Practical Philosophy with Dr. Gregory Sadler

george grombacher 0:01
Well workloads, George G. And the time is right. welcome today’s guest strong and powerful Dr. Greg Sadler. Greg, are you ready to do this?

Dr. Greg Sadler 0:08
I am. Thanks for having me on again.

george grombacher 0:10
And welcome back. Let’s go. Dr. Greg is a professor of philosophy. He’s the president of reason IO. He’s an APA, certified philosophical counselor. And I think this is your third or fourth time back on the show. So excited to have you back, tell us a little bit your personal lives more about your work, why you do what you do?

Dr. Greg Sadler 0:30
Well, I’m a person who’s got his foot and two different fields, you could say, but they’re closely connected. So I still do academic philosophy, which is where I started out, I teach for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and occasionally from Marquette University. But I do a lot of public facing philosophy and working with professionals. And as you mentioned, I’m an APA, certified philosophical counselor. So I work with individual clients. And so I’m, you know, kind of doing two different closely related jobs. And I like to say that I just saw our motto is, you know, putting philosophy into practice. But I actually tell people that in both of these jobs, I’m really more of a Salesman, what I’m doing is taking products from ancient or medieval or modern philosophy, and then repackaging them and selling them. And it’s really nice to do, because if you’ve got a quality product, you don’t have to do a lot of salesmanship or, you know, you don’t have to resort to lying to people or things like that, right. So if you’ve got a product that sells itself, so long as you don’t screw it up, which is what I think philosophy, rightly understood is, then it, you know, it’s, it’s a lot of fun to do. So that’s, that’s essentially, what I’ve been doing. You know, maybe the last decade and a half, since I left my full time position at Fayetteville, Fayetteville State University, and then sort of branching out, but that’s a lot of bio already.

george grombacher 2:07
I appreciate that sells itself, as long as we don’t screw it up. Seems like that’s a feature slash bug of the human condition is when things are going well, we have a tendency to screw them up.

Dr. Greg Sadler 2:18
We have a tendency to like, take it easy, thumb wise, right, we have this tendency last things are gonna just keep proceeding along for the next 510 years. And the market won’t change or conditions won’t change. And I mean, nowadays, the rate of change is so quick that we, we can’t afford to just coast I would say for a while and I think about like what you’ve done with this podcast, it’s gone through some interesting, important changes, right? I imagine that those weren’t just knee jerk reactions, but you’re like, I think I got to take a look at what’s happening down the pike. And you may not have formulated it in terms of philosophy. But if you think about the thought processes that go into it, it probably does fall under that that rubric.

george grombacher 3:11
What do you mean from, like, from how, how so from a, from a philosophical standpoint,

Dr. Greg Sadler 3:17
so one of the terms that we often use, which is kind of jargony is teleology, right? And what it means is thinking in terms of where you want to go your ends or purpose or your goals, and then figuring out how you get there the means, right? And figuring out what your real goals are, and what’s driving your, what are your motivations, you know? So for example, we were going to talk about wealth in this, why do people want to be wealthy? Right? Is it so that they can like, buy everything under the sun? Well, that’s one set of goals, right? Or it could be I want to provide for my kids and be able to take care of myself and not be a burden. That’s a whole different set of goals. And we could keep on going with that. And then you think about, well, what are you going to do? What do you have to do in order to get there, and we don’t typically think of that sort of reasoning is philosophical, but that’s what philosophers from, you know, Plato and Aristotle onward really did talk a lot about and you’re not going to get that too much, I would say in an academic philosophy class, but that’s where we can we can apply it in real life. So there’s a lot of people I would say, who are doing practical philosophy without even realizing that’s what they’re engaged in, because we call it all sorts of other things, you know, business productivity, or, you know, self help or things along those lines.

george grombacher 4:46
Do you think that we put a different name on it like that to make it more palatable?

Dr. Greg Sadler 4:51
No, I think well, maybe maybe in some cases, right. Because there’s some crowds where if you say, Hey, we’re gonna do some philosophy, they their eyes will glaze He’s over there, they’re gonna leave the room. But I think it’s more that philosophers are responsible for this. They the academic philosophers did a lousy job for years and years and years, explaining what the hell they were doing to ordinary people and why people should care about it. There’s this kind of elitist, right, like, oh, philosophy, that’s for the smart people, not for not for you bums over there. And I think that the philosophers who indulge themselves in that for whatever reasons, maybe they believed it, maybe they just liked, you know, feeling superior to other people, they screwed over the profession by doing that. And so now, we gotta kinda, you know, bring philosophy back front and center. But we got, you know, we got to make a case for it. We can’t just say, Oh, here’s a prestigious thing that you ought to indulge yourself in, because that’s, that’s not, that’s not really making a case to anybody.

george grombacher 5:58
Is that it strikes me that that there are there’s always sort of that that’s happening. It’s so many different aspects of our lives, you have coastal elites. And then you have the the deplorable basket of people. It’s kind of see what I’m saying is that

Dr. Greg Sadler 6:24
I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t divided along coastal versus like flyover country, because you’ve got elites all over the Midwest and South to write. And some and it’s not even like, you could say political, they’re, they’re conservative elites, they’re liberal elites, and you can find them just about anywhere. And then, you know, on the coasts, a lot of people got to just make a living, too. Yeah.

george grombacher 6:53
And I guess I should have just said, elites versus people that aren’t necessarily the, those are the wrong terms. Is it? Is it a function of, of it, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a human arc of, of meeting my needs, and then reaching a level where I’m successful, and I can either remain there, or I can realize and kind of get over myself, and not be so pompous or highfalutin about it?

Dr. Greg Sadler 7:22
Yeah, I think that that would be a factor in it. I mean, I do think that there is a tendency among many people, if they do have, if they’re elite in some way, they’re going to hold on to that, right, because it makes you feel good to be superior to other people. And then, you know, you can have like crises and realizations and be like, Oh, that’s maybe not what I should be focused on, people. People grow out of that occasionally. But some people stay with that forever. And there is no profession that’s immune to that. So you would think that, like philosophers are super rational, right there, they’ve got this long history of questioning authority and stuff like that. And, you know, on the whole, academic philosophers are just as bad as conformist and prestige driven as any other person, they just have. They’re doing it in different modalities. So now, you know, philosophy can help us understand that it is can you know, other disciplines that are closely connected, like psychology or economics, both of which came out of philosophy, originally, or, you know, we could pick and choose others? So, you know, I would say to sort of bring that, what would you call it, tie it up in a knot. There’s a, there’s real helpfulness, that philosophy properly understood, can bring to the table for a lot of people. But philosophers, by the way, that they’re trained aren’t automatically going to be good at that you got to, you got to appreciate ordinary people and not just talk down to them. You know, you gotta, you gotta, like, take their needs and wants and fears and desires seriously enough. And that’s what I think a lot of the great philosophers throughout history did. You know, Aristotle is a great example. We tend, we typically think of him as like, you know, he was part of a Greek elite, guaranteed. I mean, he was his dad was a doctor who worked at the court of Philip of Macedon. He had he didn’t have him on phone, but he could like reach out to Alexander the Great and get specimens and stuff like that. But he also, you know, he thought that it was important to look at what, what problems people had and dig into that and figure out how you could you could change your motivational structures how you could like, move away from troublesome traits of character and improve your life so you could have good relationships with other people these these are very relatable things I think it’s just that a lot of time. times the way it’s explained isn’t so relatable.

george grombacher 10:03
This idea or this practice of or whatever it is teleology. I’ve never heard that term before. I love it. Yeah, it makes me think of the whole The unexamined life is not worth living. It makes me think about how so few of us in this, this was me, too. I knew how important goal setting was and thinking about my future, but I never did it until I was 35 years old. Yeah, so I feel like there’s so many people out there that it’s not that we’re not capable of doing it, it’s just that we’re not doing it.

Dr. Greg Sadler 10:32
Yeah, and maybe you could say there’s incentives against doing it too. You know, we live in a culture that sometimes preaches to us don’t consider certain goals, because those are just bad goals. You know, like, so if we’re going to talk about wealth, you know, a lot of these ancient and medieval philosophers, they didn’t look at wealth, whether it’s property or income, or however, we want to conceive of it as a bad thing. But I think there’s a lot of people who think that if you are, you know, if you have to make a living, and which also, you know, philosophers have to, that there’s something bad about that, you know, or something shameful, like you, you’re not, you know, looking at really important things, you’re, you’re worrying too much about the day to day stuff. But I mean, you and I both have kids, and, you know, spouses and households, and so we know very well that, sooner or later you got to get paid. Somebody’s got to pay you. And you know, you gotta be willing to ask people for that, and sometimes take on extra projects, or ask for a raise, or do whatever else you need to do, and, you know, are going the other way, because that’s like money coming in, you can think about like, what are you spending your money on? Are you are you wasting it on products that are not really going to conduce to your happiness, but you’re doing because everybody’s telling you, you need these sorts of things, you know? Well, that’s where considering the goals that you have can be really helpful. And I you know, another thing I would say, too, we will often frame this in terms of like individuals, right? You and I are people that we can decide are on our own. But if you are in a, in a matrix, a fabric of relationships, like a marriage, or a business partnership, or some sort of institution, it’s really helpful to have other people in on thinking that stuff through I mean, my wife has helped me out in a lot of cases by saying, What the hell are you doing? What are you thinking with this? I didn’t, you know, it’s not always a very aggressive challenge or something. So it’s asking a useful question. And then we we talk things out. So, yeah, that thinking through things telling a logically can be very, it can be good to have a guide or to have a partner or somebody else who can bounce things off.

george grombacher 13:06
I couldn’t agree more. I’m fascinated by talking about money. It oftentimes, it oftentimes, it takes rock bottom bad news, so major problems to actually start doing thinking things. Yeah, making change. Yeah. You know, and I’m fascinated by, that’s the behavior gap between what I intellectually understand I ought to be doing and what I actually do. And it strikes me that I recently learned about the whole memento mori. Okay, thing I’m fascinated by it. Is, so there’s a question in here somewhere, but I don’t know exactly what it is, other than how do you? How do you motivate people to proactively engage in teleology and to, to act more in, in, in, in their benefit?

Dr. Greg Sadler 14:06
I suppose, I mean, the dynamic that you’re talking about at the start is something we can see throughout history, right? People when things are going well, they’re like, well, system must be working, or I don’t need to think about this sort of stuff. I’m just gonna, like, take it easy, and enjoy and coast along. And that’s when things start getting dicey. And you know, problems are on the horizon, or you lose everything that people are like, oh, man, I really have to rethink things. Because clearly, I had the wrong mindset. And so you mentioned being proactive about that. And I think that’s a great contemporary term for you could call it teleology at a meta level, you think about okay, so things are going okay for me right now or even good for me right now. I’m happy with how things are. But if I’m prudent, I should realize stat with within the world of money, or social status, or any of these things that that we often call external goods, they can change pretty quickly. And they’re they’re rather unpredictable. You know, even our bodies, right? As we age, weird stuff starts happening. And we’re like, yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t think I’d have need to get a gallbladder out or whatever it happens to be, you know, I didn’t but but I know people who have, and it’s always a big surprise. So we can we can decide to be more mindful and not in the like, the clearer your head, I’m going to sit in a corner and just like think about nothing, or my breath kind of thing. But being mindful in a more important way thinking about like, Well, what do I want my life to look like? Or how do I want my kids to be doing 20 years from now? And what would I need to do in order to like, make those sorts of things happen? Or what do I want to do when my kids are going to leave the house? What does the rest of my life going to look like? What am I going to find? valuable. And so being proactive means being thoughtful or mindful about what it is that we need to think through. So philosophy can be both a means to that it’s a way of being thoughtful and proactive, but it can also be part of the end, maybe you want to do practical philosophy, you know, in a very broad sense. So there’s all of that stuff going on the Memento Mori, right. So being mindful of death. Sounds very morbid. But it’s actually super helpful. Because if you think about, like, what your life is worth, what it’s about, and what people would, for example, say about you after, after you die, like you know, oftentimes we have students and ethics classes, particularly business ethics classes, write their own eulogy, right, so they can, and we distinguish between, I forget who came up with this idea of eulogy virtues, and resume virtues, the resume virtues are the things that you like, you know, your day to day stuff. So he showed up to work on time, he was very diligent or something like that. That’s a resume virtue. If if the best thing that somebody has to say about you at your funeral is yeah, he showed up every single day, that’s not good. You know, you want it to be more like, well, he was generous, or he, he was very, you know, attentive to the needs of his family or something. Along those lines are he he found ways to make a lot of money without cheating a whole bunch of people? That’s those are good things, right. So by thinking about being mindful of deaths, I think that’s the best way of translating my mental Morey. You can help to put things in perspective. You know, a lot of things in the end don’t matter quite as much as we think they do, like making money, right. But interestingly, even these philosophers who didn’t have any conception of an afterlife, and who thought that death, that’s it, they had wills, we know that Aristotle, for example, had a will because it’s recorded. Epicurus, you know, think about the Epicureans life is all about pleasure, avoiding pain, let’s live in this comfortable garden together, he gives very specific instructions about what they’re supposed to do with the common funds whose daughter needs to be taken care of all this stuff, right? So why would they care about that, because they realize that their life isn’t the whole show that what we can do is set things up well for other people. And we can think about the, you know, if we think in the present about the value of our life that can make us prioritize, or deprioritize things that we’re doing so I can say, you know, watching shows on Netflix, it’s fun, but maybe that’s not the most important thing I should be doing. Maybe I should reach out to somebody I haven’t talked to for a while, you know, rebuild that relationship, or I should do a little bit of hustling and think about, you know, a way that I can earn some money doing some constructive activity that people benefit from, you know, so being mindful of death, I think can be, at least for some people quite helpful. And you don’t have to do you don’t have to like think about death every day in order to do that, but it sure helps.

george grombacher 19:33
I think I I really think that it does, I think

Dr. Greg Sadler 19:36
that’s your I mean, you mentioned it’s become something new on your radar. Have you been like experimenting with it like thinking about?

george grombacher 19:44
I had never I just had never heard the term. I had heard that stoics meditated on their death. And so I’ve been doing that for a long time since I started meditating in roughly 2015 So it is, I could see where people would think it’s morbid, because it certainly is. But it’s more, you know, it’s just going to happen. And it helps me to. It helps me to just just just to reframe, and to consider what is important. And what’s the most important thing I should be doing? What’s the highest and best use of my resources? Yeah. And I could do that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but I’m sure that philosophers wouldn’t want me to be burning out or to not have any time off or, or, or not.

Dr. Greg Sadler 20:35
Yeah, it’s, it’s one of those things that we call a philosophical practice. And you could think of this as analogous to practices that you do in other domains of your life, like, you know, exercising, right. I mean, you could, in fact, be at the gym, not 24 hours a day, because you need to sleep and you also need some some rest time, but you could be like, obsessing over your body all the time. And that, you know, there are some people who do that. I don’t think that’s a particularly happy life. Because what about your relationships? What about reading books? Or, you know, listening to books on on? I was gonna say, tape, but you know, that’s really dating myself. On mp3 files. What about all the other things that we like to do? And this is, this is where like, proportions really important, we want to have a full well rounded life with other people that we’re sharing a full, well rounded life with. So we have to say, Okay, this gets this amount, this gets this amount. So you know, considering your own mortality, maybe that’s a daily practice for five minutes. And, you know, maybe you bring it up every once in a while, like you’re visiting somebody in the hospital and they’re not doing good is, it’s kind of a good occasion for thinking that through. So it could be like, you’ve got your, your routines, and you’ve got your opportunities for practicing that. And you can you can do this with other philosophical practices as well.

george grombacher 22:12
I think that that’s such a valuable thing. I’ve taken it to thinking about in terms of what’s my working title is rituals of success. So whatever that might be,

Dr. Greg Sadler 22:22
I like that, that rituals rather than just like, practices, ritual sounds a bit more bit more weighty.

george grombacher 22:32
Right. Yeah. And I also like proportion, okay. In financial, we think about asset allocation. Right. Right. You know, but proportion is, is I think that that’s a it’s routines versus ritual, I think the proportion is better.

Dr. Greg Sadler 22:50
I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, when we do think about so income sources, and then you know, what we’re investing in, and then what we’re spending out what our consumption is, if somebody just has one main stream of income, and it’s not something completely reliable, you’d be like, well, that’s imprudent that’s, that’s not smart. And then, you know, what are you, you could think of the investment part as like, well, we’ve got my body that I’m gonna like, keep, you know, relatively healthy, I’ve got my relationships with people, we’ve got, like, you know, whatever I am doing in my community. And these are all things that we make allocations, not just of money, but even more importantly of time, and attention and effort. And I kind of like that metaphor, and I may actually steal it from you and use it and tell us about asset allocation. Because that’s a great way to get that across to people. When you say proportion. People like Yeah, yeah, yeah, proportion, everything needs to be in proportion. Sounds great. But then they don’t want to do it.

george grombacher 23:56
Makes sense? But there’s no chance of actually going to do that.

Dr. Greg Sadler 23:59
Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things where it sounds great. And this is where, you know, philosophy becomes very practical, as opposed to merely theoretical things can sound wonderful as we’re like listening to some, you know, some somebody explaining it, and we’re like, oh, this is so cool. I’m gonna make this part of my life. Well, no, you actually have to do make it part of your life. And that requires all these little anchor points, you know, in the day and the week and, you know, consulting other people in my doing the practice, right. And I think a lot of people are less prone to, to do that.

george grombacher 24:39
But more likely, if you do find those anchor points, I mean, it’s so much of my life and the success that I’ve had, it’s about habits and and and the routines associated with them and finding those different anchor points or rituals of success. This is when I do a certain thing and it causes me to think about it this way. Do I need to remind myself? And I need to be consistently reminded otherwise? I forget.

Dr. Greg Sadler 25:08
How do you do that? Do you do have other people involved in that process of reminding yourself? Or do you create for yourself? Like, you know, calendar appointments, where it’ll shoot you a little, you know, reminder and say, Hey, now’s the time for doing this, or did you do it? Can you like, do it on your own? Where you’re like, Okay, I need to remind myself, it’s this time of the day, I need to, you’ve got it going out in your mind, you’re like talking to yourself? Or do you do a combination of all three of those are?

george grombacher 25:38
Yeah, for me, it’s definitely a combination. There are certainly some things that are triggered by other human beings, like my kids waking up in the morning that triggers certain activities that must be done. I have plenty of electronic reminders that, you know, every certain time of the day, or the certain kind of time of week that I do certain things. I I have a skull that I wear around my neck. That is the momento Mori. And, and so every time i i, if I’m putting ticking it off, or on or I feel it, it just, it’s a small little liner. Yeah. Smaller reminder. So yeah, I try. And I try to once I’ve decided, this is something I want to do, or a certain attitude or certain way they want to feel, I will sometimes have a physical thing like, like the wedding ring is certainly another one example. Yeah,

Dr. Greg Sadler 26:33
yeah. And, I mean, you’re badly off. If you’re using the wedding ring in the sense of like, somebody’s flirting with you. And you look at your hand, you’re like, Oh, I’m married. That’s right, I better not do that. It can be much more, it can be a lot better in terms of like looking at it and be like, oh, I need to actually, like, make sure I connect with my spouse who I haven’t talked to all day, because we’re both working really hard about, you know, whatever it’s going to be you know,

george grombacher 27:02
give her a compliment, whatever, whatever it is. Do something kind Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I

Dr. Greg Sadler 27:08
hadn’t thought about that. I mean, I, I’ve been wearing this one. Well, since we got married 12, almost 12 years ago, and rarely take it off. And rarely look at it.

george grombacher 27:23
But that’s easy. Yeah. But I’m fortunate

Dr. Greg Sadler 27:26
that, you know, we’re in almost constant contact, because we both work largely from home and do a lot of things together. So, yeah,

george grombacher 27:37
there’s, it seems like once I get a hold of a quote, I’m like a dog with a bone where I just want to keep using it. And right now, it’s Samuel Johnson’s, we need to be reminded more than we need to be informed.

Dr. Greg Sadler 27:47
And that is a good one. Yeah.

george grombacher 27:51
It’s we know a lot of the stuff that we need. It’s the whole everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten kind of a thing. So yeah. What’s true, and it’s not an ocean of stuff that I need to learn still, Greg?

Dr. Greg Sadler 28:04
Well, you and me both, you know, sometimes people will, because I’ve been doing, you know, philosophy in one sense or another, either academically or professionally now for almost 30 years. And people will be like, oh, you know, you’ve read a lot of stuff. And you know, you’re putting a lot of stuff out there must be so wonderful. And I’ll be like, Well, I mean, the stuff that I’ve read is just a tiny, tiny little bit of what you could actually possibly read, I don’t even know. And I kind of suspect that the stuff that I read is pretty valuable and pretty important. You know, I think it probably can’t go wrong reading some Plato or Aristotle or the stoics are, but you know, there’s, there’s like, literally hundreds of 1000s of people that I haven’t read, and I’m never gonna get a chance to read, you know, and how do I, you know, it’s funny, because people will be like, have you read so and so on? I’ll be like, I’ve never even heard of them. You know? So it’s, it’s oftentimes somebody who is whose opinion I value or I think, has their head screwed on straight, they’ll say, Well, you should really read this person. I’ll be like, yeah, see if I can fit it into my, my schedule, you know, and hopefully, after I read it, I won’t forget half the things that I’ve read in there. So, yeah, there’s an awful lot that we need to get from other people. And that’s just with reading, I mean, think about like, physical exercise and our bodies, or how to invest our money wisely. Or, you know, all these myriad matters, how not to screw up our relationships or how to fix them once we’ve actually bollocks them up pretty bad.

george grombacher 29:45
And all too often, the answer is just to do nothing. And to kind of keep it going. Well, which is a really sad and terrible way to kind of bring things to a conclusion, Greg, shame on.

Dr. Greg Sadler 29:56
I don’t think so. I think in a lot of cases This is and I do get a lot of clients in the philosophical counseling, and then sometimes with executive coaching, where they’re bummed out because they’ve, they’re doing the right thing, but they’ve kind of hit like a plateau. And they’re not feeling the same psychological rewards from it. And I’ll say, No, it’s a great thing that you’ve actually got that far. And, you know, it might be a year before something cool happens, you know, but you’re, it’s not without value the putting in the daily work and continuing on, even if it seems boring, or how did you put it? We’re going out on something. I mean, what I want to say is, these things are positive, we often treat it as if it’s a neutral, but it’s really a positive.

george grombacher 30:53
Well said. Greg, thank you so much for coming back on, where can I learn more about you? How can people engage with you?

Dr. Greg Sadler 31:01
So I’m really fortunate, and you may get a kick out of this. In the past, I would say, well, you need to look for me here and this website. If you just Google Gregory Sadler, most of my stuff will pop up. And you know, I’m at the top of the search engine things, at least for Gregory Sadler, which sucks for the many other Greg and Gregory Sadler’s out there who are working professionals who aren’t in like the top page. So if people want to find me, it’s easy enough. You know, almost all of my interesting things that people could want to see will be in the first couple search results for Google. That I guess if you’re like not a Google person, put it in DuckDuckGo or Bing and see what comes up as well.

george grombacher 31:47
I love it. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did show, Greg your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Type into your favorite search engine, Gregory Sadler, sa d le AR and immerse yourself in the world of all things that are Dr. Gregory Sadler. Thanks again, Greg.

Dr. Greg Sadler 32:06
Thanks for having me. Yeah.

george grombacher 32:08
And until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

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