I started the Practical Stoicism podcast in 2022 with the intention of providing myself a bit of Stoic self-help therapy. I had drifted far from my own Stoic practice, and I thought a weekly podcast could get me back on track.
When the podcast became a global success fewer than 6-months later, I was pleasantly surprised, of course, but nothing about the podcast needed to change.
A few months later, when the podcast was acquired by Glassbox Media (I've since left and found a new home at Evergreen Podcasts), and as a dyed-in-the-wool people pleaser, I immediately felt burdened with a great responsibility.
I was now running ads and being paid to podcast full-time. At the time, I felt strongly that this meant I had to do more. In retrospect, I now know I was wrong. In retrospect, also, I'm glad I was wrong because it brought me to the realization which has prompted me to make the change I'm writing this blog post about.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself.
I went from podcasting once a week to podcasting 7-days a week. I thought I had to. Not because anyone told me I had to, but because I felt that was what I needed to do to "earn" this new privilege I had. There are very few people who get the chance to podcast for a living.
I also felt that, because my episodes were so short, and the network wanted a certain number of ad slots a week, that the only way to make listeners and the network happy was to spread those ad slots out across many episodes so that listeners only had one or two ads per 15-minute episode.
People pleasing, network pleasing, I was slowly outsourcing the form my show took. I was allowing what I felt others wanted, or what others told me I needed to do, to change what the podcast looked like.
Had this been happening to a friend, I could have seen the mistake. But it was happening to me, and I was too caught up in the sudden urgency of it all. The podcast was my job now, there were so many listeners, it felt like so much was riding on doing so much.
The longer this went on, the more anxious and self-conscious I got.
Fear about not doing enough was replaced with fear of not being smart enough to be "the most reviewed Stoicism podcast on Spotify." My response to this was to bring on an Academic co-host in 2023, another mistake, but one that would, again, lead me to an important realization.
Now I had a show that was about Stoicism. That's never what I wanted, I never wanted to be a podcast that was about studying Stoicism, I wanted a podcast that helped me live more Stoically.
By doubting myself and outsourcing the direction of Practical Stoicism, I had created a podcast that was only 50% self-help and now 50% dry academic nuance that was only interesting to people who wanted to study Stoicism more than they wanted to live it.
This caused so many problems. And it caused them during a time in my life where I was navigating the implosion of an ENTIRE LIFE built on this people pleasing disposition of mine.
This podcast lead me to the life equivalent of a hard reboot in the most dramatic sense of the metaphor. It exposed everything I had been ignoring in the name of people-pleasing and forward-progress.
I was born in 1983, I started this podcast in 2022, and I only figured out who I really was in 2024.
If you're a young person reading this: midlife crises are not myths, they are the result of a lifetime of assenting to false impressions, and they only happen once that rickety scaffolding of false impressions has been piled so high it can't support your weight anymore.
In the aftermath of the collapsing of my scaffolding I've been wrangling with a thought...
"But I know all about Stoic concepts, principles, and values... how could this have happened to me?"
Because memorizing books, chapter and verse, doesn't equal knowledge. I talked about this in a recent episode -- it's amazing how much this podcast is still about me learning as I go -- where I said something along the lines of,
"You have to internalize what you know, or you don't really know it."
This is the difference between the sage and the Prokoptôn.
The sage has internalized everything he or she knows. It has become part of who they are to such a degree that they cannot act out of accordance with their knowledge.
The Prokoptôn, on the other hand, might have read and studied all the same things, and they can answer all the questions right on the multiple choice "Virtue Test", just like the sage could, but when it comes time to put things into to practice, they still hesitate, faulter, and fail. Because what they've learned hasn't become "known" enough to become who they are.
This podcast isn't a "Stoicism Podcast", it's a "self-help podcast rooted in Stoic principles, concepts, and values."
And I have been so afraid of saying that out loud because of how people think of "self-help" as a genre of media or information.
The self-help industry is a playground of charlatans, a library of endless psycho-babble, and I didn't want to be associated with it at all. I didn't want to have to try to be one of the few outliers within that genre that aren't perfect examples of what is wrong with that genre.
But who permitted charlatans and proponents of woo to own the entire landscape of self-help?
And what is philosophy, and especially Stoic philosophy, if not self-help? The entire philosophy is about attaining the knowledge of how to live excellently, and it says that this knowledge looks different for everyone and is arrived at through different paths that each individual has to walk alone.
That's self-help and self-improvement, isn't it?
Was Zeno a charlatan? No.
Is Stoicism invalidated by its being a form of self-help? Certainly, it is not.
People refer to me as an "American philosopher of Stoicism", and I'm okay with that, I guess, but I'm not interested in creating philosophy content for philosophers... nor am I interested in creating content for people who want to study Stoicism... I'm not a Professor, am I?
What I'm interested in is creating self-help content based on real Stoic philosophy for people who are looking to leverage Stoic concepts, principles, and values (fully or just in part) to live more complete and fulfilling lives.
I'm interested in that because learning how to live Stoic values is far more important than learning how to recite them -- and even if you only learn how to live a handful of those values, and you do it imperfectly, that's okay because we're all Prokoptôn, even if we're not all Stoics.
It's been a painful evolutionary process, but...
I don't wish it would have been a less nauseating rollercoaster. Instead, I'm thankful it's been exactly as chaotic as it has needed to be in order for me to arrive at a place of clarity where I understand and believe in my role confidently and without uncertainty.
As a result of my realizing what this podcast really is, not much will change.
I'll still be giving advice about contemporary concerns through the Stoic lens, and I'll still be sharing excerpts from ancient Stoic texts. What will change is my willingness to discuss Stoicism from a much more contemporary position.
Stoicism is a philosophy for living.
If you're going to practice it, or emulate even some of its ideals, you need to put it to the test not against the sealed records of history but against the world which exists today.
That's Practical Stoicism. That's what this podcast is about.
