This is Why We’re Afraid | How Tim Ferriss Deals With Champagne Problems (Using Stoicism)

0:00You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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3:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

3:27This is why we're afraid. The ancient world had all the same natural events we have today. Earthquakes, lightning, tornadoes, volcanoes. These things were unexpected, terrifying, disruptive, and often deadly. Today, many parts of America will experience a solar eclipse. In this instance, a uniquely rare phenomenon, since the proximity of the moon to the Earth will increase the duration and the totality of the eclipse. But like the others we mentioned, this natural event happened in Greece and Rome, too. Imagine what it must have been like for the world to suddenly go dark. In The Obstacle is the Way, and in Courage is Calling, there's a famous story about Pericles, the Athenian statesman in general.

4:11During a naval mission in the Peloponnesian War, his fleet of 150 ships was thrown into disarray by an eclipse by which many believed to be an evil portent. To illustrate that they had nothing to worry about, Pericles threw a cloak over a man. Are you scared now, he asked. No, the man said. What do you care if the cause of darkness differs? Another time in the face of a fearful storm, Pericles grabbed two large rocks and smashed them together. What do you think thunder is, Pericles said to his men, but the clouds doing the same thing. The truth is that most of the things we're afraid of is rooted in a similar ignorance.

4:50If you don't know what a tornado is or what's behind an earthquake, it may well seem like the wrath of a vengeful god. But then you learn about tectonic plates or atmospheric pressure and it's not quite so scary. It can still hurt you, of course, but you'll both be better prepared and less likely to take it personally. When Seneca said he pitied the man who had never been knocked down or bloodied by life, this is what he was referring to. When the Stoics strove to be more than pen and ink philosophers, this was why. They knew that you had to be exposed to things, to places, to people, to phenomena.

5:22Otherwise, you'd be afraid of them. You wouldn't understand. You couldn't draw analogies. You couldn't explain or help reassure others. We fear what we don't understand. We are vulnerable to what we can't explain. And this is why science and history and good old personal experience are so essential. They make us wiser, but also braver because now we know. And once we know, then we know what to do. We know how to prepare, or in the case of today's eclipse, how to appreciate and enjoy a beautiful and fleeting moment, which as a reminder, you should not stare directly at. Anyways, I've always loved this story about Pericles.

5:56I think it first appears in Thucydides maybe or maybe it's Plutarch I don't remember but I've loved it I've loved it always and uh it's one of the first stories I wrote when I was riding the obstacles away hang on one sec yes buddy Jonesy's definitely not in here but uh I like that you're playing hide and seek can I finish recording this though bud everyone's everyone on the podcast is going to hear you doing this but I promise you didn't come and hide in my office because the door was shut. But you're being very thorough. Sorry, that was my kids playing hide and seek. The point is, I put that story in the obstacles way before I had kids, before I even knew I would have kids.

6:37Here we are 10 plus years later. And I think the story holds up, holds up for 2000 plus years for a good reason. And then I talked about it again in Courageous Calling. It's right there at the beginning. And let's see what chapter it's in. My favorite chapter in that book is The Important thing is not to be afraid, but it's we defeat fear with logic actually has one of my favorite acronyms in sobriety. They have this saying false evidence appearing real or fear. That's what fear stands for. It's about exactly scenarios like that. So that's today's message. And I hope you enjoyed the eclipse. It should be really beautiful and awesome here in Austin.

7:16And I'll let you go after it.

7:31How has stoicism helped you? I mean, you've done very well. You've done lots of interesting things. You've been at the top of the author game, the podcast game. You've been a great investor. How do you think of stoicism in that sense as something that helps you deal with what we would call champagne problems or too much of a good thing? You know, like stoicism is also there. You can see the YouTube thumbnail now. Tim Ferriss on champagne problems. There are a few things that immediately come to mind. So the first is I do a lot of things that I know are perceived by many people to be high risk that I don't consider high risk at all because I've run through exercises and journaling and so on that lean very heavily on stoic practices and have come to the definitive conclusion that this is not holistically high risk.

8:20I see. in the long game yeah right like the the real world mba where i traded stanford business school for the the crucible of angel investing that's right the the in theory tim ferris fund of angel investing that i deployed over two years and yes there was a risk even the expectation it wasn't even just a risk i expected that like tuition that money would vanish and i was like okay let's assume the money vanishes yeah how can i approach the angel investing in such a way that my skills and relationships developed over that period of time far exceed what i am expecting to lose yeah and so i pulled the trigger now the timing was also yeah incredibly lucky in retrospect at the time it wasn't obvious, but in retrospect, it was, it was very lucky, but there was some, there was also some deliberation around it in the sense that, and I think this is compatible with, it might not be verbatim reflective of stoic writings, but thinking about competition very carefully.

9:31In other words, so this is very, Seneca is not the only who has written about this, but in terms of competing with your peers and - Yes. And keeping up with the Joneses. Keeping up with the Joneses. Oh, you want to wear a purple tunic, do you? Hmm. Let's talk about that. You think you're a success. That person has more than you. So you're not. Yeah, right. Right. You feel like you need to go to the banquets and you need to do this and you need to do that. When I find an area that is crowded or competitive, I look at that as an opportunity to find something that is very uncrowded. So that has also helped me.

10:08For instance, I'm coming up on the 10th year of the podcast and podcasting has become incredibly competitive. And there was a long time when I felt like I was category of one. And if I'm being honest with myself, that's no longer the case. There's some very, very good interviewers out there, yourself among them and the production quality has gone parabolic yeah it is it is going to be harder to build a business and to fight for successfully fight for attention sure in this particular format and i love doing my podcast i'm going to continue doing it however because i would pay to have these conversations anyway, by and large.

10:59I'm taking a moment. Say, all right, wait a second. When I did angel investing from say 2008 to 2015, it got crowded. I felt like it went from single deck blackjack where you can kind of count the cards to like, you know, five deck. And then the table stakes got a lot higher because the terms got weird. There's a lot of money coming in from places like China and sovereign wealth funds. And I was like, oh man, this is going to a very, now the risk is real for me financially. Sure. So I stopped for a while and I've done that over and over again, right? Stopped the books for a while. And in this particular case, I'm like, all right, I may not find an answer, but it would be a mistake not to look for an answer.

11:42Like what's neglected? And that's not necessarily something new. For instance, I think text is neglected. I think writing is neglected. Yes. And text isn't dead. It's just not surfaced by the algorithms. It's just not favored at the moment. But... It's the most perennial of the mediums. It's the most perennial and it's the hardest. So if I'm looking at differentiation and competitive advantage, you have this too, right? You can write. Writing's hard. Yeah. Writing is very, very hard, at least for me. and for that reason i'm like all right well maybe it's just the return to basics in that sense maybe it's fitting something old into a new vehicle etc etc let's come up with a lot of bad ideas to see if there's maybe one or two good ideas we can test and so to come back to your question though i i think that that is a way of avoiding comparison and with others that can lead directly to outperformance if we're talking about success in financial terms.

12:50But it's also very compatible with success on your own terms, right? I think Kevin Kelly's a great example of this, right? Has really forged his own life. There are other people for sure, but he's very good at questioning basic assumptions that are common, right? They're so common that it's taken to be fact, but in most instances, you can kind of negotiate reality around a lot of these assumptions. I was thinking of other sort of success problems that socialism helps with, like haters is probably one, or people who don't like you, or negative attention on top of. Yeah, I mean, the more, especially if your version of success or what you're pursuing is going to make you more public, Like you are going to have to deal with all sorts of things that at least at current, you have not faced this magnitude of negative attention.

13:48Yes. And I've seen people buckle under that if they don't have the toolkit. And the toolkit doesn't have to be sophisticated, by the way. Like rule number one, don't go looking for it. Yeah, sure. It's kind of like, all right, if you're going to like do shuffle sprints on top of like broken floorboards, You're going to stub your toe all the time. And then, I mean, I'll admire you if you have the best stubbed toe fix, but maybe you just shouldn't run across the floorboards barefoot, which is what a lot of folks do when they're kind of hunting for comments, but being human, ending up fixating on the one or two people who are awful.

14:23I remember one time you said something like, okay, so let's say how many people know who you are, right? Like the first part of your career as a creative person, really even anything that relies on the public, was you want lots of people to find out who you are. Your first problem is a lack of awareness. And then you get the awareness. Now, a certain percentage of those people are not gonna like you, or they're gonna have had a bad experience, or you're gonna turn or something. Or they're gonna be nuts. Yeah, right. So like, you know, Daily Stoic has, let's say, 3 million Instagram followers. So let's say 10 % of those people are just not fans.

14:54That's hundreds of thousands of people who just plain don't, who know who you are, but don't like you. Whereas in normal life, you know, if 10 % of the people you meet don't like you, those people could fit in a small SUV. You know what I mean? Like it's not that many people. And also like 20 years ago, they're not enabled with the ability to publicly - They can't reach all the other people. Yeah, right. And so I think that's a very key. So Marx has to come to terms with the fact that he's the emperor of Rome. Some people don't even like that there's an emperor. Some people don't like him for good reasons.

15:27Some people don't like him for bad reasons. But the point is you're not gonna please everyone. And in fact, part of the job is just putting up with the fact that a bunch of people hate you. And having to come to terms with the fact that one, it's outside your control. You can't make everyone like you. And two, if you try to make those people who don't like you, like you, or you spend your time obsessing about them, what you're doing is making yourself miserable and not servicing or serving the people and things that do like you, that you are good at. Yeah, totally. I was wondering, I don't know if you know this, this is a pretty sort of arcane fact to ask for, but do you have any idea what the greater, not the Roman empire, but the greater Rome area, let's just call it, just like you'd have the greater Austin area or Rome central, do you have any idea what the population was around Marcus Aurelius' day?

16:19So the empire I know, because I looked it up for something, is like 50 million people. So let's say Rome is 10 % of that, right? There's still millions of people, right? Where I was going with that is like more people may dislike you and me individually than hated Marcus Aurelius at his peak as the last of the great emperors of Rome. Yeah, yeah, totally. Which is kind of hilarious to think about. Or to think there's probably more Stoics now than have ever existed before in history, right? There may be more people who know about Stoicism but don't like me specifically than have ever been interested in stoicism ever, right?

17:01Like, you know, the numbers get really big really fast because that's what technology allows for when you live in a world of 8 billion people. Technology allows you to reach lots and lots of people. And it's not healthy or realistic for humans to be subjected to that, but we are subjected to it, right? Like, so you think success is gonna be amazing and it is in a lot of ways, but it's subjecting you to a fundamentally unnatural, really difficult thing, which is like, you have to wake up and deal with the weight of the fact that like lots of people like hate you, like they hate you. And if you don't have the sort of fortitude and the confidence to just sit with that and to not let it eat at you or make you swerve off what you think you're supposed to be doing, like you're going to get eaten alive.

17:52Yeah, you'll get eaten alive. You'll eat yourself alive. You let yourself alive. And I think Stoicism and reflecting on applications of Stoic-like thinking, right? Because I'm not a Stoic fundamentalist. Sure, me neither. I'm not like, this is the scripture. This is the end all be all. Well, let's extend that. It isn't one. Right, exactly. So let's extend, let's expand. All right. What other ways could this type of thinking apply? and I think that extends to 80-20 principle, Richard Koch type stuff. I think it extends to, it's really about the number of people who get it, not the number of people who don't get it.

18:34Kevin Kelly, 1 ,000 true fans type of thinking. Blue Ocean versus Red Ocean, Blue Ocean strategy kind of stuff. These are all highly, highly compatible and I would go further to say there are a lot of people who, at this point, they've probably heard the word stoic. Yeah. At least in the modern sense. Yeah, lowercase. but they're not familiar with the canon of stoicism. Yet, if you look at anyone who has thrived in what most people consider high stress environments, they're going to walk the walk. I think that there's such a selection bias. There's a survival bias towards anyone who indirectly or directly has put into practice these principles on a regular basis that if you look at, and this is just the other hypotheticals.

19:26I haven't asked these people, but anyone from a Bob Iger to a hedge fund manager to an exceptionally good athlete who has had longevity, if you were to sit them down and walk them through Marcus Aurelius and so on for the first time, they'd be like, oh yeah, oh yeah. No, that's how I live my life.

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