The Daily Stoic - Brigid Delaney’s Life Changing Year of Living Like a Stoic

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Brigid Delaney was at a unique point in her life and found herself looking for answers around life’s deepest questions: What does it mean to be a good person? How do we stop letting the things out of our control rule our emotions? Can our anger be tamed? After learning more about Stoicism, Brigid decided to let the ancient wisdom from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca guide her decisions for a year. While in Australia on tour, Ryan had the chance to meet Brigid in person and talk with her about why Stoicism resonated with her, how to successfully apply Stoicism to modern problems, and the common misconceptions around Stoicism being exclusively for men. To learn more about Brigid’s experience, check out her book Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times. Brigid Delaney is the author of Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times and Wellmania: Extreme Misadventures in the Search for Wellness. Be sure to check out the Netflix series Brigid co-create, inspired by her book Wellmania!📚 Books Mentioned: Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times by Brigid Delaney The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan HolidayOn Anger: De Ira by SenecaThe Therapy of Desire by Martha Nussbaum Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero by James RommFollow Brigid Delaney on X @ BrigidWD🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And I'm Monica Padman. Monica and I do three weekly shows with celebrities on Monday, experts on Wednesdays, and crazy stories from listeners on Fridays. We're so excited to officially be a part of the Wondry Network. So follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Armchair Expert on YouTube. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired

by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. ["The Last Supper"]

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's funny when we first started doing the podcasts, you know, it was just me reading the daily emails and then we decided we'd do some interviews. Pandemic made it tough to do in person. So we just do them over Zoom. I think I was telling you about this the other day. I just had a guest on who, he was the first podcast that I ever did.

This is Chase Jarvis. I'll bring that to you in a couple of days. But anyways, I did my first podcast in person and then probably like a decade of podcasts over Skype. This is before Riverside and all the software. You just do them all remote. It wasn't until I built out the bookstore that we started doing some in person,

then we built up the studio next to the bookstore. So if you ever watched the Daily Stoic on YouTube, you've seen the studio there. It's in an old barber shop on Main Street here in Bastrop. I haven't done any episodes where I recorded on location until I was in Australia this summer. You know, I was there doing those two talks. By the way, I'll also be doing talks in Europe

and Canada in November. You can grab tickets at RyanHolliday.net slash tour. And when I was in Australia, I knew I wanted to talk to Brigid Delaney, who is a hilarious Australian writer. We shot in this wonderful studio. Thank you to Thomas from Wisecast Studios. But it's funny, Bridget,

Bridget had trouble buzzing into the studio. I was busy doing something else and so was the owner. And as she finally gets in and we're like, she kind of pops in, we're like surprised to see her. She goes, I had trouble getting in. I ended up buzzing enough times and somebody let me in, but I was really worried because there's a lot of brothels in this neighborhood and I didn't want to be barging

into one and I sort of laughed. And then the owner was like, no, you're right. There are a lot of brothels around here. And I was like, oh my God, this is hilarious. She has this new Netflix series that we watched while we were there called Well Mania, which is all about the sort of wellness industry. And she, like me, is sort of skeptical

of some of these wellness influencers, practitioners, pseudoscience, et cetera. And she's been writing this column for many years where she kind of pokes holes in things, looks at fads and trends. And originally she was really skeptical of stoicism. And if you watch the Netflix series or you read her book, Well Mania, you get it.

She's sort of cynical, she's funny, she's insightful, she's kind of a human guinea pig. So when people started talking to her about stoicism, she was like, what's this fad? Obviously this is stupid, Obviously this won't work. And she wrote kind of a negative column about it. And then people pushed back on her a little bit and urged her to give it a real try,

which she did during the pandemic. And whoa, she thought, this is real. This can actually work. And she wrote a whole book about this called Reasons Not to Worry, How to Be a Stoic in Chaotic Times. She let the stoics be her guide for a year. And it's a witty funny book where she's following the wisdom of Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

So we had an awesome interview. She's the author of three books, as I said, Well Mania, This Restless Life, and Wild Things. her new book Reasons Not to Worry How to Be a Guide in Chaotic Times is wonderful. I thought this was a really awesome conversation. You can follow her on Twitter at Bridget WD. You can check out the new paperback edition of Reasons Not to Worry How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times and I'm not sure if I'm gonna be recording any episodes when I'm in Europe,

but if you wanna see me in Rotterdam, Dublin, London, you can grab those tickets at Ryan Holiday.net slash tour. And then I'll be in Vancouver and Toronto after that. And I hope to see all of you there. And thanks to Brigid for coming on the podcast. This was a really fun chat. I thought I'd start in the nerdiest place possible, but have you read Mark Skrillis's letters to Fronto? Do you know who Fronto is?

Oh, the love letters. Well, I wouldn't. There's one interpretation, yes, there is one interpretation that there are love letters, but I just thought it was interesting. So you're a speechwriter, and we have Mark Aserilius' letters between him and his speechwriter, basically.

Yeah, they're amazing. Yes, they're beautiful. I have read them, and I've also read different interpretations of them. But if you want to understand meditations, that's a really great place to start. Well, I just thought the timelessness also of like, you have the same job. Yeah, you know what it like, we think that the ancient world was so different. And it wasn't that different. There were so many like there were lawyers and there were artists, there were poets,

there were speech writers, there were soldiers. Like I just, when you get these like little glimpses into like, no, politics was very different, but also like fundamentally the same job as it is today. And also the founding of Stoicism, like Zeno going into that bookstore and asking, where can I learn philosophy? Now I go into bookstores all the time and say,

where can I learn about this? Or what can you tell me about that? And I mean, that's the extraordinary thing about discovering Stoicism is you discover universalities that are across time and space. Or just the fact that he's a merchant, he's in business, he goes bust, and then he has to be like, what should I do with my life?

Yeah. And how that of like, I screwed this up or this bad thing happened to me, and now I'm starting from scratch. The timelessness of that itself is reassuring and beautiful and surreal. It is, and when I first started diving into Stoicism, it felt very remote.

It felt very masculine, very ancient. It felt like I didn't have the right degrees or qualifications. I felt like I didn't have permission to enter. And then I realized that it was a philosophy of the street. The Stoic is the porch where they all gathered. And there were people who weren't, you know, deemed philosophers.

There were people who had all sorts of ordinary jobs, but wanted to work out how to live in a way that would minimize their suffering. Yeah, I was gonna say, I feel like maybe nobody gave you the memo that Stoicism is only for men. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I found it so applicable to basically, you know,

men and women and children, people who are parents, people who aren't parents, you know, it was so universal. And I found great comfort in the fact that it wasn't exclusionary. People will tell you it's exclusionary, but you know, I looked at the three Romans, Stoics, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. At no point did I ever see anything

that shut the door on me, and that was fantastic. There's some people who think that Zeno was not white. Yes. Described by his swarthy complexion, he's from the Mediterranean. And yeah, the whole idea of like, it's a bunch of old dead white guys is not exactly true. I mean, even it's also fascinating if we have this sense

of like, oh, the Romans were these people who lived in Italy, you know? And, you know, Seneca's from Spain. And when you see the enormity of the Roman Empire, you realise, oh, these people would have seen themselves as being very different and diverse. To say nothing of slave and emperor is literally encompassing the entire social hierarchy. And I think when young men, because it was young men then, went to Rome to make their

name, it was like going to New York now or Washington or going to London. It's a rite of passage. You end up in Rome, but your journey takes you in different places. And one of the things I've been fascinated with, and haven't been able to get to the bottom of, but the crossover between Eastern philosophy and Stoicism. So, you know, there's so many things that make sense, things in Buddhism or the Vedic worldview and Stoicism really collide.

So it makes me think there must have been so much exchange back then of ideas and wisdom, books. You know, during Marcus Aurelius' reign, an envoy, they don't know if it was official or it was just a random Romans, but they make contact with the Han dynasty in China. Oh, wow. And so, yeah, literally East and West do meet

in Marcus Aurelius literally and sort of intellectually. Yeah, there's so many overlaps because the book I did before my Stoicism book was on the wellness industry. So I spent a lot of time in places like Bali and in India, speaking to people who were very deep into meditation or fasting or Eastern traditions. And then I jump over to St stoicism and it's very similar.

Yeah, I mean, Mark Cirillis' book is called Meditations. It's a different form of meditation, but the idea of sort of sitting and observing your thoughts, whether it's like this or it's like this, is fundamentally the same practice. Yeah. And I've been thinking a lot about journaling recently because I'm writing a follow-up

and I keep on returning to the idea of journaling as a way of keeping track of your stoic progress because in many ways meditation is great, it calms the mind, but journaling, you can flip back to what was your mind doing two years ago? Where was your character? So I think journaling seems to be a really specific stoic practice.

I think stoicism is journaling. Yeah. And journaling is stoicism. They are the same thing. It's not like one is a subset of the other. It is basically impossible to practice the philosophy without the writing. And I think that's, you know, we talked about fronto,

like Marx really just learns from his philosophy teacher, but then his rhetoric teacher is teaching him sort of logic and metaphor and tight sentences. And it weirdly, like you take all spiritual and philosophical parts out of meditations. It's just a brilliant work of art and work of thinking. Like here you have this man writing private thoughts to himself that he's not intending to publish.

It shouldn't be so fucking good. Yeah, it's so good. It shouldn't be, the writing shouldn't be, like as a writer, you can't help but go, that is just extremely well. And to imagine that Marcus Aurelius is doing this It shouldn't be, the writing shouldn't be, like as a writer you can't help but go, that is just extremely well, and to imagine that Marcus Aurelius is doing this in Greek, not his native tongue, not intended for publication, I don't know, it's like watching the greatest musician just gave the performance of their life in private and nobody ever knew about

it. That's what meditations is. It is and it feels like, even if you just read it for the writing itself, for the prose, there's poetry in pretty much every line. So, I mean, one of the ones I love the most is watch, see the stars or watch the stars and run with them. Yes. Gives you a sense of look up, check out the cosmos.

It's beautiful. And then you're part of it. So you run with it. And the other one, I was reading it out to someone yesterday. So I won't give perfect recitations here, but it's, you know, accept fate, love the people that fate's brought to your life, but do so with all your heart.

So, I mean, even the most extraordinary romantic poets never got quite as close as Marcus did to the real guts of love and life. He has some passages in there where he's just sort of noting the poetry or beauty of ordinary life that I think about all the time, both as a philosophically, but then also as a writer, he talks about the stalks of grain

bending low under their own weight. He talks about the flex of foam on a boar's mouth. He talks about the way that bread cracks open in the oven. And he says this is a bit of nature's inadvertence. The baker isn't intending for that to happen, but it does. And I've come to understand that that's what meditations is. So Marx really is doing this private inward act of reminding himself what he believes, what's important,

what he should be doing, what he needs to get better at. And the accidental byproduct of that is this book, Meditations, which you and I are reading 2000 years later. He said posthumous fame was impossible and worthless, and he's accidentally seeking it, not because of his accomplishments on the battlefield or his policies as emperor, but because of this private sort of singular act.

There's something amazing about just the beauty of it as a work of unintentional literature. It is, and I think it's important to work out how to read meditations because it does get misread. I was listening to a podcast recently where Mary Beard, you know, the great sort of classicist. She does not like Marx really. She does not like him and doesn't like meditation.

She says it's almost like an Instagram, you know, these Instagram quotes or memes. And I heard that podcast and then I went back to Pader Hedo who did this great, this kind of great sort of introduction as to how to read meditation. This is the inner citadel, right? Yeah.

And what he's saying is that it's a spiritual exercise. So he's not talking about his inner life. He's practicing appreciation of the moment. He's practicing accepting fate. He's practicing all these things and that's the form it takes. It's a byproduct. The writing is the byproduct of the practice. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've noticed, and I'm sure you've done this with your books, is that when writing about Stoicism, I use repetition a lot because it is a practice. You know, you don't read one Stoic book and become a Stoic. You need to, and I was raised Catholic. You know, if you're raised Catholic, you go to mass every week, you go to a Catholic school where you're taught religion every day.

Say the rosary, say the chants. So it seeps into you. And stoicism in many ways is no different. It's a practice. And so whether or not we're modern stoics writing about it now, we have to, you know, have that repetition in our works. Marcus was using repetition, Seneca, you know,

they were all... Look, Marcus is repeating himself because he's struggling with the same things over and over again. He's not trying to write a riveting work of literature. He's trying to work on what he is struggling with in that moment. And we have no idea how he structured it, how it was organized, right?

Even its survival to us as a manuscript is a complete and total mystery. So maybe he put the gratitude stuff at the beginning, maybe he didn the gratitude stuff at the beginning, maybe he didn't, right? Maybe all these singular repetitions were put together in little sections, maybe they weren't. We have no idea, right?

Maybe there was a bunch of stuff that didn't make it, somebody cut it out, we have no idea. So I think it's hard, that idea of repetition, it seems to me to be an empty criticism because, yeah, my journaling is repetitive because I have the same fucking problems. Yeah, I was gonna ask you what if, you know, your journal was to be stolen and published on the internet, what would it look like?

You know, what are you sort of doing? Well, I have the luxury of getting to do a good chunk of my sort of stoic journaling in public. So I wrote this book, The Daily Stoic, which was one page a day, and then I just kept going. So every day for eight years, I've published like a stoic meditation. So it's like, I've been doing that 365 days a year now

for quite some time. So that's my very stoic, explicit practice. Like I think people sometimes, because again, it's not public, Marcus Rufus is not crediting the people that he's riffing on. A lot of the images, the lines, the words in meditations are not Marcus' own.

They're something that he heard from philosophy teacher or read in a book, right? And so I think it's important that we see it as what it was. It's kind of his commonplace book kind of a thing. But so I get to do that part in public. And then my journaling is much more personal and specific, if that makes sense.

About like- Is it about your day? Like are you reflecting? I do one journal. I have this one that makes sense. About like- Is it about your day? Like are you reflecting? I do one journal. I have this one that I love. It's called One Line a Day. And it has five sections on each page and you do it every day for five years.

And you see where you were that day earlier. Or a year earlier. So the first year is cool. The second year is cool. The fifth year is amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. Because you're like, this is the repetitiveness of life. And then yeah, I just have kind of a blank journal that I do and then I did this book called

The Daily Stoic Journal, which has like a stoic prompt every day and I like the prompts, so I do those from time to time also. So for me, it's kind of like this grab bag of just different things to be thinking about, but it's usually like prepping for, okay, I'm flying the next day.

Who do I wanna be? Do I wanna be anxious Ryan or not anxious Ryan? My wife and I have been arguing, where's that my fault? How do I fix that? I'm just working through very specific things in my life. And sometimes I'm writing down things that I might wanna remember later, just cool things. But my journaling is not as publishable

because I get to do the publishing side of things. I find what's amazing about journaling is you see yourself evolve. Yes. So before I found- Or not evolve. Or not evolve, often. So I've kept a journal since I was in my early 20s,

so decades, but not a stoic journal more, just this is what's going on in my life. And what's amazing to read back on journals is how many of your problems just repeat time and time again. Like we seem to have, or humans seem to have one or two core problems that manifest in different situations. And if you're journaling, you can see the patterns.

And I think growth is recognizing your own patterns and then resolving to do something about it. You don't wanna be reading the same problem for the next 30 years. I never quite got Mary Beard's sort of negative fascination with Marcus Aurelius because maybe it's jealousy, he's a much better writer than she is. But like of all the emperors, he's the most likable.

Do you know what I mean? Yes. Like he didn't murder that many people, he didn't get corrupted by the power. You would think also as a historian, as a writer, he would be the one you would gravitate towards. I would be curious to know what she finds so unlikable about him for someone who clearly loves

Roman history and all aspects of Roman life. I've never quite got that. Have you heard of tall poppy syndrome? It's a big Australian thing. Yes. So, you know, you heard of tall poppy syndrome? It's a big Australian thing. Yes. So, you know, cutting down the tallest poppy. So Marcus is the tallest poppy in that world. Sure.

And I think the fact that he is so popular and his books constantly selling, you know, she might be wanting to offer a counter, a counter opinion. When I read Marcus Aurelius, I don't necessarily judge him. Same with Seneca. You don't judge them on their historical record in terms of how many people they killed or their plots, because then you get caught in the weeds. You know, what's the philosophy say? You don't judge Seneca at all, being in politics?

I judge him a little bit. I mean, there's different accounts of also how culpable Seneca was. My, I love the James Romm book, Dying Every Day. That's extraordinary. What I actually love about Seneca is his humanness. He had this ideal that he tried to reach and he had the reality, which was working for Nero. They just couldn't connect. And also the other thing I find fascinating about Seneca is the materialism. You know, they're ordering, I think I read this on your website, the 500 marble tables

for a banquet. And it's like, well, how does that work with preferred indifference? How is he, he's obviously got big appetites for vineyards, for summer houses, for power. And yet he has this side that is telling everyone else how to do life. And that's the other thing is was he telling everyone else or was he writing to himself? Because I get this with my writing is I think sometimes

people presume that I am lecturing as opposed to first speaking to myself. Which I think if you're not a writer, I get you don't necessarily understand, but I find, and I think this is probably true for your books, you're going on a journey yourself first. You're just communicating about it as you go. And so if you see Seneca as speaking to you from a place of perfection,

he's gonna rub you a certain way. And if you see him as a person struggling with these things amidst temptation that by the way, you and I have never had to feel. The most powerful person in the world who, by the way, could kill us at any moment has not asked us to come work for them. And the stakes are not, hey, if I don't do this,

someone worse will do it. We don't necessarily know how we would act in that situation. And so I think to me Seneca is fascinating both first as a writer and a philosopher, but then also as this kind of Shakespearean character. And when you read his plays, which are so dark. Thiestes is incredible.

I can't help but feel that he really did wrestle quite deeply with the moral implications of what he was doing. He just did not have the freedom to talk. Like where was he to speak about how awful Nero was? In his work, you know, I think maybe was? Well, in his work, you know, I think maybe that was the safety valve or the release valve was he couldn't in his own life act a certain way, but he could write.

Yes. He had freedom to write. And I think Shakespeare did the same thing. Shakespeare mentions one contemporary event and it was nearly thrown in prison for it. That's why he talks about Roman history and Danish history and Greek history. That's why he talks about these other things

is because he didn't have the freedom of speech that we take for granted as artists today. They're having to supplement the truth of what they're saying in fiction and drama. Yeah, and I think back to your first point, writers write for themselves. That's the primary, you know, you write a book because you're trying to figure something out.

And it's a private thing. And it's almost bizarre when you have people talking to you about your book, because it's like, oh, that was my own journey. And then it touches people in different ways. But I'm sure Seneca in much of his work was trying to work stuff out for himself. And you know, like letter to Marcia is a good example,

you know, like that's to someone, you can see him working out death and grief in that work. Shortness of life, same thing. It's an intellectual exercise. It's also a spiritual exercise. And it is almost to, you know, there wasn't necessarily a God there that gave them a ready fitted, you know, philosophy or theology that they could live by. They had to sort of come up with it themselves and you can see them doing that in their work. Have you seen the John Malkovich movie where he plays Seneca?

No, should I? It's fascinating. Well, there's a great line in it and his wife is, you see yourself as this philosopher, this simple man. She's like, do you know how the Romans see you? She's like, you're Nero's fucking ghostwriter. And he was. He was.

And the other thing about Seneca is, you know, like when I write about him in, in reasons not to worry, what's his equivalent today? Elon Musk, you know, it's sort of, Well, it's interesting. It's this very powerful, very rich person. It's possibly a Bezos or a Musk, not the murderous kind of impulses,

but the amount of power and the amount of money. So if you imagine Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos being also a great philosopher, what would that look like? And also the greatest writer of their time. In the James Romboc, he points out that for 2000 years, no one could believe that Seneca the philosopher and Seneca the playwright and the politician

were the same person because no one could be that talented. And he's saying that's basically like if Emerson, Ralph Aldo Emerson was also like in Lincoln's cabinet, you know, and it's just, it's unbelievable that you would be that good at that many things. And also have 10 years having asthma in Egypt and you know, convalescing and being exiled. A lot of the dramatic stuff that happened in Seneca's life

was quite a short amount of time. You know, there were, what was interesting about him were long periods spent thinking and contemplating, and then these shorter periods of time of power and action. Yeah, I mean, the Elon Musk example, I would argue it's not Seneca's Elon Musk. Imagine your Elon Musk's advisor, what an exhausting, difficult, morally vexing job

that would be, right? Like you're having to rein in someone who by definition is un-reinable. And so are you judged on the bad things that they do or are you judged by what you prevent them from doing or are you complicit for perpetuating it even though it would happen whether you were involved or not? And there is some argument that the first couple years

of Nero's reign are pretty good actually. That was when he was very young, I guess. Yes, but then there's also, and as we're seeing this in America right now, everyone tells themselves that they're indispensable, that they're the adult in the room, that they're making it not as bad. And there's a fine line between that and enabling and that if everyone stopped enabling something would happen, right? And it doesn't. So it's just the timelessness of the issues is fascinating.

It is. And I think the first Trump administration had a lot of old school Republicans saying, you think I'm a terrible person, but you should have seen what I stopped Donald Trump from doing. I'm a hero. Yeah, yeah. And in some cases weren't wrong. Yeah. Do you know who General James Mattis is, the Secretary of Defense?

I mean, he's a practicing stoic. He reads meditations for like a period of 40 years. Trump's national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, you know, has read the Stokes too. And so like here you have what it feels like this intellectual dilemma when you look at it in Seneca. And then right in front of you is the actual dilemma. And it's real.

Yeah, it is. That's what makes the writing so powerful and resonant today. Yeah. It has these echoes. And one of the other funny things about stoicism is that things they didn't predict or couldn't have seen back then,

like the internet and social media, they actually had amazing sort of souls for, like their whole treatise on dealing with insults is something that you can just pick up and apply to how you go on X or Twitter or Facebook. You know, it is perfectly designed for our times. Yeah, I loved researching this book because it just showed me how to sort of.

So how did you come to the Stokes? So I was a columnist at The Guardian, and I have a weekly column, and I write about, you know, one week I just listened to Joe Rogan nonstop, and I wrote about that. Another week I'd, you know, wake up at 4 a.m. and, you know, act like a CEO. So it was a lot of gonzo stuff.

And Stoke Week was happening in the UK and a friend of mine who's an editor sent me the press release and said, live like a stoic for a week. I was like, oh, I'm more an epicurean. And so I did it. I did Stoic Week. I was hungover. I was, you know, I missed a few of the lessons. I didn't really like it. And I wrote essentially a piss take saying, oh, Stoics, you know, they're so po-faced and boring. And you know, this is, I was too hung over to take this seriously. And I got a lot of pushback from people within Stoic Week, but also Stoics who said, it's a real shame because it's a great philosophy and you could have

actually got something out of it. And I took that on board and the following year I did Stoic Week privately. I did it with some friends, we formed a WhatsApp group, I didn't write about it and I just showed up, did it and really, really liked it. Like the second time round I got it. And I was telling one friend in particular about Stoicism, he's an economist, and it just chimed with him and we decided to sort of undertake a project where we would do some reading and then meet and talk about Stoicism. And we did it each week. So we had a kind of almost a dialogue, a stoic dialogue.

And I'd go and see him and say, I've had this terrible week, I got turned down for a pay rise. And I'd be really frustrated. And he'd say, well, was that within your control too? And so we started applying the stoicism like it was the medicine to each other's lives. And we were out one night talking about it at the pub

and there was a publisher sitting, a publisher that I was acquainted with who was sitting behind us. She said to me later on, you should do a book about this. I said, I can't, you know, I can't write about stoicism. I did one year of a philosophy degree at university and dropped out because it was all mathematics. And you dropped out also.

Yeah. And didn't feel like I had the permission to enter the space. But my friend and I kept going with our stoic journey. And then the pandemic happened and I started writing and it just, it just clicked in and it came out, like Australia had some very severe lockdowns. And so people felt like they didn't have a lot of control. And the book came out after all of that, but people were kind of in a space where they thought if this happens again,

I need to have some sort of framework that's gonna help me understand or help me accept a reality that I don't like very much. And so my book did really well in Australia. It's sold in like more than 20 different countries. So it's been, and now I'm doing another one, which is more of a fable and it's a dialogue between a seeker and a sage. So, so that's really cool. And I found myself practicing it. So the books were a way, the books and the reading

are a way of reinforcing stoicism in my own life. I think that's really important, right? Like stoicism isn't this thing that you read one time. It's not a thing that you get a degree or a certification in. It is a thing you are doing. It is a noun or it's not a noun, it's a verb, right? And the writing about the stoic, you can't write and talk and think and read about this stuff

and not have it seep into you in some way. And that the longer you do that, the more you do that, the more able you are to draw on it in moments big and small in your life. So if you see Stoicism as this thing that you are studying as opposed to a thing that you studied, you're a bit closer to what it's supposed to be. And by the way, that's what Marcus Riehlis is doing,

that's what Seneca is doing with his friend Lucilius, is this kind of ongoing dialogue practice process that's helping them get a little bit better every day ongoing dialogue practice process that's helping them get a little bit better every day at the thing. Absolutely, and you have to keep doing it. Yes. Because you drop it. It's like going to the gym.

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Follow Even The Royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Even The Royals ad-free right now on Wondery+. podcasts, you can binge even the Royals ad free right now on Wondery Plus. My big thing that I'm struggling with at the moment is if people are rude to me, or if someone's, if I'm having to deal with someone that's obnoxious, I get reactive back and I get shitty with them and I ruminate. Yeah. I'm like, how dare that person? And stoicism has been, you know, you go go back to the, what does stoicism say? Oh, you can't control them. Oh,

of course. You know, I have to control my reactions and it's never wrong. You know, I don't always like stoicism. I don't necessarily like the fact that it's a bit unforgiving, I don't necessarily like the fact that it's a bit unforgiving, but it hits real, you know? And... You know what's funny? It's very forgiving to other people. It's not forgiving to you, right? Like, you know, the passage that I have helped popularize

this one from Marcus Reel is about how the obstacle is the way. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what he's specifically talking about is difficult people. He's saying that they are the opportunity for you to practice the stoic ideas. So you could be trying to have a wonderful,

loving, friendly conversation with someone and then they can make that impossible, but they can't take away from you the opportunity to practice some other kind of virtue, patience, forgiveness, empathy. I try to remind myself that that's, when the stoics say the obstacle is the way, they're not talking so much about pandemics

or car crashes or injuries or bankruptcies. They're mostly talking about day to day interactions with annoying, obnoxious, frustrating, evil, stupid people. And Marcus actually put it very plainly in his book, you know, each day you will wake up and you'll be annoying people. It's like, oh, of course. And I love the quote by Seneca, we are bad men living amongst bad men and only one thing will calm us. and that is we must go easy on each other. To me that's the great calming quote because I think if I was to diagnose one of society's biggest problems right now, it's anger. Anger seems to me, there's a huge sort of increase in reporting of domestic violence

in Australia. I'm sure those statistics are across the board. Road rage has gone up, assaults. Also every shop you go into little signs saying don't abuse the staff. It's insane. So it's like, okay, we have an anger problem. Stoicism is so explicit in how you handle anger and how you stop yourself from becoming reactive. And I think if there's one thing I want the world to take from Stoicism at the moment, it's just dealing with anger. If we can do that. There's a wonderful woman named Ashley who does the customer service for Daily Stoic. And you should see some of the emails that she gets from people who ostensibly know and understand

and follow stoicism, people who just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we don't control the post office. We're not the reason your package is delayed. That was the storm that you just experienced. That was the ocean that it had to cross. That was the person who stole it off your porch. It wasn't us.

And yelling at this poor lady, does it do, does it magically make it go away? And it's been illustrated for me because like I get to the airport and then the people tell you that the plane is delayed and you know, like I feel that. And I've certainly acted in ways in the past that I'm not proud of, but just this process of,

yeah, hey, is this in my control? Is this who I wanna be? What opportunity is this presenting me? I think that passage from Marks Relius that you mentioned, the famous one about how today the people you will meet, and he lists all the shitty things that people are gonna be and do. But I think it's so easy we forget the second half of that,

which is he goes, and why are they like this? No, he says, because they don't know any better. And he says, what they can't do is implicate you in their ugliness. Like you, that's the choice that you make, that part's on you. And he says, by the way, we're meant to work together, we're meant to be together.

We're two rows of teeth in the same mouth. That's beautiful. I mean, that's great writing and such a profound insight that the quote can work on this superficial level to the frustrated person who's just pissed off at humanity. And then also the second level, the wiser or philosophical level of like, okay, I've calmed down a little bit.

Here's how I should think about this. I think also just thinking about anger is that not being angry may not necessarily, you might not get on the plane earlier or whatever, but I think you're creating a situation where if you bring the temperature down in your own interactions, it does have a knock-on effect. I had breakfast with a friend yesterday

who works as a volunteer counselor for Lifeline, which is the- Suicide hotline. Yeah, suicide hotline. And I always like asking him when I see him, what's the main kind of thing that people are calling up about at the moment? Like what's the big issue?

Previously it's been addictions, during the pandemic it was like drinking too much. And now he's saying he's seeing a big rise in loneliness and that people feel like they don't have anyone close to them. And they also don't have any interactions necessarily that have got warmth in them either. So I think part of being a stoic is not just to not be reactive, but also to be aware that if someone's angry at you or they're in a bad mood, what's behind that?

I think about those videos, they're very popular in the US because we're awful to each other, but it's some lady or some man freaking out at someone at the store. They're basically screaming, berating. Sometimes they brandish a weapon, whatever. But when I would first see them, I would be like, fuck this person.

And then I've gotten better at going, what is that person's life like? Why did they break in line at the supermarket? What happened? Why did somebody cutting them off in line? Why did this thing not being on sale? What is happening? Their life must be a pressure cooker

of stress and dysfunction because this is not how they want to be acting. You know? This isn't normal. And I think underneath a lot of anger is a lot of suffering. So, you know, there's no compassion in stoicism. That's, you know, something that I grapple with. You know, it's not a stoic virtue.

You don't think it's in the virtue of justice? So my read on compassion is that compassion is wanting something better for someone else, and that's outside your control. So if you have strong emotions of compassion, you are actually wishing for something that you can't change. Yes. I don't know, the golden rule seems to me to be the definition of justice

and is rooted in the sense that how do people deserve to be treated. Yeah. And there is a sense, to me that seems rooted in compassion in some way. Okay, well maybe I can incorporate that into my interpretations. But I think for me the goal in Stoicism has not just been controlling my own sort of worst

impulses, but it's being able to see the suffering in other people and try and show some sort of kindness to others. I think that's where Stoicism stops being this thing which people accuse it of, which is being just all about you and your responses and being actually a, look, it's probably a bit more almost more Christian than most interpretations of Stoicism is, but I think it does and it should have that element. Have you seen the circles of concern, the idea from Heracles?

Yes. I think to me that's about, why would you be expanding the circle if you didn't care? So for people who don't know that basically the Stokes say like, look, we're born selfish, we have self-interest, but we start to care about the people who raised us, the people we're related to, the people who live near us. And then they say you can imagine the world

being this series of concentric circles. And he says that the purpose of philosophy, but I think namely the virtue of justice is about pulling those outer circles inwards. And he said this is a beautiful madness, to care about someone that you've never met, it's not like you, that you're not related to. And to me, that's rooted in compassion.

So I think it's there. It's just not what attracts us to stoicism. It's not its most salient feature, but I think it's there. Why Marcus Aurelius could have been so much worse? Yeah. You know, what's the governor on that? It certainly wasn't the guardrails of the Roman system. It was some sense to him of other people's inherent value and worth.

And also our own nature, I think, feels good to do good. Of course. And it feels bad to do bad. And that's the kind of interesting thing about how we are in the world. You know, we have these. I did a chapter in the book on how to be good. What does it mean to be good? And the writing in it was quite, you know, wasn't fantastic because the only thing I could come up with was we want to be good because it feels good.

You know, yes, it's a duty, but also I get a bit of a buzz when I've done something for someone else. It's nature. It's something working within us that it doesn't really have a lot of language around it. I definitely get the sense that Seneca saw really shitty people up close. Epictetus saw awful people up close. Mark Cerellis saw awful people do awful things. And I think they get the sense, and I'm sure you've met people like this, where you go, oh wait,

they're not getting away with anything. It's awful to be them also. You know, like that it's not just that being good feels good, but that being a selfish, merciless, you know, evil, vindictive, angry, insert your adjectives there, person is a real hellish way to live. I agree with you, but I also think a lot of people

would see that in this world in current times, you're not necessarily punished for being bad and you're not necessarily rewarded for being good. But I think they're saying when you're at home with yourself at night, that's the, they're not saying society, karma exists and that society rewards good people and punishes bad people.

I mean, there's a great line in meditation, the remarks for this as to be a good king is to earn a bad reputation by good deeds. So he saw like, hey, I could be, I'm doing my best here and I'm taking all this heat for it. I don't think they meant it in that sense. I think there's this famous passage, one of the middle stoics,

he's at the deathbed of this Roman general named Marius. And that's the one that Seneca says, Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius. And the stoic basically sees the most powerful man in Rome in his last moments. And he realizes he's sort of in and out of it. And he's kind of commanding these troops that no longer exist.

He just goes, oh, all of it was hollow and empty and you're a sad, dying, vulnerable man. And then- Do you think everyone has that on their deathbed? Like, do you think there is a moment where people are conscious of their actions throughout life or do you think some people never have that reckoning? I definitely, I don't think, you know,

you eventually get what's coming to you, but I would go, the reason to not be Donald Trump is because there's probably not a more miserable person alive. Do you know what I'm saying? Whether he wins or not, whether he's rich or not, whether he is ever held accountable for his numerous crimes and just general awfulness,

I can't imagine what it's like to live in that head for five seconds. Do you know what I mean? He's not, however much he is rewarded, loved, famous, however much he's getting away with it, those quiet moments alone, there's probably first off a reason why there's not many quiet moments alone. And that's because those quiet moments alone

are a torturous, horrendous experience. He's not a drinker to, you know. Just to take the edge off of it, yeah. He's just channeled it all into vomiting it on other people. Let's go back to anger for a second, because my wife sent me this tweet the other day that I thought I'd get your opinion on,

because I think I've been struggling with it. She says, it's from this guy, Tim Grierson, he said, being angry all the time is exhausting and corrosive. Not being angry feels morally irresponsible. Yeah, that's interesting. How do you balance that? So that's a tough one. One of the things I struggled with most with stoicism

was the approach to social justice. Yes. And my friend and I, when we were having our stoic sessions, you know, we'd always come back to this, particularly the climate, and we'd wrestle with it, you know, like really wrestle. I still grapple with it. Me too. And in the book that I'm writing now, because it's a dialogue between a seeker and a sage, that is one of the things that they keep locking jaws on. There's tension in Stoicism. There is tension throughout the

whole philosophy and I think this is one of the main areas of tension. And also I would put desire in this camp as well, where there's Stoic teachings and okay, it makes sense, but it also isn't necessarily human nature. But let's just stick with anger for the moment. The tension is that stoicism walks is that you can't control, like I can't control what happens in the Middle East. So therefore would me going on a protest

or me doing some action or me getting angry, would that change anything? A pure stoic would say no. Sure. But if everyone felt that way. If everyone felt that way. So same with the climate crisis. One of the reasons I was attracted to work in politics is that you're actually working,

you know, it is a system where things happen. It's the government. is that you're actually working, you know, it is a system where things happen. It's the government. So I think there's ways of directing your impulses to make change. One of them is working within a system, but people who think the system's broken would say, no, get angry, stay outside the system.

Anger can give you energy to fight, but it can also burn you up and mean that you're not effective as an activist. I think about it in sports, it's like what is the single best thing you can do to weaken your opponent? It's to make them angry. It's to get in their head and needle them

and frustrate them and either make them give up or make them overreact or distract them. And so it's like, I've come to think about it as like, okay, either the person that you're angry with, like your political opponent or whatever, is either a good person who is misinformed and thus redeemable and informable. And so anger is probably not gonna help.

Or they are genuinely evil and awful, in which case you need all your wits about you to be able to beat them. And that anger, the Stokes would say, is sort of the most irrational and the most difficult to contain of all the emotions. It's precisely what you don't need in either situation. And I think it's William Irving that talked,

or Irvine that talked about fake anger. So you use it when you're teaching, say, small children who might be mischievous. So you pretend to get angry. So you don't have, so you scare. Do this in sports too. The coach gets upset to rally the players, but they're actually still in command of themselves. They're acting. So I think that's, you know,

the main thing's ataraxia, like how is your equilibrium? That's very important to me at this point in my life. I, if I feel myself getting angry, I can actually feel the chemicals, you know, leaving my brain, circulating around my blood. It's not good. It's very unhealthy. But that the impulse of anger comes from a feeling of injustice. So you know, it's catching, it's getting that initial impulse, closing it down, which is what?

Chrysippitus, or I'm not sure how you pronounce him. Like before the, the cart rolls down the, the hill with the dog attached to it, you know, you stop it before it takes off. Um, so you recognise the impulse, stop before you blow up and then you think, well, what's in my power? Yeah. stop before you blow up and then you think well what's in my power? But I am increasingly becoming more of a mainstream like traditional stoke with anger which is there's no place. I recently read Deira, the Seneca book.

He is so unequivocal about how bad anger is and I tend to agree with him. And it's just working out that tension between justice and control, the control test that I think every stoic has to kind of deal with. Yeah, look, I mean, almost to a person, the stoics are involved in politics. Absolutely. So this idea that they didn't think things could change or were worth trying,

or that there wasn't a responsibility or an obligation. Sometimes people get mad and do, I'll talk about something that's happening politically. And they go, what would the Stoics think? And be like, they probably think I'm not talking about politics enough, quite frankly. The idea that Stoicism is this self-improvement strategy divorced from the world that you live in is nonsense.

It's a way to let yourself off the hook to not have to face these things that are happening around you in the world that you have some ability to affect. You know, yeah, you don't control what happens in the Middle East, but you control who you vote for. And most people don't even fucking do that.

You know, so you have little ways to have influence and then you have to content yourself with, have I at least done all that I can do? And Mark Shrula says in meditation, he says, look, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. Most of us are guilty of those injustices, of just, we could do more,

we just make up excuses for not doing it. It's definitely nowhere near nihilism as a philosophy. You know, nihilism is all about, and I've had readers who've approached me after book events and said, you know, I like the sound of stoicism, but it really, it's not what we need in this day and age

because it's such an urgent time in history. And I said, well, when hasn't history been urgent? All through the 20th century, look at how many people were killed. History is one urgent moment after the next. How do we respond to that moment? When that tweet says the only way to respond is with anger, it's like, well, what does that look like if everyone's angry? I'm saying- Is it actually true that we need more angry people? That's not what I would diagnose

as what's happening. I mean, I think there's things that people are not as engaged with as they should, but I'm not sure anger is the way through them. There's possibly a generational divide on this. Like I speak to friends in their twenties and they say, we're watching killing and death in real time in the Middle East via social media. And these old ways, stoicism, 2000 years old, it's just not applicable anymore. So I take that on board. I think one of the great things about stoicism is that it wasn't defensive. You know, the Seneca said, um, this philosophy is open for people to change it depending on the new discoveries. I don't know the exact quote, but I've read it in your books. And it's, um, you know,

if someone comes along and says stoicism isn't working for these times for these reasons, I'll listen and really think about it. There's some fundamental things that we don't control as human beings, right? We don't control other people, we don't control the weather, we don't control this or that and the other, but we thankfully live in a society

of much more dynamism and agency than the one where Epictetus is a slave, right? Or where Marcus Aurelius is an emperor, right? So if you live in ancient Rome, you don't get to choose who the emperor is. We live in a society where we get to elect our leaders, right? So I think it's important to think as society has involved and invented things,

we have more influence over things that 2000 years ago, the Stokes were having to steal themselves to accept and be resigned to. And so, slavery was a perpetual institution which no one could do anything about until one day some people did something about it and now it doesn't exist, at least in the same way, the same prevalence.

And so, yeah, I think seeing stoicism as a way of thinking about things, that there's some things that are in our control and some things that are not in our control, that is timeless and always will be true. What was in our control and not in our control was different in Zeno's time than it was in Seneca's time than it was in Marcus Aurelius's time. More like society empowered,

things changed, things were invented, mechanisms were created, new breakthroughs happened. And so we should feel empowered to update and adjust Stoicism for a world where we have, thankfully, mechanisms to do things that were unthinkably out of everyone's control. Particularly as a woman, you know, it's a completely different kettle of fish, you know, between now and 2000 years ago. Yeah, but we have to look at, I think, as modern stoics,

it's on us to look at systems where there is oppression and go, okay, well, I mean, I see capitalism in many ways as being great for some people, not so great for others. So if you're caught in what seems like endless, mindless, low wage work, where you have to work two or three jobs, I've had a couple of periods of time living in America where you see people on the subway dead asleep. Obviously, it looks like they're onto a second shift. And I'm not saying that's slavery by any stretch of the imagination, but it's being caught in a system where you don't necessarily have agency. So how does stoicism apply not just to those of us who have a lot of choice, but to people

who are caught in a system where they don't have a lot of autonomy? Well, and to go back to the stoic virtue of justice and compassion, first off, to not see that person exhausted on the subway, grinding themselves down, living without a safety net, raising their kids on this sort of razor's edge, and to not think that's just the way of the world, it has to be that way. That's that person's problem. Me as a stoic, I am self-contained,

immune to their suffering or problem. I think to think that is to miss what stoicism is actually asking of you. You shouldn't become a wreck at the sight of this and despair and then just go home and feel awful. But to me, the idea is you see an injustice and you go, well, what part of this do I have control over? How can I help that person?

Or how if I can't touch this person is in a different world than me outside of my ability to influence, but how do I treat the people that work for me? What's going on in their life? You know, like you can decide to do better in your own sphere of influence, having bumped up against somebody else in a different sphere of influence.

And I think when I was in America, there was a change to the minimum wage in fast food restaurants because of union organizing. So, you know, it's a very fast world, but there's also some changes that are happening, which are really, really great. And they're usually the result of sort of collective, whether it's voting or organizing. I see all that tension in stoicism with, you know, can you affect social justice? And I think you can, but you just can't lose your shit. Just can't get angry. Cause then you're not effective.

That's right. So how can we make stoicism more accessible to women? Because I think people have this sense that like, people assume, I'll see it sometimes in articles, they assume my audience is like 100% male, which it's definitively not. And they sometimes stereotype it as like bro-icism or whatever, which is not what I'm interested in.

And also historically not true. You know, Mussonius Rufus isn't just teaching Epictetus a slave, but he's also saying, why can't women learn philosophy? Do they have reason? Yeah, he's like, what is gendered about virtue? I think that was such a great way of thinking about it, but there is some element of stoicism

that maybe isn't immediately accessible or inviting. How have you thought about it? I've just thought about it as in, you know, the doors open, they all opened the door. All those older guys, Seneca, Aurelius, you know, walk through it. And when you walk through it, it's absolutely just a, I think it's a PR problem that stoicism has.

I didn't come across anything that felt even vaguely misogynistic or unfriendly to women. You know, there's stuff around, as I was saying earlier, desire and, you know, ataraxia. Like if you're, you know, a woman with a menstrual cycle, you're going to have ups and downs, you're going to get angry. You know, there's going to be certain things that are certain types of the month where it's harder to control your emotions. And stoicism does not deal with that in the ancient texts.

And that's what I say when I give talks. It's like, you know, there's things that we know now about the unconscious, about hormones, about the brain. Never do they go, hey, you know, when you're hungry and tired and thirsty, it's harder to be stoic. You know, they're just basic understandings of human biology that the stoics were totally ignorant of. They had no sense of trauma, no sense of,

yeah, any of these things that we've slowly discovered over time. Which is, I think why it's important to keep talking about it and keep writing books on it from the perspective of knowing science. Yes. Because you can bring all that in and it doesn't destroy the philosophy, it sort of adds to it. Look, with the women thing, Martha Nassbaum is an extraordinary philosopher. I think she's possibly Princeton or Yale. But she wrote a wonderful book called The Therapy of Desire, which looks, you know,

there's a case study, a kind of fictional case study of a young woman in Stoic times who is learning Stoicism. And you know, there's this great, you know, Martha Nussbaum is a brilliant writer. So she writes about... And a translator also. Yeah, she's extraordinary. But she writes about, you know, she wants to live a life full of passion.

She wants to fall in love. She wants all these things. And how compatible is that with stoicism? You know, how compatible is desire and attachment and loving something deeply and getting angry at injustice? Like, how does that fit? And I think it's thinkers like that, that bring in not just a female perspective,

but the human perspective that were very helpful for me as a reader. Yeah, and I think there's a difference between not being ruled by the passions and not having them. Yeah, exactly. And I think part of the reason the Stoics talk about these things so much

is that they were very passionate people. They were. If Marcus Aurelius never got angry about things, why would he need to write in his private journal about the dangers of losing their temper? Yeah. You know? He's clearly upset at people who are dishonest,

people who don't hold themselves to high standards, people who hurt other people. This pisses him off. I don't think he's saying that the feeling of injustice you feel is bad. He's saying, hey, if you condemn them, if you hurt them, if you overreact, all things he was empowered to do, not only is it not good for them,

but it's not good for you either. And so I think the Stokes were passionate, loving, I mean, they have children, they make works of art, they strove to be great at their careers. When you look at the lives of the Stokes, it's impossible to say that these were unfeeling, nihilistic robots who retreated to a monastery and you know just waited out death right. They were involved in vigorous. They also

died in an extremely passionate ways. Yes, yes. Like fighting for things. Yeah. They were in the center of things and there's a whole generation of Stokes known as the Stoic opposition who were just a perpetual thorn in the side of these emperors. So these were people, again, Seneca is like the great artist of his time. You don't write those plays if you don't feel those emotions. And so I think what stoicism was, was a governor on those feelings, as opposed to a repression of those feelings, you know? That was people working it out, you know? Yes. So the beautiful thing about that writing is

it links people who were struggling then to us struggling now. We made no progress, we still have them. But it's just this, you know, it's the way that we speak to each other through time and space is through books, you know, it's, um, it's the great conversation. It is the great conversation. So Marcus is, Marcus Aurelius is talking to me when I read meditations, Seneca is talking to me. It blows my mind. And when I was sitting in my tiny flat in Sydney in lockdown in the pandemic, feeling very scared and not in control and lonely, I would pick up the Stoics and they kept me company.

They were able to say, I've been exiled. I've faced a plague. I've been scared. That hit me so, I mean, I'd been reading Marx Relays for 15 years and I'm reading it in 2020. And it struck me for the first time at any real resonance that Marcus lived through a plague. Yeah.

And was right, Meditations was a plague book. Yeah. And he has this passage about, he says, you know, there's the plague that can take your life and the plague that can destroy your character. Which one should you be the most worried about? And I was like, oh, he knows, he saw all this. He saw people lose their minds.

He saw people become cruel and indifferent. Taking all the toilet paper. Yeah, he saw, yeah, exactly. He saw people scared. He saw people stupid. He saw people, he saw all of this. And yeah, you're right back, but time and space collapse,

and suddenly you're right there with him. I think that was something also amazing that I only realized somewhat recently. Stoicism was ancient philosophy to Marcus Aurelius too. Zeno is in the fourth century BC. You kind of forget that. Yeah, because we're just like, oh, it was all happening at the same time. Like not only do we miss the enormous scope

of the Roman Empire, that it's Britain to Africa and all the way almost to India, and we're also missing just how long it endures, and that it starts in Greece Greece and then Rome takes over Greece and then philosophy comes and for hundreds of years. I mean, Marcus really quotes Euripides in Meditations. Euripides is to Marcus as Shakespeare is to us, maybe further.

And so the distance. Almost like Chaucer. Yeah, the distance and the rhythms of history that have passed, so when Marcus is like, hey, think about all these, he is naming emperors that were centuries past that have started to be forgotten just as to us people are like, is Marcus really that guy from the movie Gladiator?

You know, and so just the timelessness of the passage of time and that people have been on this thing, just trying to find answers, trying to get a little bit better, trying not to be rattled by the enormity of what's happening around them. That's the tradition of philosophy. That's the conversation that we're having.

Do you have a more, I felt a real mourning though, at one point in my kind of stoic journey of its disappearance. Yes. There's a reason they call those the dark ages. Yeah. And I felt a real sadness about had the world gone a different way, had stoicism got stronger and stronger rather than weaker and weaker, what would today look like? Would today be less angry, less divided,

less religious wars? Or what of a world where we take the best of the philosophy and the best of Christianity and the other religious traditions and we're able to bring them together and create something that allows someone to feel that full spectrum of the human experience. Like, I think it's striking that the philosopher

that Seneca quotes the most is Epicurus. The one that he would disagree with the most. And so this familiarity with things that you disagree with or are different than you is a really powerful thing too. So I have no doubt in my mind that the Stoics, if they were alive today, would be availing themselves of all these other things that they only didn't talk about because they didn't even know they existed.

Yeah. Well, look, I do Vedic meditation and the closeness between the Veda and Stoicism is like their brother and sister. Often some of the best ideas transcend religion or nationality. They are universal. I just think we went through that period of time where we were burning witches and, you know, any woman that seemed to know what to do with herbs or,

you know, how to deliver children was was drowned. And it's like, how did we get from these guys who had you know such respect for reason and rationality to superstition, fear, division and you know that's why I'm so passionate about stoicism is because I want to bring that back you know like. Well there is this rediscovery of the ancient ideas we call this the Enlightenment, there's the Renaissance and we have this rediscovery of it and then there's but then you know maybe it's the middle of the ancient ideas, we call this the enlightenment, this is the Renaissance, and we have this rediscovery of it, and then there's, but then, you know,

maybe it's the middle of the 20th century, then it's almost like we forget all of them again, right? Like kids used to be taught Latin, kids used to be familiar with these ancient figures, and that's kind of gone too. I think part of the people are like, oh, it's a fad, it's popular. Like, with Stoicism, I think it of the people are like, oh, it's a fad, it's popular.

With stoicism, I think it's a fraction of as popular as it could be and as it once was. And I think there's something powerful and important and necessary about talking about it and exposing people to it. Because what's the alternative? Where else are people learning about these things? If you're someone who doesn't feel called to a specific religious faith,

what's your guide to the good life? What's your code? What's your- What the world tells us is the good life, which is often material things. Yes. And that's where the danger is. What we're sold now as the good life

is something that's terrible for the planet. It's terrible spiritually. Bad for your health in most cases. Bad for your health. A lot of really young people when my book came out became huge fans because they just grown up, they grown up without religion, they grown up. Don't trust institutions, don't trust their parents.

Totally with just the internet, selling them stuff all the time. And there was something about stoicism that just felt so true and it wasn't trying to sell them anything. It was just about your own character. And I think that's really refreshing for a lot of people. Yeah, or just that character is important.

You know what I mean? Like that you're supposed to be cultivating your character and that just doing whatever you want whenever you feel like it is a recipe, both for unhappiness, but also a shitty world. Do you find though that if you're not introduced to the concept of character, you might not hear about it until you're in your 30s or something. Where do you even start? I mean, because of the popularity of the books, I've spent a lot of time talking to sports teams

and a lot of time speaking to military groups, different branches of the armed forces. And really nowhere else do they earnestly talk about these sort of values and ideas. And I almost feel a jealousy when I like, when I'll speak to like at the Naval Academy or West Point or something. And you go, these people are being steeped

in a set of values and principles as if they matter, as if like the ideas matter and they matter as individuals. And what would the world look like if everyone was given this kind of instruction and treated this way? Yeah. I think people want it. Of course.

People wanna know what's a good character. What are the things I have to reach towards? And one of the issues of having such a secular society is that the only things that we're shown to is strive for a fantastic car. In Sydney, where we're having our chat, you know, real estate is the is the king. You know, people are regularly written up in the paper for, you know, having bought a 10 million dollar house, a 20 million dollar house.

Who's living by the harbor? Who's beach? You know, that's the values. How they got there is less. Yeah. Yeah. So if that's all you're reading and that's all you're consuming That's the values. How they got there is less. Yeah, yeah. So if that's all you're reading and that's all you're consuming and you never hear anyone talk about character, then where are you meant to start? Yeah, no, you're competing with there

instead of competing with, as the Stokes would say, like sort of who's the better person. I was a lawyer for a brief period of time and character was really important when it would come to sentencing. Yes. It's too late.

You'd have to go to the, you'd have to say to the judge, my client has a brilliant character. Here's a letter from his primary school principal. And of course the shifty looking, you know, defendant would be scratching around, you know, there'd be something saying, yes, he turned up, he was punctual or, but that was really the only time characters seemed to be important. I sometimes hear people sort of equate stoicism

with that, you know, British saying of keep calm and carry on. I feel like the Australian expression of no worries is maybe closer. No worries, mate. Yeah, because it's not just no worries, like don't worry about things. But I also, you know, Mark Sturlus has this passage I love.

He says, you did something for someone, they benefited from it, don't ask for the third thing. Right, which is the gratitude, the recognition, the appreciation. And so, you know, in the US, you're taught as a kid, you know, say thank you, and then they as a kid, you know, say thank you, and then they're supposed to say you're welcome, right? And I love no worries as a,

I just did it because I'm supposed to, you know, like the no worries of the shrugging off of the gratitude to me is a very stoic idea. Isn't that an amazing thing with stoicism though? This blew my mind. If you lend someone your house, you're going away and they have a nice house and you have a nice house and they wanna stay in your house. So you let them stay in your house,

but you cannot expect that there'll be a gift or an offer to stay in their house. Like I think it was Seneca who said, you have to be generous without any expectations of anything in return because it's out of your control. Yeah, loyalty is something you give, not something you get. Yeah.

Yeah, but that's hard. It's radical. Yes. It's really radical. And it has changed the way that I, when I do favors for people, I now am like, okay, I'm doing this because I wanna do it, not because I wanna get something. Yeah. I get something, that, okay, I'm doing this because I want to do it, not because I want to get something. I get something that's nice, but.

Yeah, well, that's the other story. If you get it, great. The stoic isn't, you know, again, monkishly turning down the things. Seneca's like, look, they paid me a lot of money for this. Yeah. Why not take it? Well, he did take it and take it and take it.

Well, the irony is he said, you can, a philosopher can be rich provided that your money is not stained with blood. Didn't he, though, call in a huge amount of loans from the United Kingdom, which ended up either causing a war or bankrupting a nation? He was a speculator and he had these enormous bonds that, yeah, turn over the colony there. But I mean, I was stained with blood before that. It was stained in blood when Nero gave it to him. So Seneca's like, do as I say, not as I do.

I mean, look, if your book sells 10 million copies, you shouldn't get that. I think you should. Oh, well, I hope it sells 10 million copies. But I mean, if it's made in a slave labor camp run by children, maybe not, right? And so like how one, like, as you said, there's obviously problems with runaway capitalism.

But in a capitalistic system, can one be successful within their own values and standards? And if you can, I think there's no, you know what I mean? Like I think about it's like, how do you do it? Try to exploit as few people as possible, try to treat everyone along the way well. And if you can do that, why not succeed?

Yeah, I agree. And also, you know, a lot of, when people say, oh, were stoics lazy, or, you know, it sounds like they just were, they saw only so few things within their control that they weren't ambitious. I'm like, some of these dudes were like the most powerful, the wealthiest.

Sure. They just didn't care about the outcome. Yes. You know, if they got it, great. They would do it anyway. Yeah, so, you know, it's trying as hard as you can in the process, whether that's writing a book, making an album, piece of art, software, whatever.

And if it does well, great. If it doesn't, and that's actually changed my approach to writing, which is the joy is in the doing. If my next book does well, great. But if it doesn't, as long as I've done the best book I can do. So the money thing If my next book does well, great. But if it doesn't, as long as I've done the best book I can do. So the money thing I try to tell people this,

especially women, it's like not getting paid your full market rate is not helping anyone. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like just being happy to be there and accepting anything and everything that's offered is not the right way to do it. Like what is market rate? What is fair? What have you earned? and everything that's offered is not the right way to do it. Like what is market rate?

What is fair? What have you earned? You know? And it's within your control often to ask for that. Yeah, yes, of course. Yeah, not asking for the raise or going for the job or putting your hand up and volunteering to be the, hey, give me the ball, I can do this.

Yeah. That's in your control. But yeah, you learn as a writer is you could do your best work and it could not succeed. And you could do something that you don't think is your best work. And there's a randomness and a luck factor to it. And to be, I'm sure you experienced this when they turned your thing into a TV show.

First off, you should negotiate to the best of your ability, get compensated to the best of your ability, and then you also have to practice the acceptance of, I don't have complete creative control, I'm working with other people, and I have to let it be what it's going to be. That's where you end up practicing stoicism also. Exactly, I mean, the Netflix show is a great example.

One of my books, While Mania, was turned into a Netflix series. The show's hilarious, by the way. Yeah. And it did a great first season. It did really well around the world. We started pre-production on season two. Netflix pulled the pin. You know, that's, that was hard. Sure.

I can't control what Netflix decides. So we got one season, not a second. And the whole process was a lesson in stoicism, you know, I can't control what Netflix decides. So we got one season, not a second. And the whole process was a lesson in stoicism, you know? Like fantastic to get the first season, not so great to not get the second season, but both things kind of even out. And it's fine in the end.

And if at the start of writing that book, someone said, hey, this will be a television series, you'll get paid X, this many people watch it, you would have said, sign me up. I would have not believed them. I would have said, how is this gonna be a TV show? Because it was a book about wellness and it was a gonzo first person account.

But it was made into a show and it was a great experience. I try to remind myself the goal was to write a book. Yeah. I thought if I wanted to be a writer and I thought if I could write a book, that's the dream. Yeah. Everything else is fucking gravy from there. Yeah.

And now you've got. It's insane. No, I also try to remind myself of what, because I remember I finished the manuscript for The Obstacle's Way on a flight from Sydney to Perth. Oh, wow. And... Three off flight.

I just finished it, I sent it in, and I had zero idea that it would do as well. If I tell myself in retrospect that I predicted all this, that I knew that it says something about me as a person, that's where ego comes in and entitlement comes in and like, at zero, I didn't even quit my day job. You know, if I knew I should have asked for more money, you know, I obviously didn't know. I was just, I wanted to do it, they let me do it. And that was success.

Everything else, the part I controlled was writing it and doing my best and then doing the marketing. And then everything else was not me and therefore not something I can allow to change my self perception. And look, a lot of it is not taking away from your abilities, but a lot of it is luck in terms of timing. I've got friends that have released books, say during the pandemic, when all the book shops were shut, books didn't sell. So you end up, you know,

so much of people's success is timing. Yeah. It was totally random. You got a bunch of lucky breaks. I was lucky to be born in America at this time, you know, like all you want to focus on the thing, in a weird way you focus on the things that had less to do with you.

So you're not puffing yourself up. Yeah. You know? Because I think, you know, obstacle is the way. I also think ego is an obstacle. Yes, it's the biggest obstacle. Your own sort of sense of your entitlements, you know, where you should be in life.

Well, look, if I tell myself a story that, hey, I predicted all this, I'm great at spotting trends, I'm the voice of a generation, you know, all the things you can tell yourself from success, it's not gonna change what happened, right? What happened is what happened, but it will change the next time I have an idea and my sense of its worth

and how much I listen to my editor or my friends who read it, you know? And all of a sudden, the next idea I have, which isn't as good, I think is a genius. And, you know, I'm not listening to notes. I'm not putting in the work. I'm coasting and it's not gonna be as good. You know, humility is a better place to come at all this stuff from

than entitlement and superiority. Also, you protect yourself down the line because if you get used to a certain level of success and there's a book that comes out that sells five copies, the devastation will knock you out of ataraxia. You might lose your confidence as a writer. There might not be a book after that. So you have to almost see, like I've done four books now,

working on my fifth. Some of them have sold really well. Some of them, one that I worked on for seven years, sold hardly anything. And that was devastating. Sure. But I now look at it as I loved writing it. Yeah. I loved it and so didn't sell that well.

That's okay. I can't control that. Well when The Obstacle Is The Way came out, it sold I think 3,300 copies its first week, which of course I thought was good. It's not really that great. It's good in Australia. And not that great by American standards. It didn't hit any bestseller lists.

And then, you know how many copies it sold the second week? Less and then less and then less. And it kind of, you know, it dribbled off. But I was writing the next book I was writing, ironically, what would become Ego is the Enemy. But so I didn't take the lack of success that personally, because I was busy doing the thing. And then some random lucky things happened,

like Amazon discounted it and it stayed discounted. Audio books started to take off. Some sports teams started to talk about it. And then it really started to sell. And then it started to sell like crazy. But I also didn't take the success that personally, cause I was writing the next book, I was busy, you know? And just being at a place where you're focused

on what you control, in that case, the book I was contracted to deliver, and which as you know, every day you sit down and the books, the project is kicking your ass. It's never as good as you want it to be, you know? And it's hard, but being lost in the hard part about it, the part that I controlled prevented me from getting devastated or puffed up. That's ataraxia. That's the even- Which I want to ask you about, because this is one thing I struggle with. I love the feeling of

being high on a success. It feels so good. And sometimes success is a few and far between. So being ataraxic, and then there's a good thing that's happening, it's so tempting to- Take the win. I think you take the win, but have you ever had a day where like one of your articles like blew up?

Oh yeah, yes. And then you're just refreshing it. Like I've- Often in a bad way. But I just, I just refreshing, like, I vote. Often in a bad way. But I just, I was like, wait, so the reward for doing this thing well is that I lost a day of my life, just like riding this high of like, who said what? Tweets, oh, this person said something like,

and I just realized that that was an ephemeral good feeling. But the feeling of of just doing the thing and being locked into it or just- Going in a flow state. The first time I hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, I remember I was in Los Angeles, so I was on book tour for Stillness is the Key.

So I was a different time zone. And so I started getting lots of texts and emails. And my thing is I get up early and I don't get sucked into my phone. So I could feel like I could feel the energy that something was happening. And I remember I had a very conscious choice. I was like, I can go do this,

which I'm 80% sure is good news, but it could also be condolences, you know? And I said, you know what? I'm gonna go for a swim. And I swam for an hour and I didn't think about any of it. And I think about that swim as the meaningful, valuable experience, the choosing not to get lost in the tough-

The dopamine. Yes, more than I think about that I got back and it was the good news. And I think also how easily I could have gotten back and it'd been bad news. Because I've had books that should have done better and they got snubbed or it was number two by 10 copies. And so what's a more resilient strategy?

It's not going to the dopamine external of, did other people say I was good? Gee, that's a hard one to master. And these are first world problems, of course, but. Yeah, they're first world problems, but they're also, they're really modern problems because we're encouraged and trained to chase the little bursts of dopamine and the big bursts.

You don't think Seneca thought about opening night on some of his planes? He must have. Marcus Aurelius saw when they put up the fucking arch of his accomplishments. I mean, they're modern, but they're also timeless. But then they had those, was it the people that rode the horses

in front of the generals? Memento Mori. Memento Mori, you know, remember you are mortal. It's like, it's a way of bringing you back down to earth. They knew, they knew how he's, he talks about not being Caesarified in meditations, dyed purple and that's, yeah. You can see, it's funny to think of Marcus Aurelius,

you know, not wanting to be this insufferable, you know, megalomaniac monster and all the pressure and temptation before him. And then you meet people, like I was thinking about it in Well Mania in your show, like, you know, how many pompous, obnoxious writers there are of so much less stature and power. So it can happen to any of us.

And we have less excuse than the emperor of Rome does or the president does. But I'm going to keep it real. Got to keep it real. Well, I thought the book was awesome and I'm so glad we had this conversation. Thank you so much, Ryan. It's been great to chat. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

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