Most of our media are owned by a handful of tech billionaires, but there's one place that still operates like the internet was never invented.

On the new season of the divided dial from On the Media, we're exploring shortwave radio, where prayer and propaganda coexist with news and conspiracy theories, and where an existential battle

for the public airwaves is playing out right now.

Listen to On the Media, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome back to practical stoicism. I'm your host, Tanner Campbell, and today I'm going to be having a discussion with Sharon LaBelle.

Sharon LaBelle wrote a book some years ago called The Art of Living. And that book is probably single-handedly responsible for me being here today. And I might mean that in multiple

ways. I at least mean that in I wouldn't be podcasting about stoicism if it wasn't for Sharon.

So to have her on the show, knowing that she does not give many interviews and knowing that she

had such a big impact on me was kind of a celebrity freakout

moment for me a little bit. The discourses from Epictetus and the Encaridion by Epictetus

and the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Letters to A Stoic or Letters from A Stoic, Seneca's

letters. Those books were very difficult for me when I was younger,

let's say 2014, 2015, which is really when I started to have my interest in Stoicism, because I

saw it as being so practical. Those books that I just mentioned were harder for me to get into

because I was an atheist at the time. I'm still an atheist, but I was part of the atheist activism community at

the time. And so I had a very acerbic relationship with anything that talked about God. Because I viewed

religion, and in particular, though I wouldn't have made the distinction at the time, modern

religion, I had such a bad view of it. And I allowed that view to get in the way of me

being able to really appreciate some stoic text, because again, it was just very acerbic. When I saw

Sharon's book, The Art of Living, there was something very different about it. Number one, it was

short. It was probably only 120 pages. And number two, the cover of it didn't look like

every other cover of every other stoic book I had seen on the shelf at that time. It was a marble

...