On today’s episode Brady Pesola explores how practical stoicism applies to facing Adversity and using it to understand our emotions. Listen in as Brady and discuss how practical stoicism is woven naturally into military life, the importance of focusing on what you can control, and how prioritizing emotions can help you face micro adversities in everyday life. We also dig into finding motivation, and experiencing emotions over acting upon them.
Brady Pesola of the Gray Man Project is a US Marine veteran with years of experience in teaching various tactical disciplines from firearms, to self-defense, to survival. He has worked as a firearm instructor teaching everyday civilians, law enforcement, military, and special operation personnel in basic firearm fundamentals, all the way up to special applications for direct action.
Brady serves as an executive protection agent and security consultant who has looked after politicians, scientists, celebrities, and high net worth businessmen. He operated a survival school teaching specialized lifesaving wilderness, urban and emotional survival skills to private clients and public groups.
Brady founded Triple B Adventure, a nonprofit focusing on improving veterans’ mental health through outdoor adventures and backpacking, camping, hunting, and fishing. Brady has built a stoic philosophy-based coaching and personal development program, and currently studies and specializes in the use of stoic philosophy to enhance cognitive function of everyday citizens and personnel in various military branches, law enforcement agencies, tactical industries to enhance their lives and the decisions that they make within them.
You can learn more about Brady’s work and the topical applications of historic philosophy by following him on Instagram @graymanproject.
Episode Transcript
I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Brady Basola of Greyman Project is a U.S. Marine veteran with years of experience in teaching various tactical disciplines from firearms, self-defense to survival. His work is a firearm instructor teaching everyday civilians, law enforcement, military, and special operation personnel in the basic firearm fundamentals all the way up to special applications for direct action. Brady serves as an executive protection agent and security consultant who has looked after
01:24
and high net worth businessmen. He operated a survival school teaching specialized life saving wilderness, urban and emotional survival skills to private clients and public groups. And then he founded the Triple B Adventure, a nonprofit focusing on improving veterans’ mental health through outdoor adventures and backpacking, camping, hunting and fishing. Brady has built a stoic philosophy based coaching and personal development program, which we will talk very much about here. And currently studies and specializes in the use of stoic philosophy.
01:53
to enhance cognitive function of everyday citizens and personnel in various military branches, law enforcement agencies, tactical industries to enhance their lives and the decisions that they make within them. You can learn more about Brady’s work and the tactical applications of historic philosophy by following him on Instagram at graymanproject, gray, G-R-A-Y. Brady, I know that I put a long string on that kite, but thank you so much for being here, my friend. This has been a long time coming.
02:18
Hey brother, thank you so much for having me. If I knew you’re going to read off my whole bio from my website, I’d give you a shorter version. It’s all good. I want people to know a lot of what’s going on. Again, if somebody just comes up and says, hey, I was in the military and I do this, it’s like, okay, I know a lot of guys are in the military. What are they doing now? And what leads them to the place that they are? But yeah, it’s important for people to understand. And for me, it seems like my great uncle was in Vietnam. He was in special forces and he was my biggest male role model besides my father. And that stoic philosophy, that practical component of it
02:48
very much is kind of woven in naturally to that military ideal. It seems like the people that have actually been out in it, the people have actually endured diversity, these austere environments that we discuss. I think you’re very much qualified to speak of what you’re talking about. I very much appreciate that, man. You’re absolutely right. It’s funny, when I started studying
03:12
learning compartmentalize your emotions, understanding that there are things in your control and on your control and to focus on things in your control and being able to execute all the things that are within your control to make you a more effective and lethal person in what you do in the military, whether it’s your one of the branches of service or if your infantry radio like I was or admin or whatever it is. Stored philosophy is very much prevalent within the military. It’s just not categorized. Nor do I think it’s…
03:40
it’s very much realized. But I think it’s very much a natural practice, even without knowing what it’s called. I think the military definitely is inherently a practice in Stoicism, whether it’s, you know, adversity or the gift of it, as you say, and I kind of adopted that, or whether it’s voluntary discomforts that the Stoics love. And that voluntary discomfort is what makes us more physically and mentally resilient in the military. So there are so many…
04:06
things about the military that is truly stoic in its nature. And when I say stoic, and you and I both know people hear that term, they think it’s a lack of emotion or the spock, it’s not. So it’s a compartmentalization and prioritization of emotions. So when I say stoic, lack of a better common term. But when I got out of the military, I didn’t really know what I was feeling or why I was the way I was. It wasn’t until about five or six years ago that I started studying social philosophy. I was going through my own typical veteran emotional issues.
04:34
And so I’d seen this quote by Seneca, the younger, and it said, we are often more frightened and hurt. We suffer more imagination than we do reality. And something as simple as that, it was very profound in me of going, Oh yeah, no kidding. I guess that is true. And it definitely brings a comfort to the mind to remind yourself. Yeah. There’s a lot worse that’s happening in my mind. That’s actually what can happen in reality or happening in reality. And we need to remind ourselves that. And that kind of helps give a little.
05:03
reprieve from the anxiety that man has felt after he got out of the military. And it’s funny, when I started reading Stoicism, I was going, you know, this is crazy. This is the same type of idea, the same philosophy as the typical military mind. And we often feel in the military, we’re told that that’s a messed up way of feeling when we get out, that we have a different type of thought process when it comes to violence or when it comes to injuries or when it comes to what everyone perceives as this is emotionally devastating. You must feel this way.
05:33
And we’re like, I’m sorry, I don’t feel the way you do. And we’re told, well, you must be a sociopath or psychopath. No. In the military, we were taught to compartmentalize emotions and redirect emotions when it was appropriate. So there are certain things that we are a bit numb to, because we’re more exposed to violence. And so we look at violence a different way as parts.
05:57
of the human evil that exists that happens. The violence in human beings has existed since we stood upright and started throwing stones and being bipedal creatures. So we see it in a different way as part of human nature. And we can’t control that human nature. And human nature is that variable, that variable and equation that you can’t control. So they teach us to be the constant in those variables of environments that are often chaotic. Our training, our mindset makes us the constant in the world of chaos.
06:27
And so we get out and we think, well, maybe I am messed up because I don’t have the same empathy or same sadness, or this doesn’t bother us, or we are unemotional to something like this. I realize that studying Stoic philosophy, I think veterans would feel a lot less messed up if they realized that the way they think and the way they feel isn’t messed up, that it’s a 2,500-year-old categorized Hellenistic philosophy that, hey, let’s put a name to it and let’s take this chaos.
06:56
in your mind of all these stoic ideas that haven’t been labeled yet, and then shape them and show you, hey, here’s how to be a little bit more sharp when it comes to your thinking. Here’s how to take all these different thoughts you have and actually bring them down and center them. And knowing what so philosophy is, I think would help a lot of veterans out, a lot of people in the military, people with PTSD, people with anxiety, depression. I think the more that they get into so philosophy, I think the more that they’re going to understand that.
07:25
Okay, there are some issues that we have, but not everything or the way I do is messed up that the way I think is actually, again, categorized philosophy. It absolutely is. And there’s so many people, like you say, we transition into the civilian sector again. And I was only in for four years. I joined when I was 38. I think you know my story. But even coming back after being injured and being paralyzed, and then being medically retired, even coming back into the civilian sector and having a punk kid.
07:54
pull out in front of me, not use a signal, slam on his brakes, and then turn into a gas station to go get an energy drink. It was like, there was that part of me from the military that was like, I’m going to go over there and I’m going to tune that kid up. It’s like, you want to grab him and shake him. It’s like, did you know that you almost caused this accident or you almost hit that person? But again, we have to understand that, first of all, that’s not my job. Second of all, he’s not in a place where he’s going to be receptive to that. And third of all, again, in society today, me doing that, that could be…
08:22
construed to something that’s adversarial. That could be construed to something that’s almost an assault worthy kind of action. So what am I learning to do? Experience the emotion. Don’t act from the emotion. Don’t try to push it down. We do compartmentalize, but in the military, we also learn as you’re relating to take that emotion and now channel it into this other thing, channel it into PT, channel it into this run, channel it into this assault. If that’s what we’re having to do. So now it’s a natural
08:51
almost yin yang, if you will. But at the same time, if we try to push that down, and then again, we have people that appreciate the military mentality, maybe they were veterans, or maybe they have somebody that served, and they think that they have to just push everything down in the process. But first of all, it’s not sustainable. We’re going to get blow up, we’re going to fester, something’s going to happen, and usually it happens at the most inopportune times. So it’s very important to start, like you said, labeling this, looking at the ideas of the Soviet philosophy. And again,
09:19
Even before it was labeled a stoic philosophy, these patterns, these ideas, these truths were self-evident to anybody that was in a martial capacity, whether it be a boxer, a wrestler, as many of the stoics were, or a person who was actually trying to go out, hunt and gather, kill something to bring it back to the cave. We had to have that. We didn’t have the luxury of feeling victimized because I missed the shot. I don’t sit here and misconstrue the motivation of this animal that comes to me. It’s like, I don’t have that luxury in the face of adversity. I need to either act.
09:48
or I’m going to be at dinner if it’s going to be the other direction, I have to be willing to put all that stuff on hold for the moment and then be able to take action in the heat of it. Right. That’s the biggest thing too is that, and I’ve mentioned it before, is that stimulation response and that space between it. I’ve said on my Instagram and I mentioned before that I started reading a lot of Victor Frankel and he has a book called Mansur’s for Meeting where he developed lobotherapy out of it, which is actually very common now, top in.
10:16
cognitive behavior therapy and other ways of psychomedicine. Dr. Frankel said between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space, we have the power to choose. I think that is a very important thing to consider because it’s physiological. If we look at the study of our minds and the limbic system where stimulus and response happens, we can actually begin to understand why there’s space between the stimulus and response. What parts of our brain allow for…
10:43
rational higher cognitive function like the cerebral cortex versus emotional response and human behavior from the amygdala and the limbic system. And I think it’s important, and this is part of the strategic stoicism that I’m developing and I want people to kind of get into is that it’s one thing to study stoic philosophy. It’s another thing to understand why it works inside the mind, what part of the brain is using stoicism and to combat the other part that it’s trying to control. So like…
11:12
started about that the cerebral cortex is responsible for higher rational cognitive thought. That’s in that area. That’s where we have that space to choose and help try to combat the amygdala response where the amygdala is stores trauma, stores our procedural memory and implicit memory. That’s the last part of our limbic system before we take action. And so I think it’s not just, hey, I’m studying Stoke philosophy. This makes me better. No, it’s
11:38
understanding why this philosophy works inside your mind. What about your mind do you know? So I often try and say, hey, if you’re going to study this philosophy, if you want to be more tactically effective and efficient in everything you do, whether it’s military first responder, it’s understand the psychology of the mind, it’s the physiology, so how it works, the physiology, the why, the psychology, and then how to respond to it with still a philosophy. It’s the three P’s.
12:06
And I think those three P’s are a good triangle, a good formula for becoming a better person and living a happier life. And I talked about the gray man leading, trying to live a more secure, happy life. And I want everybody, regardless of whether you’re military, law enforcement, first responder, EP, I want the average person to be able to use this as well and say, okay, I’m gonna understand my mind more, I’m gonna understand how it works more, and then I’m gonna study philosophy.
12:35
to help respond to it a lot better. And then I think the fourth P is what everybody forgets, which is practice. Oh man, practice is a thing, putting it in actual practice every single day. And every day we all suffer the human condition until they come up with a cure for the human condition. We will suffer, but that suffering is good. It’s okay to suffer. We shouldn’t be scared to suffer. And if we use the four pillars of stoicism, wisdom, courage, justice, and my favorite, temperance, we can…
13:04
seek to become a better person. I tell every man or woman that I know that you should strive to go to bed a better person than when you woke up, whether it’s something small where you said hi to a person or you got out of your shell or you did something where, you know, with justice, treating people with dignity, kindness, and respect, you know, where someone said something very hostile towards you and you were like, I’ll take the Marcus Relation route. I’m going to reject my sense of injury so I’m not going to be injured. And I’m still going to treat that person with kindness and dignity.
13:33
Because to me, to act with dignity is to be dignified despite the noises that comes from other people’s mouths. I think it’s very important. So I think throughout the day, temperance, temperance of moderation, restraint in your diet, in your drinking, your thought process, your anger, your temperament, your politics, everything throughout the day should be in moderation, courage to get out of bed every single morning. Marcus really says, so what, you’re supposed to lay in bed and feel nice all day, the bees are doing their job, so why am I not out there?
14:03
doing my job with the God’s assignment to do, you know, and even says you don’t love yourself enough if you don’t get out of bed. So courage to get out of bed every single day despite how you feel, despite what the noises inside are making. Say, hey, you know what? I know what’s happening here. I’m going to get the fuck out of bed and I’m going to go out and I’m going to get stuff done because that’s my duty as a man. That’s my duty as a woman. That’s my duty as a father, as a mother, as a partner. I’m going to get out of bed and go do what I’m supposed to do despite how I feel.
14:32
being the exception, obviously, but even that pituitous says, even if you’re ill, you still have the ability to reason despite what’s going on. You don’t have to let those things affect you. You still retain the ability to reason. So using the four pillars every single day, as you said, the fourth key is practice. That’s really putting a practice, voluntary discomfort. And that is amongst other stoic exercises that
14:57
You know, you can go on YouTube and they go on for days and days and days of everyone’s interpretation of the stoic exercises. But practice is such a big one. You’re absolutely right. That’s why I call the podcast Octo Nonverbal because so many people love these quotes. They love, like you said, on YouTube, going through getting this dopamine hit or this tutorial. But goddamn it, it doesn’t do any good if you’re not going to apply it. More importantly, it’s not going to do you any good if you can’t do it now in a controlled environment, let alone.
15:25
when you’re in the heat of adversity, let alone when you’re actually in a position. Everybody talks about carrying a firearm or being in these places where they’re very prepared for everything, but yet they don’t give themselves the adrenal dump. They don’t give themselves that. They’re nowhere in that place. Also, because they’re not using logic, they’re more concerned about debating about Glock versus a 9-millimeter that’s from a 45 from whatever, and they’re not concerned with understanding that their mind is the weapon, and they’re actually going to have more of a possibility
15:54
use a tourniquet than they are actually a pistol at times. So if that’s the case, why are you romanticizing this ideal that may not be serving you when there’s these other areas that are obviously weaknesses that are going to help other people as well? So we have to have all of that. And then again, Bruce Lee’s idea very much from Taoism, which to me, Taoism and Marcus Aurelius are very similar, which is this idea that knowing is not enough, we must act, willing is not enough, we must do, and then we must continue to do that. So again,
16:24
Just like what you do with pistol courses and teaching people these things. And you and I were in the military. So it’s like, these are called stress shoots. When I was in squad designated marksman school, when you’re preparing to go to like their sniper course, it wasn’t about, can you zero your rifle? They assume that you could hit something at a thousand meters at that point. They were like, okay, can you sprint a hundred meters? Can you do 50 burpees? Now, can you buddy carry this guy? Now you have three seconds, you’re on your belly and now you’re prone. Can you control that? And can you get it? Now you’re like.
16:52
Holy shit, I can’t even hit the side of the target. It’s like, yeah, you don’t think there’s gonna be a little bit of adrenaline dump when you’re there with the cold bore in the middle of having this one opportunity. So this is very much about why we have to apply stoicism. Anybody can meditate in a garden. Can you do the draw stroke? Can you stop the blade? Can you move forward without hesitation in the moment? And lots of times we have no clue until we’re there. I hope that nobody hearing this has to actually be in that place.
17:19
But if you don’t have some sort of micro adversity to push you, whether it be a Tabata, whether it be a sprint, whether it be a conversation with somebody that disagreeing about politics, if you can’t maintain your wherewithal and grace under pressure right then in that controlled environment, how the hell do you expect to do it when you really need it? 100% agreed, brother. You hit the nail right on the head. They say, sweat now or bleed later. I mean, that’s such a great, very, very underestimated quote. If you sweat now, you’ll bleed less later. And…
17:46
Embrace the adversity that we experience every single day, whether it’s small micro adversities, whether it’s getting them in the morning. I tell everyone, first thing is don’t get on social media, which funny enough, that usually I’m the first one to post on social media at like eight o’clock in the morning. But it’s something I hope that the people, you know, when they’re doom scrolling and getting their very, very cheap injection of dopamine, that they actually walk away from something like a video that I do with a caption in it. But stay off.
18:15
social media. And you had mentioned, you know, that these guys train all their weapons, but they don’t use this enough. And they’re training for a scenario that has less than a percent of chance of happening, yet they’re not paying attention to the harshest environment they ever endure. And that is the mind. The mind is the harshest environment, and they don’t train that enough. You know, I’ve taught survival. I’ve taught wilderness survival.
18:40
The wilderness doesn’t come out to the urban environment and take you and suck you in and say, you’re going to survive this now. Mother nature doesn’t do that to you. Murphy’s law gets you whenever the hell he gets a hair up his ass and says, yeah, today’s not going to be your day, buddy. And so Murphy’s law is our enemy. And so if your mind isn’t trained to handle that adversity, you’re going to crumble. And so you have to keep a good stable mental environment, just like outside when we like
19:09
nice kind of cool breeze. We have to have a good environment in our mind to be able to handle when there’s a storm, when there is problems, when there’s wind blowing, when it kicks up, right? Because, you know, think about it. When you get up in the morning, your nine to five job, and most people work a nine to five job, they hate their life. They’re like, is this my life right now? Well, if you don’t get out of it, yes, it is going to be your life. And you got to learn how to deal with that and accept that for what it is, because that’s a choice you made. But people get up in the first thing in the morning and
19:35
Generally, they go what, through three buzzers, three alarms, the average person goes through, and then they’re kind of late to get in the shower, they come out, they don’t have time, their coffee’s not hot, or they’re a little late, they’re already set in their minds, their mental environment in a very bad spot. Now you get in the car, get out, and you hit the traffic, and traffic is my favorite test of adversity, because there is nothing you can control about traffic. You cannot do anything but sit there and stew in your hate and discontent.
20:03
for the human population that is around you. You’re looking over and you see a lady with her thing down and she’s putting her eyeliner on. You’re like, you need your eyes to drive. You got a dude over here reading the newspaper. You got, you’re looking around going, oh my gosh, what are you doing? But that’s that point where you realize like, well, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do and they may cause an accident, but they’re not gonna cause an accident with me because I know I’m paying attention now. I’m controlling my actions and my emotions. So.
20:32
if I control my emotions and accept, hey, this is what’s happening, I can’t do anything about it, so I’m gonna come at peace. And the less emotionally you are, people won’t realize the less emotionally you are, the more logical in your reactions you’re going to be when it comes to have to respond. Because, Marcus, I think you would agree on this is that… And most people agree that we should never make decisions under the influence of drugs and alcohol. They cloud our judgment. Drugs and alcohol cloud our judgment. And to do things under those…
21:00
creates more adversity, more problems, more situations, which creates more bad feelings in us and then we do more bad things that act out. We do more… Right? It’s an ambitious cycle. It’s the same thing with emotions. Emotions affect our brains, much like drugs and alcohol. Do they cloud our emotion? And don’t get me wrong, like I talk a lot about emotion. I don’t think emotion is a bad thing. I think properly applied and used in the right environment situation, of course, emotion is a good thing, but we shouldn’t make decisions on the influence of emotion.
21:29
So anger, sadness, lust. Now people think, you know, oh, I feel good. I got all this extra oxytocin in me right now. And they go do something stupid that they shouldn’t with someone that they shouldn’t, if that makes sense. So as you’re sitting in traffic, you got this going all day. Your mental environment is just destroying itself. Any dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, epinephrine is just getting later. Now you get to work, you’re late. Boss says something about it. Ooh, that doesn’t feel good.
21:59
And then you’re trying to cheer yourself up. You say a joke to a funny coworker, but all of a sudden, now HR wants to hear what was so funny too. So now you’re in HR talking about that funny joke that they didn’t think was terribly that great either. And now you’re dealing with anxiety. You get home, you go through all day, you get home, you fought through traffic again, you sit down, you have a couple of drinks and you go to bed and you do it again. Every day we get up nine to five.
22:23
sit in traffic with a car that we can barely afford to go work with people we barely don’t like just so we can go home for a couple hours at nighttime in a house we barely get to live in, spend time with people we love and then what happens on the weekends. The best day, I think the best time on the weekends is Friday night because you’ve got two days and you wake up Saturday and then boom, you don’t want to do anything. You know you got to get stuff done. There’s so much stuff that you want to do that you don’t do it. Sunday, you’re like, oh man, now I got to get ready for work this week and boom, Monday you’re back to work. That’s a terrible vicious cycle. And if that’s every day in your head.
22:52
No wonder why people are constantly anxious and no wonder why people are constantly depressed. No wonder why that people, they’re so full, especially last couple of years, so full of anger and angst and they want to take their emotions out on other people. And for some reason, it makes them feel better about themselves to shit on other people. Because just everyone around me, I was in LA working recently. I’m just looking at everybody and looking at their body posture and
23:16
always looking down and everyone’s just trying to struggle. Everyone’s trying to make it through. Everyone’s just trying to figure it out as they go along, which most of us are. But these days and age, man, we really need to start learning to come together as a society and start really start going back to our roots of philosophy. The Greeks, 2,500, 3,000 years ago, all they had was wine to really deal with. And people look at Roman times and they look at Greek times. Life was shit back then.
23:40
I mean, Marcus Rulis lived through the Antonine Plague, 20 years of the plague. People always dealing with like war, dealing with disease, dealing with battle, becoming enslaved. And we look at all these videos about the Roman times and stuff like that, people glorify it. Life was shit. A lot of philosophy was developed because they had to figure out a way to cope with the adversity that happened living in Hellenistic era or ancient Greece or Rome. Life sucked and all they had was watered down wine.
24:08
They can only get drunk so much before you have to wake up with a nasty wine headache. I’m sure we’ve all had that and go, that wasn’t it. There’s a guy named Socrates over here. He’s talking about some stuff. Or there’s this guy, Zeno or Aristotle or Epictetus or Musonius Rufus. All these guys are starting to talk. It’s like, look, we can figure out a different way to deal with these adversities. We should embrace these adversities because it’s part of our life. We can’t control what’s going to happen to us. We can only control.
24:34
how we respond to it and that’s what matters. And they’re trying to find this balance between their deities and between the universe and nature and all these different things. And they’re trying to figure it out and figure it out because they didn’t have drugs. They didn’t have therapists. They didn’t have, all they had was philosophy. That was what they try to make themselves stand out as. It’s constantly the why, the who, what, where and why. But why is this happening? How do I deal with this? You were talking about emotions. Emotions assassinate the truth.
25:01
It’s impossible for us to have that true sense of what’s truly going on. Once we’re emotionally involved and we all get emotionally involved to an extensive capacity to step back, to pause, to adapt again, that gap between stimulus and response, and we’re able to elongate that gap if we so choose, if we’re able to cultivate an empty space, if we’re able to sit with this comfort, whether it be in the meditation, whether it be journaling, whether it be going for a walk, whether it be just saying, I’m going to do one more rep or one more sprint, whatever it is.
25:30
Just to prove to ourselves, listen, this is uncomfortable. I get it. But even though this emotion is uncomfortable, where is the true evidence that is harming me? And if we can do that, and if we have the courage to stay in it just for a second longer, it shows us there is more that I can do. There is more things I can accomplish in the process. And again, we’ve been in the military. You were three 11, you were in the infantry. That was a radio operator, not infantry, but you were still attached to those guys. Yeah. You had to be in shape. So again, sleep deprivation, that was the norm being hungry.
25:59
That was the norm. Being semi-dehydrated, that was the norm. So if we can take that mentality of thickening our skin a little bit, understanding that these are just temporary emotions, temporary external stimuli, and now we come into the civilian sector and now it’s like, wow, it’s safe here for the most part. I’m not gonna get bombed. Nobody’s gonna kick in my door, probably. I’m in pretty good shape. I have plenty of water. I have a controlled environment. What am I gonna do with this? But as human beings, as creatures of habit,
26:29
What do we do? We acclimate quickly. We re-assimilate quickly. Even me after my injury 10 years ago, the beautiful thing about my injury in a lot of ways is I still have a neuropathy in my hands and my feet. So I have some numbness. So pulling a trigger, squeezing a trigger, swinging a blade, throwing a punch. It’s not quite as good as it was that tethers me to that adversity. So I never forget about it. And as humans.
26:58
almost like a child, we touch a hot stove and then we get away from it as quickly as we can. But if we can learn to maintain a little bit of presence, if we can stay there with the wound while it’s open, if we can choose to even make it something sacred as an opportunity, that’s when we learn because the wound that you have and the wound that I have are very personal to us in that moment in time. And if we can look in there and excavate this with curiosity and say, why is this hurting me so much? Why the fuck do I keep finding myself in the same position over and over again?
27:26
Now it’s like, uh, maybe that. So again, back to the Socratic method, back to logic, not necessarily the idea of a lot of rhetoric, but more of this idea of saying, why let’s pull on this thread, let’s understand what’s going on. And once we’re able to do that, like you said, now we’re able to use that in any arena in which we enter. And if we have that capacity to maintain that integrity, intellectually, philosophically, emotionally, now it gives us not only an unfair advantage against an enemy that’s trying to hurt us, but
27:55
Again, in any environment we decide to enter. So as an entrepreneur, as an instructor, as a husband, as a father, as a leader, that’s what we need. And everybody wants the warrior mentality, but there’s a lot that has to go into that. And more importantly, there’s a lot that has to go in to maintain, let alone elevate in that martial capacity. Absolutely. 100%. You’re talking about most initial response. And I’m going to throw the actual science behind it real quick, just because I think
28:23
listeners should know and this is we talk about I said the hey look we should know that psychology the philosophy and the physiology of the mind we’re talking about stimulus and response there are two routes that information takes and stimulus from the families and give an example like say when someone comes behind you and scares someone tries to make you jolt stimulus response so there’s the long route that information takes and then there’s the short route and the short route is generally going from stimulus to response so when someone comes behind you if you’re trained in martial arts or something like that
28:53
The first thing that your body does is it goes into like a warrior stance, a judo stance. Or if you’re not trained, some people go into the universal I surrender stance, hands up kind of thing. And that happens because if you’re trained a lot, a lot of your training procedural memory and implicit memory is stored in your amygdala. The amygdala is the last organ that information goes through before you commit to an action. So stimulus response, familis to amygdala, and you get in that judo stance or that fighting stance. The long route, which I call the logic route.
29:21
It goes through your sensory cortex, it goes through your hippocampus, then your amygdala, and it sets into your cortex, which is like, you know, sight, hearing, touch, taste, and things like that. It goes through your hippocampus where explicit memory, contextual memory is stored, names, dates, locations, what people look like, recognizing, stuff like that. And so it’s in that long route that you turn around with judo stance, that’s your short route, and then your long route, which when I talk about long, I’m not talking about minutes or whatever, or even a second, it’s thousands of a second.
29:51
of taking in the external stimulus and trying to calculate what is happening. You turn around, you see it’s your buddy, and you go, oh, well, I can still punch him. I’m not going to. That is what happens. So it’s that long route. That’s that space that Victor Frankel talks about. That’s that space that the Stoics talk about. And we know that three, ethics, physics, and logos. And within the Stoicism, that physics they talked about more along the lines of the universe and nature and your reaction and the cosmic web.
30:18
Even part of that was part of physics, like, why does our brain do this? Why is that space? They knew there was space because they could practice it all the time. They just didn’t know, okay, this brain limbic system, this and that, so on and so forth. But now that we know the physiology, why this happened, I think it’s easier to understand why certain things happen like PTSD. PTSD, I call warrior blue balls and I’m happy to expound upon that because I know probably people are like, okay, what do you mean by that? Yeah, you’re going to have to give a little bit of depth in there. Yeah, warrior blue balls. Okay, we know what blue balls are.
30:48
We get amped up for something that didn’t happen. And now you’re walking around all juiced up and ready to go for an event that just didn’t happen. So now you’re gone. So, Warrior Blue Balls, let’s look at PTSD through this. Let’s talk about, well, it’s easier to kind of explain this. Let’s talk convoy security. Everyone in the military is talking convoy security for the most part. If you’re a ground combat element, whether you’re artillery, infantry, radio, military, police are oftentimes put in that category. They do convoy security and things like that.
31:16
Even motor tea operators and motor tea operators, I’m not talking about operators, I’m talking super squirrels, talking the actual motor tea guy who drives a truck. Everyone is taught convoy security, whether it’s here at home or overseas. And what’s the one thing they tell you when you’re doing convoy security? Everything is suspect. A dead cat, a bag, a small pothole, everything’s a potential bomb that’s going to kill you and your whole team doom and gloom. So if you do that…
31:43
after seven months, a year, multiple deployments and stuff like that, and that happens. You’re driving down the road one day and there’s a dead cat. You don’t call it, all of a sudden, boom, your convoy’s wiped out, your truck is flipped over, or whatever it is, that seals into your mind. Everything is a threat. Everything on the side of the road, whether it’s a McDonald’s cup or a pile of tires, that can be a bomb. And so that’s stored over and over time through procedural learning, which becomes procedural memory, which is stored in your amygdala for implicit memory.
32:12
And remember, again, your MIG-12 is the last part of the limbic system that is responsible for human behavior, human response. So we do that for seven months at a time and eight months at a time. Same thing when it comes to combat, when you hear a rifle going off or something like that. Your body, your mind goes, hey, we know what that sound is. That’s possible danger. So now we take that common way of security. You’ve done eight months deployment. You’ve done five or six tours or eight tours, whatever it is. And now you’re here in San Diego and you’re driving down the road. You’re driving down the road.
32:40
And what happens when we drive down the road, we brains tend to just wander off in the lava. We start thinking about this, we start thinking about that. And procedural memory and procedural learning takes over. You’re driving down the road. Keep in mind, your limbic system doesn’t know where the fuck you’re at. It does, it has no idea where you’re at. It doesn’t know if you’re in Iraq, it doesn’t know if you’re in Afghanistan, it just knows we’re driving down the road, the person hit the brakes, I’m gonna hit the brakes. The person moved right, so I’m gonna use my blinker, turn left, so on and so forth. And all of a sudden, your brain,
33:10
watching the road catches a box on the side of the road and all of a sudden you slam on your brakes, it wakes you up, pulls you out, fucking out of lala land and your body is ready for a fight. It’s pulling blood back into your major organs, making you breathe heavy to get more oxygen in your blood, it’s dumping epinephrine inside you to fucking get that numb to pain or whatever and it’s sending adrenaline and all of a sudden you’re sitting on the side of the road
33:34
and you’re ready for a fight. It takes a lot of aggression to get into a fight, ready to cause some hate and discontent. You have to have aggression. It’s not emotional aggression, it’s physical aggression. It is ready to go, I’m gonna cause hate and discontent, there’s a box on the side of the road, are we gonna get blown up? And then all of a sudden you realize, fuck me, I’m in San Diego, why am I still on the side of the road looking at a box? Oh. So now your body’s worked up for a fight that doesn’t exist. That’s why I call it warrior blue balls. And that is an example of what I demonstrate as PTSD.
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It’s not something that I experienced at PTSD just doing a lot of research, talking to a lot of veterans and guys and spending a lot of time on the campfire with guys. The best context to put it into is the physiological sense, psychological, and then being able to work your way back using philosophy going self-talk. I wanted to marry that up really because you’re talking about it as like, okay, why am I angry right now? And it’s not self-talk inside the mind. You have to actually hear your own voice, break yourself out of it. You have to say, why am I angry right now? Oh.
34:33
Oh, I’m ready for a fight. Is there a fight? No, where am I? I’m in San Diego. What am I doing right now? Well, I was on the way to work. All right, fair enough. Can we handle work? Yeah, we can handle work. We got this, we know where we’re at. Okay, let’s keep on going down the highway and not go off in La La Land again. So that’s that self-talk that you have to work yourself through. It’s like, okay, I’m good. We’re Sparks on Southern Road. So it’s not combat. I’m solid, I’m in a crude car. I feel good, I’m fat, happy, and I can’t wait to go out this Saturday with my friends and this and that. You know, it’s like, okay.
35:03
Self-taught working way out of that and realizing these are the motions I’m feeling why am I feeling them? Are these emotions helping me at this point right now and generally it’s like what am I feeling anger? Okay, good to go What am I angry about? I’m asking a question. Why am I angry? Is this anger helping me out? No, do I need to be angry right now? No, generally anger isn’t a useful emotion It can be if you’re in a fight of your life, right? But even then you have to remain logical and rational in a fight to be more and that’s where training
35:32
procedural learning makes you a better shooter, makes you a better fighter, because more you’ve learned and committed to memory, now you can actually start going, okay, I drew my gun, because that’s procedural learning, drew my gun, now I have it ready to go. Now that I’ve learned that, committed that to procedural memory, my brain can now function on the cognitive, like, oh, positive identification, oh, this is not, okay, that’s distance, okay, there’s another guy right there, so on and so forth.
35:58
I know that you’re familiar with Tony Blower’s materials. So he’s very much with this Tony Blower for the last 40 years. He studied martial arts, but he actually studied that fight or flight reflex. He calls it no fear. KNOW to no fear. He’s been on black belt magazine covers. You need to check him out. I will check it out. I think I’ve heard the name before, but I will write that down. He talks about that capacity for us to endure the adrenaline dump. Like we say in combat or in martial arts, there’s a lot of times that
36:26
One of the things that he says, I went and spoke at one of his conferences last year. I’ve actually followed him most of my life and then actually getting to meet him and talk to him is incredible. But one of the maxims that he has is he says, if you can manage your fear, you can manage to fight. And oftentimes people can’t. And one of the great analogies that he uses is he says, listen, there’s a guy over here that does jujitsu. There’s a guy over here that does crop. My God, there’s a guy over here that does kickboxing. These are three vehicles is what he considers them. He’s like, so think of it like an SUV Corvette and
36:54
soccer mom’s vehicle, whatever that may be. They’re all driving on the road and then a plane comes and hits all of them. He’s like, it doesn’t matter what the vehicle is. If you cannot endure that initial adrenaline dump and override that stimuli, because like you said that, that fight or flight reflex, sympathetic nervous stimulation, if you can’t overcome that, it doesn’t matter what technique you have. Doesn’t matter how great you are, how good you are at drawing these weapons or any of this escalation of aggression until you can get beyond that.
37:24
And most people don’t and most people are not able to actually learn. So even in martial arts, by the time I realized I’m in a fight, I’m not a step behind, I’m usually two or three because it takes me a while to process. It takes me a while to understand. And that’s the hardest part about a fight. This guy’s walking down the street and he’s looking at me. He’s looking around. My situational awareness tells me it’s like, well, he’s not looking around for somebody that’s about to attack him. He’s looking around and see there’s a cop. And if there’s nobody else on the street, he’s looking to attack me. So I have to have that capacity, that situational awareness to know that it’s coming.
37:54
And then now I start watching his hands. So I don’t want him to get close to me. But again, if my head is buried in my phone, or if I’m more concerned about some bullshit that isn’t really important in that moment, now I’m wanting to be a victim, now I’m choosing to be a victim. And most people volunteer to be victims because they are not volunteering to be proactive, to have that kind of situational awareness. So that’s why all those things are so important. And just like what you were talking about here, being able to unpack that, look back what that would look like.
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understand the importance of all those things now. And then what does that give us? That gives us not only a fighting chance to survive, but now that gives us, again, like you were saying, body language, seeing that person when if you’re in a negotiation, seeing that car salesman, if he’s being adversarial or aggressive. When I did security in Atlanta, it was the same thing. Like I had to be able to see this person within two seconds, no. When you literally see the guy ball his fist up and look at you and you can almost see him pull out a measuring tape to be like, can I get to that guy in time? It’s like, don’t make me do my job. Okay, here we go.
38:52
Again, because they’re drunk or they’re on whatever, but this is part of it. This is part of understanding what that is, the human condition. And then also being aware of, I can be empathetic to this person, but it doesn’t mean that I allow them to punch me in the face either. And that’s where a lot of the practicality of philosophy, especially still philosophy, is important. I’ve seen so many people that are more concerned about memorizing the ethos, but yet put it into play or putting it in practice. Yeah, that’s the hardest part.
39:20
and then being able to do it even when it’s difficult or being able to step back after they’ve fallen down and say, shit, I could have done that better. When people talk about gratitude, I kind of hate the buzzword of it because most of the people that I know when they say brach-creditude, they’re sitting on their hands and they’re just letting life happen to them. And there’s all this chaos, but they’re like, oh, but I’m grateful. And that’s what a victim does. That’s a person who wants to stand up and defend what’s theirs. The importance for me is
39:48
I asked them to find gratitude in adversity. So we’re talking about reviewing the day as a stoic would. At the end of the night when you’re brushing your teeth, I asked them, think about that thing that pissed you off today. And now usually there’s enough time between then to where they have that space, they had that gap, they had that capacity to be actually very logical about what happened. Is it really that big of a deal? Am I really that pissed off at that person who cut me off in traffic? Probably not that big of a deal. But now we can come back and untrace what that lesson was and figure out, okay, what was the gift in the adversity?
40:18
Where can I put gratitude in here? And what it does is that conditions us to find opportunity all the time. Because again, if all we’re looking for is a threat, that’s all we’re gonna find. What is our make or the done? As a matter of fact, when we stimulate ourselves enough, in today’s society, so many people have never actually been in an altercation that they don’t even understand what is a true altercation. So now because somebody disagrees with them, that’s adversity. Oh, it is. And it’s funny as it triggers a fire fight and people a lot more getting.
40:46
someone saying something neat about you or nasty about you, it’s immediately a fight or flight response. People feel like they have to defend themselves. Even online from a simple comment. Especially online. It elicits such an emotional response. It’s crazy to see. I’ve said some things, you know, I’ll say something that kind of drives attention to what I’m saying, but then explain it. And then by some people, they just, they look for that.
41:12
opportunity to become angry. They look for the opportunity to become provoked. They look for the opportunity to elicit emotional outrage. And it’s interesting to see an immediate fight or flight response. They have to. And I tell you, it’s funny, I try and practice this with people like on my Grey Man Project when people comment. I encourage them to reply objectively, reply without negative intent. Because everyone these days on social media loves, loves to
41:42
as they say, they love responding sarcastically or they love being snarky and things like that because they feel that they’re being a smart person for an audience that really they perceive exists, right? They don’t see the audience, they just believe that there’s an audience they’re looking at so they want to be the cool person. I say rather than responding snarky, respond neutrally. They should agree, but respond neutrally. Don’t say, well, obviously you haven’t blah, blah, blah, because that’s a lot of logical
42:10
But yeah, back to the fight or flight response, people nowadays are so easily provoked to the point where it almost becomes like a ribbon system of how often I provoke, okay, I have these adversities. Well, that’s your adversity. That’s not my adversity. You can’t logically expect me to feel the way you feel about it. That’s your journey. That’s your path. I can certainly express empathy. And if you ask for help, I will help you the best way possible. But you can’t expect people to feel the way you do.
42:40
You can’t establish morals by what people follow based on how you feel, some ethics and virtue, and now we’re just into virtue signaling and things like that, which is a whole other conversation for a day. And I want to rewind back to earlier when we were talking about, and this is going to cause probably some hate mail, but you had talked about people on their phones all the time and not paying attention. That’s where I have a problem with the term OODA loop for situational awareness. People will be like, ooh, what’d you say about OODA loop? Because OODA loops turn around for a…
43:09
In the technical industry, it’s a mathema to all of a sudden go against something that’s been around as a doctrine, as a practice. But if you understand the LibBic system… For those that don’t know, explain the OODA Loop. Yeah. So OODA Loop was a thinking program designed to help pilots in the air be able to respond to stimulus from other airplanes, dogfights, and things like that. OODA Loop has then been translated down to situational awareness and has been…
43:36
used for traveling, for military, for law enforcement, for the open-ended observe, orient, decide, act. That is the thought process. That is the reaction process. So observe, orient, decide, act. The problem with that is if you know about the limbic system, you understand the physiology of the mind, that stimulus versus response, you’ll understand that it is a hunter mentality, not a prey mentality. And most of us are in a prey mindset. We are reactive.
44:05
You have to be actively and consciously on a hunt because when you observe, orient, decide, act, that is a conscious decision-making program, a line. That’s where I have problems because most of us human beings are in a reactive state. You’re not going to do OODA loop when you crash into a car. You’re going to react. So I say that instead of OODA loop…
44:31
which I have nothing against, by the way. I don’t want everybody to hate me alone and I have nothing against it. I think it’s a great thought process, but I think we should also add on what I call the road up, which is react, orient, decide, then act. You have to react because a stimulus and response is a reaction. If you’re gonna observe something, you have to see something coming. If you’re an observe, orient, decide, act, you have to see something coming. Most of the times when we’re hit by something, we’re in a car accident or a threat or something like that,
45:01
I mean, as much situational awareness, I love it on Instagram, everyone posts something, they post someone getting absolutely just fucked up and destroyed and their response is situational awareness as if that’s the fucking answer to everything. No, let’s break it down, right? Situational awareness isn’t just external, it’s internal. Well, what’s your situational awareness inside in order to be situational where outside? And that’s where I try and talk a lot about with stoicism and the gray man is what’s going on in here that allows you to be more technically effective out here.
45:31
So as much as situational awareness, we could say that all day long, oftentimes shit just fucking happens. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to react at that point. Stimulus response. And what you react with the amygdala, that stores your procedural memory, which is, okay, I’m in this fighting stance war. I’ve got my gun out and I’m four thumbs and everything like that. We react. Then once we react, we orient ourselves. Okay, where am I in the situation? What’s going on?
45:57
then we make a decision because now we’re coming out of the react stage into the decision making stage and then so we decide and then act and then then once we go from there then we can go in the UTA it’s kind of like when people say you know in combat a pistol is a fight to your rifle that’s what ROTA is in my opinion is fight to your rifle using your pistol ROTA to UTA once you’re in UTA then going from ROTA to UTA then you’re good to go and I know probably hasn’t been talked about I know people are probably going what the
46:25
What the fuck are you talking about? And look, I will hone it more with a better explanation, but that’s kind of the bare bones in my mind of like, that’s my argument of Oodaloo. It’s a hunter mindset. And don’t get me wrong, we all love a hunter mindset. We love being a hunter mindset. But as humans, when our heads are perasses and we’re thinking about something like something that happened to us in the military, something happens in a relationship, our mind is in a spot where we aren’t in a Oodal response. We’re on a road of response where we’re going to have to react, orient, decide.
46:55
then act, work our way to Uda as far as it goes. People like to use Uda for everything. I just don’t think it’s a that counts for actual human physiology and the workings of the limbic system. Well, and it’s just like anything, it’s a tool. If all I have is a hammer, everything is a nail. If all I have is Uda, then that’s what I’m going to dogmatically defend. But again, all these things have a purpose. There’s usually a couple of tools that we can use, but at the same time, understanding what’s the most optimal tool.
47:22
this moment, what is the best tool, what’s going to have the best repercussions. And again, without self-awareness, it’s impossible to have situational awareness. So we have to have all of those things combined, which again, the people that are on the phone probably don’t have a lot of self-awareness, which makes it impossible for them to even understand Rota or Uda in the process of getting to those places. And that’s why, in my opinion, Stoicism, Zen, Taoism,
47:50
It’s not so much about balances, about the capacity to adapt quickly because of the environment, because of what’s going on. So again, content without context is confusion. People don’t understand. So again, just like you’re talking about online, I’ll put a quote out or I’ll put a tweet out and I’ll have a bunch of people come at you sideways and it’s like, they look again, they, they want to take this out of context. They want to get attention. They want to do whatever they’re doing. And that’s fine. But I don’t have the time to go out and explain to them.
48:18
what’s going on. If they want to learn more, if they want to see more of the content, that’s fine. But if that were the case, and they had seen the rest of the content, then they wouldn’t have made the comments. So again, it’s like, all right, I’ll just kind of let that go. Oh, yeah, I’ve definitely suffered that adversity where I’ve had people take my things out of content and just say awful shit about me. And it’s like, and I take the stoic approach and go, Epictetus said what? That’s the worst you got? To me, it’s not that’s the worst you got. To me, I take the approach that like Epictetus talks a lot about.
48:47
what other people feel and what’s right for them. If that’s what was right to you, then it was right for them. It’s not my fault. If you’re wrong, then the injury is on you because you’re ignorant or you purposely took things out of context. And Epictetus said, hey, when someone has spoken ill of you, rather than make excuses for what is said, say, they must be ignorant of my other faults. That’s why I mentioned these ones alone. And I love that quote because it’s like, look, we can’t control your reputation. We can’t control what people are going to say about you. You can only control how you act. Marcus Reilly has said, hey, man.
49:17
all I can do is worry about not being contemptible and doing good as a man, doing good as a person. And people are going to say what they’re going to say. There’s nothing you can do about that. And so people definitely love taking things out of context. And they do it because they want that dopamine, that cheap dopamine feeling of like, I want attention. I want attention on me. Oh, that’s the same thing with like, you know, virtue signaling cancel cultures because everyone wants to say, hey, I’m morally correct. I’m ethically correct. I’m virtuous.
49:46
look at me, look at my part, I’m doing my part, like, follow, subscribe, comment, and people use other people to get engagement with their content, which I find just cheap and I find it just undignified, if that makes sense. So it’s certainly an interesting thought, especially in a society. And that’s why I honestly think with Stoke philosophy, the more people that read it, understand it, and apply it, I think they’re actually will be bridging a gap of other society. I think we can all come together. I think if we look
50:15
at politics. You know, Stoic philosophy was used by politicians and Romans back in the day. It wasn’t that they were injecting politics into Stoicism, they were injecting Stoicism into politics by use of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. My problem a lot, I see with a lot of other people that are more well known that use Stoicism is they tend to put their politics into it in a post and I just don’t think that’s fair. I don’t like that. I respect them as a writer. I respect their work. I absolutely adore their work and stuff like that.
50:42
I just disagree with them putting their politics into it because to me, you know, someone might ask me, you know, what my politics are, and I like to call myself a radical centrist. I look at both sides and I go, I want to use the philosophical approach, the stoic approach of temperance, moderation, absolute moderation in how I look at things because I want to see objectively both sides and like, yeah, this is good, this is good, this is crazy, this is crazy. Let’s take the good of both worlds. I’m adapted to my life. And I think most people are like that. I just think there’s a lot of loud people on the outside.
51:11
that affects the people on the inside. And I think the more that we are able to start to strive for social independence, start to fear being ostracized less because here’s the thing is people have a fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is very strong inside people. You know, cancer culture is a form of rejection, social rejection, social pariah. People are scared of that. We’re scared of that because we go back all the way to our…
51:38
in places and ancestors, you know, that walked around. If you didn’t go along with the tribe, you were exiled. And that exile meant your certain death unless you had a specific job within that tribe, right? So if what you were doing didn’t help with the fitness of the social group you were in, you were cast out and it was potential death. And I think that fear carries with us nowadays. We have this fear of missing out, this fear of rejection. What I love about stoicism, stoicism teaches you not to fear that rejection, but to love yourself wholly and to say, hey,
52:08
If I love myself, then I become unfuckwithable. People can say what they want to about me, but the most important person that needs to love me is me. And if you’re able to get up every single morning and say, I love myself, this isn’t just the hippie woo woo, fucking take LSD and all that shit. No, you literally have to find contentment in yourself. You have to actually, as a Stoic say, be content in the presence of yourself. Because the more content you are with yourself, the less you’ll go out searching
52:38
for attention that you think you need and be like, no, but if I’m gonna spend time with other people, it’s gonna be with quality people that I want to spend time with. Surround yourself with people that uplift you. So the more that you love yourself, the less you’re gonna find yourself in toxic relationships, toxic work environments, toxic marriages, toxic friendships. Because if you love yourself and you start seeing red flags from people or you start seeing a little adversity and you’re like, whoa, this, I can choose this adversity to a certain extent.
53:08
But at a certain point, I’m going to tap out because I’m not afraid to be myself and love myself. Absolutely. And as you were saying, the more that we study stoicism, if we actually studied the writings, that’s when we can actually feel the essence of what’s going on. Like you said, anybody can use rhetoric to cause a little bit of dogma and put it into their writing. And now they’re trying to influence us as opposed to us. And again, they’re trying to use that to leverage that. That’s kind of the buyer beware ideas. And again, even like
53:35
I love Donald Robertson’s stuff. I know that you do as well. I’m sure you’re familiar with his material. Absolutely. Donald Robertson, Ryan Holiday, all those guys. Yeah. They’re fantastic writers. I just tend to find that when I’m looking, objectivity is hard to find. So I see a lot of bias in that a lot of political bias or current environmental biases. And for me, one of the things about when I teach about someone being more technically effective.
53:59
is using stoic logic to mean more objective about your environment to reduce your biases, your political biases, religious biases, sexual biases, orientation biases, gender biases, racial, ethnic biases, to be able to objectively look at the environment and say, okay, this person isn’t here to hurt me. There’s biases inside of me that are saying this person’s bad, but in reality, that person’s not bad. Or this isn’t the reality, but my mind, because of my biases and because of my culturation and my upbringing.
54:28
makes me think this way or my politics make me think this way, I need to step back, observe my biases, try and reduce those. And that way my mind can be more objective, more logical, more rational, and I can come at something with a more tactical approach, whether, hey, I’m gonna decide when to engage or disengage the situation. That’s why I’m talking about being a gray man. It’s not about, hey, I just want to blend in and then be a Billy Badass when it’s time to break gray. It’s, hey, I’m observing a situation. Does this really need my input?
54:58
Marcus really says this thing wasn’t meant, you know, it’s not actually judged by you. Leave it alone. That part’s that philosophy that we can say, hey, do I really need to have an opinion about this? Or is this my biases that’s working my anger up, my emotions up, my biases because I think this person should think a certain way or be a certain way? That’s my biases. That’s not fair to push that on them. Okay, now let’s reduce the emotions in our brain because we have to realize, man, that bullshit. You know what I mean? I don’t need to feel like this. Okay, that’s my bias. That’s my upbringing.
55:28
That’s not logical. So we want to be objective and more objective. We are, I think, the more technically effective and more at peace and happiness. We’re going to feel with a view in our life. And so people come to me and say, hey, you know, I’ve been reading these books, you know, by these different guys. What do you recommend? I said, have you read Seneca? Like, no. Have you read Epitetus? No. Have you read, you know, Masonius Rufus, who I love with Sony is, dude, if you read some of his things, he’s a little caustic. Read the one about shaving a beard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:57
Don’t shave your beard if you shave your beard to trim it to look good, then that is on par with being womanly It’s like whoa, hold on a second But he also talks about the closer you live with earth more virtuous of this as tending to a field tending gardens He talks about like Missonius is a low-key prepper like a low-key survivalist. He even preaches vegetarianism He also talks about peace like revenge is beastly
56:21
to not take revenge on something is to and to have empathy towards the person who does something towards you is to be more civilized. Like with Sonia Rufus, I’m adoring the hell out of this guy. Or you look at Cato the Younger. Cato, who was like, absolutely like, fuck tyranny, fuck the government, fuck the state. Like he fought against Julius Caesar when Julius Caesar came over. He said, I’m taking myself out on the living under this guy. I was like, wow, okay, cool. The stoic resistance, you know, so I talk to these, these people they come at us and said, read from the horses.
56:51
mouth. Everything that you read now, Donald Robertson and Ryan Holiday and all these other people that come out, even when I write my book, go to the horse’s mouth. And don’t be wrong, I’m not talking bad about, I love Ryan Holiday stuff, I love Donald Robertson stuff, like absolute wonderful, respectful gentleman. And I’ve looked a lot towards like Ryan Holiday and his stuff. I’ve learned more about stoicism. I’m like, oh man, I love how you put that.
57:14
But first, before you get to them, read the classics, read the stokes, read discourses, read the Enchiridion. For those who don’t know, discourse is the longer version. It wasn’t written by Epictetus. It was written by one of the students listening to Epictetus. And then the Enchiridion is the abridged version, which is basically, let’s put those down. Sharon LeBels, the art of living, which is an interpretation. I absolutely adore that one. That is a great one. Let’s go after a letter by Seneca, the Gregory Hayes version of Marcus Aurelius.
57:42
and then of course, Viktor Frankl read those guys first and then start looking at the more modern stoics and how they interpret that philosophy and where philosophy live in a current environment that we are now. Well, and back to your point about reading from the horse’s mouth. If you love meditations by Aurelius, there’s many different interpretations literally of that, not from another person, but from like literally the same material and now go through and read those and see the similarities, see the differences.
58:10
See how the changing of one word may change your interpretation of what it is. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Changing the diction just the way that they approach it. That’s where again, value will get caught up within the semantics of what somebody else is doing, but you can truly know this material and it becomes a part of you, which makes it easier for you to actually put it in a play as opposed, again, Epictetus says, don’t tell me your philosophy, embody it. This is literally what we’re trying to accomplish and then living it in every ounce of your being. Trying to live a philosophical life. I’ve found no other noble pursuit.
58:40
I really haven’t liked, I’m great at shooting guns, you know, I’m great at martial arts and stuff like that. But the philosophy has been so fulfilling to me, stoicism has been so fulfilling to me, just constantly learning and trying to implement these practices and temperance and justice and treatable kindness and going myself. It’s like, why am I feeling like this right now? I don’t need to fucking be a dick right now. There’s no reason for this. That’s not being just to somebody. I don’t need to do this. I need to be a better man. But there’s other translations. Absolutely. Like I’ve taken up a couple of books and
59:09
meditations, the different versions, stay away from the ones with thou and thy. That’s oh god. First of all, he didn’t talk like that. He wrote meditation was in Greek. When he wrote it originally, he didn’t write it in Latin. He wrote it in Greek. So if you really, really want to get to the source of the head, find the best Greek translation possible because that’s… But of course, there’s things in Stoicism that are Greek that can’t be really translated well, like New Dimonia and things like that, or ascesis.
59:39
which is they use it as religious over the top like slashing yourself. But askeces also is like severe self-discipline in a sense for personal betterment. So there’s different ways. So, but the Greek translation that they’re going to offer, I think the best, if you can pick up Greek, which is fucking terribly hard. But yeah, look at the different ones, different versions of meditations. My favorite is Gregory Hayes version. I think it’s the most pragmatic, but there’s another one too that I liked. And if you look, if you read because a lot of them match up.
01:00:06
You can see how one thing can be translated differently than the other and go, Oh, this has a whole different meaning now. It absolutely does. And like you saying, find your six or dozen favorite quotes and then whoever it is, Marcus Reilly, Subway Kittas, Seneca, whoever, get those and then find different interpretations and look at how they all match up. Or maybe there’s a little divergence and understand what the intention is behind that, or maybe the lack of intention is behind that. And now that gives you the capacity to actually put this into something that you can do.
01:00:35
can maybe work for you in a way. I think that people get so concerned with memorizing a quote, understanding what this is, regurgitating this, and they have all this. They’re looking at a tree in the forest. Yeah, that’s it. Where they have this, again, the OODA loop, but that doesn’t mean anything until I know who I am. What is this all about? What is the first thing about philosophy? Know thyself. And if you haven’t gone through adversity, you don’t know who the fuck you are, it doesn’t matter what philosophy you have above you. It doesn’t matter what system, it doesn’t matter what religion or lack thereof. It matters what you do.
01:01:04
in the moment, it matters what you’re willing to do, the other people are not. And more importantly, are you willing to do that over a long enough timeline to make an impact on those around you? That’s what philosophy is supposed to be. It’s a tool, but it’s only as good as the person using it, just like a pistol, just like any weapon. How many people bitch about this particular weapon or this particular whatever it is because all so and so, so and so says it’s not good. Well, maybe that’s just their preference. Maybe it’s just like the interpretation of meditations that we don’t like as much.
01:01:32
The first meditations I tried to read was when I was 12. And it was that sort of interpretation where it was like, dee da da da was. And I’m like, yeah, I’m named after this guy and he’s talking about these people that I don’t know who the hell he is. I don’t care about his father, what he learned from him. But now that I understand more about what he was doing, it wasn’t supposed to be published. It was literally his meditations, his reflections, reminders. That’s what I love. I love so much about that is there is no agenda. Yeah, and look.
01:02:01
nothing on Christianity, religion, stuff like that. It’s just, you know, I look at the Bible about being a good person. I look at Marcus Aurelius about being a good person. Marcus Aurelius had no agenda just to tell himself, be a good man, live a good life, praise the gods, worship the gods, be good to other men, stuff like that. And I love that. I love more if you look at Seneca, if you look at Marcus Aurelius, if you look at Epictetus, they were all written during times of adversity. Look at Seneca.
01:02:27
Seneca was in exile half the time and then he was ordered to kill himself and because you know, he was supposed to drink a poison, he was immune to it, so he had to open his veins up. That was execution back in the day. He wrote most of his stuff in exile. Vesalius Rufus wrote his stuff in exile. Marcus Aurelius always experienced and suffered in adversity during the Antonine Plague, at war with the gull, rumors about Faustina, you know, doing her thing and all those things like everything they did, everything they practiced.
01:02:53
in times of adversity. Even Seneca said or Epictetus said, even when you’re feeling good, even times when you’re not in adversity, still hold true and practice the philosophy. Not just because I’m feeling down, I’m going to bury myself in this. No, constantly practice it because if you forget it, even times of good, you still have to practice this to maintain that goodness, to maintain that peace. It’s kind of like some people are on medication and they get off of it because they’re like, oh, I feel good now. We get off of it. Like, no, there’s a reason
01:03:23
Continue it, not even in times of prosperity, but continue that philosophic life. I carry this around, this is the one I carry around all the time because no matter what bad day I’m having, good or bad, I can flip this open to any page and find something in there that kind of makes me think. Like book four, 51, take the shortest route and the one that made your plan. To speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that and be free from pain and stress, free of all calculation and pretension. How do you not look at something like that and go like.
01:03:51
Man, yeah, if I was a better person, I would have less stress going on. You know, if I’m a shitty person, then I create more stress because people treat me like shit. I treat everybody like shit. I’m treated like shit. I’m not going to get the jobs I want. I have the opportunities I want. I’m not going to get the money I want, whatever it is. If I am a better person, better things will happen and I’m a good person and bad things still happen regardless. That’s a core to nature. And so I accept that, embrace that kick of adversity, and I continue on despite that and say, okay, I learned something today.
01:04:20
And every single day, I tell you, carry this around, man. I was telling you earlier, I carry about five books with me all the time, the Sonius Rufus, Seneca, Fictitas, Victor Frankl, and so on. You know, every day in my bag, I go to work for security. You know, bring a book with me, I’ll leave the rest in the hotel, and bring you today, we’re going to read more about the Sonius Rufus. And when you guys decide, and those who listen to this, and my people who are following The Grey Man Project, who listen to this, when you decide to start looking into stoicism, don’t just read the books.
01:04:49
the people behind the writings, understand who they are, understand where they came from the times that they lived. You know, it’s funny, it’s like even in the Bible, you look at Thomas Aquinas was a well-known Stoic. You look at Paul the Apostle. Paul the Apostle was… He was in the closet Stoic, yeah, for sure. Well, here’s the thing, Paul the Apostle was brought before Galil or something like that by the Jews, and Galil was like, nah, man, I don’t give a shit about this guy, do whatever. His brother is Seneca the Younger.
01:05:14
It’s just amazing to see that these philosophers living during times of high Christianity, and believe it or not, and there’s no proof of injection of Stoicism into it, but if you even the Quran has a lot of Stoic or Stoicism in it, it’s not actual Stoicism, but you see the same principles, the overlap and the principles of Stoicism and Islam within it. Same thing with Taoism and Buddhism.
01:05:39
I talk to people about this and that, are you a Buddhist? And they’re like, no, because that’s a lot of Buddhist stuff. It’s like martial arts at the highest level. They’re very similar. All the movements, all the ideas of efficiency. In martial arts, if I teach you a concept, you learn 1,000 techniques. If I teach you one technique, that’s all you have is one technique. The idea is to have these undeniable truths to see where they can be applied in every other area, and more importantly, to have the courage to apply them, especially when it feels like we don’t have the resilience to do it in that moment, because that’s how we level up.
01:06:09
That’s when we get to the next level. And that’s when we look back and say, wow, I’m really fucking glad that happened to me, even though at the time may not feel like it. Tell us where we can follow you. Tell us where we can learn more about you. Tell us, first of all, some people may not know what a gray man is. And you alluded to it earlier, but can you give us a little bit of an idea of what that is? So the idea of a gray man came out like the pepper community. It’s like about like a doomsday type of idea. It’s like book of you like kind of stuff where the world ends. Now you have to blend in with your environment.
01:06:37
That’s where the Grey Man started from there. Then it moved up to like, you know, guys in the technical industry, preppers, survivalists, shooters, you know, military guys, not wearing 511s. And so, you know, like, oh, that’s the tactical guy, the shoot me first guy. Where the tan can still carry. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the first guy I’m shooting. Yeah. It’s like, okay, that’s, that’s definitely one of the guys, right? Yeah. And so I want to take a step further than that with the Grey Man project. I started it back in this Instagram.
01:07:07
It’s not an organization, it’s not a business, it’s just a bucket name on Instagram. I wanted to create a more palatable approach towards safety, security and survival to the average person because there’s too much of like the political doom and gloom stuff in the survival community. There’s a lot of preppers that are more, they’re very political in one certain degree. I want people to know that survival has nothing to do with politics. Survival is about your ability to be safe, secure and survive.
01:07:36
whatever happens, you know, people were going without their toilet paper for weeks on end. That was something simple and basic that people like lost their minds about. People lost their shit about not being able to wipe their ass. I understand that, but being a Marine and having cut his shorts off right there because he had a toilet paper, you got to improvise, adapt, overcome. Yeah. And so it was a lot about social awareness and being safe and stuff like that. The great man is, and to me,
01:08:03
I always heard this term gray man. You know, it really has like a great nomenclature. You hear gray man, philosophy, gray man, doctrine, gray man, tactics and stuff like that. But I didn’t like the gray man philosophy because in the tactical side of it, at first, I didn’t think there was anything about philosophy with it. You know, philosophy is a love of wisdom. I didn’t think, you know, there wasn’t a lot of wisdom. But then I started over time, I realized, you know, the gray man is the wisest of all of them because a gray man is about…
01:08:30
blending in so you don’t get into a certain conflict. You have the ability to choose to engage in conflict or disengage when there’s a threat in your area, right? That’s what the gray man is. How is being situational aware, hyper-vigilant, going, oh, this could be a bad situation. If I stay here, I might get involved or I’m gonna back away and reduce my signature and posture so I don’t get involved with a situation that I don’t need to get involved in because I’m the one with the gun and he has to let the situation, not get involved. This person’s becoming nasty, mean, whatever. The gray man…
01:09:00
to me now is the most wisest tactical strategic person. I hate the term tactical, but if I use it, you understand what I’m talking about. That person now looks at a situation using stoic philosophy to say, okay, what are my biases? These are my biases. This guy is coming off as a threat to me, but if I look at my biases, he’s really not. This guy’s probably not gonna be a threat to me. Well, this situation is evolving and I feel a certain emotional connection towards it. Okay, I need to recognize that emotional connection.
01:09:28
and realize, hey, this is making me feel a certain way, which might encourage a reaction that I don’t want, which makes me tactically unsound. When you’re compromised by your emotions, I feel you’re tactically unsound. Your tactical efficacy goes down. So stoicism to me helps me recognize that stimulus and response, the space between stimulus and response, how to react using logically and identify the emotions that I’m experiencing. Stoicism says, hey, we’re not suppressing emotions. We’re helping you identify.
01:09:58
compartmentalize them or redirect them in appropriate way. And so if I practice Stoicism every day, read those quotes, I mean, yeah, memorizing quotes one thing, but taking that quote into application, oh shit, I can do that. So to me, the gray man is a philosophic warrior, a philosopher warrior, someone that likes philosophy more, but has the potential to act as a warrior when necessary because they are forced into a confrontation they cannot get out of. Like if philosophy broke down.
01:10:27
their situational awareness broke down, their emotions, they control their emotions, they did everything right, but they’re still in the situation, then boom, break gray, become the warrior, fucking handle it using minimal force necessary. Still using justice, still using temperance in how you apply the force necessary, because you still have to deal with the law of justice. Yeah, the repercussions. So that’s the gray man to me. And look, everyone’s got their idea of gray man. What’s wrong, what’s right, isn’t for me to decide.
01:10:57
I can only give you my flavor of Grey Man and the Grey Man is a philosopher warrior to me. The Grey Man project flavor of it is a philosopher warrior. Someone that wants to live a happy, peaceful life, learn safety, security, survival, they strive for social independence, self-reliance and mental resilience. That’s a person that wants to better themselves. That’s what the Grey Man is. I train. Even Vassalius Rufus talks about training.
01:11:23
applying your principles. Everyone, a doctor, a lawyer, they all have the principles. They apply that in application. Same thing. Train every day. Get up, get outside, go train, go work out, grab your firearm, do some drive firing, train, train, train, get that procedural learning into procedural memory, second nature for the amygdala. So that way when you get a stimulus, everything that you have to react when you break gray goes, okay, I’m already trained for this. So now I can actually use my cerebral cortex in that space between stimulus and response and go, okay.
01:11:52
Well, I’m ready for the fight. I just got to turn on whether this is the fight I’m going to be a part of or not. But because I got all the skills necessary, I’m more confident now. I can now make more cognitive decisions and how I apply the force that I’ve been training for. To me, stoicism is a tactical philosophy. It has a potential to make people more effective in what they do every single day, whether it’s doing firearms, first responders, people, whatever it is you. The more that you are able to control your emotions, the better.
01:12:22
tactically effective you’re going to be, the more you’re going to survive, the more that you’re going to be able to do and increase your chances of a desired outcome. So that’s what the Grey Man is to me. That’s why I inject Stowe philosophy into it so much is because I think there’s a great tactical application for it for both living a happy, peaceful life, but a more secure and safe life as well. I also believe that that’s why it’s so important for us to train. If I have this capacity to be marshal, it allows me to have the decision. I have a choice.
01:12:52
Many people hold on to a philosophy because they have no other choice. They have to feign this outrage because there’s nothing else that they can do. They want to shame you. They want to virtue signal in this capacity to try to control you because they have no other means in which to do so. And if something physical happens, they’re the first ones that are going to scream and yell and have the audacity to be surprised. The reason why you want to work on strength, the reason why you want to work on all these ethos is because if I have strength.
01:13:21
I can afford to have empathy. I can afford to give this person grace. I can afford to let this slide because at the end of the day, I know that it’s not a threat. Back to the people who don’t understand what a real threat is, the fact that I don’t agree with them from a political or religious ideology or lack thereof, they’re the ones that want to be in your face the most, that want to try to get you to cave to their belief system. And when we have that resilience, we understand, listen, first of all, I don’t need to. Second of all, they don’t have to agree with what I agree with, but more importantly,
01:13:51
I understand that this is not actually being worried about or being concerned about, frankly. And I can let this go and I can focus on things that are more important as opposed to being drawn into this minutia of what social media political stuff is every single day. And frankly, that’s the thing. The more that we practice this, the more that we hold onto these ethos, the easier it is for us to let these other things go and to focus on things that truly are worth our time. And now we become less and less concerned with that and more and more concerned with this philosophy that we put into play every single moment.
01:14:20
What’s funny too is the more I’ve really gotten in this stoic philosophy, the more I’ve just doubled down, doubled down, actually less social media I do nowadays. I find myself posting less on Instagram, even despite the fact that I’m just trying to teach what I know and what I understand. I don’t post quite as often as I used to because I just, my importance is somewhere else. My focus is somewhere else. I know I’m trying to eventually become a coach and speaker and still need to maintain a certain audience. And there are people that hit me up too sometimes and say, man.
01:14:49
you know, what you said is helping me out. Someone said the other day, is they’ve taken what I’ve talked about and they’ve preached to his kids’ softball team and the kids are doing better in sports by doing that stuff. So it’s really cool kind of to see that stuff, but the more that you engage in the philosophy, it’s actually the more that you really start to figure out what’s more important and you start shedding.
01:15:09
the stuff that just doesn’t matter. And I’m still working on that. I still hyper, I got the ADHD, man. It is crazy. And I still hyper-focus on certain things emotionally. That’s when I go back to Marcus Ruiz. I go back to Seneca and say, I suffer more imagination reality, dude. You gotta let this one go. Things are gonna work out the way they’re supposed to, not the way you want, the way it’s needed, but according to nature. And if this happened and you didn’t like it, it is what it is. It’s gift of diversity. You learned it, but this is according to nature. And because it was according to nature, it wasn’t evil, it wasn’t good, it was indifferent.
01:15:38
It just happens. People always say, you know, it’s like they talk about, man, the universe is working against me. Bro, you ain’t that important. The universe does not give a fuck about you. Your mistakes are your problems, man. You’re in a bad situation right now because you made bad decisions. I look at stuff that’s happened to me and I’ve suffered a lot of adversity this last month and I perceive it as adversity. It really wasn’t adversity. Things are working and changing. I see change as adversity. I have to work on that. And I go, well, change isn’t adversity. Change is change.
01:16:05
whether it’s good or bad is on me to perceive it as such. And so people need to understand that. And I have to, as much as I talk about this and teach this, you know, I’m always very eager to talk about it, even though the Stoics say, don’t fucking talk about you practicing philosophy, man, people are gonna make fun of you. But then I take the epitome out, I’m gonna fuck what they say about me. Because what matters to me is if there’s someone out there that heard me or saw a post and made their day better, they made them one step closer to saving their own life, then…
01:16:36
That’s all that matters. That’s really all that matters. That’s the best embodiment of a philosophy. We can find you at… Yeah, yeah, on Instagram, it’s at gray, G-R-A-Y dot man dot project. There’s other ones out there, but Gray Man Project is g-r-a-y dot man dot project. Find me there. And that’s really, you should find me right now. Working on getting a podcast, working on doing maybe doing some YouTube, or I’m still working on my website, so there’s nothing really on there. But yeah, go to Gray Man Project.
01:17:05
my Instagram, it’s where you can find me and find the content I’m putting out there in regards to the tactical cool guy, super underwater and just go with sniper shit. And as well as the mixture of still a philosophy and trying to live a more happy, healthy, peaceful life. The goal of Grey Man Project is to help folks become more socially independent. That is to say, hey, I’m refusing to be part of the mob. I’m refusing to give power to mob by loving myself and rejecting.
01:17:32
It’s not about being anti-social. Anti-social is a hate. But to be socially independent is to love society by stepping back and taking away its power. I also want people to become more self-reliant in what they do, give power to themselves, confidence themselves to say, hey, I can go on YouTube University and learn how to replace the battery in my car or replace the brakes. I don’t need to go get somebody and spend money. I can become more self-reliant and more empowered. I think women and men become…
01:18:00
more empowered by doing stuff themselves. And then to become more mentally resilient. To take the last two years and people have memories like Goldfish, last two years, people forget the adversity last two years. They’re just trying to move on like it didn’t happen. I don’t think we should. I think we should. Oftentimes, even every once in a while, put on a mask to remember how much it fucking sucked and say, I still survived. And do that. So become more mentally resilient. So when this does happen again, and it just may, who knows? You have the emotional tools.
01:18:30
to survive. And I before I know you’re anxious to get off here, but do you want to talk about with suffering? I do with Viktor Frankl talks about suffering. And for those listening, whether you’re suffering right now, you have to find meaning in it. That’s what Viktor Frankl teaches. And before Viktor Frankl, I thought about that all the time. It’s like, what? When I’m in a bad way, what am I giving meaningful? What am I doing? Well, I have a daughter and I love her so much. And I’m giving meaning to my suffering by
01:18:59
enduring the suffering and forging the tools in the furnace of adversity to give those tools to later on in life and go, hey, I went through this. Here’s a tool that I have that I used to get through the situation. So here you go. So my daughter is my meaning for suffering, is understanding that, okay, same thing with my wife. You know, we take everything we have and try and give it to our daughter. And that’s the meaning for my suffering. Like you say, if we can find meaning, then we can endure anything.
01:19:25
Right. Victor Frankl says when we find meaning in suffering, we cease to suffer. That’s exactly it. Thank you, brother, so much for having me on Marcus.
