The Worst Advice On The Internet

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1:42Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audio books that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:20Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Look, the great thing about the internet is that no one's excluded, right? It's radically inclusive. It was a huge leap forward in the accessibility, the spreadability, the collapse of barriers when it comes to information. Even in the case of stoicism, stoicism has obviously existed for a very long time. I haven't changed it, but without social media, without Amazon, without all these different platforms, it's not like someone else would be doing it. Stoicism would have been left only to academics where it had languished for so many centuries.

3:07So obviously these tools have a lot of good in them. But the problem is, it's not always the best ideas that spread. I talk a lot about this, and trust me, I'm lying, the high-valence ideas, high-valence personalities, people who are shameless, people who tell people what they want to hear. They're really adept at using these platforms to not just make themselves popular, but spread really bad ideas. If you listened to my episode with Renee DiResto, I was sort of a disinformation expert. I think we talked a lot about this. But I wanted to specifically drill down in today's episode on a handful of people who are giving extremely bad advice or strains of advice that are extremely bad.

3:49And some of these people have overlap with stoicism. Some of them I've been fans of at one time or another. Some of them have good ideas in some areas and really bad ideas in others. But I want to specifically talk about some really bad advice. I'm going to call it the worst advice on the internet. And I wanted to call some people and some things out. It's not fun to do this. It would be easier to be silent. It'd be easier just to do my thing and be like, oh, cool. You do your thing. And generally, that's my attitude in life. But I think the problem is there is a cost to this. When bad ideas take hold in impressionable people, impressionable young men, impressionable young women, older people too.

4:34Just people who don't get to see the full picture. They don't understand the forces that are operating on this information. It's dangerous stuff. And so that's why I wanted to call that out. And so today we're going to talk about some really bad advice and the stoic countervailing counter argument to that very bad advice. So here we go.

4:55There's a lot of bad advice out there. A lot of it from not so great people. One of the things the Stoics say you have to get really good at is separating the good from the bad. Epictetus said we have to be like a money changer. From the way they bang a coin on the table, they can tell whether it's real or fake. And I think with advice, we have to do something similar. Is the person saying this someone I respect, someone whose example I want to embody? Do they really know what they're talking about? If everyone followed this advice, what would the world look like? And in this video, what we're going to do is go through some of the worst advice on the internet and see what the Stoics would tell us to do instead.

5:35Show me someone without an ego and I'll show you a loser. Donald Trump. One of the things the Stoics said was that conceit was the impediment to knowledge. It was one of the traits they hated to see, particularly in young students. Epictetus said, remember, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. I have a reminder of this tattooed on my arm. Ego is not something to aspire to. It's not something we should admire. In fact, it's the thing that holds us back. And it's historically been the thing that's held many great people back. You could argue that Marcus Aurelius' meditations, one of its primary purposes was Marcus Aurelius meditating against and trying to counteract the very real ego that would creep in for having so much incredible power and fame and influence.

6:21He says he's trying to escape the stain of imperialization. He's trying to escape being Caesarified, trying to escape being dyed purple. That's the color of the cloak of the Roman emperor. He's trying to remain normal, trying to retain his sanity, trying to stick with what is true and real and not what other people are saying about him, not what his very natural ego wants to puff oneself up about. He's trying to be honest and real and stick with reality, which is what leaders ultimately have to do. I mean, look, Donald Trump is objectively a loser. He's lost elections. He's declared bankruptcy multiple times.

7:00He's a laughingstock. He's just fundamentally bad at almost everything he does, except for getting a lot of attention. In that way, I guess, sure, maybe his ego has served him well and that it's made him utterly shameless and impervious to the kinds of things that you and I would have been mortified to do. Like whatever allows a person after the Access Hollywood tapes to go up in front of America and call it locker room talk or whatever allows someone after they made such a horrible mess of things to think, I should do that again. I am qualified for the toughest job in the world. Sure, perhaps in some ways it's served him.

7:38But in actuality, Donald Trump's ego has made his life more difficult at literally every turn. It's taken a very hard job and made it much, much harder. We all hold up humility as like this admirable trait, but we're afraid it's not going to get us where we want to go. But actually, some of the true greats are the most humble people. George Marshall's wife would say, George Marshall had an ego, but what he did was work really hard to contain it. He was a human being like the rest of us, but he tried to put the mission, the job, the country in front of his personal interests. Never did Marshall think about himself, is what Truman said.

8:14You probably say something similarly true about Marcus Aurelius. Then you look at Donald Trump. Okay, sure, it propels you into the presidency, but then all your cabinet members quit. Your family hates you. You are impeached twice. Is this really success? Is this really success in the profession that is called public service? No, of course not. When I say all this, oftentimes people go, sure, sure, sure. There's the extreme cases. Obviously, ego is bad. But then they say, isn't a little bit of ego important? And I would still say no. If we can define ego as this destructive, toxic thing, this thing that gets between us and other people, between our art, between reality, it's not good.

8:51But confidence is important. An understanding of your capacity, of your strengths, of your skills, of your experiences, that's important. But confidence also has to be paired with self-awareness, with an understanding of our weaknesses and with a humility because it's humility that allows us to continue to get better. That's what Epictetus was saying, that you can't learn that which you think you already know. If you are open-minded, there's a Zen parable about a cup. The cup is full. It can't contain anything else. But if the cup is empty, more can be poured into it. If you think you are great, if you think you're a God's gift to humanity, if you think you are perfect, you cannot get any better.

9:28You cannot receive feedback. You cannot grow. and certainly you're going to have trouble being of service and use to anyone other than yourself. Work like hell, put in 80 to 100 hours a week, Elon Musk. Success in life is hard. It takes a lot of work. You don't get things phoning it in. You don't achieve mastery or prominence laying around. Dante said, you know, under the blankets is no way to fame. It's true. You have to work hard. I work very hard. But I think this sort of hustle porn, hustle culture, brute force, burn the candles at both end mentality. I mean, we know where it ends. It ends in burnout.

10:08And that's not sustainable. Ariana Huffington, who carries actually a quote from Marcus Aurelius, laminated in her purse. She tells this story from her days building the Huffington Post. She wakes up on the floor in a pool of her own blood. She passed out from sheer fatigue, hit her head on the way down, knocked out teeth, was bleeding everywhere. It was a wake up call for her that she wasn't taking care of herself. And that although this might have helped her succeed in one sense, it was either going to lead to her downfall or it was going to make it impossible for her to enjoy said success. The Emperor Augustus, his favorite saying was festina lente.

10:39It means make haste slowly. So, look, I believe it is important to work hard. Mark Stabilius worked hard. He admired Antoninus' dedication at the office that he put in the hours. The Stoics and the greats understood that sustainability was the name of the game. and that pulling all-nighters, not taking care of yourself, neglecting yourself, it ended poorly, as it clearly is doing for Elon Musk. I mean, he is deteriorating before our eyes. He may have continued to be very wealthy and successful, but clearly his judgment is impaired. Elon Musk talked about in the New York Times his reliance on Ambien, which his own board of directors have gotten really concerned about because he's working himself into such a state that he also can't wind down and sleep.

11:22And I saw this at American Apparel. It looks like it's all working. It looks like the person is pulling heroic hours until American Apparel imploded from lack of sleep and overwork and lack of balance. And they see this when you don't sleep, when you work 100 hours a week, you are not sleeping nearly enough. And you are operating cognitively at a level that has a similar level of impairment as drinking. You have to take care of yourself. And I've been young. I've been ambitious. I've been there. But as I've gotten older, it's not just I'm slowed down. I've decided to slow down because I want to keep doing this.

11:55And you have to come up with a pace that you can sustain. Seneca says, you know, the mind that is not given over to relaxation, it breaks as sure as the anvil breaks the hammer. The world is undefeated. Human beings have limitations. We can only do so much for so long. If you've got 10 children, you're running multiple companies. If anything, conservation of energy should be your primary concern. You have to eliminate the inessential. You have to focus on only what matters. You have to take really good care of yourself. You can't be tweeting at three in the morning. You can't be out partying until late at night.

12:31You can't be getting caught up in drama and unnecessary conflict because you can't afford it. We got to slow down to speed up. We got to do things sustainably if we want to do them for a long time. We have to take care of ourselves. We cannot burn ourselves out.

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14:31Clinical depression isn't real, Andrew Tate. We got to make a really clear distinction between lowercase stoicism and uppercase stoicism. Uppercase stoicism is this philosophy, the philosophy that comes to us from ancient Greece and ancient Rome, Marcus, really, Seneca, Xeno, Clientes, Chrysippus. And then there's lowercase stoicism, like what the word means in English. And a lot of people associate that to mean invulnerability. They take it to mean emotionlessness. They take it to mean like superhuman strength. It's like repression. And that's not what the stoics were but it also it does play into what can be called by some this idea of toxic masculinity and of course no one embodies toxic masculinity we're just being a fucking douche more than andrew tate i mean look this is literally a guy on trial for sex crimes is a dude who's so insecure about going bald his identity in the world that he takes advantage of women he treats women terribly.

15:30And then he needs to impress a bunch of like losers on the internet. And look, he's definitely not a doctor. He's someone who's got kicked in the head a lot of times. So probably not someone that you want to take medical advice from. All that being said, this idea that all of our problems are going to be solved by philosophy, that you can just rub some dirt on stuff that people who are really struggling are like faking it or just need to suck it up. This is someone who either hasn't gone through anything themselves or just fundamentally lacking in human empathy. Also, by the way, if you never met anyone who's depressed, this is why we read.

16:05We read novels, we read memoirs. When you hear about the experiences of someone and they describe to you what depression is like, you don't judge them. You go, oh, but for the grace of God, go I. Whatever you need, how can I help you? Because it sounds fucking tough to be you. When you read Marcus Aurelius' meditations, you get the sense that Marcus Aurelius was a tortured man in many ways. He had not just physical ailments, but this was a guy who struggled, who grieved, who had every reason to not want to get out of bed in the morning. And the debate that he has with himself in book five of meditations about getting out of bed in the morning, I think shows you how tough it was to be him.

16:43So look, are there things we can do just generally to take care of ourselves, basic practices that not enough people are taking advantage of? Of course. and that other people are struggling with things that we can't even imagine. When we are glib or insensitive or make light of what other people are going through, we're just being awful. I really like Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet, where she talks about this idea of melancholy, that some people are just wired differently. But that experience they have, that worldview they have, it can be a source of greatness. I mean, Lincoln suffers from acute melancholy.

17:18There was a point in Abraham Lincoln's life where his friends had to remove all sharp objects from his room, so concerned they were that he would kill himself. But it's from this trial, this aching, painful period, where he didn't want to get out of bed, where he saw no reason to live, where he was as close to the definition of clinical depression as one could imagine. But he soldiered on, he struggled through, his friends were sympathetic, his friends took care of him, his friends didn't demean or belittle him, they didn't call him a weakling, they didn't say that he was faking it, that none of this was real.

17:47No, they supported him. He could lean on them and they helped him come through to the other side. And we're lucky that that happened. We're lucky that Marcus Aurelius pushed through to the other side. These are people who had every reason not to keep going. And we want to encourage people. We want to support people. We want to understand Kevin Love, who's read The Daily Stoic and talks about it on social media sometimes. You know, he's like, you got to remember, people are going through things and you know nothing about. Stoicism is about self-discipline. It's not about you judging and holding other people to high standards.

18:19It's about you understanding and empathizing and appreciating what other people are going through. As a result of that patience and understanding, maybe you can also be kinder and gentler to yourself. In order to think you have to risk being offensive, Jordan Peterson. Now, look, I would agree in the sense that sometimes ideas are unsettling. Sometimes the truth hurts. Epictetus says, you have to remember that when you are offended, you're complicit in taking offense. Events, remarks, ideas, they are objective. And it's how we experience them that determines whether they're offensive, inappropriate, whatever.

18:56And so generally the Stokes, yeah, try not to be offended easily. They try to be tough. They're not sensitive little snowflakes. But you know what they're also not? They're not assholes. There was this guy, I believe it was in the UK, and he was just a real jerk at the office. He practiced poor hygiene. He was rude to people. He ignored civilities. and politeness. He asked people questions you shouldn't ask at the office. He said things you shouldn't say. And ultimately the boss fired him because he was disruptive and unpleasant to be around. And the man sued and he said, you're violating my religious rights.

19:28I'm a stoic. Talk about fundamentally misunderstanding what stoicism is. I mean, come on. That's closer to the tradition of cynicism. Look, and I like the cynics, but even then, I mean, come on, It's not that hard to not be a slob, to not be a jerk, to make basic efforts to meet people where they are and to just generally be a civil member of society. Like when I watched Jordan Peterson repeatedly deadname someone for I don't know what shits and giggles because he's a bigot, because he likes the attention. I don't see someone who is intellectually dealing with tough or sensitive issues. I see someone who's a bully who has decided that his social media platform should be used to punch down instead of punch up.

20:12And I think he was originally resisting the legal side of things. He didn't want to be told what to say, which you can agree or disagree on. But it turns out that he's actually just a person who bullies and trolls people he doesn't like or understand. I see very little empathy for what it must be like to be a transgender person. And I see very little consideration in much of what he says about anyone hearing or experiencing those words. And look, it's not always examples like that. There's a story Jeff Bezos tells when he's a young boy. He figures out some fact about the world. He calculates the exact number of years that his grandmother, by smoking, has cut off from her life.

20:54And she bursts into tears. And look, he wasn't wrong. The math he did was probably correct. But his grandfather takes him aside and says, Jeff, as you get older, you'll understand it's easier to be clever than it is to be kind. The Stoics I admire, the people I admire, they're not in the fuck your feelings crowd. They're not provocative and incendiary for the sake of it. They treat people with respect. They meet people where they are. They think about the effect or the impact of their actions. The Stoics were the perpetual thorn in the side of the powerful and the elite, but the ordinary people, they were kind and respectful to.

21:31I think Bezos's grandfather wasn't saying that Bezos was wrong. He was saying that there's better ways to deliver that message so that it's actually heard. And so in this kind of anti-woke culture that we see, particularly in the right online, I see people hurting other people's feelings for the sake of it. Like the cruelty is the point. That's what shows that they're clever, smart, more rational, better than other people. I agree what they're doing is revealing. I just think it reveals something very different, about a very different set of priorities than what stoicism is about.

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23:08Psychedelics change everything. They show you what's truly important in life. I was doing a talk in Australia not that long ago and someone in the audience asked me about psychedelics and where they fit in with stoicism. We got back and forth and I said, look, there are some illnesses that are very, very serious, clinical depression, treatment-resistant PTSD, for which if you need to try some experimental treatment because nothing else has worked, I'm all for it. My good friend Tim Ferriss is funding some interesting and serious research on the topic. I'm not criticizing that. But generally, I said, I'm very nervous about messing with your brain chemistry.

23:43He said something, although he was more a supporter of psychedelics, that really stuck with me. He said, we should be wary of unearned wisdom. And I think what keeps me up about this sort of recent trend, intersection of wellness and psychedelics. First off, the number of people who have no medical background whatsoever, evangelizing something for which there hasn't been too much research on, as if they know what they're talking about and you should listen to these people. I'm always very skeptical of whatever like the big thing is. And I think you should be too, especially if that thing is veering into the medical treatment area.

24:15But I'm sitting here. This is Joan Didion's table. She wrote some fascinating essays on the psychedelic scene in the 60s, and Tom Wolfe did too. And I reread the electric Kool-Aid acid test recently, and it struck me just the similarities, the clownishness, the absurdity, the certainty of these people, how similar it is to the exact scene at Burning Man now, the scenes that you see on the internet, these shamans and whatever. Again, there are serious people doing serious work in this field, and then there are people who no one should be listening to under any circumstances. And that middle area, I think, gets gray really quickly and muddied very quickly.

24:53One of the things Joan Didion said, she actually gave a commencement address at the university that I went to, UC Riverside. She said, living in the world takes work. She says, you have to keep stripping yourself down, examining what you see, getting rid of what blinds you. But I don't think she meant you could do that with a pill or a paste, that you could get it on demand. Wisdom takes work. There's a difference between coming to a conclusion after years of therapy or reading or work on oneself and getting in on a weekend surrounded by a bunch of people who paid to go on a retreat with you. And so this idea of being wary of unearned wisdom is, to me, a really important one.

25:30A lot of what you hear from people on psychedelics, the insights they've had on psychedelics, they're interesting, but they're also pretty basic ideas that are captured in most of the religious and philosophical texts out there. And the desire to get that for free, to get that as a shortcut, to get that on demand is, I think, to miss the point. And so I'm just urging a smidge of caution is all I'm saying. It works for you. It works for you. You want to roll the dice, roll the dice. But I can think of very few times in history when magical medical solutions have aged well. If you think there's a magic pill or a magic button or a magic book or a magic technology that's going to solve all your problems, it's going to catapult you ahead.

26:10that's going to clear up all the confusing things out there, you're probably fooling yourself. And look, I would say one more thing about psychedelics. They were so transformative. Why do they have to keep doing them over and over and over and over again? And why do they so desperately need to convert you to do them? I've always found that a little funny.

26:29Follow your passion. This is one of the most cliche bits of advice out there, but we all kind of default into it. A young person asks you, what should I do with my life? Find what you're passionate about. I think the Stoics might have been a little adverse to that. Actually, I have a chapter about this in Ego is the Enemy, about the dangers of passion. You know, many of the biggest blunders of history were defined by a very passionate person being blinded to something that everyone else could see. Christopher McAndalus was very passionate about going out into the wild, but it blinded him to how difficult that would actually be and the basic preparations that you had to do.

27:02In exploring, there's this danger of like summit mania or pole mania. As people get close to the end, they start to ignore the very real dangerous warning signs. They make this mad dash to finish the thing. And that's when it kills them. The great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was asked to describe John Wooden in a word. And he said, in a word, dispassionate. Now, we think of the coach screaming on the sidelines, amping everyone up. But actually, the best coaches calm us down. They give us clarity. They direct us. They channel our passion properly. I think passion is a dangerous fuel. You don't just want to find what you're passionate in life.

27:39You want to find what you're good at. You want to find the intersection between what you're good at and what the world needs and what you're excited about. I love writing about stoicism, but if I was the only one interested in it, that would be a bad career decision. You have to find where your skills intersect with the needs and the necessities of the world. I don't want to hire really passionate people. I want to hire competent people. I want to hire emotionally mature people. I want to hire rational people. I want to hire people who give me a dose of reality. Great passions are maladies without hope, Gertz said.

28:14I think he was talking about the damage that hugely passionate people have done, whether we're talking about your Napoleons or your George W. Bushes. They drag people along into disaster because they can't see what is clear and real in front of them. Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't care about what you're doing. Of course, you should care a lot. But you should care more about what it does for other people than about yourself. I think passion is kind of inherently narcissistic and selfish. I don't want your stream of conscious email about how excited and pumped you are. I want you to have been in control of yourself to step back, to have thought about it.

28:52Stoics talk about command of the greatest empire, ourselves. When we confuse this with a passion, then maybe we have something to work with. but passion by itself, just finding your passion and handing yourself over to it, that's not a recipe for success. That's a recipe for disaster.

29:09Don't have a morning routine. It's funny. Advice is sort of circular. Oftentimes, advice becomes popular because it counter programs. It's very different than what everyone else is saying. And then it gets popular and then people argue the opposite. You know, most people just sort of wing it. So the advice about having a morning routine, hearing the morning routines of successful people, that became a thing. And now some people are counter-programming against that. They're saying, don't have a morning routine. Why I don't have a morning routine. You absolutely should have a morning routine. William James talks about how nothing is harder for the person who is making lots of individual decisions in the course of the day about what they do and don't do.

29:47What a great routine does is it hands over decision making, particularly early in the morning when you're deciding between a good day and a bad day, a disciplined day and an undisciplined day and it's handing it over the choreographer twyla tharp she talks about her morning routine how you know she wakes up gets the coffee gets in the cab to go to her dance studio and she's saying the day isn't one in the dance studio the day is one if she gets out of her apartment to the cab just starting the routine handing herself over to it that's the minimum effort that she has to do and then the rest kind of takes care of itself as they say well begun is half done.

30:24If I wake up and I'm hitting the snooze button on my alarm a bunch of times, I get sucked into my phone right after I wake up. I'm immediately procrastinating. I'm putting bad things into my body. The days are going to get worse from there. I'm not going to redeem myself. But if I get up early and promptly, I am intentional. I have some reflective time. I'm calm. I'm not rushed. I'm focused. I do the hard thing first. That's going to be a good day. I've already won. The rest takes care of itself. The Stoics say that, you know, every habit is confirmed when you do it. We sort of feed this habit bonfire, if you will.

31:03And I think about the morning as how we send the message for how the day is going to be. This is why that famous passage in Mark Sreelis is so important. He opens book five in meditations with the debate, you know, the debate that says, oh, don't have a morning routine, just wing it. The most powerful man in the world was thinking about that. He says, at dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. What do I have to complain of if I'm going to do what I was born for? He says, or is this what I was created for, to huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

31:31He says, but it's nicer here. So you were born to feel nice? But look, the mind is insidious. The laziness, what Steven Pressfield would call the resistance, it's always there. And if we give ourselves the room to wing it, to follow the path of least resistance, that's what we're going to do. So a morning routine is so important. I want to win the day. If I get up early, I take what I should be taking, nice interactions with my kids. I get them to school on time. I get to my office. I sit down and I write by like 10 o 'clock, man, the rest of the day is all bonus. I already won. You win the morning so you can win the day.

32:06That's why that advice is so bad. To not have a morning routine says, hopefully your 2 p.m. self after you've eaten, after you've been on phone calls, after you dicked around, you'll just magically rise to the occasion. No, you won't. You've already used up your willpower and you've already got decision fatigue. You're already burned out. You've already got excuses to not be your best self. So don't wing it. Have a morning routine. I'm not saying you got to get up when Jocko gets up. I'm not saying it has to be set in stone, but you got to have something and you got to turn yourself over to it.

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33:24We'll see you next time.

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34:23We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year.

35:02Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.