The welcome to today's episode of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast.

We are continuing our series of irregular episodes during these irregular times.

Amanda is here joining me.

Hello.

And we're still curating some content for you today, but doing it in a different way

than usual.

I got thinking about how now more than any time I've been aware of in my life is an excellent

time to reflect on really any philosophical, psychological tools that we can find that

work for us to help us get through this time.

And the one that I came across five, seven years ago or so that I think is just tailor-made

for the situation we are in right now is stoicism and more specifically the tool of negative

visualization that stoicism sort of pioneered a couple thousand years ago.

It's had a resurgence recently and you know, so I came across it pretty recently and I

turned out I wasn't the only one.

It's sort of becoming more and more popular just within the last decade if you believe

some of the articles that are being written about it.

And so first of all, I want to read some excerpts from the book that introduced me to the

concept, but we also have some clips for you today and we're going to be discussing as

we go.

And what I will, I will preface this by saying that stoicism in general and negative visualization

in particular are things that people tend to either immediately love or hate when they

first hear about it.

...