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.c.u.u.k. Go to shopify.com.uk.uk.u. That's shopify.com.com.com. Welcome to the daily stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key

stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Skip the shortcut. Take the long way instead. There's a great exchange between Epictetus and a student

that encapsulates how the Stoics likely would have felt about artificial intelligence. Tell me what to do,

the student says. It would be better to say, Epictetus corrects him, make my mind adaptable to any circumstances. In our fast-paced

world, we are constantly bombarded with promises of shortcuts to success, happiness, fulfillment.

We're advertised get-rich-quick schemes and productivity hacks on social media, which is itself

kind of a shortcut to human connection.

And now artificial intelligence presents itself as perhaps the ultimate shortcut,

offering to write our emails, draft our essays, create our art, even think and plan for us.

AI promises to do the intellectual heavy lifting while we reap the rewards, suggesting we can

bypass the learning process altogether. Marcus Aurelius, despite being Emperor of Rome, still made

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