The Daily Stoic - Rich Roll and Ryan Reflect on Stoicism (Live Talks LA)

Episode Date: November 22, 2020

Today’s episode features an interview of Ryan conducted by yesterday’s guest Rich Roll about Ryan’s latest book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius at a Live Talks LA event. They talk about the intersection of Stoicism and politics, the best way to live virtuously, and more.Live Talks LA: https://livetalksla.org/Event page: https://livetalksla.org/events/ryanholiday/This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.Follow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Rich Roll:Homepage: https://www.richroll.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/richrollInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/richrollYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/richroll66See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more

possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to another weekend episode of Daily Stoic. Yesterday, I had the privilege of interviewing my friend Rich Roll. Well, today's episode, the Rolls are reversed. Rich Roll is interviewing me for the launch of Lies of the Stoics. Rich and I were supposed to get together in Los Angeles and do an awesome event for LA Talks Live. I was lucky enough to interview Robert Green in the same format when laws of human nature came out and I thought it'd be awesome to get to see my friend Rich to do a big theater event for the book. But as you can imagine, that went by the wayside. So we did this remote when I was down with the beach in Florida. I was on my laptop. Rich Roll was in his amazing shipping container office

that is placed there in Malibu. So we were not able to be in the same room together, but we had a great conversation instead of me interviewing him. He was interviewing me, but we go in depth on some of the same topics that we did yesterday, but from the other perspective, as I said yesterday, Rich is just one of my favorite people. It was an honor to be interviewed by him. I think you will see just what an incredible interviewer Rich is. He'll put my interview with him to shame.

I'm sure he's so good at asking the right questions. He's such a thoughtful guy. I think you'll love this. And of course Rich has a new book out. You can check out called Voice and Change. You can also listen to my interviews with Rich on his podcast. I love Rich's book Finding Ultra. It's one of my all-time favorites. Love Falling Rich on Instagram and YouTube. Just a great guy. Love his podcast. His interview with George Ravling is incredible. Just a great guy.

And I am planning. I just sent an email this morning. I am going to have Rich Rolls-Father David Roll who wrote a wonderful book about George Marshall on the podcast very soon as well. So enjoy this interview with me and Rich Roll. Welcome to another virtual live talks Los Angeles event. We welcome Ryan Holiday and Rich Roll to our series. We invite you also to visit our YouTube channel for over 300 conversations much like this, including an episode with Ryan interviewing Robert Green. Today they'll talk about Ryan's book, Lives of the Stoics, the art of living from

Xeno to Marcus Aurelius. Glad to be here and good to see you, Ryan, who would be nice to do this in person, but this is the world that we live in. It'd be nice to do a lot of things these days, but that's where we are. Well, we're here to celebrate your new book, Lives of the Stoics, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. Congratulations on the reading. Thank you. I will, as somebody who's known you for many years, though, my first, my sort of knee-jerk reaction when I heard that you were writing this book was was immediately like, really,

like, we're going to continue down this path like what is this fixation on stoicism that you simply can't seem to shake you know. You know, obviously is credited with doing more to popularize this strain of thought than any other, but I'm interested in, you know, from whence this fixation, you know, originates. And you've spoken about your introduction to this canon of thought by, by dint of, of needing Drew Pinsky at an event. But I'm interested in what's behind that. Like what was going on with you personally as a young man that magnetized you so completely about the stoics

in this particular vein of philosophy? It was a weird experience. I bought this random book on Amazon as one does. I remember back then I had to wait for two days shipping because Amazon Prime didn't exist yet. I remember I had to buy another book so I could get the free shipping. Because remember it was like,

if you spend $25 on Amazon, that's what qualified you for free shipping. So I think what Mark's to really survives on my doorstep and or my PO box, but whatever it was in college. And I remember opening it and just being struck with how sort of matter of fact and accessible in straight forward, the language was like,

it really felt like this was a human being writing. To me, there wasn't a Roman emperor writing, you know, from 2000 years ago. And I don't remember exactly what was going on in my life. I don't remember being particularly happy. I was, it was in my sophomore year of college, just going okay, but it just sort of was like everything that I needed and wanted.

But one, it funny enough, as I was writing lives, I came across this story about Xeno getting this prophecy as a young man. Basically, the prophecy from the Oracle Delphi says, like, you will become wise when you learn to have conversations with the dead, which he later comes to understand me and his reading. And I think what I was really struck by reading Marcus Reales was like, I'm talking to Marcus Reelis. Like this is the most powerful man in the world, writing in such an accessible, straightforward way, that all time and space and social hierarchy and all these things, it just completely falls away and you're like, you're like inside this guy's mind. Yeah, and it seems to be, you know, the gift that keeps giving.

And one of the things that struck me about the new book is first and foremost, that there's actually robust documentation about how these people live. Like I was shocked at how much information you and Hanselmen were able to unearth about people, I would have suspected that it would be close to impossible to learn anything about the personal lives of these people despite their writings. It's weird to think that these philosophers were like

world famous in their time. Like we're, you know, sought out by kings, there were books written about them. They were truly famous because philosophy, as it's being invented, is this kind of radically transgressive, earth shattering concept, just in the way of like, you know,

obviously there's figures in the Bible, we have historical documentation about, and there's sort of independent confirmation about these things. It is interesting. We do have so much information about the Stokes, but it was tricky. I think I don't want people to get the sense that,

like, when you're reading the book, that there's, like, a whole world about these other figures that you could, like, everything that's there is in the book on a lot of these figures. I mean, on Sena and Marcus and some of the other characters, you could really write more. But some of these figures, you know, we're, we're, what we're hearing

is like an anecdote from a person from a person from a person. So it's kind of this mix of like myth and legend. I heard this great quote from Val Kilmer once when he was describing playing Doc Holiday in Tombstone, which I think is one of the great performances of all time. And he said that acting in that role was like putting clothes on a ghost, which I thought was a beautiful expression. And there was a little bit of that on the stokes where we know this and that about them, but really understanding how that fits into their personality and who they were, that was the tricky part on the book. And what I ended up trying to do was like,

just get a sense of the essence of these people as human beings, less, you know, like some of these figures, it's like, Cresimpus or something, where it's 700 books. I don't really know what he says in those books and we don't know because a lot of it's lost, but I am interested in the kind of person who would write 700 books. I don't I don't really know what he says in those books and we don't know because a lot of it's lost, but I am interested in the kind of person who would write 700 books and what makes that

person tick. Right. It's a it's a series of short biographies that are written in the stoic tradition, meaning that in contradiction to kind of what we think of as the modern biography, which is a deep dive into somebody's life and every facet of it. This is an effort to illustrate some key things that kind of demonstrate this person's character, whether it's a simple action or the way that they died or an exchange that they had. That tells you essentially everything you need to know about how they embody these stoic principles for better or worse. Totally. So Plutarch, who of how weirdly small this world was, but he makes this big distinction between writing biography and writing lives. I thought that was really interesting. He said, lives is, and there's a reason this book is called lives,

but it's a lives is like an anecdote, it's a story, it's a quip, you know, it's a split-sector in someone's existence that captures or is reflective of the whole as opposed to this sort of minute, detailed, you know, listing of every single thing that ever happened to a person. What was interesting for me was learning, you know a very arms-length relationship with Stoicism. I understand the greatest hits. Sanika, Epictetus, Marcus, or really us. What I didn't realize is how robust the tradition was and the length of time over which it's spanned

and how many people were involved, how many leaders, how many factions, how many little groups involved, how many leaders, how many factions, how many little groups, and the leverage throughout a pretty long period of history, these people exerted on everything from public policy to leadership and the battles that were waged. Yeah, it's 500 plus years of history

and not minor history. I mean, this is the history, this is the period that shapes Western civilization, right? This is Greece leading into Rome, you know, ending sort of with the decline in fall of Rome. I think what I found fascinating about these folks, and I agree, I didn't really, I sort of knew about the beginning,

and I knew about the end, and I knew a couple of the people in the middle. I really didn't realize how active the stills were at the highest levels. Like for instance, I knew about Kato, Kato being the sort of the resistance to Julius Caesar. And I thought that kind of stoicism dies out there. I didn't realize that the two teachers

and primary political advisors to Octavian or Augustus, whose Caesar's direct successor happens to be these guys Athena Doris and Areas who were Stoics. I didn't realize how immediate the transition was and what's fascinating about how immediate the transition was is all the complex moral and ethical contradictions there. It's like you have a Stoic who's literally willing to kill himself, then be associated with the transition

from Rome as a republic to an empire. And then he's barely in the ground and two other Stoics are like, oh sure, we'll advise the new emperor. It's sort of like the king is dead long live the king kind of a moment. And I just found that so complex and fascinating. Right.

In thinking about areas, I mean, we have areas is to Augustus as Seneca is to Nero. Yeah. Phil in the blank is Trump. I mean, there's something for Hussin about these complicated relationships of these philosophers to leaders that is highly relevant to what we're enduring right now.

One what's so complicated about is that Augustus is a pretty good emperor. I mean, he's an all authoritarian king. So obviously within whatever the sort of the bounds of absolute power corrupting absolutely, but as far as being a decent emperor, no one thinks that he did a bad job, right? He did a good job.

I imagine those two still rationalize their sort of cavorting with an autocracy. As, hey, this is the least bad version of this scenario, right? So then you flash forward several generations, Stenica, who lives through the life of five emperors, now gets called into the service of Nero. The idea of restoring Rome to a republic is probably a fantasy at this point. It's all he's ever known. And two of his heroes seem to have done a good job mitigating the worst impulses of an emperor.

You know, he's telling himself, hey, this is what my duty is. And I'm forgetting the phrase, I think it's Quin, Quin-Kinium, Nironium or something, but the first five years of Nero's regime are considered kind of a golden age and Sennaka gets most of that credit. So then you flash forward 2000 years

and these people who spent their lifetime in DC and Republican politics and now they have a chance to be the head of the CIA or the secretary of defense. As an outsider, you might go, oh, that's a morally incomprehensible sort of choice, but it's complicated. Because somebody's gotta do the job. And I think that's what I think that's in one sense, that's where they

get you. And on the other hand, the Stoics would say, but isn't that your duty? And it's I don't have a good answer. Yeah, it's a very complicated sort of algorithm to solve that a lot of people in the administration are going through right now. This idea of, is the institution that I serve better off with me here trying to stabilize it with some anchor or ballast? And what is my obligation to my colleagues and my peers in this institution versus taking the kind of implacable ethical stand and departing, knowing that that spot's going to get filled with someone else who might do a greater disservice to the

greater good. And so, again, the still-expeeing famous, you know, Tacitus is sort of the most well-known Roman historian of this sort of imperial age. And, you know, Tacitus is talking about the Stoic's, Tacitus is also where we get historical confirmation of Jesus Christ, right? So Tacitus is talking about the sort of Stoic opposition. That's what they called Helvides and Thrasia and Seneca and a Hand and Musoneus Rufus and a Handful,

the other Stoics who sort of defied and fought against Nero. And actually his sort of argument against them is that they made almost no difference. That, you know, he said that they sort of paid quite dearly and accomplished nothing except for basically being difficult. And so I think that is another wrinkle in it. It's, and I remember I was,

I'm trying to not name too many names here, but I was in, I had breakfast in the Senate dining room a few years ago, shortly after, I guess is midway through Trump's first term, hopefully last, but anyways, and I was asking, they were sort of privately expressing to me their doubts or frustrations with Trump. And I brought up Jeff Flake and they said,

look at Jeff Flake now, he's not gonna run for reelection, he's not gonna be a senator anymore. And they're like, what difference can he make now? And so that, I was, I was both as a citizen. I'm a little, you know, I have one set of feelings, but as sort of a historian philosopher, you're like, Oh, that's the exact same dilemma that Seneca was thinking about. Seneca, you know, begins to push back against Nero, and then it gets pushed out. And then shortly thereafter he has to commit suicide. So on the one hand, you could say he went out, you know, insisting on what he believed in, but it didn't do anything. And so I think this is the

this sort of there's a pragmatic side to the Stoics, and there's a sort of a principled side of the Stoics. And those things are often in tensionpled side of the Stoics and those things are often in tension with each other, just as I'm sure you are with your audience or with my audience, it's like I can say what I think, you know, let's say you and veganism, obviously the more strident you are in your beliefs, you perhaps end up alienating people who are on the fence or who are not interested, and then you cease to be able to have influence or impact with those people.

So it's this weird tension, and I don't think there's a clear cut answer, but I think it was something that even 2000 years ago the stokes were struggling with. Yeah, it's this idea that it is through storytelling that we'd learn. And This is how these principles really find weight in the human condition. You can post these quotes on Instagram or talk about the philosophy from 10,000 feet, but placing these people in context and what they're actually struggling with is when they really become resonant.

And it's amazing how these ancient historical figures were struggling with the same things that we're dealing with now. There really is very little difference. And we talked about this before, but I believe it was Marcus Aurelius where he's writing down his thoughts and there's a gym downstairs and are making all kinds of noise and he can't clear his mind and it just,

it really, it's a very short leap to, you know, the struggles that we have, turning our phones off or trying to find that ability to focus to do the deep work. Well, I love, I think Sennaka is the source of the sort of senior talking about, but both Senaika and Marcus really, they talk about like sort of wanderlust for the desire to travel, like the desire to get away from it all, to, you know, to head to the mountains or the beach or the, or a country retreat. And there's that feeling we get when we're stressed or when we're unhappy or when we're sad. I just need to go on a trip.

I just need to go somewhere. I think one of the things that pandemic has been both a read awakening and a nice bit of training is as our ability to distract ourselves with business goes away, you're forced to sit there and wrestle with a lot of these things. To connect that back to this moral dilemma we were talking about earlier, I think one of the reasons, one of the way Seneca is able to navigate that series of contradictions is probably not thinking about it at all, by being so busy, by dealing with one crisis, one, this is a guy who was a senator,

a political advisor, and a famous playwright, and a philosopher all at the same time. I've got to imagine part of that busyness is, you know, built around not ever having to stop and think about what the hell you're doing. It would be as if Lin-Manuel Miranda was also the president and Tom Brady, like in one person. So James Rom, who's a great biographer of Seneca, he was talking about, like Seneca was so talented that there's for most of history, we thought Seneca the the playwright and Sennaka the philosopher, politician, were different people because everyone in Rome has the same name, like every member, every female member of Julius Caesar's family is named Julia, for instance.

So the idea that they were the same people is, was incomprehensible. And he says, this is the equivalent of if Emerson, the transcendentalistist had also written Faust, the play. And actually, as I say in life, that's actually not true. It'd be like if that were true, and Emerson had been in Lincoln's cabinet,

like if Emerson had also been vice president. So just the sheer brilliance, but also the sheer busyness of Santa ika, I think begins to shed some light on how he found himself in the, you know, moral quandary that he found himself in. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some

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So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondaria. Well, given the pandemic that we find ourselves in and the kind of, you know, challenging political climate, instead of monopolize our focus at the moment, there's never been, pandemic that we find ourselves in and the kind of, you know, challenging political climate instead monopolize our focus at the moment. There's never been a better time in our lifetime to flex these stoic principles, you know, for so many people, the world feels very out of control. You know, there's an incessant new cycle that's fueling anxiety and vitriol and conflict and confusion. We're seeing a breakdown of trust and institutions and in journalism and our ability

to productively communicate. And so there is this sense that the principles, these ancient principles of stoicism are needed now more than ever. Like in this, you know, there's a call to return to rationality to, you know, to a place of nuanced discourse and, you know, a respect for centrism. So how do you think about all of these things in this post-fact world that we're in? It really hit me at the beginning of this pandemic. Obviously, you know, Mark's is really saying I've had this sort of love affair now. I guess it's a one-sided love affair for a decade and a half. And so I knew it objectively, but it never quite struck me fully that he was writing during a pandemic. Like Marcus Aurelius, shortly after Marcus Aurelius takes power, the Antoni, what we now know as the Antoni in plague hits Rome. And it lasts for 15 years longer than that.

He eventually dies of it. So for his part, it was the death sentence, ultimately. But just the idea that what he was going through in the second century AD was very similar to what we're going through right now. There was political division. There was a public health crisis, there was an economic crisis. There were all these things happening at the same time.

And the full weight of that never sunk in with me until our lives started to resemble that, which is a really weird thing. And I think the ability to wrap your head around what's happened, like, he has this great quote. And again, it's like, you get it, but then you don't get it till you really get it. You know, he says like, a plague can destroy your life. You can take your life, but he's like, it only harms you if it hurts your character. And so I thought that was a beautiful idea, obviously, when I first read it. And then it didn't, again, it's like, oh, he was also literally speaking of a plague, right? And it struck me

the other day. I was, I'm thinking about writing this a friend of mine, actually a mutual friend of ours. I was talking to them and all of a sudden, they started saying like some crazy kind of conspiratorial stuff like, doubt masks and you know, all this. And I was like, oh, this person is infected. Like not with COVID,

but infected with another sort of dangerous, like idea virus. And so I think this, and that struck me as very sad, but in some ways inevitable. It's just, I guess, the idea of being able to think clearly of not being distracted or, you know, corrupted by the mob, of not losing your good-heartedness, of not losing your civic-mindedness, like the Stoics were struggling with those things just as we're struggling with those things. So I take a lot of heart from their teachings, especially lately. their teachings, especially lately. So then in more specific terms, how have you doubled down or applied these principles

to what is unique about right now? I mean, I think the civic-mindedness one is really a big part. So obviously you and I are doing this remotely because it's the right thing to do. Just a few days ago, I got an offer for a talk, like an in-person talk. I don't know if you've started to get these requests sort of creeping back up as well. And so in the one hand, it's sort of a temptation, it's sort of a temptation in that like, you know, we've been forced to sort of stay at home and

be productive and focused and not get distracted. And it was easy to say no and to sort of zoom in on what I have to do when no one was asking me to go do things. But it's also easy to say like, hey, people should be safe. People should not expose others. People shouldn't take needless risks. People should think about the common good. It's easy to say this like in a debate about whether college football should have crowds in the stands or not.

And then when someone is then offering you tens of thousands of dollars to go do a smaller version of a dangerous thing, now this is like where the rubber is meeting the road. So that's just something I've been thinking a lot about. It's like, it's very easy to be pure about these things, to be very strident about them, to be very insistent on what you know is right. And then when your livelihood is on the line,

suddenly you're different. So I think one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is just like, what are your obligations to your family, to other people, to your country, and then how do you kind of navigate that, you know, amidst the various obligations that you have as a human being? Yeah, in 12-step, they would call it practicing these principles in all our affairs. Yes.

It's when you're faced with that challenge yourself. Do you show up and live those principles or do you make some kind of excuse so that you can do what you want to do? Well, I heard a great line where it was like, it's not a principle unless it costs you money. So it was like, I'm not absolutely opposed to doing anything in person, but my wife and I had to sit down and go, okay, so here's what here's here are the constraints under which we would feel

comfortable like getting from place, you know, point A to point B, right? Like here's how we would do it. Like we don't feel comfortable traveling, like flying or staying hotel. So here's how we would do that. But then it was like, okay, what are what are the safety protocols that I would insist on? And here they are. Now you can say that to this to the event organizers. And then they could say, no, we're not gonna do that. And then you have to go, okay, well then I'm gonna say goodbye to that amount of money. You know what I mean? Like you actually have to, like it's,

again, it's easy to say, hey, everyone should wear masks is harder to say if you can't guarantee that everyone in this event is gonna be wearing masks or that the attendance is gonna be below this level or that everyone's gonna event is going to be wearing masks or that, you know, the attendance is going to be below this level or that everyone's going to be tested beforehand, I'm willing to walk away from X. And I think at a different point in my life, I think I would have had a lot more trouble doing that. And even now, it's a hard thing to do. I don't need it, but it's still a hard thing to do. And so that, you know, again, I think one of the things I've tried, the standard I've tried to hold myself through the pandemic is,

have I kept my family safe? That's obviously your first obligation. But second, have I done that without exposing or harming other people as well? Do you know what I mean? Like I think, and I think that's something that we as a society have really struggled with. Like, again, we were talking about this, just telling you about someone who is sort of passing forth some conspiratorial thing, and we might be getting too off in the weeds here. But there was a discussion about masks, and they were saying, you know, a lot of the people who have been exposed or who have tested positive were wearing masks.

And so to them, this was the argument, this was, you know, evidence that they don't, they shouldn't have to wear a mask, which fundamentally is not just wrong scientifically, but they're missing the entire moral argument for masks, which is that you wear the mask to not to help other people, not to yourself. There is science that mask reduces your viral load. You could pick up.

But the argument for masks, the stoic argument for masks and Stephen Pressfield, I think expressed this very brilliantly, he was saying that the Spartans, if you lost your helmet or your sword in battle, the Spartans would get you another one. But if you lost your shield in battle, the Spartans would punish a soldier with death. Because the shield was not for you, the shield was for protection of the entire Spartan line. If each Spartan holds their shield in the in the in the failings, everyone is protected. But if someone drops their shield, the person

on the right and the left of them becomes exposed. And so again, like, I think what I've really taken from the Stokes, especially lately, is just a much stronger sense of what our obligation is to other people, especially, you know, even and especially people you will never meet and never know and never even have any idea whether you negatively impacted them or not. Yeah, of course, the the shield just being a proxy for the mask. Yes. Yes. Right. The mask is to reduce your spread of the virus,

not to protect you from getting the virus. But that's almost the exact opposite of the way our brains are wired these days. Is we think about like James Stockdale, who I don't really talk enough about in the book, we decided to cut it off at the modern, you know, that Mark's really speaking the last joke that, that, that marks really is being the last joke, but I did kind of a bonus chapter on him.

He has this, he said, the flip side of what's in it for me. He said, is I am my brother's keeper. The idea that, um, it's not about whether this helps you or not, but it's about what your obligation is to other people or not. And we seem to struggle with that. Right. Well, there's something I think very American about our struggle with that,

because rugged individuality is so bred into the genetic material of who we are as a country. And that's at odds with being more communitarian and oriented around our neighbors. And the fracture that we're seeing has to be traced back to that on some level. But it's metastasized to such an extent that it's really fractured us in a way

that it's difficult to see our way back. Yeah, there's this great Huffington Post article the headline I think is just perfectly captures where we are today. And it's from a few years ago, but it's the headline and I think about it all the time, almost on a daily basis, because I do feel like I'm constantly bumping up against this with people I know, with my readers, even with my own family.

But the headline is just, I don't know how to tell you constantly bumping up against this with people. I know with my readers, even with my own family, but the headline is just, I don't know how to tell you that you have to care about other people. And I really feel like that is something that people seem not to understand, just at a fundamental level. Like they don't understand why they're supposed to care. When you look at stoicism, these principles emerge courage, justice,

temperance, wisdom, I'm sure there's a bunch more. No, those are the big four. Those are the big, okay. a bunch more. No, those are the big four. Those are the big, okay. But it is very much, it's kind of ephemeral, like when you contrast it to say the 12 steps as an example, or the atelimmed path, like these are ideas or not necessarily philosophies, but like ways of living that philosophies, but like ways of living that are, that are, you know, kind of distilled into very practical steps or practices, whereas stoicism is, I think you're the one who said, you know, it's kind of a choose your own adventure way of living. And I find myself struggling to figure out like on a day-to-day basis how to take these ideas and put them into practical practice. It's tricky and so for the Stoics and Christianity, the cardinal virtues are the same, right? Courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. But well,

Christianity, and I think this is a brilliant, I don't wanna call it invention, that sounds patronizing. But it's one of its sort of critical features, one of the reasons it becomes such a dominant sort of way of living in God is that Christianity also gives us the 10 commandments, right? Like the very clear do and don't list. And one of the chapters in the book is about a stoke named

Aristo. And Aristo, I don't want to say he screwed it up for everyone, but he sort of creates this early stoke backlash against what they call precepts, like the rules that you're talking about. He says like, you should just know that it should just kind of be obvious. That once you study, you should just know that it should just kind of be obvious. That once you study, you should know what's good and bad and then sort of intuitively, naturally,

always do it. He sort of likens this to an athlete. He says, you know, a javelin throw or just, you know, from from their practice knows what to do. But I sort of push back on that, not just in the book, but in my own thinking. It's like actually, athletes have coaches. And the coaches are telling them exactly what to do and not do. And they have very specific game plans. So I think as stoicism evolves,

it gets closer to precepts. But the tragedy of stoicism is that the vast majority of the writing does not survive. For most of the stoics, excepting basically Seneca, Musonius, Rufus, Epictetus, and Marxer Relias, all that we have from them are a handful of fragments. So we have quotes of quotes of quotes. I think in the actual stoic texts, there probably was a lot more specific instructions and a lot more, a lot more in the way of clear guidance. So I think what I try to do in my writing is then to still illustrate these sort of more ephemeral ideas in stories or examples or rules because I agree with you. I think that's ultimately what we need.

It's like, look, someone can tell you the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous. That's not really the process. The process is that you then go to meetings multiple times a day in some cases where they're reviewing it constantly over and over and over again, just like, you know, it's not about reading the Bible once. It's about, you know, 80 years of going to church and hearing about it and talking about it and dissecting it. So I think where stoicism has struggled is that it hasn't had, it hasn't been brought to people in the form of a practice or a sort of a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, figure engaged with and that, that's what I try to, that's what I've

tried to make for myself, but that's also what I try to do in my writing. Reading the, the back to this idea of, you know, you being a person of influence and, and trying to figure out how to articulate your perspective and often a perspective on current events and the impact of that on this audience that you've built as created an interesting experience of diving into your comment section, which is highly entertaining and reveals a sort of moral confusion, I think, not only about the essence of stoicism itself, but

also its responsible application to action. It's like there's a blindness in certain people to the fact that the Stoics by and large were people of the world, that they were integrated into public life at the highest level, literally themselves, politicians. integrated in public life at the highest level, literally themselves politicians, and to see people frustrated or upset that you would express perspective or an opinion on things that are going on right now is kind of amazing. Like do they not know what it is that you're talking about?

Like how do you, they are not very articulately, but I think you know what I'm talking about. I know exactly what you're talking about because it's consumed way too much of my mental and emotional bandwidth lately. It's rather surreal, right, to hear from someone, you know, and I've seen this coming out a thousand times, like, what would Seneca or Marcus are really a circuedo think of you bringing politics into this. And it's like as professional politicians, I think they'd probably be okay with it. You know what I mean? What are you talking about? But it's been hard because I think

you know this, it's like you work so hard to build an audience. You have an affinity for the audience. You are loyal to the audience. You have an affinity for the audience, you are loyal to the audience, you feel obligated to the audience, you're proud of it, you know, and then you think you have one set of connections or you think you're on a similar wavelength then you go, maybe not, maybe we're not even existing in the same reality. And that's been, that's been hard. I sort of go back and forth between being sad about it and finding it absurd, heartbreaking, and then also, you know, sort of galvanizing.

I kind of go back and forth, but it is, it's like, Ariana Huffington is a modern stoke. She's very liberal. James Mattis is a modern stoke. He's very liberal. James Mattis is a modern stoke. He's a lifelong Republican who served for a time in the Trump administration. James Stockdale, you know, a relatively modern stoke. He's a political independent.

He runs for vice president as a political independent. So I don't think the stokes are necessarily going to have a bunch of specific policy views. But it seems undeniable and indisputable to me that the Stoics would be opposed to a whole swath of things that are happening right now. And we know this because we saw them oppose very similar figures

at very high personal cost. And we see them talk over and over again about our obligations to other people about their obligation to goodness and decency and kindness. And so it's just incredible. And when you see people sort of using stoicism to justify or rationalize, like, just completely heinous things.

Yes. I don't agree with that. I think we only have a few minutes left. So I do want to give it a little bit. Yeah. You explore a little bit more deeply this idea of what it means to live and examine life, to be devoted to lifelong learning. And also packed into it, this stoic idea of life being a training ground for death, like learning how

to live your life to prepare for death. And death throughout the new book is so prominent, like the way that these people die and the sort of intentionality that they put into the choices that they make are surrounding their death is very unique and you know is not something that I think we think much about at all. Was for spoiler alert all the still hooks in the book die? Then none of them are still alive. That's a reality of the human existence.

I think Edmund was at Edmund Wilson said death is the one prophecy that never fails. None of them are still alive. That's a reality of the human existence. I think Edmund Wilson said death is the one prophecy that never fails. And so it's a book of the lives of the Stokes, but it's, you know, by definition, also a book of the deaths of the Stilics. I think, I don't know about you, but I do feel like the pandemic has brought mortality

much more into focus for people even myself. It's like, I mean, you could argue that the risk of dying of coronavirus is probably similarly low to a bunch of other things that we regularly don't think about or take for granted. And that's because we can't just get those things going outside and being breathed on by someone, right? So what the, you know, or you sort of see this argument, people go, but, you know, X amount of, you know, a hundred thousand people die every year of the regular flu. As though that somehow makes the pandemic not serious, what I've taken from a lot of those arguments is like,

oh man, there's been a lot of horrible public health crises that we have just not been paying attention to because we assume that we're invincible and it doesn't affect us. So I think what the Stokes wanted us to realize is that death is sort of ever present and it's always there and that rather than being scared or intimidated by this, it should shape how you live.

I think the most beautiful thing I've taken from Sena her, she has this idea that don't think of death as something that looms in the future, but think of death as something that's happening right now. So, you know, all these people we went into quarantine or we went into this weird limbo that we're in, and they were like, oh, I'll just wait to do this until we get back to normal.

And Sena could be like, but you just died eight months waiting for things to get back to normal. Like you'll never get those eight months back. And so I think one of the big things you take in living a life that is prepared for death is that you don't waste the life that you have. In the process of doing your own examination around this, like where do you find yourself struggling? Like where's your inflection point as you continue to evolve? There has to be obstacles that you have self awareness around that continually trip you up, and this is where you need to put your time and effort into.

Well, I think it's relatively easy to get to a place where philosophically you're okay with death, you know, provided that you're not like a sort of eraging narcissist or something, right? Like, it's, but it's then when you have attachments or obligations to other people that it gets very tricky, right? Like, um, Marcus, it really talks about when you tuck your kids in at night to say to yourself that they could die before morning, which on paper, you know, reading at 19 years old, I was like, that's an interesting way to think about it.

Well, when you're cuddling with a four-year-old, that's a heavy thing to do. You know what I mean? And even, you know, writing this book, really trying to wrap my head around the fact that Marcus really loses multiple children before adulthood. You realize it's like, okay, it's one thing to sort of be philosophical about death

because it's involving you. But what about when your death affects other people or what about your love or care or commitment to other people is affected by the reality of death? So I think it's like, look, I don't want, you know, you don't want to say goodbye to your family. You don't want anything to happen to them. And so I think wrestling with the real implications of nothing being certain and mortality being

real is just another thing entirely when it affects innocent other people. So in the book, you profile, what is it, like, 26 of these Stoics? It had to be a process trying to figure out who's in the book, who's not in the book, but who, in the unearthing of all this research, surprised you the most. Like what was the, you know, as somebody who's been steeped in this for so long, what were the kind of happy accidents or surprises in the writing?

The one character that, one of the things I really wanted to do is I wanted to make sure it wasn't all men, which is not an easy thing to do because the ancient world was, you know, sort of heavily biased towards men. And so the exploration of Porsche Cato, I mean, I knew who Porsche Cato was and I think I vaguely understood

that she was married to Brutus. There's this scene where basically she, and again, the idea of just how real the stuff is, like she gets the sense that her husband is up to something and she doesn't know what. And she gets the sense that he doesn't want to tell her, not because he's ashamed of it, because he doesn't want to harm her.

And so she realizes, oh, he has a secret that he's afraid if he tells me it will put me in danger. And so she stabs herself in the leg and then just sees how long she can deal with the pain before she breaks. And the reason she's doing this is that the punishment for secrets, a conspiratorial secrets in Rome was the punishment of torture. So she's basically torturing herself just to see if she's got it and she does. And ultimately, this is what lets her in on and makes her a major component of the conspiracy

to assassinate Julius Caesar. And you're just like, okay, I get why we mostly talk about men historically, but like this is such a bad-ass story. How did I not, how is this not been taught in every school? You know, it's like I read Julius Caesar in high school and we didn't spend a couple days talking about poor show, but that would have been fascinating. You know, so I think just how central she was and how central her identity was as far as the stillyx being very unanimous about their belief that virtue had nothing to do with gender. That was a wonderful discovery. Yeah, and her being the daughter of Cato, and where she kind of sits in the lineage, and that when Brutus goes off, to do what we all know that he was setting out to do, the confusion around like who died first, did she die, and the anxiety that she had about where he was in the

world and whether he was going to make it back is fascinating. Yeah, and I just love the idea of like husband keeping a secret from the wife, but of course the wife immediately knows, like I just loved how modern that felt as well. Speaking of modern, if if Marcus Aurelius or Seneca were around today and made their appearance on CNN or Fox, what is that talking head look like? Well, I don't know if you've seen this, but if you google it, a bunch of really interesting artists have been doing this thing where they kind of reconstruct what people look like from statues. They've like put sort of skin on the statues. And I've got to say, I'm going to send you this photo. You've got a Marcus really a thing going on right now. I'll take that as a compliment.

Yeah, the hook on the question. No, I don't know what they'd be saying exactly, but I think they would be doing, I think it'd be a Lincoln-esque kind of a moment, appealing to the better angels of our nature, that a divided house can't stand. Marcus says, the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. They'd be talking about sort of being in this together. They'd be talking about what our obligations are to ourselves to other

people. And I think they'd be, you know, those four virtues are of courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom are as relevant and in desperate short supply as they ever have been. So I'd like to think it'd be a reminder of that. And sadly, I also think they'd probably get mocked on social media almost immediately as well. And how would they manage that mockery? What are they being with the comments and the trolls? I don't know. I think Senaco would be a much more astute sort of player

of information and understand how persuasion and sort of political realities operate. Marcus, really, as you kind of get this sense that maybe he was a little bit too pure for this world and sort of struggled. So I don't know, but I certainly know they would be involved, right? Because that's the fundamental, in the ancient world, the fundamental distinction between the Epicurians and the Stoics

is that the Stoic believed he had to be involved. Yeah, the Epicurians being more, there's a little bit of like an Eastern bed to that, right? Like it's your relationship to yourself and you're kind of opting out of that discourse that's happening publicly. Yeah, the the the epicurean is turning inward and the stoic is which is ironic because we think of the stoics as being resigned the stoic is saying no you got to you got to go into this trife. All right as we as we wind us down I think it would be instructive for somebody who's listening

or watching who's new to these ideas, they haven't, you know, read any of your books. This is their first introduction to the idea of stoicism. What is it that you want the reader to take away from this newest book or what is most fundamental to understand about stoicism and its applicability to, you know, how we love our lives currently and how we engage with our communities. Although there are certainly philosophers alive today, I would argue almost nobody cares what those philosophers are doing. They don't care what kind of car they drive, they don't care what they think about this or that. they exist in almost a purely academic setting. That was not what philosophy was in the ancient world

and that's not what philosophy is supposed to be. To me, what is so powerful about the Stoets, why I wrote this book was that the purpose of philosophy is to improve yourself as a human being, to improve yourself as a citizen, as a spouse, as a child, as a leader, as a, you know, whatever, right? And that the purpose of philosophy is to get better as a human. And that the reason we look at what the philosophers, we should look at what the philosophers did

more than what they said is that we want to see how they manage to measure up and what lessons we can learn from that struggle between theory and application. So I don't think the world needs more people having clever thoughts. The world needs more people who manage to put these good ideas into daily practice in their lives. Now, I mean, I'm not saying I've mastered that. I'm saying I'm struggling with it, but I think that struggle is what philosophy is really here for. Right.

And I think you've done an amazing job of not only being a stooch shepherd of these ideas, but also being, you know, how do I say this? Like in the ancient tradition, there were these groups that would get together, right? They would congregate and they would talk about these ideas. And you've kind of created a digital version of that by virtue of the Daily Stoic,

which allows people to congregate virtually around these ideas to propagate them. And I think, you know, what you've created is a service to humanity. And thank you for doing that. And I look forward to the next book about stuff. I appreciate it. Thanks again, man. It's always good to chat.

Right? You're well in your next book, I would imagine. Yes, I'm actually, I've sort of finished one, and I'm on to the next one. And you're going to be predictably tight left about what that's about. Of course. Of course.

All right. The book is live to the Stoics. Thank you, Ryan. I look forward to seeing you in person when this thing lifts and when it does. And till then, everybody watching and listening, thank you for your attention. And check out the world of Ryan Holiday, RyanH Ryan holiday.net. You can sign up for your, it's Ryan holiday.net, right?

It's time for Ryan's monthly email newsletter where he talks about all the books that he read that. And it's highly recommended. Thanks, man. Is it? If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you canic early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today,

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