May 26, 2020

Rory Sutherland is a best selling author, ad man being the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and Mather and co-founder of Ogilvy Change, a behavioral science practice where they believe the greatest gains to be made in business and society are psychological, not technological.  
James Altucher has been talking with a wide variety of experts about the Coronavirus, everyone from an immunologist, physicians, geneticist, economist to policy experts and super forecasters in the form of regular updates starting in February. He also lives in Manhattan, which is ground zero for the epidemic here in the states, which gives him another perspective I don’t have.
The Stoics’ realized that even though you have limited control over what setbacks you experience, you can develop considerable control over how you respond to them. The 1st century Stoic Seneca wrote about the differences between experiencing a setback and suffering from it, by changing the perspective of how one thinks of setbacks. 
This episode is about trying to understand our true capacity to cope with stress and how to arouse the dormant resilience in all of us. My guest on this show seems to be proof there are benefits from extreme physical challenges. In his case, actually seeking out stressors and using them to hack the nervous system - reprogramming it's response to those stressors.
As I publish this on April 6, 2020, there are 340,000 cases of the Coronavirus in the U.S. with over 9,700 deaths. Over 70,000 deaths world wide. The amount and velocity of information on the pandemic can be overwhelming and much of it is conflicting. Do this - don't do that, this works, no it doesn’t.
Dr. Steven M. Southwick, is the author of Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges. In this show he summarizes his research into the psychological, biological, and social impact of trauma, combining the latest scientific findings in the area of resilience drawing on two decades of work with trauma survivors