. Yep. So you eat well. Yep. You know, to be a good parent, I think you have to make

certain lifestyle decisions that set you up for success or don't set you up for success. And making those decisions is really hard, but a lot of who you wanna be as a person or as a parent is downstream from sort of big lifestyle choices that you make once and don't think about, but we're really deterministic. Yeah, and I didn't know that we'd be kind of sagging back

to something that I write about in the book here, but it's this notion of an independent self versus an interdependent self. So this comes out across cultural research. An independent self, it's a very western way of thinking, which is eye control things, eye make things happen on my own. I exert control over my environment. An interdependent sense of self is my environment controls me in lots of ways. And yes, I have some agency, but it's a lot less than we in the West think. And I think, I never thought of it like this. I wish I would have written in the freaking book, but I think parenting, a lot of being

a quote-unquote good parent, is conceiving of yourself as an interdependent self, and then doing everything you can with the independent self, the self that has agency, to create the right environment for you to be able to thrive as is apparent. And I know for me, a part of that creating the right environment is like just making sure that I have an hour and a half every day to do some kind of creative work because if I don't, I'm just irritated. And then there's downstream effects of that. Yeah, I think even just noticing this sort of month, it was like we were in a very fancy neighborhood in Los Angeles, and so like the cars

that the other parents were dropping their kids off in school was just a very different vibe than what I'm used to in rural Texas. And like I'm not really a car person, I don't really care what people think of what I'm driving necessarily. I mean, I'm not like a st. You're a monk or anything, so I do care to a car person, I don't really care what people think of what I'm driving necessarily. I mean, I'm not like a saint or a monk or anything, so I do care to a certain degree. But what I was noticing, I was like, oh, if every other car in front of me in line is a

G-wagon, that feels reasonable. And you start to go, is there something wrong with what I'm driving? Who I am? So, choice is about who you surround yourself with as a parent or just as a person. So, yeah, if you work, if you're living in a very high cost of living area, a very competitive area, if you're where all the people in your profession are, you're gonna be more competitive,

you're gonna be more envious, you're not gonna be measuring yourself, let's say on how happy is my family, you're gonna be measuring yourself on how does my family seem like they're doing next to all these other families who are maybe presenting or signaling with very different values.

Yeah, and the same thing is shown on the internet because the internet, like, the fucking internet, you're not just comparing yourself to people in your fancy neighborhood, you're comparing yourself to people in every fancy neighborhood all the time. And I do think it's something that we talked about last time, you and I recorded for this podcast, is just like having some real things in your real community. I mean, clearly you are doing this. We are in your

bookstore. You know, if you want to breed German shepherds, breed German shepherds, go to it local gym and deadlift, but do real things in your community with real people. Yeah. And that will help ground you because if you're just living in this world of keeping up with the Joneses on a global scale, which is kind of what the internet is, social media for sure, you are never gonna arrive. Yes, and you'll always feel inadequate. And then you take those feelings of inadequacy

or insecurity and you take them home and they shape the decision. And you always feel worse, because like you, I mean, if I can shoot, I don't know, 54% on this stuff, I'm having a good day, but I will still fall into the trap of being like, oh, there's a couple other books that come out the same day. Let me check their Amazon sales rank and then mine.

And it never makes me feel better. If my Amazon sales rank is better than theirs, I still feel like shit. If there's this better than mine, I feel like even more shit. Then I feel like shit at myself for even like checking that and that gets back to the environment. Like why am I doing it?

Because the freaking browser's open. So the more that you can have an environment that is conducive to the values that you want to live, the more likely you are to live them. And I think like that shift of, hey, I'm an interdependent self, is really how, it's been helpful for me. Yeah, well, and then going, hey, a person who thinks they're shitty

or feels like shit, that's not a person who has that extra 10 seconds of patience, or that extra 10 seconds of kindness, or that extra 10 seconds of space to go, yeah, sure, that doesn't matter. Let's do what you want to do. Not me who feels like I need to get back to my email or I just changed, I don't want to jump in the pool with you.

Like, to be a good parent, I think you need to be present. You need to be flexible. You need to be game like for whatever's happening. And you need to be game like for whatever's happening and you need to be like patient and forgiving and all these all these things that take a certain amount of willpower they take a certain amount of security and and confidence in yourself right to be like You're having a temper tantrum like if I'm looking around and going our other people judging me as a parent,

and that matters to me, I'm not going to be able to be as good at responding to this as if I didn't care about these other people. I didn't really feel like I had to get anywhere or do anything. I'm going to be able to respond to these. Those two frames are very different in terms of dealing with this thing in front of you. So if you can cultivate that space and set up your life that cultivates that space, you're

going to be able to be better at these things. Yeah, and you'll still fail all the time, but you'll fail a little bit less. Yeah, yeah. But if you're like, I've got to get back to my email. Always behind. If you have this exhausted inadequate insatiability about you professionally and personally, it's going to be very hard to get an opposite of those things as a parent. And we're talking a lot about parenting because some of you and I share in common are I'm the thick of, but it's the same thing to be in a relationship, an intimate relationship

to be a good friend, you know, on and on and on. Yeah. And I really do think that again, like so much of this is, yes, it's based on who you are, but it's based on with whom you surround yourself and where you live. Yeah. And the choices that you make about what you follow or don't follow or think about or don't think about or how you measure yourself

or don't measure yourself. Yeah. You want to be, you know, the great media theorist, Marshall McCluen and the Neil Postman after him, they talk about like the medium is the message. Yeah. So, I think about this a lot in terms of responding versus reacting, something we talked about. Like, central theme and mastering change and being rugged and flexible is like,

how do you respond, not react? How do you have that space? But if you're constantly in mediums, technological mediums, thinking social media, but again, the internet that trains you to react and rewards reaction, then you are going to become a reactionary person. It is inevitable. So if you going to become a reactionary person. It is inevitable.

So if you want to be the kind of person that can respond and have that space, have that 10 seconds when your kids melting down or when your significant other needs you, and you think you can just turn it on if you've spent your entire day in reactionary mode, like good luck, never going to happen. So it really starts like so far upstream of that and saying, hey, if I want to be the kind of person that responds to change, to disorder, whether it's a temper tantrum, whether it's your dog has diarrhea on the floor, then are you putting yourself in responsive situations throughout your day or are you constantly in reactionary mode?

Yeah. Churchill's quote about architecture was we shape our buildings and then our building shape us. I never heard that. Who is that good? Yeah, I think that applies to our choices and our environment. And so, yeah, if you want to set yourself, I think about setting myself up for success as a parent by the choices that I've made about where I live, about how my house is organized, about, you know, the boundaries that I have on work, you know, what I allow in the house, what I don't allow in the house,

and instead of just expecting yourself to be this sort of perfect person with unlimited willpower, you can try to make some big choices that create positive downstream effects. That's right, and that's another way of seeing your identity as formless. Yes, right? Because like your environment is bleeding into you.

Yes, and yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, this is awesome, man. I love the book. I love the ground in this book, too. And thanks for coming out. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to get to talk to you

and see the shop and to see some of your environment. You set up here. That's always. Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks. Appreciate you. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us

and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.