The Daily Stoic - There’s A Reason People Like This Line | Ask DS

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

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Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Pre-order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital editions, wherever you get your books. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life.

Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily Stoic life members or as part of the challenges.

Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you. There's a reason people like this line. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. This passage has been highlighted over 11,000 times in the Kindle edition of Gregory Hayes' translation of meditations, one of my all-time favorites. But basically, it's the most popular quote

in the most popular edition, and as I said, I think it's the best one. The reason that it resonates is that it articulates in simple terms a timely and timeless truth that's as empowering as it is profound. It's not events themselves that cause our suffering, but how we choose to interpret them. Events are objective, our interpretations of them are not.

They are a guess, a story, an opinion as to what's happened and what it means. And whether or not our actions are governed by these instant interpretations is a good indicator of exactly how stoically we're behaving. Remember Epictetus's famous observation that every situation has two handles or two interpretations and that we choose which one we grab?

We decide what story to tell ourselves. We choose how we react. We decide to feel harmed or not feel harmed. And once we make that choice, choosing not to be offended, choosing to see an opportunity to practice a virtue, then we really haven't been harmed. There's a reason that so many people

have highlighted that passage. It's because it's true. And I'll say this again. I think the amazing thing about meditations is that year after year, read after read, it's incredibly timely and timeless. That's why the book has endured now for 20 odd centuries. And we actually worked with Gregory Hayes to do the leather edition, the one that sits on my nightstand, the one I pick up.

It's no longer the paperback that I got at a Borders bookstore in Riverside, California, you know, 15 plus years ago. It's not the one that came to me on Amazon that I put so many miles on. It's this one, this new one that's designed to stand the test of time. It's my absolute favorite. We bought the rights from Gregory Hayes to do this edition. We work with this awesome manufacturer in the UK and this awesome old book binder in the UK. And if you want one, you can grab one

at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes. But if you want the meditations that I read, this is it. If you haven't read meditations, you should. There's someone in your life that you wanna introduce Stoicism to. This is the addition to do it with. Check it out.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. There's basically nobody in the world that I get more out of talking to than Robert Greene. Known him now for 15 plus years. And I've always taken the times when he's called me, or I've gotten to meet with them, or we've gone out to eat, or the couple times we've done stuff on stage as a very

scarce resource. Like, how am I going to use this time to learn as much as I possibly can? Because I have. So many of the conversations that I've had with Robert Greene have changed the course of my life, and I've always seen him as this great resource. So when I got this chance to do a couple of talks with him in the fall, we did one in Los Angeles, and then we did one in Seattle at the Moore Theater, which is just like an insane experience. I wore an Alison Chains shirt

because they had performed at that theater. Many times it's this beautiful, historic old theater. And we had a wonderful conversation. Before I get into it, just FYI, I am doing two talks, unfortunately, not with Robert. It'll just be me, but it'll be similar amount of Q&A. I'm doing them in Australia this summer. So you can pop by and see me in Sydney and Melbourne.

And then I think I'm planning some European dates and maybe some Canadian dates in the fall. But if you want to see me in Australia, just go to ryanholiday.net slash Australia. But now if you want to listen to the audience, ask Robert and I some questions about stoicism. This was back in September of 23 and it was just a absolute rare treat for me. I think Robert was in rare form and it's awesome.

So I'll bring you this conversation with Robert Green and I, and look, if you haven't read any of Robert's books, I don't know what you're doing with your life, but he's the best. So check out Mastery. I just had a podcast guest yesterday who was raving about Mastery.

That's one of my favorites of Robert's. The 33 strategies of war is probably the one that's influenced me the most. Of course, the 48 laws of power is a classic. And then the daily laws, which I was lucky enough to work on. You can grab all those at the painted porch. But here, now you can listen to it

straight from the horse's mouth. And thanks to everyone who came out in Seattle. It was an awesome once in a lifetime experience for me. And now everyone else gets to listen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Stoicism and UHealth has helped me a lot with my profession

as a physician treating cancer. And I have memento mori here. Help me relate a more fatigued to my patients. Relate a more fatigued here to cancer Relate a more fatigued to cancer patients? Cause it's gonna go here. Yeah, I think it's important, and Robert brought up a good point. When we talk about these things,

and feel easy to be glib, you know, oh, accept it, love it, embrace it. You know, when you're going through the hardest thing that you've gone through in your life, when you're going through something that could take your life, it's not helpful for someone to say, use this, this is great. This is what was chosen for you.

And some of the Stoics sort of did talk about things like that in their writing and it doesn't ring well. It doesn't stand up well. The way I've come to understand it, and I think Victor Frankel talks about this probably most beautifully of anyone sort of in the modern era writing about stoicism. When these things happen, when terrible things,

tragic things, painful things happen, it's not like, oh, this is a great opportunity to transform or to do this or that. It can be a chance to be heroic. It can be a chance to inspire other people, it can be a chance to practice sort of virtue in the stoic sense of, you've got really nothing else you can do,

but be sort of brave and strong and sort of great in that moment. Do you know what I mean? So it's not that this cancer is the best thing that ever happened to you, it's totally missing the point. It's that this thing happened to you. You can't choose it to not happen to you. So what are you going to do with it? What are you going to, what is it going to mean to you? How are you going to deal with it? That's, that's the opportunity, right? It's not the opportunity you wanted,

but it's the one we're dealing with. So Robert and Ryan, from a broader perspective, how do you foresee Andrew Tate's influence affecting the mindset and choices of young men, like myself, from both positive and negative? And what advice would you offer to navigate the potential impact of such figures on personal development?

I couldn't hear. He's asking about Andrew Tate. Do you know who that is? Sure. If we can stipulate that by many metrics, women are doing better than men, graduating from college, doing well in school, mental health, all this is doing very well comparatively.

Or we could just stipulate that men all over the world, especially young men, don't seem to be doing particularly well. There's clearly a crisis of meaning, clearly a crisis of health, clearly a crisis of health, right? As well as mental health, men are not doing well. So I think it's inevitable that charlatans and con men and grifters and criminals would step into that space and exploit it, right? I can tell for instance, when I get an email from someone who's also an

Andrew Tate fan, because it's basically indecipherable, or it's misogynistic, or outright stupid. So I sort of get who he is preying on. I also see the way that he has used these platforms to reach a lot of people. So the platforms are tools, they're not good or bad. How he's using them are bad. I try to use those same platforms and I think better ideas with the Daily Stoke to reach those people. And I think one of the, like, it's easy to go, this person is bad, his influence is bad,

his message is bad, but it's harder to go, okay, what is a better message and how are we delivering that message and how are we not just leaving those people to fend for themselves? Because if we do that, you know, you're essentially ceding a generation of people to people that I don't think anyone actually thinks they should be listening to. So that's my thought. Yeah, I think it's important to kind of maybe redefine the ideal of masculinity in this world. And he kind of represents the polar opposite. So I don't see him as strong in masterhood and control,

so I see him as a weak little baby insecure, crying and trying, crying for attention and playing all these stupid games about pretending that he has all this money and all this glitz. That's not being masculine. That's being a weak little boy, right? So if you look at that line...

It's like a blind fantasy of what a man is. You know what I mean? Yeah. But then we have to create what is it now in this world to be masculine? What is the ideal? What is the goal? And to me, it has, you know, other people can define it, but to me, it's a sense of self-control, of number one, respecting women as our equals in all areas of life, right?

On and on and on. It's not being hysterical like he is. I look at him and I see him as like this constant, he's so emotional and he's so out of control. And I could build, I could spend hours trying to, maybe it's a book to be written about what it means to be masculine in the 21st century. Because it's very confusing times for men.

We really don't have any icons out there. Maybe in sports there are a few and they're very interesting and important. But I think stoicism and a lot of the audience for happens to be young men predominantly. I think they're attractive for that very reason. So my main point is he's not masculine, he's the opposite of it. We should have the space to be able to ridicule him in some way. So that's my take on it. Gentlemen, thank you so much. You're welcome.

Robert, in your book, Mastery, you speak less about greatness and excellence and more about apprenticeship and multidisciplinary learning. So I'm curious how you would define mastery in a single concept. How would you define sort of mastery as a concept? You talk less about the end result in the book and more about the sort of process. Is that how you would define mastery as a process? Well, no, there is an end result. And the end result is so beautiful and so wonderful and so sublime. That's why I wanted to create the picture of it. Then I wanted every single human to be aiming for it. And so when you reach that level, and I can't say that I have,

but I've had moments where I felt it, you almost don't have to think anymore. Your mind has reached another level. It's almost like science fiction. You're seeing patterns and you're having intuitions that nobody else is having. I think of the great chess master Bobby Fischer and he reached a level you can call it 10,000, it's like 20,000, 30,000 hours of playing chess and absorbing all of the various patterns of chess

till they were inside of him. In the moment, he doesn't have to think. He's already seeing 40 moves in advance. What power, what grace, it's like a God-like feeling. Great musicians, pianists have that, great scientists who discover something. This is the ultimate potential of the human brain that is, as I said, this incredibly powerful instrument. Now a lot of us are never going to get there. Maybe most of us will never get there. I may never get there, right? But as an ideal, it's so beautiful and so powerful that when you

think of mastery and, oh God, I've got to put my 10,000 hours in, I've got to have so much discipline, I've got, you know, and I'm only 21 and it's all these years ahead of me, damn it, I can't make it. If you can think about what it might be like in the end to have that kind of power where your ideas are just coming to you out of nowhere, and great entrepreneurs also have that same kind of power, any field you have that power, it happens in sports. If we just celebrate it in our culture, instead of mindless celebrities,

if we celebrate it in our masters, I think young people will be going, wow, I want that in my life too. I did spell out the end in the sixth chapter on actually combining the intuitive with the ration. I think I do. Great question. My question is, since publishing 48 Laws of Power,

since publishing The Obstacle is the way, you talked earlier about the importance of knowing what you don't know and kind of humbly being willing to correct your own thinking. What from each of those books is something that you have walked back in your own mind? This next year will be the 10th anniversary

of the Obstacle's Wet. And the publisher was asking me if I wanted to sort of update it or change it. And I don't know if there's one thing I'd be like, oh, I'd change this chapter, I'd get rid of this. As I've written more, I feel like my writing style has evolved and the standard that I hold myself

has gotten higher. So maybe something that I would have only spent a few words on in the obstacle is the way I now understand it's much more nuanced. And when I look back on anything I've written, the one thing that never ages well, I found, is like certainty or glibness, right? Because as you said, the things that you don't know,

you realize, hey, maybe there's an exception to that, or there's this part, or what about this? And so I'm gonna spend some time working on it, and it'll probably, again, I don't think there's one thing I'll change, but maybe it'll be 5% longer, 10% longer, and I'm just gonna be adding nuance or qualifications because you realize that the things are harder and

more complex as you go. And that's something I've strived to in my writing, just be more nuanced, more empathetic, more understanding to go deeper on everything that I do. And I think as you get closer to mastery, you also, there's just more things you didn't even realize you didn't know. And that's something I feel like when I'm right now. Well, I'm gonna be very contradictory and hypocritical, but I wouldn't change anything.

It is the perfect book. I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that, but I'm a great believer in turning the page. I wrote the book in a moment, I put all of my energy into it. And I never liked to look back and go, oh, I wish I had done that or I wish I had done this. The book is kind of this object that's out there.

Certainly, yeah, it has its flaws. Maybe it's a little too mean-spirited in some instances, but it was right for the moment. It was who I was at the time. I just, I don't look in the rear view mirror, it's over, it's onto the next book. People ask me, what's the 49th law of, the 48 laws of power? We asked Chad GBT this the other day,

what the 49th law would be. That was so stupid. The 49th law is to not write the 49th law, it doesn't exist. Don't go past, move on. Don't go past the mark you I you aimed for. Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you.

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