Massimo Pigliucci

And he says, I'm paraphrasing here, but he says that essentially the obstacle can become the way, the way forward.

In other words, the obstacle itself might suggest to you another way of doing things that uses the obstacle in your favor instead of against you.

Now, that really is straightforward Taoism.

This is going with the flow.

However, that's only one component of both Taoism and

and Stoicism, they differ in a number of other respects.

And also, we have no reason to think that one directly influenced the other.

Taoism took shape a little earlier than Stoicism, about a century or so or thereabout earlier.

But we have no reason to believe that there has been any contact between the two cultures in that sense, in sort of a philosophical exchange, so to speak.

Also, there are a number of other things

Stoicism that don't find any, as far as I know, I'm not an expert on Taoism, but as far as I know, they don't find a correspondence in Taoism of, for instance, the notion of cardinal virtues, the notion that we should live according to nature in the specific sense that I was saying earlier.

But certainly there are similarities, and not just with Taoism.

Buddhism is perhaps even more obvious example of a similarity there.

between the two philosophies on the Eastern and Western tradition.

In terms of their ethics, there often are major differences in terms of metaphysics.

The way in which, let's say, Buddhists or Taoists think about the universe and how it works is very different from the way the Stoics do.

Yes, and unfortunately, the listener is pointing to a whole subcategory, subclass, so to speak, of aspiring Stoics who is really making a fundamental mistake.

These are the so-called red pill, manly man kind of approach to Stoicism.

I call it Broicism, as in bros, and it's really a distortion of the original Stoicism.

In the case of the Broics in particular,