Bill Irvine (00:00)

You at least had the guts to try something that you could fail in. There are people who don't, you if they think there's a chance they could fail in doing that, I'm not gonna do it. But you go out and you try hard things and you fail. Two things, two takeaways from that. Number one is you've challenged yourself. And number two, you can learn from the

Paul Warloski (00:44)

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast, where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. Today, we are very honored to talk with Dr. William B. Irvine, a philosopher who has spent decades studying and practicing Stoicism and who found his way into the world of endurance sports. He's the author of several books on Stoic philosophy, including the widely acclaimed, A Guide to the Good Life, The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

the stoic challenge, and perhaps most interestingly for our audience With Two Oars a book about his decade as a rowing coach. Dr. Irvine doesn't just think about stoicism. He lives it on the water, pushing through long rows and the discomfort that comes with them. Dr. Irvine spent 38 years teaching philosophy at Wright State University in Ohio, retiring in 2021, and has appeared on podcasts like Hidden Brain, The Knowledge Project, Happiness Lab, and 10 % Happier.

His approach to Stoicism is deeply practical, less about abstract theory, more about how to actually handle life's setbacks, challenge, and the daily grind. We're going to talk about how the ancient wisdom of Stoicism can help us thrive in our training, our races, and our lives. Bill, welcome to the Athlete's Compass podcast.

Bill Irvine (02:05)

it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Paul Warloski (02:08)

You wrote With Two Oars about your experience as a rowing coach. How did your personal practice of stoicism influence your coaching philosophy?

Bill Irvine (02:18)

Actually, when I started rowing, I wasn't a stoic yet. ⁓ So there's ⁓ sort of a long and roundabout story here. I mean, number one is I was the ⁓ least fit person in my eighth grade class. That was when they would post it in public. You'd take tests and then they would post that. And I was at the bottom of the list. So I decided I was gonna do something about that.

Paul Warloski (02:22)

Wow.

Bill Irvine (02:44)

So I tried wrestling. I tried running. It turned out that I was best at a distance running and we had a two mile. This was back in Montana and we had a two mile race and I set the school record, but that goes in with an asterisk because it was the first year we had that event.

Paul Laursen (03:05)

You

Bill Irvine (03:07)

and I was

the only one dumb enough to run it. But I got the school record, which I think lasted only that first year, but that's still, it's still something. Yeah, so ⁓ I kind of got into rowing ⁓ in the early 2000s at about the same time I was developing an interest in stoicism. So they kind of overlap and actually guide to the good life is

Paul Warloski (03:15)

That's okay, you hit a record.

Bill Irvine (03:34)

dedicated to a rower, an excellent rower, Charlie Doyle. And his motto was, keep your head in the boat. And I didn't really realize it at the time, but that's beautiful stoic advice, because you have some control over what's going on in your boat. You don't have control over the weather. You don't have control over the currents.

Paul Warloski (03:46)

Mmm.

Bill Irvine (04:00)

you don't have control over what the other rowers are doing. So if somebody is sitting there in the boat looking at where the other boat is, they're wasting, it's actually potentially hazardous thing to do, because it increases the chance that they're gonna catch a crab, they're gonna do something foolish, or they're gonna go off track. So you keep your head in the boat. You do your best.

with what you've got and what you've got. The part you can control is what goes on in your own boat. So it's a beautifully stoic bit of advice.

Anyway, he later asked me whether I was interested in rowing a double with him. And I mean, it was an act of charity because I was, you know, novice rower. And I said, yep, I'll do that because I knew I would learn a lot. And I did learn a lot. So.

Paul Warloski (04:40)

Mm.

Bill Irvine (04:52)

He kind of set me on my way. And so that's simultaneously stoicism and rowing. And in rowing, I guess, I realized that there are some basic things you need to know about rowing. And so I self-published. So it's a self-published book, but the book with two oars.

And you know, there's just things that it seems like I hadn't been taught as a rower, the importance of symmetry in your stroke, you because if you don't, the boats can turn, you know, all sorts of things are gonna go wrong. So I wrote that just as kind of this idea of, know what? Well, I'm a teacher, that's what I am at heart is a teacher. I like to learn new things and then I like to explain to people.

other people what I've learned. And so I thought, the world needs a book like this on rowing. Turns out some of the world did. It didn't ever make the best seller lists or anything like that. But there were people who, you know, have sent me very kind letters and said they've appreciated it. So.

Paul Laursen (05:58)

Yeah. I just love that though, Bill, the keep your head in the boat philosophy. And to me, would just, in a coaching context, I would be saying control what you can control. Like you can't, know, in any given, sport, whether it's, a solo cycling time trial, running race.

Bill Irvine (06:14)

Yes.

Paul Laursen (06:23)

or a triathlon race, it's like at any given moment, what is it that you can control? And in any given training moment too. So I'm sure that's really what you were going there. And it's just, it's such simple wisdom, but it's, we forget it all the time, right? So yeah, I guess, and I guess the stoic philosophy is always trying to going to reach back inside your mind to be able to realize that and remember that and then execute.

Bill Irvine (06:38)

Yeah.

Yeah, so I don't have any tattoos, but if I did get a tattoo, I would say do what you can with what you've got where you are. It's superbly good advice, and by the way, it's all you can do, you know? You do what you can with what you've got where you are. And then backing up into more kind of theoretical Stoicism So in my books, I have described what I call the stoic trichotomy.

So when you look at the things in the world, the events in the world, the circumstances around you, you can divide them into three different groups. There are things you have absolute control over. One of them would be your values. Things you have no control over. Weather, the weather for instance, be one example of that.

⁓ And then there's this wonderful middle group of the things you have some but not complete control over. And so when it comes to training, you cannot train, you cannot determine how hard your opponents train. You can't control the strategy they bring into a race. So you can certainly think about some of the things they could do.

But what you can control is how hard you train, and you can control your strategies. And your strategies might include what you're going to do if they do something, but you focus your attention on the stuff you have absolute control over, because you have absolute control over it. So that's easy, your values, for instance. And then you control it on stuff you have some but not complete control over. And you just put out of your mind.

the things you can't control. And it's good advice because you can't control it. And so if you're worried about it, if you're burning up calories thinking about it, you're wasting your time and effort. So it's just good, practical advice.

Paul Laursen (08:47)

Yeah. And I'm reflecting, you you're speaking there, Bill. I'm reflecting on another one that I think it comes from the AA branch, but it's God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, the courage to change the things that I can, and then the wisdom to know the difference. So.

Bill Irvine (09:04)

Yeah, it's ripped off of the Stoics, you know. And once you know what Stoicism is, you'll find ⁓ it's borrowed. There'll be more generous about it. But you find that Stoicism is kind of sticking out its nose all over the place. And I mean, it's the kind of advice that when you hear it, you want to say, yeah, right? Except ⁓ the interesting thing is the Stoics themselves used to be quite

Paul Warloski (09:13)

Yeah

Paul Laursen (09:14)

Bill Irvine (09:31)

prominent if you took, if you studied the ancient philosophers, you would study the Stoics. And then that declined in the 20th century. And by the time I was a philosophy student, this would be back in 1970, I took philosophy classes and didn't get any exposure at all to the Stoics.

And the thing was, I had gone into philosophy because I wanted to live a good life. And then this is shock. ⁓ but they don't do that anymore. They got other things that they do. And I actually encountered Stoicism in a logic class because it turns out that Stoics were the preeminent logicians of the first century.

⁓ BCE and they invented propositional logic, which is actually the kind of logic that they use in programming computers. That was my only exposure. And then in the early two thousands, I was writing a book on human desire and, had to introduce different,

philosophies for living and came across the stoics and I said, yeah, the logicians. And then I realized, no, they had a whole nother program going on. And that is advice and wisdom on how to live a good life. And from their point of view, good life, one of the key marks of a good life is you were in a state of equanimity. That is you weren't experiencing extreme emotions.

You weren't a giddy all the time. You weren't depressed. You weren't angry. And then so the brilliance of it. So we think of them as stoics, as a philosophers, but they were early psychologists because they developed psychological strategies for dealing with life setbacks. And I read that and I thought, okay, know, besides telling the world about.

about desire. My next book, The World Needs to Know This, I'm going to tell them about the Stoics. when I did that, there were maybe five books written.

for non-academic audiences, books on stoicism And now they're coming out at about one a day. And I've been told most of them are written by AI, but hey, there you go.

Marjaana Rakai (11:46)

pull this back to endurance training. What you just said really rings a bell here. Stoicism is about living a balanced life, a good life. And in order to do that, you kind of bring all these extreme emotions to the center and balance it out.

But that's what endurance training does too. Like you're mad, you go for a run, you come back more balanced. You're happy, you go for a run and you just like bring everything back in the balance. Like how do you tie in stoicism and endurance training?

Bill Irvine (12:25)

Yeah, so there are a bunch of different things you can do to try to get that sense of balance. You know, lot of people very swear by meditation. And I know that when I'm ⁓ when I go for a row or a good bike ride, I don't run much anymore. You do come back ⁓ with those natural tranquilizers.

Now when I exercise, well, I'm older. And now I find that for every minute of serious interval training I do, I subsequently will need a minute of nap. It's not like I decide that. It's just my body says, OK, you're going to take a nap now. mean, you you could be driving somewhere, but you're going to take a nap while we're going there.

Paul Warloski (12:56)

you

Paul Laursen (12:57)

Thank

Bill Irvine (13:07)

So I've given into that. It's a practical, sensible ⁓ thing to do. yeah, but I understand you get that tranquility. But here's another kind of tranquility that stoics were particularly interested in. And that's the kind that when life deals you a setback, it can be a little setback. It can be a huge setback.

So it's not just keeping an even trim throughout the average day, right? And sure, working out, exercise can be one way to do that.

And by the way, of course, in competition, you're also going to encounter setbacks, okay? And you can't control, we have some control maybe over being setback. You can plan ahead, you can do things.

But the setback itself, you you can either let it shatter you or you can say, well, OK, I'm going to keep my cool and I'm going to press on from there.

Paul Warloski (14:07)

Bill, how do you do that? How do

you maintain that more even keel in the middle of ⁓ a race when things are going wrong?

Bill Irvine (14:16)

⁓ Well, you keep your head in the boat. That's what one of the things you do. ⁓ Now, I mean, other things. So after writing Guide to the Good Life, there was a follow on book called The Stoic Challenge in which I deal specifically with life's challenges and how to respond to them. So one of the things you do is you you can frame what happened. So they were big on this notion of framing. So if somebody insults you.

one way you can do it is you can say, no, I've been grievously attacked verbally and my reputation is in tatters as a result. Or, brilliant maneuver, you can turn it into a joke. And I mean, it's a wonderful defense because they hit you with your best shot and you laughed it off, right?

And even maybe even more devastating is you can respond by not responding at all. You can consciously just pass on as if they had said nothing. And if they say, don't you realize I just insulted you? And you can say, yeah, I guess. But anyway, and then you carry on. And it's like they've hit you with their best shot and you're just shrugging it off. But there's lots of different ways you can.

you can frame things. So for instance, if you're jogging across the grassy field and someone runs up from behind and tackles you to the ground, right? Well, let's see, how should you react? Well, if you're playing football game, you just got tackled. What do you do? You get up and you shake it off and you get back and ready for the next snap of the ball.

⁓ If it's a complete stranger though, you're going to frame it in a different way. Same physical event, two different ways of framing it. How you frame it will have a huge impact on how it affects you. Guess what? Framing is one of the things we have considerable control over. Another thing you can do with setback in life or in competition,

is you can treat it as what I refer to as a stoic test. Okay? And so here I'm gonna get a little bit mystical on you, but so the game is you imagine that there are these stoic gods, okay? I don't believe there are stoic gods, but bear with me. It's a great metaphor here. And what they do is they spend their day kind of watching you and occasionally they'll say, you know, he's having a pretty good day.

So let's present him with an obstacle. And so an obstacle comes into your path, okay? Okay, why would they do that? Are they evil? Are they evil gods, the stoic gods? No, they're good coaches. What does a good coach do? Does the good coach just pamper his or her athletes?

Paul Warloski (17:06)

and

Bill Irvine (17:10)

and tell them, oh, you're a wonderful rower and you're perfect just the way you are. And yeah, if you start feeling tired, you should slow down, you know, you should be able to have conversations in an eight, even in the middle of a race, you shouldn't push yourself too hard. Well, now a good coach is going to take you and shape you, make you more resilient, make you better able.

to deal with setbacks and one of the ways the coach can do that is to set you back on purpose. So Charlie Doyle, the rower I told you about earlier, ⁓ told me a story about how he was in a, this was when he was in training. He was, ⁓ had a coach and the coach said, okay, guys,

We're going to go out and we're going to work hard. We're going to do 10 of these and I want you guys to give it your all. And if you guys slack off, there's going to be trouble. So give it your all. And so they did the 10 intervals and then, you know, they turned the boat to head back to the dock and the coach said, what are you guys doing? And they said, well, we're going back to the dock. And then the coach said, ah, no, you're not. You're going to do an 11th. Okay.

Which, you know, if you're thinking in terms of 10 intervals, that's just killer, you know, because you've really, you're at the edge, you know, on that last interval. And then for the coach to do that, well, one thing, it's a setback. OK. But another thing, it's a way for them to find out, gosh, they still had something in the tank at the end of that tenth interval.

Paul Warloski (18:53)

Hmm.

Bill Irvine (18:53)

they could have pushed harder. They weren't utterly exhausted. And they'll become more resilient. They say, this challenge, I met this challenge. And you come away with self-confidence. So we seem in recent decades to have entered this period where a lot of people are just, they're coddled.

and we want them to feel good about themselves. Okay, well, one way is to just coddle them. Another way is to give them challenges that with effort they can surmount because then it takes care of itself. They're going to get self-esteem. They're going to get a sense of who they are and it's the best outcome.

Paul Laursen (19:39)

I love that. I reflect on the there's a sports science experiment that basically mimicked exactly what you said there, Bill, where they used deception and they did like just like you said, 10 intervals and then they told them to do it one and they told them to do them all out. And then they, you know, thinking that you get to the end with an RPE, rating perceived exertion of right to the peak rate, when in theory it should be impossible to do more. And then they

Paul Warloski (19:39)

Bill, yeah.

Paul Laursen (20:06)

they get them to do one more and sure enough the body's able to do it. it's great. mean, gotta be cautious with that coaching technique to some degree. Might not wanna use it all the time. It probably would get a little rusty, but it's amazing what the body can do.

Bill Irvine (20:09)

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

know, and another thing is,

Charlie would have done this before they had sports science, so he would have been back in the day. But another thing is that you do that trick once, and then in the future, they're going to hold back. You might do that trick again, and, this time, we'll be ready for it.

Paul Warloski (20:34)

Hahaha

Paul Laursen (20:34)

Exactly. That's,

Yeah.

That's right.

Paul Warloski (20:42)

Bill, endurance sports require us to live with discomfort for extended periods. I do gravel races that last four to six hours. What does stoicism teach us how to, when you talk about reframing, how to reframe that physical pain or fatigue during a long event?

Bill Irvine (21:01)

Okay, you raised a few issues there. First, I want to get talk a little bit about pain and fatigue and discomfort. I use the word pain very rarely, but I know people who are always in pain and some people are always in pain. But for me, there's an important line. I experienced pain rarely.

Paul Warloski (21:12)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Irvine (21:21)

and ⁓ things that should be painful, like when they're giving me an injection, I make a point of looking at it, thinking about it, and know that it could be very painful, but it's not that bad. I experience almost nonstop daily discomfort, though, because

Like I said, I'm older, but I'm still doing intervals and they're serious intervals, still lifting weights. I've discovered that this thing called sarcopenia, and that is as you get older, the muscles are so hard to acquire and they run. They run like the wind as soon as you turn your backs. It's hard to keep ⁓ muscle mass. And yet if you keep doing it,

⁓ you will be sore. And the act of intervals, for instance, this morning, we did four minutes on, ⁓ five minutes off, times four. Not collegiate level intervals, but still took them very seriously. And at the end of that, I'm hunched over on my erg, just out of breath.

And is, am I in discomfort? Uh-huh. Am I in pain? Not really, you know. I wouldn't say it crossed that threshold into pain. And I think it's probably important to keep those two separate. Pain is your body's way of saying, hey, what you just did could have serious health consequences. Discomfort.

I think you should, if you want to stay healthy, you've got to experience a certain amount of discomfort. So in ⁓ Stoic Challenge, I talk about Stoics going out of their way to do something that's going to make them uncomfortable. And it can be physical discomfort, and it can also be emotional discomfort. So they have a fear of speaking. So what are they going to do? ⁓ Well,

they're going to go out and get in front of audiences whenever they can. And the interesting thing is that's the best way to overcome fear of speaking. When it comes to physical discomfort, they're going to adapt. They're going to build up their resilience. They're going to build up their ability to tolerate discomfort. And it's a skill that could come in really handy at some point in their life. There could be a time when

Paul Laursen (23:31)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Irvine (23:53)

they're really sick or in a dangerous situation. then the ability to say, you know, I've trained for this. I can deal with discomfort. Okay. The other thing, talking about being ⁓ in a serious situation or being sick, you know, that notion of when you're rowing, I know when I'm erging. What's the trick? You take one more stroke.

And I find myself doing all of these mental games as I'm coming up at the end of my interval. You know, I know my stroke rate. I do the math internally and I'm thinking, okay, only 20 more strokes to go. So what I got to do is the next 10. And then I do the next 10 and okay, now five more. do five more. It's his mental game, but those games will keep you, will keep you rowing and just do one more stroke. Lately I've been, ⁓

binging on YouTube on these people who are rowing either across the Atlantic or rowing across the Pacific, because my local coach wants to do that and in fact is kind of committed to doing that. So I would not want to do that. But you talk to them and you know it lasts like for 60, 70 days, depends on how fast you go. And it's just hellacious rowing circumstances.

Paul Laursen (25:03)

you

Bill Irvine (25:14)

You know, they have to use macron instead of hatchet blades because when you lower the blade to go into the water, you don't know where the water is. If you're on a wave, you know, it's a one or plants the other or doesn't plant. But just them ⁓ talking about how do you do it? How do you keep going for all this time? And that notion of, well, you just say I got to take one more stroke. And what do you do when that's over?

Well, I gotta take one more stroke. It'll get you far in life. And if you were ever in dire circumstances, you know, ⁓ the difference between those who survive and those who don't is, you know, there might be a time in my life where for me it becomes a.

Medical metaphor, you know, of, what am I going to do now? Well, I'm going to do the medical equivalent of take one more stroke, and then I'll worry about what happens next after that.

Paul Warloski (26:10)

Hmm. So one more pedal stroke in my bike race or one more running step in a running race.

Bill Irvine (26:21)

I find myself counting too. Yeah, yeah. I find myself counting strokes. And of course, the erg will do it for me. But on a bicycle, the number of times I've turned, so I turn everything into a number and then just start thinking about the numbers. Another thing about doing difficult training is it's a chance to encounter

Paul Laursen (26:21)

just get to the next telephone pool.

Bill Irvine (26:45)

⁓ this, horrible, corrupting being that I call Lazy Bill, that lives within me. it lives in the back corner of my mind. I think it stays in its bedroom all day long playing video games or something. But when I'm doing intervals or when I'm doing a race, it comes out and it says, you know, you don't have to be doing this. You could be back here with me playing games. You'd be lying down.

You could be just enjoying yourself. And you know that after you do this, you're going to be sore for a few days and you don't need to do that. So just stop rowing. So it's like this battle. The voice comes out and then I just have to tell it, you know, get out of here, go back into your bedroom because I'm not listening to you. A lot of people let that voice take over their existence, their daily life.

Paul Laursen (27:23)

you

Bill Irvine (27:42)

And it's that voice that says, take it easy, don't do hard things. And you can, most people do that and they survive, you know, but I don't know if they're as fully, they end up as flourishing as they could be if they tried hard things. And you know, sometimes you fail, sometimes you do it successfully. Even if you fail, if you learn from your failure, good for you. And by the way,

Paul Warloski (28:35)

you

Bill Irvine (28:37)

You look at the most successful people, you know, in business. mean, a lot of them can recount, oh, yeah, no, I went bankrupt six times before I figured it out, right? You know, Dyson with his famous vacuum, what was it? It was number 5,800 of the attempts that he finally got it all right. So that fear of failure is a fear that you can overcome.

⁓ How do you do that? You do difficult things where there's a significant probability of failure and you do them anyway knowing that. Now, you don't want the failure to be fatal, you know, but for it just to be a little blow to your ego. Okay, that's fine.

Paul Warloski (29:13)

and

Wow.

Paul Laursen (29:25)

Yeah, it's awesome. Taking all this to heart and completely relate.

Paul Warloski (29:28)

Yeah.

Bill, the Stoics warned against tying our happiness to external things like race results, podiums, PRs. How can competitive athletes stay motivated without making their self-worth dependent upon outcomes?

Bill Irvine (29:50)

When I race, I'm racing against myself and that inner voice. That's my enemy. That's the rival team. The other people in the race, they are just my collaborators in my contest against that side of me. Now, that's because what do I value? I want to become

I want to flourish in life. want to become the best kind of ⁓ person I can become. And for me, best means what? It means ⁓ I'm helping other people. I'm maintaining my equanimity. That's what that means. But of course, there are other things you can value. And if you look at social media, what a lot of people value now, I mean, they go online and... ⁓

They get a following online and then they start, it's called audience capture. When in order to ⁓ deal with, well, in order to grow their numbers, they have to start giving the audience what the audience wants. And then they start turning their life upside down to give the audience what the audience wants. So they start going on lavish vacations so they can.

Put it on YouTube, right? So their audience will those people they're living they're going into debt and they're living their lives to do what yeah to impress complete strangers Okay, that's crazy that you've got only one life to live and you really want to Try to impress complete strangers. So in racing in and I know I I've known something extremely competitive

people and their value is winning. And it's a form of fame and social status. And to the extent possible, I try to avoid playing the social status game. I got better games to play like ⁓ self improvement. Okay. And by the way, there are things I would do where everybody, almost everybody, if you said, well, here's what my values are, they'd say, well, you're crazy. Those are crazy values.

Yeah, okay. And I wouldn't say this. Yours are too, if you think about it. So it's a question of values there. And I know if you want to be first in the world in some sport, you've got to be a monomaniac. That whole idea of, I've got to beat the others. And that's how I determine my self-worth. Okay, I don't do that. And I'm never going to be champion.

⁓ I'm going to be at best a middle of the pack in whatever competition I'm in. And that's okay, because that's not where I'm aiming. That's not what I value.

Paul Laursen (32:41)

Yeah, I love that. often ⁓ frame that as a in a you talk about outcome goals, which you're kind of alluding to their bill versus a process goal and training, right? The process goal should be internal and it should have a, your own internal benchmarks and whatnot that you're striving for. But they just relate to you and you can't you can't control it's back back to, you know, keeping your head in the boat, right? You can't control any of the

Paul Warloski (32:49)

Thank

Paul Laursen (33:08)

external things that your competitors are going to do. So why waste energy worrying about those things?

Bill Irvine (33:14)

Yeah, process is ⁓ what you can control. So you put your effort into process. And if you train optimally and you lose the race, hey, you did what you could with what you had. It wasn't in the cards. It wasn't in the cards. And the fixation on outcome can also corrupt the process, right? Where you try to take shortcuts, you get too fancy, you get too cute by half.

Paul Laursen (33:27)

right.

Bill Irvine (33:43)

Yeah, so process ⁓ is ⁓ the big thing. And you can also judge the choices you make by values and by the process that went into making those choices.

Paul Warloski (33:54)

Bill, the Stoics valued visualizing challenges, including things that could go wrong before they happen. How might an athlete use this before a big race?

Bill Irvine (34:08)

Stoics were big fans of negative visualization. It sounds like a negative thing to do, but bear with me. So what you do is you go out of your way to think of bad things that can happen. There are actually two reasons for that. One is to prevent them from happening. But the other is so you can realize how good you've got it.

So bad thing. So think about the things you value. Your health, your vision. You you can go, it's a really long list. Do you have a place to live in that isn't being bombed to daylay, which would be the case if you were in some parts of the world right now. Do you have three meals a day? Or do you have a boat to row that you can row when you want to row? And you go through the list and you realize you are one.

incredibly lucky human being. Except most people don't take that route. Instead, they think about the one thing that they don't have and they imagine that if only they did have it, then life would be perfect. And so the Stoics say, if you want to learn how to appreciate what you've already got, take a moment to engage in negative visualization. Imagine that you lost what you have.

And do that just for a few seconds and you can even visualize what that would be like. Think about what that would be like and then go on with your life. Okay. Now, you don't want to do too much of that. You don't want to do it too long because that's a sign of clinical depression. But it's just an exercise where you say to yourself, okay, what would it be like if the power went off?

Gosh, you I rely on it so heavily and yet I take it utterly for granted. And you come out of it more appreciative and you can do that with, ⁓ well, okay, I'm a married man and my wife will periodically ⁓ mid afternoon hear me yelling out from my back office here where I write, yelling out, ⁓ thanks for existing. She knows.

she knows that I've just engaged in negative visualization, you know, because it's a relationship and relationships are so easy to take for granted, and yet relationships do come to an end. And so if you've got one, boy, you're a lucky human being and you should really savor it. And this negative visualization is one way to do that. Along those lines, there's another thing that the stoics do and that's called

meditation. ⁓ So there will be a last time for everything you do in life. There will be a last breath you take there will be a last race. That you race in I probably already raced my last race I didn't know it at the time I mean I was very competitive you know and then COVID hit. And then I did erg racing and then I got old.

⁓ So, but there would have been a last, but there's gonna be a last to everything you do. And if you just think in those terms, it's this mental, psychological trick once again, then you stop taking things for granted. I get to do this again. Aren't I a lucky individual that I get to do this one more time? Okay, because there will be an end. There will be a last time.

⁓ So you can see what we got here is psychological ploys, strategies, and these last two, this last time meditation and negative visualization are to keep you, have you keep in mind just how lucky you are. And you might say, well, I'm not lucky, you know, I just got fired and da da da da da da. Okay. Yeah, but still you've got a lot. And of course, if you compare any of our lives,

to that of our great, great, great grandparents, right? They might have lived in a shack with a dirt floor. No toilets, ooh, no toilet paper, not to be forgotten. You go through that. If they could see our lives, you know, it would be like, you know, they'd see a cell phone and they'd say, why does it have pictures? well, right now I can, standing here, order pizza.

from a restaurant in Japan. You're kidding. No, watch. And to them it would be like, that's just miraculous. And you know, back then child death was fairly common. Why'd you have 10 kids? So five of would make it to adulthood. And now we have drugs. There was a time before antibiotics, and it wasn't that long ago, where you cut your finger and you die. So. ⁓

We've got it so good. And yet you look at people who just can't see that. All they can do is fixate on the little things that aren't right with their life.

Paul Laursen (39:03)

Hey Bill, I'm listening to what you're saying here and it's kind of like, it's so obvious. Like we're living in a dream, but yet our mind goes towards that negative depression and spirals down in so many of us. So why does our mind do that to us?

Bill Irvine (39:12)

Yes.

That's a good question. So I'm a philosopher, not a psychologist. So I can't give you ⁓ the deep answer to that. But I know, so there are people who are ⁓ clinically depressed. And ⁓ if our listeners are in that category, help is available and you need to get help. But most people, know, life has ups and downs. And...

Things are, yeah, I mean, there's just, but it's like psychological strategies. Just keep in mind, things are never as bad as they seem. Things are never as good as they seem, because it's all gonna shift back to the midline at some point. Things are never as bad as they seem at 2 a.m. Just make it to the morning and wake up and you'll realize, nah, it's not really that bad.

So, ⁓ you know, we have—we are ⁓ uppity primates, you know, not long—that long ago, ⁓ a million-plus years ago, our ancestors. You know, if you did your deep ⁓ family tree, you'd come up with ancestors who lived on the savannas of Africa. And they evolved to be really good at dealing with—

savannas of Africa, being able to survive and reproduce on the savannas of Africa. Well, guess what? That's not where we live anymore. And the world is so radically different from their world. And yet we've inherited their wiring, the way we cope with the world, the way we respond to the world. And it's called maladaptation. So it worked really great back then, but things have changed. So it doesn't work as good now.

And in just the last two decades, social media, suddenly you can be famous, right, ⁓ for doing who knows what. And at one time that wouldn't have been possible. And now AI coming along ⁓ as well and people forming relationships with chat bots. And we aren't, we aren't.

We aren't wired to do that, you know? So it's a very ⁓ disorienting time to be alive.

Paul Laursen (41:39)

But I guess, mean, it still kind of comes back to that philosophy, right? And you kind of articulated that the stoicism is really just like the level, right? Like, it's just, you and I think, forget what this, it's the Chinese proverb or whatnot, but it's like, when you look at anything that happens,

Paul Warloski (41:47)

Thanks.

Paul Laursen (42:01)

is that a good thing or a bad thing? it's like, ⁓ forget what it is, but maybe it is, maybe it isn't, right? you won the lottery. You're so lucky. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. you lost ⁓ so-and-so. You know, you're so unlucky. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, right? And it kind of just goes through that. And it's like, yeah, it's, who knows how the twists of the world are gonna go. You probably know what I'm talking about, though.

Bill Irvine (42:24)

Yeah, so here's a quick version of it. So farmers, horses all ran away and the neighbors came over and said, ⁓ your horses ran away. the farmer said, maybe. Then the next day, the horse that came back, came back and had a bunch of horses come back with him.

And so the neighbors all came back and said, that's wonderful. Now you got lots of horses. And the farmer said, maybe. Then the farmer, one of these new horses, the farmer's son tried to ⁓ mount it and break it, I guess is what they call it. So it would be able to do that. The horse threw him off and the son broke his leg.

Neighbors come over and say, that's a terrible thing. Farmer says, maybe. And then the next day, the emperor sends his men to recruit people for the army and they pass up the son because the son has broken leg. And the neighbors say, that's a lucky thing for you. And the farmer says, of course, you guessed it, maybe. So it's true that life's little things

And you know, life has these inflection points. It really is ⁓ kind of curious. These moments when suddenly the course your life is taking takes a sudden change. And you can think about your own life. Think about ⁓ if you have, if you're married, there was a time when you met this person, right? And it was sheer luck, right?

And then you can multiply that by, okay, and their parents had their mother and father not taking the same bus at the same time in the same city and sat next to each other. And you go back and it's just incredible. Have kids, major inflection point. Break a leg, major inflection point. You might not be able to do things you used to easily be able to do. Yeah.

This is turning into a dark conversation. ⁓

Paul Laursen (44:21)

Yeah.

Marjaana Rakai (44:24)

I keep thinking like I'm

listening and I'm thinking like it's like motherhood. Like you have kids and you have only certain amount of control over what happens to your kids and you just have to live with it and like, you know, say maybe, you know, it's, I feel like parenthood really teaches you Stoicism know, like it's like a crash course.

Bill Irvine (44:47)

Yep, it's a

very difficult job. The one thing is it gets you out of your own self. You you realize there is a world outside of me. And again, to keep the tone going, your children, it's a whole different thing to be the parent of adult children.

Paul Warloski (44:56)

Mm-hmm.

Marjaana Rakai (44:56)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Irvine (45:06)

of children who have grown into adulthood. It's just a whole different game. ⁓ And then you adapt, you you adapt.

Paul Warloski (45:14)

Bill, what would you say that if a daily stoic practice that you would recommend for endurance athletes, know, simple ones, what would you say?

Marjaana Rakai (45:21)

simple.

Bill Irvine (45:25)

I guess I wouldn't have a particular one for endurance athletes. I guess I would have this larger kind of panel of things that I've talked about. There are these meditations that maybe not the perfect word for it that they can do. And they just have to remember that they're doing something really, really hard.

And they can either say somebody's forcing me to do this, or they can say, and you know, I'm doing it voluntarily. How come? Because I want to optimize myself as a human being. If I win races, that's really cool, but I want to optimize myself as a human being. Keep the bigger picture of what they're doing. And the training, again. ⁓

realize that there are lot of people, they're in races, they're doing this training, there's a lot of people who might not say this, but will sort of look at them and think, gosh, he's willing to do things I'm not willing to do, because he's not as lazy as I am, because I have years that he doesn't have, right?

So there's that aspect of it. And even if you do those things and fail, that's OK. Because think of the literally billions of people who wouldn't even have the courage to do those things. Yeah. And you know, if you want to become this really elite athlete, top level athlete, there's just so much competition. And it's a very steep.

pyramid and only a few people standing at the top. And it's actually unrealistic to think you're going to be one of them. And so if you're not there, well, that's because what you're doing is just incredibly, incredibly challenging.

Yeah, and you know, it's it's what are you going to spend your time doing? You know, there are a lot of people who sit down with TikTok early in the day and finish up there. And that's one way you can spend a life. Unfortunately, there are other ways you can spend a life too.

Paul Warloski (47:39)

So if an endurance athlete takes one piece of stoic wisdom onto the race course, would it be that they're doing the hard things or would it be something else that you would tell them onto the course?

Marjaana Rakai (47:43)

on the race course.

Bill Irvine (47:50)

bit of business

for the race course, do what you can with what you've got where you are. Because that's the best strategy. I mean, you think it through. That's really, really good advice ⁓ for life, but it's also really, really good advice for if you're in a race and you see bad things happen. So let's see, I guess they have the Giro d'Italia going on now.

Paul Warloski (47:55)

Yeah.

Bill Irvine (48:16)

So I watched snippets of it on YouTube and you see these colossal crashes. You see these masses of riders and one person crashes and their bike goes and shooting across the road and takes out 10 others. And then suddenly there's this big pile up. Okay, what are you gonna do with that? Well, you're gonna do your best. And what if you can't? And what if it's, well then you did your best. If you do your best,

You've got wonderful consolation no matter what happens. You did your best. What else could you do other than your best? Now, of course, that ⁓ takes back. What about training? Well, did you train the hardest, smartest that you could train? And if you did and you lost the race, well, those other people were just really good. Or they're using a different strategy, in which case maybe I should.

Follow that strategy. I should learn from my failure. Yeah, so if you're doing something really difficult and you fail, well, it's difficult. It was really difficult. yeah, you can walk away proud.

Paul Warloski (49:28)

Bill, where can people get a hold of you or learn about you or read your books? What have you... You just came out with a new book, didn't you?

Bill Irvine (49:36)

Yeah, I kind of. Split from stoicism. I still practicing stoic, but as far as writing goes, I told you how saturated the market is with stoic books, so I didn't want to do that again. And I realized another thing where I think the world could change is just in terms of. Reasoning their way to conclusions, engaging in evidence based.

reasoning ⁓ to conclusions. So I just had a book come out on how to think more and better, being reasonable in unreasonable times. That's from Oxford University Press. And then in support of that, I started a Substack. And I just posted my hundredth essay on Substack about

thinking more and better. And so it's that whole notion of the goal is to optimize your mind, fill it to the extent possible with true beliefs. And how do you do that? You engage in open-minded critical thinking. Notice those are attention with each other.

you're critical thinking in that you're being skeptical, you're asking for the evidence, you're asking for reasons why, and at the same time you're being open minded. You're saying there's a lot of things out there that I need to learn about that I don't. So that's my new crusade. There was one time when my crusade was to introduce the world to the extent possible to stoicism, because I thought this is great stuff, and the world needs to know.

So I moved on to a different quixotic challenge and that is to do something similar but with open-minded critical thinking. So there are the books. Then there's the sub stack and it's called More Better Thinking. my name, my official author name is William B. Irvin.

Paul Laursen (51:27)

Professor Irvine, just been amazing. just so enjoyed listening to your thinking and your wisdom. And I've just taken lots on board myself. So just wanted to thank you so much for all you do and all you've given us today on the podcast. It's been great.

Bill Irvine (51:41)

Well,

thank you very much for inviting me. Yeah, I've had a pleasure talking to you.

Marjaana Rakai (51:43)

Thank you so much.

Paul Warloski (51:49)

Yeah, thank you, Dr. Irvin. And thank you for listening today to the Athletes Compass podcast. Take a moment now, subscribe, share, and let's keep navigating this endurance adventure together. Improve your training with the science-based training platform, Athletica, and join the conversation at the Athletica Forum. For Dr. William Irvin, Marjaana Rakai, and Dr. Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening.