The Daily Stoic - Susan Sauve Meyer On Becoming A Better Person With Aristotle

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Ryan speaks with Susan Sauve Meyer about the work of making ancient philosophy accessible in today’s world, the insights that she has gained from teaching philosophy to powerful and famous people, what it was like to practice philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, in what ways Aristotle and the Stoics would have agreed and disagreed, and more.Susan Sauve Meyer is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and she taught at Harvard University before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on Greek and Roman Philosophy and the History of Moral Philosophy, and includes her books Aristotle on Moral Responsibility and Ancient Ethics. Susan teaches a popular online course in philosophy on Coursera, which gained national notoriety when it was attended and praised by pop singer Shakira.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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 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 actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. One of the joys of my life has been popularizing inter-philosophy. People go, oh, you're just a popularizer and I go, yep, that's what I'm trying to do. So it's not an insult and I consider myself a very good company, not just with great popularizers of other ideas like a Malcolm Godwell, but I'm not the only one taking philosophical ideas and bringing them to a wide audience. Donald Robertson, who I've had on the podcast,

I've raved about his work before, or Elaine DeBitton, however that's pronounced, and School of Life has done a spectacular job of popularizing a bunch of philosophical ideas. And actually, my guest today has made Aristotle exciting and interesting, not just to hundreds of thousands of people, but most famously to Shakira, who took her four-week course on Plato during the lockdown phase of the pandemic in early 2020. My guest today is Professor Susan Sove Meyer. She's at BA from the University of Toronto.

She is a PhD from Cornell. She's taught at Harvard, and now she teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she is a specialist in Greek and Roman philosophy, focuses on the ancient ethical tradition, and that makes her look particularly hard at Aristotle and the Stoics. Her book, Ancient Ethics, which came out in 2008, is a systematic treatment of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurian and Stoic ideas. And it's a fascinating book. More than 100,000 people around the world have taken her open access online courses on

ancient philosophy. And she has a new book as part of the series I have raved about many times here, The Princeton University Presses, presses ancient wisdom series. This one is called How to Flourish an ancient guide to living well, which is a translation of Aristotle. She translates it, makes the selections, and then tacked on a wonderful little introduction to it. Comes out on June 20th. She and I had a fascinating and super fun conversation, 20th, she and I had a fascinating and super fun conversation. And I think you're really going to enjoy it. So here's to all the popularizers out there,

whatever it is that you do, there I think there's something special is something to be proud of. Certainly worst occupations in the world. And taking something you're really passionate about, something that means a lot to you, bringing it to people and people to it. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

That's what I'm doing here on this very podcast, open to popularize Professor Myers. Excellent work. Enjoy. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, life can get you down. I'm no stranger to that. When I find things that are piling up,

I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously, I use my journal, obviously, a turn to stochism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time and has helped me through a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy remote, so I don't have to drive somewhere. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Toxbase makes it easy to find a therapist that you like. It's convenient, it's affordable. By doing everything online, Talkspace makes getting the help you want easy and affordable. So, why wait? And Talkspace can help with any specific challenge you might be facing. That's why it's the number one online therapy platform with license therapists and over 40 specialties.

It's secure and private and in network with most major insurers. As a listener of this podcast, you can get 80 bucks off your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com slash stoic to match with a license therapist today. Go to Talkspace.com slash stoic to get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the daily stoic. That's Talkspace.com slash stoic. It's funny. I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that. And they tell me how they fall in love with reading.

They're reading more than ever. And I go, let me guess, you listen audio books, don't you? And it's true. And almost invariably, they listen to them on Audible. And that's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audio books across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs. And of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app. You'll always find the best of what you love

or something new to discover. And as an Audible member, you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest best sellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out stillness is the key, the daily dad I just recorded. So that's up on Audible now coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audio books. So all those are available and new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500, that's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500.

Well, I'm very excited to talk. I thought the book was really interesting. Of course, you know what I like about this series. I've read most of the books in the University of Press, in忍 Wistem series. Now, Princeton, sorry. But I've read a lot of them, and I've read most of the original texts, you know, in the whole book, but this is like, it's like a nice, greatest hits album or way to reread the books with a good intro

and just get a bunch of stuff that you vaguely remember reading, but then you're getting to see for a second or a third time. Yeah, so that's actually one way that this series works. And also I think it serves as a, I was hoping it could also serve as an entry point for some people who just like hadn't heard about respect and on the way in. But yeah, so there's a lot, there are a lot of barriers to just picking up a book and plowing through it, so having this sort of public-facing series addressed to the General Reader, I think, is fun. It's also actually really fun to figure out how to produce the text that would

serve, that would speak to your ordinary intellectual, not someone else like me who's a scholar writing, you know, scholarly articles about this, right? We have our own language and it puts everyone else off. Well, I know Aristotle didn't choose the title, but whoever chose the title did not do a good job of titling the text itself. I, when I read it in college, my professor called it Nika Manchin Ethics, but how did, how do you pronounce it? professor called it Nika Manchian Ethics,

but how do you pronounce it? I pronounce it Nika McKeean Ethics. But it's Aristotle's Ethics. I mean, all of Aristotle's work have just very simple descriptive titles, like there's the physics, there's the meteorological, and then there's the ethics. They just have to be two ethics, two ethical treatises. And by tradition, one of them is called the ethics to UD-mas, so dedicated to UD-mas. And one is dedicated to Nikomicus.

So that just came to be known as the Nikomikian ethics. Yes, but it isn't a great way to sell a book, I think, in these days. Well, your title is spectacular, which was my point, which is I think people tend to see the philosophical works as these books written by people with unpronounceable names, although Aristotle and Plato and Socrates have the three most pronounceable names.

But, you know, their titles you can't pronounce written by names you can't pronounce, written by names you can't pronounce, that don't necessarily give you anything in terms of the promise or the potential of the work. So even ethics, right? A small percentage of the population, unfortunately, is gonna sit down and go, you know what I need?

I need to ground myself in ancient ethical thought versus I would very much like to flourish, right? So I think this series I have felt has done a great job at titling. There's the epic teetist one. How to. That's a fabulous volume. Yes.

The Stenica one. What is it? Is it how? There's the one on Don Anger, right? Yeah. How to keep your cool. I think. Yes, how to keep your cool. Yes. That was great. Even the the one on Horus's poetry is good. Just all the titles are doing a great service in that they are saying there is a purpose and a function to this book other than academic philosophizing. Right, yes, I guess every work of literature,

anything written text is part of some conversation or some project and the farther away in time we are from when somebody wrote it, the elusive connection we have, if we may have entirely lost it to what actually, what was the conversation? Like what was this about? Like it sounds like no,

in which end you pick up, like when you would you to look at it. So yeah, this series, sorry, I keep looking down because I'm looking at my own copy of this sitting here, has been great at showing which end is up. Like what is this about? And how, at showing which end is up. Like, what is this about?

And how, yeah, this is very much ethic, the ethical tradition in the Greek and Roman tradition. It really is for people who want to live good lives. Like how, you want to, I don't want to speak to anybody who isn't interested in living a good life. That's what Aristotle says after he's cleared his throat for a couple of chapters. He says, you y'all, you may be too young for this.

Well, if you're happy. Epic Titus says, every situation has two handles, and I would argue that every work of art has two handles. There's the packaging that will pull people in and bear the weight of the work, and then there's the one that, if it doesn't bear weight, it may do worse, it may repel people, right? And there is an art to making these things accessible,

especially in a world where, you know, a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, thousand years ago, most people are reading Aristotle, not voluntarily, right? And in today's world, accepting certain people like me who took it in college, the vast majority of us are not being taught in school or not learning Latin, we're not having to memorize these sentences. And so if we're going to read Aristotle or Plato or Socrates or the Stokes, it's going to be voluntarily. And so how do you make that attractive to people? Right.

And that's a continually evolving problem set. Because every generation pretty much needs its new translation. Certainly every century, but they're different idioms and understanding. And even what resonates with people. I changed it. No one would have thought of translating you Diamania with flourishing, you know, I probably 70 years ago in English. That just didn't come up. Well, I want to talk to you about that in a second.

But first, I thought the way into this for me was Aristotle taught Alexander and you taught Shakira. So what? Yes, my claim to say. What have you, what are you, what, what insights do you have about making philosophy accessible and interesting to powerful, driven, busy people. Yeah, I find that that was just so remarkable in my way that what you need then to appreciate philosophy is a certain amount of leisure, intellectual leisure, and a certain amount of intellectual

craving. So there we were at the beginning of the pandemic Everybody's stuck at home, you know with their kids in their laptops That was Shakira. She has lovely apartment because she like I could see her watching my lectures on parminities with this beautiful backdrop behind her And as she had her kids, right? And so let me do so what how do I engage myself? So this is when the on lot these open online courses, you know, got a huge jump in and run what I went for getting a hundred people a week to getting a thousand people a week. Right? So then everybody, even a pop star, might be interested in play. I think

she took the play of course. I didn't think she stick around for the Aristotle course. Or at least she didn't tweet about it if she did. And I thought, well, you know, this is really enduring, amazing material. And I thought, I actually found it very gratifying to have produced those lectures that gave so many people who weren't college students, and weren't university students, didn't have an agenda to take it, and to try and give them an entry point to it. So that was, and

then a lot of people got excited about that. People who really liked Play Doe got excited about it. I think there was no one, public television and Athens had a sequence, you know, on, you know, Shakira's talking about Play Doe, like they were new to just being all my friends who work in the scholarly world and our society. Did you see that Shakira is not taking your course? I don't speak Greek or Latin and can't read them, but the translator I worked with on the daily strokes, Steve Hanselman pointed out that the word school in English comes from the Greek scolay, which means leisure. And I was struck by how far our current definition from school is, from that more timeless tradition, which is, what should I do with my excess time? How can I fulfill myself, find meaning, not be idle or wasteful, I'm going to go learn something and why not

turn to the ancients. That's what Shakira was doing, but that is such a timeless embodiment of that idea. Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm a language nerd, so I love these facts like what's Skolay comes to me. And you know when we talk about schools of thought, so there's our term schools of thought, that's come from the Greek Skull I mean leisure. When we talk that there's the Aristotelians, there's the Stoics, there's the Christians,

there's the Dachy, you can go all different schools, there's the Marxists, there's the Leninists, but they're all schools of thought. But school there, if you wanted to translate that back into ancient Greek, that is a highrises, which is a Greek for choice. So in fact, that's where our term sects comes from, you know, different sectarian, different sects, because that's for the Latin version of the Greek, which is selection and choice.

So you sort of, you pick a particular standpoint. Yeah, so then, yeah, the way language just picks up, it carries its history, it drops off stuff, it takes on baggage, and if you can trace that history, it's always, there's always interesting things that show up. What struck me about the tweet that Shakira put out, I think her then husband or boyfriend, I believe there was a bunch of drama relating

to both of them afterwards, but I remember there was a video of her taking her course and then she tweeted about it and she said something like, I know my hobbies are impractical, but blah blah blah. So it was interesting. There was this, I thought it was very representative of the defensiveness or insecurity or stereotype that even someone who was interested in it had about the role that philosophy or Aristotle could or ought play in our lives. Yeah, so we think of it.

It's not like getting, you know, studying accounting or management or, you know, chemical engineering. It's something it's got broad application, it's humanistic inquiry and that you need a certain intellectual leisure to do it and the payoff isn't in your paycheck and in any deliverables and your work product unless you like me and your right books about Aristotle. But for most people, the path is that this is reflection on really important questions about human life. And if you're a human and then you're interested in thinking about those questions, then you know, have a conversation with Aristotle and see with what you think about whether you agree with and what you could take away with from what he said.

You don't always have to agree with what you read, but just take, you know, wrap your mind around it and chew on it for me. That's the really philosophical way to engage with it. It is funny, though, to me, to think in the case of Shakira here, you have someone who's very famous, very powerful, very wealthy, very busy, besieged with requests, with temptations, with criticism. All of these questions that Aristotle does deal with, right? And I could see she's saying it's impractical, but I could so, if Aristotle's writing about how to flourish as a human being, and find and what to say yes to and what to say no to, what the right thing is, what the wrong thing is. Who are these questions more urgent and important to? I think they're important to all people,

but with her privilege and success, these are the critical questions. She's not dealing with how do I find money to eat tonight? She's dealing with, should I go on this extra tour or not? Should I be worried about this bad review or not? Like, she's worried with the kinds of existential philosophical questions I think Aristotle spends quite a lot of his brain power thinking about.

Yeah, yeah, so we all can learn something from Aristotle, and sometimes it doesn't, you don't get to help to answer this question right now. Do I sign the contract or don't I sign the contract? But it percolates through. It's when you feel about how it turned out. And the bad review, there's probably an Aristotelian virtue that tells you how to deal with bad reviews and good reviews. How much you should care about it and how to put things in perspective and think about it in terms of a life as a whole which is

the way I kind of think about an Aristotelian approach to life as you take a kind of a whole life perspective on a lot of questions. And I that's an immense, um, epitetus does that too, as well. You can stand back and think of it from the point of view of humanity. That's, that's sort of a global picture for epitetus, but for Aristotle, so you think of your life as a whole. He's not a cosmopolitan. I think of Aristotle's concept of the mean, particularly in relationships to temperance, probably on a daily basis,

like it's one of the most practical, philosophical things that I've ever learned. It's practical, except that it doesn't tell you whether that beer is the one you shouldn't, this is the time to stop drinking or that. This is not, this is what to order for the menu. This is what not to order. Right?

It's not, it's not so intensely practical in that way. It's not like a little algorithm. Yes. It's both sort of, it's a permission. It's a look at, you know, bodily temperance. It's the virtue about bodily appetites. Right? None of them is bad in and of themselves, but there's a right time and a wrong time. There's too much

and there's too little. There's doing it with self-respect, not with self-respect. And that's the way you should think about it. So especially for resisting sort of the bad advice, it says that you should never, never eat that. then Aristotle can give you sort of a healthy sort of distance from it. But I think one of the things I think I've heard you say, thinking even thinking about the stoics, is Aristotle emphasizes that it's your practice and sort of the habits you develop that make a difference

for things like temperance. And that it's not easy. Like you decide, OK, I'm going to cut down on carbs. I'm not going to eat processed sugar. And so that means, no, I'm going to cut down on carbs. I'm not going to eat processed sugar. And so that means, no, I'm not going to have that glass of juice. I'm going to have a glass of water. So that's really hard. Like the first time, because this is the day, the first start your day, you're going to

have your glass of juice. And you're not going to do that. But once you get, you develop the habit to do it, you do it, it gets easier. That's what Aristotle told us. And then you feel, you know, it's not it easier, but you feel better about it and you can appreciate the reasons you had for doing it. No, you're right. But if the philosophers were truly practical, they would say, do this, don't do this.

Here's the right amount of this. Here's the right amount of that. These are the things to avoid. These are the things it's okay to do. Instead, Aristotle says something like, the key question is to do the right thing at the right time and the right amount for the right part. And so you can say thank you very much Aristotle. Right. I leave it to you to figure it out. But here's the here's the here's what success looks like. And you're like, Oh, okay, I have to figure out how to get there.

But he does do a good job of giving you the tools and the exercises about how to think about these things. Right. He's always encouraged you. So you are a human being, which means you are thinking being, which means that in any sort of domain, whether it has to do with food or it has to do with anger or it has to do with frightening stuff, there frightening stuff, you know, there's, you know, there's doing, you can, you can, there are things you have to, you can, you have to think about,

right? Is this, would be this be a disgraceful thing to do with this be a decent thing to do? And you can always think about it, maybe not in the moment, sometimes you've got to decide quickly, that's, you know, courage is that kind of a virtue, but most of them, you've got, you've got time to reflect. And the idea is that you, even if you're responding with your emotions, and because emotions are a very important part of human life, your emotions are not sort of pulling you against what you actually think you should be doing. So that's bringing you, getting what you think you should do

and the way you actually feel about things, getting those things to line up. That's the true, and so not to be conflicted, right? That's the piece of mind and the inner harmony that's really the core of both of Plato's and Aristotle's ethics. Do you, I was curious to ask you, as you mentioned, your course doing

well over 100,000 students, how does the scale of that strike you? I think sometimes I, I think about that. I go, how many Stoics could there have been in the ancient world? And then to be able to, in a YouTube or a a podcast reach maybe more than ever existed cumatively in history. It's kind of crazy to think about what these tools allow us to do. The ideas are not necessarily our own, but we have the ability to reach vastly more people than would have been able to touch these ideas when they were on little rolled up scrolls or whatever. Right. Yeah. In the way you either attended somebody's lectures or maybe or you read you borrowed books or you borrowed scrolls. But these are, it's a very small percentage

of the population that has a lot of there, there are no public libraries. You can have their own library. There's a preface, the one of Cicero's dialogues, the dramatic part. He says, I was just over at Sohn's house. He was away, but so I just went in and helped myself to the Aristotle books. So you have to have access to the books, and you have to be literate.

And in a time when literacy was not nearly as common as now, but imagine having YouTube, YouTube actually I can't imagine Aristotle and YouTube play, though I can. But that's because the Aristotle we have is isn't the Aristotle that was for public, you know, presentation. He wrote treatises that we've law laws. They were for publication the way Plato's dialogues were for publication. They're very polished.

And we know, I think again, Cicero's our great reporter on most things in the history of philosophy before him. He said, cause I'm like the golden flow of words from Aristotle. And I say, well, it doesn't seem to be my text that I've got, but these are the working, you know, his working drafts. We don't know exactly how we use them, but they were not, you know, they were presented with the view of engaging with an audience, whereas, you know, successful YouTubers are really, they figured out, you know, how to do that.

And you know, this is the age of, you know, video communication, where well beyond the end of your life. No, we'll be watching this video right now. Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, this whole, I'd never, I'd never even like to look at it videos of myself or audio of myself before I made those lectures. Now I've got like 75 lectures out there. Angie has made it easier than ever to connect with skilled professionals to get all your home projects done well.

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I think back to this time when all these great philosophers were alive. And that's probably not representative of how the world actually was. What is your read? Were a lot of people interested in philosophy or was it actually kind of similar to now where there's a handful of us

and everyone else is just too busy trying to make it through the day to contemplate ethics or what the ideal city should look like? Was philosophy for an elite minority or was it, was it a popular discourse? Well, it was, I think more popular than it is today among sort of the social class that has sort of the means to engage. So if you work for a living, I apologize about this to buzz, you're going to be too busy to engage in sort of the business of citizenship, the life in the palace, and then evolving, you know, serving

on juries, going to the assembly, doing that, but also talking to your fellow citizens of course it's entirely men right because women you know are kept at home but philosophy wasn't a narrow discipline then that excludes let's say theology and biology and chemistry you know basically all of everything except for mathematics pretty much would have been within the realm of what philosophy is. In fact, it even included rhetoric and it's not in the fourth century between the Sabotones, very famous debate between Plato and hisocrates over who gets the title philosophy. And who gets this stuff? There's a serious reasoning. So you can see philosophy dramatized in the dramatic dialogues of Plato, which is then describing it's sort of a fourth and early, late fifth, early fourth century audience

he's describing there. So Aristotle's writing a little later than that. You can figure the same. These are the young from sort of well-to-do families who expect they've got property. They're gonna be managing the states, but they're not spending their days writing briefs and filling teeth or laying bricks or anything like that.

So it was a leisure class. It was an activity of the leisure classes. But within the elite, It's it, it was an activity of the leisure classes. But within the elite, it was probably a more widespread activity than philosophy today. The big divide was, and you can see again, Plato was sort of very much shaping my own picture. This is to those who are gonna engage in politics

that is in the business of the city as opposed to, that is not running for office but just being active in civic life as opposed to talking about stuff that's useless. Even this idea that philosophy is impractical is all intellectual activities kind of impractical. You should just go out and do stuff. There's still like that divide this between the two ways of thinking about the world. You know that's as old as Plato and Aristotle or older, maybe as long as there's been human societies,

there's probably been that, those two ways of thinking about it. Yeah, there's this kids book I reach to my kids, I don't know if you've ever seen it, it's called Fredrick and it's about the mouse and all these little mice are preparing for winter and gathering all the stuff, and they sort of go, Frederick, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm gathering the colors,

and I'm gathering the words. And then when they're all starving, they go, Frederick, when are you gonna do your part? You've emailed our food and he says, oh, well, let me, he recites them a beautiful poem that warms their souls. And I just think about, you know, that is what poets and philosophers have basically been doing for thousands

of years. Sure, I can't lift this heavy thing. Sure, I don't produce food or fight battles or whatever, but let me entertain you with this poem or this work of art. I actually do think that's an important function. Obviously, it's close to my heart as a writer, but yes, there is something, not only something fundamentally impractical, but there's probably been resentments about how impractical it is for as long as there have been divisions of labor.

Yes, yes, but it's actually true that there are lots of very important things in life that you can only Have it's a luxury to spend time on them. You not if you're hungry and cold and have and tired and have you know I have to fight for your security and worry about basic, you know, basic conditions of survival. So the question is human society is all about stabilizing and managing those risks so that there's time for all the, you know, for religion, for art, for philosophy, for science, for YouTube, right? Like YouTube is a luxury. If we were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse where we were fighting for survival each day, we probably wouldn't be recording this podcast. Shakira wouldn't be studying Aristotle or Plato or whatever, right?

We would be dealing with more urgent concerns. Right. And that's a bad thing. That's a bad state to be in. You want to get your civilization out of that after set of point. Because what's the point of solving all these problems apart from things doesn't hurt so much? Is there more and no more in life than just not being hungry and not being afraid? That's aversion.

Well, actually, there's a version of Epicurus. He says that's actually what it is, but he has a much more robust view of what that, not being hungry and not being afraid is. I think it's philosophy's got a lot to do with that. Well, I think of the Epicurians as the quintessential example of the Fredrics of the world where they're basically like, someone else will take care of politics, someone else will take care of fighting in the wars, someone else will take care of everything. And we'll Terry here in the garden and think about big ideas. That is philosophy and it's most Zen form to me where it is a rejection of most of it's not the pure pleasure seeking hedonism that it's stereotyped as, but it is the least engaged of the philosophical

schools with the realities of the world. Right. I mean, that is one way of interpreting sort of the political commitments of an epicurean. But if you notice that there were epicureanism was massively popular in Rome. And Cicero is always, you know, in vain against his contemporaries who were so, you know, interested in, and devotees of Epicurus. And they were Roman notables and politicians in this.

So it wasn't, so their strategy, I think, is an interesting question of how much a card carrying Epicurean, like what would a card carrying Epicurean, like what would a card carrying epicurean say about, being involved in the life of the community because it sounds like, well, it's not going to promote your immediate pleasure, but that's not the kind of pleasure that epicure says to maximize pleasure is the highest pleasure is not being afraid and not being worried. And so virtue is to be practiced in order to provide the conditions of not being afraid and not being worried. And community is a big part of that.

So that's why Epicureans live in communities. You say the garden, like we're, we're like, we've got the, we've walled out the world. We can't wall out the world. So there are, I think, decent arguments that people have given that Epicureans can be consistently believe in engaging in politics because that would be, that would be like justice requires it. So they believed in the virtues and justices of virtue. They just thought, had to be what it was all for.

That's true. I mean, when you look at the lives of the Stokes also, which I wrote a book about a few years ago, these are people that they got married, they had children. They made works of art. They ran for office. So just as there are Buddhists who serve in the armed forces and our companies. And so there is this, it's almost as if it's almost that like, if you are engaged in the world and you are doing these things, you need the philosophical counterbalances to maintain your sanity and clarity and direction. If you truly did disengage from the world and you just lived in your monastery or your garden or

retreated inward, actually a lot of these coping strategies would be less less valuable to you because you would be coping with so much less stuff. I need Stoicism when I'm putting out a book because I have made myself vulnerable to externals. If I had truly discounted anyone's else's opinion, the market, the world impact, et cetera, I wouldn't publish the book at all. Right, right. I think one of the ways of thinking the difference between Epicureans and Stoics,

because they're very similar in lots of ways in terms of the life, like having this kind of zen attitude to life, is that the Epicureans are very optimistic about how invulnerable you can be like to what goes on in the world. Or the Stoics are perfectly realistic, like you cannot guard again, you cannot securely guard against these kinds of disappointments. All you could do is you can you can gird up yourself and your own attitudes and expectations. So you'll be able to deal with it. Right? Epicures promises that somehow there there's enough to go around of all the basic stuff

that everybody needs. And so don't worry about you can get it. Are you kidding? But whereas the Stoics said, well, no, you can't guard against it, but you could be absolutely secure about getting the only thing that matters, which is being virtuous. Yes. Yes. And I do feel like, and maybe there's a little ego in it, but I feel like the Stoics were like, somebody has to be the adult, right?

Like somebody has to run these things, because if we don't do it, this is particularly as in the later years of the Roman Empire where it's like, if the philosopher doesn't hold office or serve in the army or take this position or, you know, all the different roles of the police, the non-philosopher will hold that role, and the state will go in the wrong direction, or the world will fall apart, or what have you. There's a, it's not a savior complex so much as it is. What are we studying these ideas for, if not to assume positions of leadership and influence and responsibility.

Or even just doing your civic duty, right? You don't have to be, it doesn't have to be a leadership thing. Yes. Yeah. Where do you think Aristotle and the Stoics would have found common ground and where do you think they would have argued with each other? Yeah, well, I think the Stoics are very much working within the Aristotelian tradition. I think Aristotle basically gave the framework that all ancient Greek and Roman ethics follows from then on.

So Plato started and he was happiness questions about living well and about virtue. They're all throughout the dialogues. But what Aristotle did is he figured out the way to organize this set of questions, which is about how to live and what, you know, what, what is this virtue, what is that for? He's questions, what is the goal of life? Like, that's how. So happiness, right, just, you say, we all agree that that's what the goal of life is. Are you a Diamania? And then, you know, we can have dispute about, have disputes about what that is. So his, so you get, so whatever sort of gives us is this framework that ethics, like this whole practice of thinking about how to live is thinking about what is the human good,

what is happiness, what is the best thing in life? And then there are different halves that relate to something, things like virtue and things, and now there are things like pleasure or wealth or friends or political power. So how these things fit together. So the Aristotle gives us the Telos question. Right, we'll call it Telos is just for the Greek for goal.

For goal. I think goal purpose is a little too intentional because your oak tree has a tell us and it has no mind at all. And so I also gives us the tell us question and he says and he even agrees that you know happiness is the tell us and he has a view about what happiness is. Right, it's going to be it's an activity of virtues is living a life that's exercising your powers as a human being, you know, as excellently as possible. And he says, but you also supposed to be happy, you also need some things besides virtue.

You can't just be virtuous. You need a certain amount of wealth and a certain amount of security and a certain, you need friends so you can't, whereas, and so different, there are different, the different, there are, virtue is a good thing. You know, it's probably the most important thing

happiness is not quite the same as virtue, but it's very close to it. But there are, there are goods that are virtues, and goods that aren't virtue, right? So you need all to be happy. You need to have a sufficient amount of your life has to be sufficient. It's called a self-sufficiency. You have everything that's worth desiring for its own sake, or at least all the gnarly general categories.

And some of that's in your control and some of it's not. So the big difference with the Stoics, the Stoics think there's only, the Stoics, the Stoics think there's only the Stoics accept the tell us question, right? They have an answer to it, what is the goal of life? The goal for the Stoics is to live in agreement with nature, right? And by that, when they mean that, that doesn't mean like going out and, you know, just hiking and, you know, not having showers and, you know, they don't really define it, right? It's like we talked about in practice. They're like, the main thing in life is to live in accordance with nature.

And then I'll leave you to infer what that means. Right. Oh, well, they have a lot to say, especially the Greek Stokes have a lot to say about it. And that is to live in accordance basically with the mind of the universe, that of God imbues all things. God is perfect, reason, perfect rationality. And so to live according to your own reason or your own powers of thinking and to line up with the reason that guides the universe, you know, is perfect consonants between your human life and what God has in mind for the universe.

That's what's living in agreement is. And they also claim that that's what living virtuously is, is leading your life by reason. And so your reason has to now appreciate then the divine reason that governs the universe. So there's a lot of like a lot of theology in there. And the Stoics is very different from what you find in there. So but the idea is that, okay, living in a grimmate with nature, that's your goal and that's exercising virtue, right? And that's the only thing that, okay, living in a grimmate with nature, that's your goal. And that's exercising virtue, right? And that's the only thing that's good. The only bad thing is being full, like not being wise.

And so that's a big disagreement between Plato and Aristotle then is whether anything other than being virtuous is in and of itself worthwhile and worth pursuing and is necessary for leading a happy life. And that's where the big disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics about the emotions comes from because the st- you know the Aristotle has the doctrine of the mean as you said you should get angry not too much or too little right right? And the stoics say no anger, right? And that's because for Aristotle, anger is about bad things that happen to you, right?

And for the stoics, nothing bad can happen to you. You can be robbed, you can be dispossessed, you can be thrown in prison, you can be tortured, but none of those things is bad. And so to be angry about it, or to be upset about it, is to respond with your emotions as if it were bad. Right? And so it's because of this basic, the theory of value that they differ on, like how you answer the happiness is that you need, there are bad things and good and bad things in life that are other than whether you're a good or bad person. And because of that, the stoics find there's nothing to get upset about in life because there's some issue about whether you can be upset about

yourself if you're not a good person as kind of training, as a kind of training wheels, you could have. But if you're a good person, there's nothing and you're practicing virtue, there should be nothing to be upset about. So that's the basic sort of normative disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics. Aristotle got to set the question and the Stoics are agreeing to answer that question, but they have very different views about what the answer is, even though in practice, a stoic, a parapetetic, a reneric, a satelian, an a stoic, a practice in a stoic, probably, you know, if they lived in the same community and space the same circumstances, they would do the same thing.

They may have a different, slightly given, interior life. You know, one's going to have more emotion than the other. But it's more, it's more how you experience, not what virtue requires you to do, but the experience you as a virtuous person would have. That's a stoic experience would be different from a narrowest to tealying experience. A narrowest to tealying is going to be a lot more, it's a lot more action going on in the emotional side. As this thing all, check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer.

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Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. you could be happy in prison and Aristotle saying, I don't know if you would necessarily disagree with that, but he's probably saying like, yeah, but it's better not to be those things. Let's not be crazy here. The idea, the ideal life,

what we're really talking about is something a bit more reasonable than all that. Yeah, so that question, can the, usually can the wise man be, the wise man happy on the rack? That's the formulation of the question and the Hellenistic here. So it's post-arrisoned to the end of the philosopher.

So Epicureans and Stoics would do good out like over that question. That's a question I think that emerges for Plato and for Aristotle. Let us come to the supremely virtuous person who has the most awful Experiential thing happened to them. Can that person really be happy? So Aristotle I think seems to be committed to saying No, you couldn't be happy in those circumstances He doesn't quite but he doesn't the things he says about needing what we call external goods like pleasure paying wealth

Like not being tortures and not having your city invaded your country invaded those things there The things he says about needing what we call external goods, like pleasure paying wealth, like not being tortures, and not having your city invaded your country invaded those things. You need those things, but they seem to be thinking that he says you need them in order to exercise virtue, right? Not because they're sort of bad, you know, in and of themselves. And Plato, there are different parts of Plato where he looks like he might be a stoic, like a stope. He has it, it's not, oh, the only idea, you know, like less than a century of thinking about formulating these questions about, you know, what happens if your virtue is and this, that happens to you? I also can think of, well, with your pre-imm, like preem in the Iliad. So his city lost the Trojan War. He watched from the ramparts,

his son Hector was killed, and his body was mutilated, his children are either dying and re-encaptive, his city is completely ruined. Like that's, Aristotle says that you're not, that's not, you cannot be happy. Even though he has, in the tradition, and he endorses it, preem is a supremely good, you know, in virtuous person. Right, so it seems to be someone who thinks that is going to not, is going to think that the good man on the rack is not, is not doing well, is not, even though Aristotle does think if you, you shouldn't, it's still the most important part of your happiness is whether you're a good person or whether you make good choices. You should never cheat to avoid getting tortured.

Right. So even though, so it's your happiness isn't entirely in your control the way it is for a stoic. Maybe it's interesting to look at Marcus Aurelius then, right? Because here you have a stoic. He's not tortured, but he has debilitating health issues. He buries six or seven children, a terrible plague. He sees awful war and violence. He's betrayed. Perhaps his wife cheats on him. All this quote unquote terrible stuff happens to him.

You know, the perfect stoic is happy about all that. I don't think that's what Marcus was, and I don't think, I don't think he was pretending to be happy about it. But it is interesting when you read meditations and you think about his life. He did somehow find a way to soldier on, to find beauty in life. He continued to try to be a good person. He didn't become

a nihilist or a band in everything he supposedly believed in. So maybe this kind of goes to what you're saying, which is the Aristotelian and the Stoic are doing the same thing, you know, are doing the same thing, you know, under the same hand dealt by fate, but maybe they're inner emotional. The story they are trying to tell themselves about this thing is different, but fundamentally runs into the same human limitations, which is you can't be like, it's so great that a graveyard is filled with my children. Yeah, I don't think anyone's happy about that. Right.

Yeah, so that's the very, before we think about Marcus, like Marcus is somebody who's trying to live by stoic principles. He's a very human, imperfect stoic, and we've got a record of his struggle, like at his day by day account. So that's the power of it. The problem with stoicism is actually Aristotelism can be like this too. It's so, it's focuses on the very perfection doing the vest. So the stoic sage, someone who's mastered all of this, is that that's none of us.

It's not a stoic thing, just about maybe there was a sage, maybe there wasn't. So all of us are, the stoics was a, we're foolous because if you're not wise, you're full. Of course, you know, their language is very, I think, very off-putting in that way. Yeah, so that's the, so the, so any fan, even Santa Caz he's he wants to be he's a he's a his a card carrying Stoic, but he loses is a cruel plenty like Yeah, and I think with Marcus I think with Marcus that he got up in the morning and made it through each day is in the morning and made it through each day is we can we can throw him a parade just for that. Do you know what I mean? Like, put aside, was he happy while tortured on the rack that he didn't quit, that he kept going, that he found reasons to be good and decent and try to do as best. That's about as close to the philosophical ideal as a person

is going to be able to get. It's like a Victor Franco situation or a James Stockdale situation, where we're not expecting them to be this philosophical ideal, but there is something deeply inspiring and moving about the person, any person, man or woman who has just been pummeled by life and remains unbroken by it. Yes. Yes. And that comes from us having a certain mindset, which is about what is important in life and how important is this challenge you're facing.

So one of the things that you've, one stoic strategy, you find this in epictetus, I find it really very, very powerful. And though it also might seem inhumane, you talk about having a graveyard full of your children. We live in a, we're fortunate, we live in a time and place where just infant mortality isn't just part of every family's life.

When we bury our children, it's a tragedy. It was a tragedy for every ancient family in their children, but it happened. It was a part, you have to deal with it because it's part of your life. And Appetite is an effect, says, like, you think no one else's children died. You think human beings died, don't they? It's like, I think about road traffic fatalities. People die on the road every day. But you know, you just, and so yes, he's kind of an accident, but it happens all the

time. So there's a certain kind of view you take, which is trying to think of how this loss fits into the whole, where it's not. Like are we bemoaning the fact that human beings not dying? You know, no, we're not. Are we, we want to be one of the fact that my, I don't, yeah, but why do my children die? Right? That's not what it is.

Well, there's a certain perspective on which it fits into the universe and then acknowledging that, acknowledging that there is some, I mean, some very religious take on it would be to say it fits in with some divine plan or that that's kind of a very burlesque of what the Stuart part is, but just it's just part of what nature is. And there's this this and it's not a bad thing of nature that people die, but yet hurts, but that's a that's the sto, that's you're supposed to be able to, when you say that nothing bad has happened when your child has died and you're so, because you're cold and unfailing parent and certainly you've got to be careful

how you comfort the breeze, because they know know, well, nothing bad's happened. You know, that's the perspective from which you don't grieve. Right? And that's not a perspective, a naris-to-tillion would take. But a naris-to-tillion would not still think there's appropriate grief. Right? And nonetheless, the thing is that you have, that you still know it's, you, you know, still think there's appropriate grief, right? And nonetheless, the thing is that you have, that you still know it's, it would be, if you, for you to have like

commit a murder or some great injustice and order, you know, protect your child, maybe your child died, he was lucky, I have to grow to maturity, but it died, but he died in battle, right? That it's not a reason for you to have kept your child from doing his military service. We're taking revenge or any of the irrational things proceeding or after. You think, yes, it's the bad thing and it hurts. It is a loss because you are part of what we do.

When we grieve, we acknowledge the value, not just the value to us, but the value of the loss. It's not like we lost our furniture or even we lost our money when you lose a person, a person had value in their own right. And I guess both Aristotle and the Stoics are give us tools to say, what is it about? What is valuable in a person and what is it that you lose when you die? They're all about, yeah, but this is, and that's what you lose life. And they're all about what is a good life. And so what is it? What is the standard against we can measure, both what we do for ourselves,

what we seek for our children, and what we owed other people in social and political arrangements. Yeah, and I always point to people who think that the Stokes were in feeling or they're mad at themselves for feeling emotion having lost someone. Seneca writes three deeply moving consolation essays or letters reassuring people who have lost someone in one case it's his own mother and she's grieving that Seneca himself has been sent into exile. But the idea that the Stoics had no feeling, I think, is also belied by the evidence that they were really good at comforting other people who had feelings and were pretty good

at expressing their own feelings. I try to make the distinction to me, the purpose of the philosophy is not to have no emotions. You lose someone and you say, nothing bad happened. I feel nothing. It's to not be, it's to me, it's the difference between being angry and doing something out of anger, feeling the grief, understanding what you're going through, giving yourself time to go through it, and being utterly wrecked and destroyed by it and having no hope of a future. I think there's a difference between feeling the emotion and being controlled by the emotion. Right, because it's always actually distinguished between the feeling, especially the initial feeling,

like the emotional response. And then when you endorse it, I say, when you ascend to, because they think of emotions, the kind they want to get rid of, they can kind of call pate as actual actions, mental actions in their own right. Any action you perform is you as sent because you think it's the right response to the situation. So the way I think of this the stoic response to grief or thinking of it is, yes, there's a natural human feeling sort of a psychic contraction they would call it that's this clenching and that's the that's you every human will have that and we should acknowledge other people when they have that but going beyond that to say oh

whoa is me this is a terrible thing life isn't fair those are all the thoughts that you have to ascent to those are involved that's what you're not supposed to have so someone who's gone raging grief, that's clearly at least the stoic view, as I understand it, is that you've ascended to it's being a bad thing. And that's what a stoic can't do, right? So when I give my talks,

and right now I'm doing this series on the Cardinal Virtues, so I've done courage and discipline, I'm just finishing justice and then I'll start wisdom here shortly. When I talk about virtue, especially in a business environment or whatever, I say the word virtue and you just sort of people go, what does this have to do with me? You know, is this going to be a religious, you know, argument or whatever. But when I, when I talk about araté or excellence, you know, they immediately see the connection or the application. And I realized that these are especially in Aristotle, not quite the same thing, but they are related. So talk to me about virtue versus excellence or virtue versus araté.

Okay, well, so there's just one term in the Greek that we can translate. So araté is a Greek term. It literally just means it's just the abstract noun for goodness. Right? So there's good, and the superlative is aristos. So the r is in there. So araté is just goodness. So we could just call it goodness, we could

test it goodness as well. But it got used before Plato and Aristotle in a very aristocratic manner. In fact, that arid aristocratic is the same thing for arre-té. Arre-tay, there's the best, like, there are people, the best families, the best. So, and your home-eric heroes, they are exemplars of our a-tay. And our a-tay has a very kind of home-eric tint to it, often connected with courage, right?

And so, then you go through Latin, and our a-tay gets translated, we're to us by which we get virtue, and we're a man, right? So it's manly. So some people actually want to translate Arate by courage. That's very kind of old-fashioned. So there's the, what Arate in ordinary language, so in the tradition, man, it meant greatness, right? It's preeminence. And there would be, and sort of, so you've got sort of hector, a killi,

zag, a memnon, and then you've got nester, no dysia. So you've got the courageous ones, and the wise ones, and those are the two great examples. Not too many, you don't know heroes, they're not known for, so for a Sunay, for temperance. Yeah. Okay, so our taste, so it has, before the philosophers You don't know heroes are they're not known for so for a soonay for temperance. Yeah.

Okay, so that so our taste it has before the philosophers get around to trying domesticating it really has its achievement oriented as being the best you can be in this very sort of vigorous public actually very kind of testosterone-induced way. And so the philosopher is going to run to try to domesticate it and make it something more psychological. Right? And so it's trying to make it not... So you could have arate, but some people might ask you, you know, Plato's Mino.

Plato says Mino. Do you know, Venus is... Socrates eventually asked me, what do you think virtue is? I mean, it says, well, it's having a lot of golden silver, right? And it's, that sounds crazy from the point of view if you think of virtue is something to do with, like, a moral or an ethical quality.

But the idea is, what makes you a great and important person? You know, there's having power and well. So, amino thinks that. So, Plato and Aristotle with him try to cultivate and propagate this sort of interiorized, they psychologize virtue. So, you don't need to be, you know, a wealthy person to have a rotate a matter of, to have a matter of having your, if it's courage, having your fear and confidence under control, if it's a matter of temperance, it's having your bodily appetites under control. So when you get to the air by the end of Aristotle's ethics, he endorses what Solan, the Athenian log-Iverin poet, says, you don't need to rule the earth and the sea in order to do,

you know, basically the right thing, or to exercise virtue, right? You don't have to, so there's, you don't, doesn't have to be this preeminent, sort of aristocratic, sort of famous kind of figure in order to have Arate. So it means, so it is, so almost Arate and Udiamania

that are even like hard to prize a part in this earlier context. So that's why they end up being so closely connected. So forever, so the virtues, Arate, really it's excellence, right? And he expects, he's talking to an audience of young men who want to have arate. And it's not because they want to enter the seminary or something, or they want to do better

and be like, they're in some self-help, they're trying to be better people. They want to be great. So, so, so, excellence in that sort of very, the kind that you find in business schools, excellence from that perspective. That's where, so, but they Aristotle is now trying to sell them this view. In order to do that, you need to cultivate excellence in this way. I'm going to tell you about it, which is that it's a feature of your character. Yeah, it's like, thereate, there's like a necessary,

but not sufficient element to it, where there's sort of, you have to be great to be virtuous, but if there isn't sort of virtue in your greatness, it's kind of an empty thing. Like there's a passage in meditations that I think about where Marcus really sort of chides himself. He says, you're trying to be a better wrestler, but not a better friend, a better forgiver of faults, a better, a more patient person. I sort of

took that as you're trying to be more successful in your hobbies, at your work, etc. But you're not striving for your true tell us, which is to be a good person. Right. Yes. So that's, you can see that's the philosophical movement, how these notions move apart, because we can think of, you can be excellence at chess, at wrestling, at all these things, whereas Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, like all along, even, I think you can say this about Epicurus too, Virtue is excellence at being a human being.

Yes. Yes, yes, that's very well said. Like we see all the time, amazing athletes, amazing, like generators of wealth, let's say a hedge fund manager or a brilliant writer or creative, but just in a bismill human being, just a monster of a human being, that's obviously not what Aristotle is describing as erotay. It's a form of erotay, but an incomplete erotay. Maybe excellence at acquisition and at attention, you know, gather.

Sure. Yeah, so that's why then so the, you don't have the quotation, you don't have to rule earth and sea in order to practice virtue. So that's tell you don't pardon? Is that Aristotle who said that? That's Aristotle quoting Solan at the end of the Nike making ethics. I've got it.

I've got it in it in my translation here. I love that. Okay. So this is, I think it's on, yeah, on page 271, at the end, he says, self-sufficiency, that means having an adequate life, does not require excess. And action doesn't either. You can perform noble actions, or you might say decent actions, even if you do not rule over earth and sea, and you can practice virtue even with moderate resources. And then he quotes Solan, says, presumably Solan was right to define

happy people as those who had moderate resources performed the finest actions and practiced self-control throughout their lives. So you don't have to have tremendous success on the stock market, on being a famous actor, or all the other ways you can get our win and election to become president of a major country. You don't have to do any of those things in order to be great at being a human being.

We all have emotions. We all have desires. We can all think. And just doing that, leaving up to the standards for being a good human being, that's everyone can do that, Arasad, thanks. And so I think that's lovely. And to bring us full circle of something you mentioned earlier, that's Aristotle's definition

of flourishing or of happiness. But you were saying that's maybe not how it would have been rendered even a generation and a half ago. Right. Well, then, yes, because that's why there are debates about it. Like, Mino is characterized to some generation, a couple of generations earlier in the dialogue.

I thought he was, he wants, you've got to, you know, be elected general. You've got to win battles. You've got to have, you know, have lots of friends and influence and power, right? And not that, not many people, like that's a, there's a very limited supply of power and influence, right? If you always want to be at the top. Yeah, yeah. So this

so it's the full it's it's the philosophical tradition that prepared the way for conceiving of having this notion of this very Homeric notion of virtue Becoming sort of an every person's notion. It's that something can be you just change tweak what you're being excellent at Sure, right. You're gonna excellence as a warrior or an excellence as a human being When and what is I guess the Stokes would say you know if if Virtue or Arate is doing all of these things, but so much of doing those things is not in our control. So it can't actually be the definition, right?

The crowd has to elect you, the wind has to be right to win the battle, the market has to be favorable to what you're trying to do. You know, it seems odd to root aratay in stuff that epictetus would say is fundamentally not up to us. Right, right, so you're absolutely right there. So having, so the sort of traditional notion of aratay is success oriented, success at things that aren't up to you. So when I was describing a psychologizing Arate in virtue, so it's a quality of a person just with whatever materials you have,

the stuff that is in your control with enough attention and hardware. Yeah, that does give you a certain kind of immune. It doesn't give you, it doesn't mean you're going to win the battle, but it means you're going to succeed at the thing that mattered, which was being courageous, right? Making, just making the right decisions, right? And that's the way the way a fatitas would put that is, you know, the only thing that's up to us is our decisions, right? In a way that, because that's the thing that they, our pro-hyrosis, right, is up. That's fully in our control. I can decide I'm gonna end this call right now,

I can push the button, but if the button doesn't work, that's what the only thing is up to me, even if it's like to push the button, maybe even I can decide to push the button and I get paralysis. I can always, wherever you keep drawing back what's in your control, but the decision, that's what's, that's, and then your virtue for a certain kind of orthodox,

Stoic really is just, you know, a matter of making the right decisions. Right, courage is up to us, succeeding not necessarily so. Right, up to you to be courageous, not to end a battle. That's in the hands of the gods, or the god for the universe, right? Well, this has been fascinating, and I for the universe, right? Well, this has been fascinating and I love the book and I hope there's more in the series from you.

Thank you so much for taking the time. Oh, it was a pleasure to talk to you. 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 and I'll see you next episode. 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 can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.