Michael: Alright Kevin, I'm going to say a philosophy: Stoicism. Give me the first, most common, clichéd image that pops into your head. Kevin: Easy. A statue. A guy with a stone face, maybe getting rained on, definitely not having any fun. The original 'unbothered king,' but in a boring way. Just enduring, not living. Michael: That is the perfect image, because it's the exact stereotype we're going to dismantle today. The idea that Stoicism is about grim, emotionless endurance is one of the biggest philosophical misunderstandings out there. Kevin: I'm glad to hear it, because a podcast about how to be more like a garden gnome sounds… less than thrilling. So what's the real story? Michael: The real story is laid out with incredible precision in the book we're diving into: "The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual" by Ward Farnsworth. And what's fascinating is that Farnsworth isn't some philosophy professor in an ivory tower. He's a high-profile legal scholar, a former law school dean. Kevin: A lawyer wrote a book on Stoicism? That’s unexpected. I’m picturing philosophical arguments with footnotes and objections. Michael: Exactly! And that’s his superpower. He approaches Stoicism like a lawyer building a case—logically, systematically, and based on pure evidence from the original texts of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. He cuts through the fluff. Kevin: Okay, a lawyer's guide to not being a statue. I'm intrigued. So, Mr. Farnsworth, what's the first piece of evidence in your case against my boring, stone-faced man?

Michael: The first piece of evidence is the bedrock of the entire philosophy. It’s a quote from the former slave and legendary Stoic teacher, Epictetus. He said: “Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions about those things.” Kevin: Hold on. Not by the things? So if I get stuck in a massive traffic jam and miss a flight, it’s not the traffic jam that’s upsetting me? That feels… wrong. The traffic jam is clearly the problem. Michael: The Stoics would say the traffic jam is just a fact. It’s neutral. It’s a collection of cars on a road. The disturbance comes from your judgment about it: “This is a disaster. I’m going to miss my flight. The vacation is ruined. I’m such an idiot for leaving late.” That’s the story you’re telling yourself, and that story is what’s causing the suffering. Kevin: So it’s like a hidden middle step. Event happens, then my brain writes a horror story about it, and then I react to the horror story, not the event itself. Michael: Precisely. Event -> Judgment -> Reaction. We think we’re reacting to the event, but we’re always, always reacting to the judgment. And the book has this absolutely wild story from the philosopher Montaigne that makes this point in the most visceral way possible. Kevin: Oh, I’m ready. Give me the story. Michael: Alright. So, Montaigne tells of a gentleman who hosts a dinner party. Days later, as a joke, he tells one of the female guests that she and the others had eaten a pie made from a cat. Kevin: No. He did not. That’s a terrible joke. Michael: A truly terrible joke. The woman was so horrified by the idea—by her judgment that she had done something disgusting and unclean—that she developed a violent stomach disorder and a fever. She couldn't shake the image and the feeling. Kevin: Wait, so what happened to her? Michael: She died. Kevin: She DIED? From a JOKE about a cat pie she didn't even eat? That’s insane! Michael: It’s insane, but it’s the perfect, if extreme, illustration of the principle. The external event was just words—a lie. But her internal judgment, her story about what happened, was so powerful it literally killed her. Her body reacted to the story, not the reality. Kevin: Wow. That’s the nocebo effect on steroids. We hear about the placebo effect, where a sugar pill can cure you because you believe it will. This is the dark twin of that. Your belief can actually poison you. Michael: Exactly. Now, a cat pie is an extreme example, but think about it on a smaller, everyday scale. An insult, for instance. Someone calls you a name. The Stoics would say the words themselves are just vibrations in the air. They are meaningless. Kevin: Okay, but it doesn't feel meaningless when my boss criticizes my work in front of the whole team. It feels very, very meaningful. It feels like a punch to the gut. Michael: And the Stoics would ask, what is that feeling? It’s the judgment: “I’ve been humiliated. My reputation is damaged. My job might be at risk. People think I’m incompetent.” Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, wrote this in his private journal. He said, “Take away your opinion about it, and ‘I have been harmed’ is taken away. Take away ‘I have been harmed,’ and the harm is taken away.” Kevin: That is so much easier said than done. It sounds like you’re just supposed to suppress the feeling. To just pretend it doesn't hurt. Isn't that just bottling up your emotions, which we all know is a terrible idea? Michael: That’s the most common criticism of Stoicism, and Farnsworth addresses it head-on. It’s not about suppression. It’s about interrogation. It’s about looking at that initial flash of anger or shame and asking, “Is this judgment true and is it useful?” The Stoics acknowledged that you’ll have an initial involuntary reaction—a blush, a jolt of adrenaline. They called these ‘first movements.’ But the crucial part is what you do next. Do you assent to the judgment? Do you agree with it and start spinning the horror story? Kevin: So you can’t stop the initial spark, but you can choose not to pour gasoline on it. Michael: You can choose not to pour gasoline on it. And that’s the whole practice. Many of our judgments are unconscious habits. We’ve spent our whole lives practicing getting angry in traffic or feeling wounded by criticism. Stoicism is the practice of training new, more rational, and more useful habits of judgment. Kevin: Okay, so if our judgments are the problem, and they're often these automatic, deeply ingrained habits… how in the world do we actually practice changing them? What's the toolkit? Because telling me to just ‘change my judgment’ feels like telling me to just ‘fly.’ I need the airplane.

Michael: I love that. And the Stoics would agree. They didn't just diagnose the problem; they developed a whole hangar full of airplanes. The book organizes them beautifully, but they boil down to two main tools: Detachment from Externals, and a radical shift in Perspective. Kevin: Detachment from externals. That sounds like the "unbothered king" thing again. Not caring about anything. Michael: It’s more nuanced than that. The Stoics define "externals" as anything that is not fully under your control. This includes your health, your wealth, your reputation, and what other people think or do. Kevin: So… basically everything that everyone worries about all the time. Michael: Everything. And they make a crucial distinction. You can prefer these things. It’s preferable to be healthy than sick, wealthy than poor. But you should never attach your well-being or your inner peace to them. Because the moment you do, you’ve handed over your happiness to things you can’t control. You’ve become a slave to fortune. Kevin: You’ve given the remote control for your emotions to someone else. Michael: Perfectly put. And the ultimate example of this is Epictetus himself, the guy who gave us that first quote. His life story is mind-blowing. He was born a slave in the Roman Empire. His master was a powerful and cruel secretary to the Emperor Nero. Kevin: So he was literally not in control of his own body. Michael: Literally. There’s a story that his master, in a fit of rage, began twisting his leg. Epictetus, calmly, just looked at him and said, “If you keep doing that, it will break.” The master kept twisting, and the bone snapped. Epictetus’s only response was, “See? I told you it would break.” Kevin: Come on. That can't be real. Michael: It's a story that's been passed down for 2,000 years, and even if it's exaggerated, it illustrates his philosophy perfectly. His leg—an external—was broken. But he, his inner self, his faculty of judgment, was unharmed. He knew he couldn't control his master, but he could absolutely control his response. He was later freed and became one of the most revered philosophers in all of history. He taught that you can be in chains and still be freer than an emperor, if the emperor is a slave to his anger, his fear, and his desires. Kevin: That’s a powerful story. It reframes freedom entirely. It’s not about your external circumstances; it’s about your internal state. But for those of us who aren't facing down a leg-breaking Roman, how do we use this? How do we build that kind of detachment? Michael: That’s where the second tool comes in: Perspective. The Stoics were masters of the mental perspective shift. The most famous one is called the ‘view from above.’ Kevin: The view from above? What’s that? Michael: Imagine you’re Marcus Aurelius. You are, by any measure, the most powerful man on the planet. You are the Emperor of Rome. You have wars, plagues, political betrayals, and the fate of millions on your shoulders. The stress is unimaginable. Kevin: Yeah, my to-do list is starting to look pretty manageable. Michael: So what does he do? He writes in his journal, his Meditations, and he practices zooming out. He visualizes himself looking down on the city of Rome, then on all of Italy, then on the whole of Europe, then the entire Earth, a tiny sphere in the vastness of space. Then he zooms out in time, contemplating the endless ages that came before him and the infinite time that will come after. Kevin: So it's forced humility. You're the emperor, but you're reminding yourself you're just a tiny speck on a tiny rock for a fleeting instant. So maybe that political squabble with that annoying senator isn't worth the ulcer. Michael: You’ve nailed it. It shrinks the problem. It drains the drama out of it by placing it in its proper cosmic context. It’s the antidote to self-importance. It doesn’t make the problem disappear, but it changes your judgment about its significance. Kevin: It’s funny, that feels incredibly modern. It’s the same feeling you get when you see one of those deep space images from the Webb Telescope. You see galaxies that are billions of light-years away, and suddenly, the fact that you got a parking ticket feels… appropriately small. Michael: It is! The Stoics were practicing a kind of mental cosmology 2,000 years before we had the telescopes. And they had an even more powerful perspective tool, one that’s always available to us: contemplating our own death. Kevin: Ah, there it is. Memento Mori. Remember you will die. Sounds a bit morbid. Michael: It sounds morbid, but they saw it as the ultimate life-enhancer. Thinking about the fact that your time is finite is the best way to clarify your priorities. It cuts through the trivialities. Do you really want to spend one of your limited days on this earth fuming about a rude comment on the internet? Or do you want to spend it on something that truly matters? Seneca said, “He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery.” Kevin: Unlearned slavery. Because if you’re not afraid of the ultimate ‘bad thing,’ then what power does anyone or anything else have over you? A threat of being fired or being embarrassed is nothing compared to that. Michael: Nothing. It’s the ultimate source of courage and freedom. It’s not about being obsessed with death; it’s about using the reality of death to inspire you to live a better, more virtuous, and more meaningful life right now.

Kevin: So when you put it all together, it really is a two-step process. First, you have to accept this radical, world-altering idea that the prison isn't the world around you; it's the judgments inside your own head. Michael: The self-created stories. Kevin: Right. And then, once you see the bars of the cage, you realize they’re made of thought. And the book gives you the keys to unlock it: detachment from the things you can’t control, and perspective shifts to change the way you see the things you can. Michael: Exactly. And the goal of all this, which is what people miss about the stone-faced statue, isn't to become an unfeeling robot. It's about becoming a more resilient, effective, and frankly, happier human being. It’s not about feeling less; it’s about suffering less over things that are ultimately trivial or outside your control, so you can free up all that wasted emotional energy for the things that truly matter. Kevin: So what’s one thing someone listening can do today? A practical first step to becoming a ‘practicing’ Stoic, not just a theoretical one. Michael: I love that question. Farnsworth includes many exercises in the book, but one of the simplest and most powerful comes from a philosopher named Sextius, which Seneca adopted. It’s a nightly review. Before you go to sleep, you take two minutes and you act as a gentle judge of your own day. You ask yourself: “Which of my wrongs did I correct today? Which fault did I resist? In what way am I better?” Kevin: It’s like a mental workout log. You’re not beating yourself up, you’re just taking stock. "Where did I let a judgment get the better of me today? What can I do differently tomorrow?" Michael: Precisely. It’s a 2-minute practice that, over time, retrains your mind. It makes you more aware of your own mental scripts and gives you the power to start rewriting them. Kevin: I love that. It’s a practical, concrete step. And it feels like a conversation we all need to be having, especially with ourselves. We’d love to hear from our listeners. What's one automatic judgment you struggle with? Is it road rage? Is it taking criticism personally? Let us know on our socials. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.