The Daily Stoic - Can You Build a Castle? | Ask DS

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

You could build castles out of the bricks they threw at Cato. But Cato didn’t need to build castles with those bricks because he had something better - an inner citadel. Ask DS:Looking at Cato’s life, does he stick to his plan of justice too much sometimes?If Ryan could ask Marcus Aurelius one question, what would it be?What are Ryan's tips or tricks to know if you’re hitting the golden mean?Why is justice a common thread between Friedrich Nietzsche’s work and the Stoics?🎙️ Listen to Will Guidara interview Ryan Holiday | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & WonderyGet your own Four Virtues Pendant to wear so you can feel its weight and stick to your principles in every situation, no matter the proverbial bricks thrown your way:  https://store.dailystoic.com/📕 Right Thing, Right Now | https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I've been writing books for a long time now and one of the things I've noticed is how every year, every book that I do, I'm just here in New York putting right thing right now out. What a bigger percentage of my audience is listening to them in audiobooks, specifically on Audible. I've had people had me sign their phones, sign their phone case because they're like I've listened to all your audiobooks here and my sons they love audiobooks we've been doing it in the car to get them off their screens because audible helps your imagination soar. It helps you

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You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audio book for free. You'll get right thing right now, totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, for free, visit audible.ca to sign up. to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street

when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. Can you build a castle? Oh, Cato might be a folk hero now, but at the time, at the time they hated him. The expression, we can't all be Cato's was not meant kindly. It was dripping with disdain. The fact that there were no statues of him in Rome

was not an oversight. This was a man who was forcibly driven from the forum on multiple occasions, a man they sent into exile, a man not unfamiliar with jeering mobs or death threats. To paraphrase the song, you could build castles out of the bricks they threw at Cato. And they threw it at him for what?

For doing his job? For not being corrupt? For sticking to his principles? For protecting Rome's old ways. But the funny thing is Cato didn't need to build castles with those bricks because he had something better. Stoicism gave Cato an inner citadel, a sense of purpose and confidence and strength for which no amount of external criticism, pressure or

violence could touch. As Marcus Aurelius, no stranger to criticism himself, would write in meditations, they kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. That somehow cuts off your mind from clearness and sanity and self-control and justice. The answer for Cato was no. No, it doesn't. Marcus Relius did his best to supply the same answer. And that's what he was trying to remind himself of in the pages of meditations. So we must strive to do the same,

no matter how many bricks or curses or tempting offers they throw at us. Nothing should cut us off from the four virtues. Nothing about it should touch our inner citadel. And that's the idea of the four virtues, which I'm of course in the middle of this series about, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. I've got the four virtues tattooed on my wrist here,

but we have a cool coin version of it in the Daily Stoke store. That's what I'm holding now. There's a ring version of it, too. You can check it out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I've been joking lately that on the Thursday episodes I answer your questions, but not really your questions, just random people's questions. In this case, you actually could have asked me a question because I was at the Barnes

and Noble in Union Square for the launch of Right Thing Right Now. Will Gadara was the host, but then we kicked it to an audience Q&A and all the people that were nice enough to show up were able to ask questions. And that's what I wanted to bring you today. This is me answering those questions. I will say the mic wasn't amazing for the audience.

So the first question was, someone was asking me about Cato. Was Cato too rigid, too self-righteous, too firm in his sense of justice sometimes? And was that a personality flaw? Cato being a sort of person of immense rectitude and principle, but this ultimately makes him somewhat ineffectual, if not ultimately problematic,

politician, because politics is about compromise. And he struggled to strike that balance between doing what was right no matter the cost and solving problems partially, which might have allowed them to solve them more fully. But there's an argument that he brings about the collapse of the republic by his intransigence as much as Caesar brings it about by his ambition.

Seneca is a fascinating example. No one writes more beautifully about the theme of justice than Seneca. And yet no one worked as closely with an evil person as Seneca being the advisor to Nero. But you're talking about the timelessness of all this stuff. It's such a, you know, depending on what side of the bed I wake up on, I go, Seneca was the worst,

Seneca's the best. You know, Seneca probably told himself he was the adults in the room and he was saving things from being worse. And then other people said he was complicit and an enabler. And people are having to make politicians and leaders and officials in this country right now are having to make very similar decisions and trade-offs.

And we can see where they fall short and where they struggle. And these are not easy decisions. You see, you're all saying the same thing about Jimmy Carter and gas, right? There's an argument that Jimmy Carter should have been more pragmatic and was ultimately the job of the politician

is to be recollected and he failed in that regard. But then I was talking to someone about this this morning. Rick Carter is my guy. But you have the argument he would make is you have the presidency now. Just because you put things off to get re-elected does not mean you get re-elected. So you have it again.

This is a debate people are having right now. You have the presidency now. What can you do with it now? And by and large, the things you did with it then were good things. And in some cases, things very ahead of their time that we came to understand later were the president. So you have it now.

You have the opportunity to do the right thing now. Your pragmatism says, oh, but if I do it later, I can do more good later. Or is that just Seneca? Seneca says, if I leave, someone worse will replace me. OK, but he's doing bad shit now. We'll be there. So these are complicated moral questions, for sure.

And I think the Stokes provides the opportunity to turn these questions over and then try to get lessons that we apply in our daily lives now. Somebody asked me if I could ask Marcus Aurelius a question, what would that be? If I could ask Marcus Aurelius one question. I mean, I think you'd have to ask Marcus Aurelius,

bro, what's up with Commodus? You're gonna leave the empire to your unstable, deranged son? I think that's one of the big questions of Marxism. You have this wonderful person, this know, this wonderful thinker, this wise, just, virtuous person. And then his son, his successor, is so important and unsuccessful. And what gives? You know, is this a, is this a struggling to put things into practice? Was he actually a not good father, which would be a mark against all the other wonderful things that he did.

Was it a quirk of history? Was, I'm endlessly fascinated with that. It was funny, we were just talking to Gary V about the, meet me in the middle and how the virtues are the midpoint between two vices. Someone was asking me about some tips and how the virtues are the midpoint between two vices. Someone was asking me about, you know, some tips and tricks for hitting the golden mean. So for people who don't know the golden mean is this idea of

Maristotle that most virtues rest between two vices. So you have recklessness and you have cowardice and courage is actually in the middle. You know, you have wastefulness and stinginess and then generosity in the middle. And so this idea of virtues being a midpoint, I think is really interesting, this idea of moderation. And any of the things taken to an extreme can become fights. And Cato's probably a great example of this.

It's sort of unbendingness works on paper, but what about sticky, complex situations involving other human beings? And I think maybe that's where we've been asking ourselves is like, is this taking into account reality, the fact that human beings are imperfect, the fact that we have imperfect or incomplete information. To me, that's kind of the question is like, am I,

am I being practical is maybe the wrong word, because practical and expediency are often excuses for not doing the right thing. But how do we think about this in terms of the real world where it's going to land? It's tough, the goal to me is very simple, but then finding what that is, is a process of dialing in and maybe giving yourself some grace that sometimes you're gonna be a little too far this way,

sometimes you're gonna be a little too far this way, but that your life is a process, kind of tuning the style to make it the way you think about it. And then somebody was asking me about Nietzsche and his connection to the Stokes, which I'm by no means an expert on and probably could know more, but I thought it was an interesting question.

I think it's the fundamental question of being a person. How should one be? What should one do? How should one treat others? And we've got a lot of different answers to that question. And some, for some of us, you know, God says X, Y, or Z is sufficient answer to that question. And then for others of us, it's we go, but why? What about this? What about this? And so what I like about the Stokes is that they try to get the answer to that question

somewhat logically. And they're saying not, hey, if you're a bad person, go to hell. They're saying, hey, if you're a bad person, your life will be in kind of hell. And they have ample evidence of that. You know they're looking at these powerful Romans and Greeks and kings and you know wealthy business people who can do whatever they want and they do whatever they want and it seems wonderful and it also up close they realize it's quite terrible. So I think

we're just this is the thing that everything that it's a wrap, that our sense of justice or sense of right and wrong. If you wanna listen to me and Will chatting, I'll link to that in today's show notes. Thanks to everyone that came out. Thanks to everyone that bought Right Thing Right Now. And actually someone sent me a picture of a table at the Union Square Barn Barnes and Noble where they had

Some of the extra books that I signed so there might still be some there And I will talk to you tomorrow Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the daily stoke podcast I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor.

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