Stoicism (ft. Ryan Holiday), Solved

Welcome back everybody to the solve podcast. I am your host Mark Manson number one New York Times best-selling author I'm here with my producer lead researcher Intrepid failed acrobat drew Bernie Intellectual failed intellectual acrobat. I don't even know what that means And we are recording a very special episode this week It's the first time that we've brought in a guest expert to Tolerate this madness. I am here with my friend Ryan holiday Stoicism expert. I know you are a A big endurance athlete you do a lot of long distance running Have you ever done long distance podcasting? Well, you know when I don't know about you but like when I started doing books They'd be like can you come on this show and do a five-minute interview or can you come to this 15-minute radio spot? And then it was like no, no, there's this thing called podcasting and those were an hour Then those became two hours and now there's whatever this is well now you're stuck. Yeah It's just like it just became bigger and bigger a bigger commitment. Yes, exactly You are known for many things, but I think the thing you're best known for Yes for those of you who are listening and can't see I just I put a stack of books on the table that are threatening to collapse the table Ryan is the author of By my count 11 Stoicism book nine Stoicism book. I don't even know. Do you know? I don't I guess you could include the journal which has like 20,000 more than it to So but yeah, those are all those those are all the Stoicism. Yeah, we'll round up to What is that? We'll round up to 10, okay, and you your new one coming out wisdom takes work It's coming out. I believe the week after this podcast is going live Pleasure. Have you dude. Yeah, thanks. This is uh, this is gonna be fun So as listeners know as Ryan knows our goal with these episodes is to be as comprehensive as possible the whole uh, stick behind solved is uh, that if you listen to if you actually get through a full episode of solved This is the last thing you will ever have to listen to on the topic. So uh for Ryan's sake. I hope that's not true, but um Please go read his books, but if you don't want to read any books then uh Stick with us because we will get through as much. Thosism as possible Also a quick reminder uh, we do have a pdf guide to this episode as we do with every episode So if you want to look up our citations, check our work and get a full summary of everything that we talk about in the show Go to solvepodcast.com slash stoicism with that show we get into it Okay, my plan here and we'll see how this goes. Okay, because you know a lot more ancient history than I do But I'd like to just kind of set the scene for people yes and like kind of set the context in which stoicism emerges I just want to talk through like What was the state of ancient Greece Around this time. So Alexander the great who had just conquered most of the known world at the time dies in 323 bc yeah It leaves everything the entire empire in disarray was completely unexpected Generals are politicking vine for control territories getting divvied up All sorts of mayhem in political chaos is ensuing What's interesting is that Up until this point Greece had always just been kind of a network of city states Everything was kind of self-contained and suddenly they found themselves uh being controlled or Past off between these large foreign powers and so there's suddenly this international influence That's happening in Greek society and culture that had never really Happened before on top of that you have merchants coming from the east you have soldiers coming back from the east So there's like all this exposure to all these philosophies and ideas That the ancient Greeks had never really been exposed to before and I guess you could say like maybe there was a little bit of a a crisis of Culture and meaning within Greece like it seemed like there was this desperate need for some sort of philosophical framework Or understanding of this new world order what was going on How do we make sense of all these different people all these different walks of life? That's where we start to see these new philosophical schools start to emerge I think crisis is the right word because and I was thinking about this because I was just in Greece But you tend to think of it as this like kind of chill place you're like okay Obviously was a long time ago and they were togas and they didn't have the technology we did But this was a relatively stable and cool place like that's how they built these huge buildings You don't think of it as chaos and dysfunction and like danger which it was So Alexander the great dies then all of his sort of successors are vying and Conquering and then there's the series of they just call them like different there. There's these different tyrants right these kings from here here They're they're ruling these different city states and then the city states are going to war with each other Like even Socrates you think of Socrates like oh it must have been You know, they had the luxury of just talking about these ideas, but like You know Socrates lives through this great power conflict between Athens and Sparta that lasts for like 30 years the Peloponnesian war At one point when Athens loses this war Athens is ruled by like 30 tyrants It must have been similar to the feeling that we have now which is like Okay, there's these institutions that we've had for a long time like that's the other thing is you you think of ancient philosophy as being This like period, but in fact ancient philosophy existed for hundreds of years and so Socrates is looking back to Heraclitus and Democritus and other philosophers as being like what Socrates is to us right like they're looking back hundreds of years to these ideas that people have been thinking about just as Zeno is is thinking back to Socrates and then you know the Roman Stokes are looking back to so so there's it's it's Similar to this feeling we have now where you have these ancient institutions that seemed like at one point they worked and now they've stopped working And there is this thing happening and we don't know what's going to happen next and I think a lot of the practical philosophy Comes out of like how do you figure out how to live in that and I think Epicurianism and Stoicism are the two are two very different reactions to the same Crazy world like the Epicurians go let's retreat to this guard and let's just focus on our own stuff and then the Stoics are a little bit more Engaged in muscular, but but they're both going like the world is very scary what What do I cling to yeah, let's start with the story of Zeno yeah He's a Phoenician merchant. Yes shipwrecks Shows up in Athens tell us so like it's interesting that an outsider is the one who kind of comes in and yes He's not an Athenian yeah, and also yeah, you don't really understand that Greece is Huge and spread out and include I mean I think Greece is like a thousand islands and each one of those islands was its own country and its own culture And they didn't always like each other and didn't always agree with each other so these were foreigners But Athens was kind of the New York City of that World or the London of that world where where if you had talent You wanted to be at the center of where stuff was happening. We would end up in Athens But he's a he's a Phoenician merchant. He's a dealer in what's known as Tyrion purple Which is the purple die that they make from the blood of shellfish So also we don't think of it as this sort of global commerce empire But it was and each one of the city states tended to specialize in one thing like olive oil or this or that And so yeah, he suffers this shipwreck. I think it's fitting that Stoicism comes out of a disaster Yeah, right So he loses everything he washes up penniless and Athens and he's walking in the agora Which is like the meeting place or the marketplace and he hears someone reading this story that we hear from Socrates It's the choice of Hercules Which is about Hercules coming to the crossroads and choosing between basically the easy way or the hard way virtue or vice and You know here's this story and he goes like what is this like I and he's told that this is philosophy And he says well where can I find a philosopher like Socrates and as it happens a man named Cratees Who's a cynic philosopher is walking by and and the bookseller points at him and he says you know follow that man Cratees is is known as the door opener. That's his nickname as a teacher Which I also think is fitting. That's what great teachers do But but he's introduced to philosophy there at sort of rock bottom You rebuilds his life his joke is that he makes a great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck He sets up the this school of philosophy on the stoapokule the painted porch Which is the porch itself is not painted. It has a large painting of the battle of marathon above it It's a public sort of meeting place and again, we think of it as this peaceful the battle of marathon is the an existential battle against The Persians who are attempting to conquer and subjectate Greece. So anyways, he starts this school out of this disaster And that school, you know then we talk about the Roman Stokes, which I'm sure we will But it's like 500 years between this moment and the Roman Stokes. So that's how that's the arc. We're talking about. Yeah. Oh and we will cover all 500 I do want to back up really quickly because one thing that I wasn't aware of or maybe I had forgotten until I was researching for this show, is that Zeno actually spent a lot of time kind of being that inherent of different schools within, so he was kind of this like seeking character, he spent a bunch of time with the cynics and studied with them, and then I believe he went to the academy and studied with them. And it's kind of this classic story of, of everywhere he went, he wasn't quite satisfied. Like there was something missing, and so he would go to the next place, and he was even ridiculed by some, it's like, you know, just a dabbler in all these different schools. - But that feels very modern to me, which is like you take a little bit from here, you take a little bit from here, you take a little bit from here, and then every once in a while, something new comes from this combination, and I think that's sort of what Zeno was doing. But yeah, we tend to see the schools as being sort of very distinct and discrete, but I think there wasn't that many people. So I think they're all just kind of talking and sharing with each other, and they're not that far apart from each other. So yeah, I think he's just kind of exploring and experimenting, and yeah, I also think it's interesting, the idea of him being sort of a devil. He doesn't, it's like the only school that's not named after the person, or one of the few that's not, it's not Zenoism. It's called Stoicism from the porch, but there's something to me revealing about the idea of it's like, no, no, we just sit here and we talk about stuff. And I think that's kind of, that's probably how he spent 10 or 15 years, just sort of exploring and learning and talking, and then this school comes out of it. - What were some of those others? So you mentioned Epicurianism, you mentioned cynicism, what were some of those other schools that he dabbled? - Well, obviously the Plato school is there, Aristotle's school is there. I think what he's doing is trying to, and this is I think what we do today, which is like, you get all the basics. You go, this smart person said this, and this smart person said this, and this smart person said this and then you kind of go, well, they're all kind of dancing around the same things, but like, here's what I think's missing. And I got to imagine coming out of a disaster where you lose everything is maybe something that Aristotle and Plato and Socrates are not bringing, you know what I mean? - They didn't relate to, yeah. - Yeah, there's something about, 'cause that's so central to what Stoic philosophy is that life happens to us, and then we figure out what we're gonna do about it, and that life can be cruel and unfair, and things can get really bad really quickly. I wonder if that's kind of what he saw. In the same way that like, you might go listen to a bunch of academic philosophers and go, this is all great if you are a tenured Ivy League professor, but what about this? - Right. - And I think he brings that to him. The, my favorite thing about Zeno, and I was, again, it was just there is, so at some point in his journeys through the Mediterranean, he stops at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which is where the Oracle is, and we're told that he asks, you know, sort of what is the secret to a good life, and the Oracle may or may not be huffing these fumes from like this, this sort of vein deep in the Earth gets high, and then says this sort of mythical thing, and then you're supposed to figure out what it means, and the Oracle tells him you will begin to become wise when you start to have conversations with the dead. And so he doesn't know what this means, and then he goes about his journey, and it's not until he ends up in Athens and he suffers that shipwreck, and he hears someone reading Socrates, who is at this point dead, that he realizes that that's what reading is, reading is talking to the dead. And so it does seem like Xenos journey was a long one, and there was kind of all these different threads coming together. - Yeah, it was interesting putting together this episode, one of the things I did is I made a list of all kind of the popular stoic practices, you know, negative visualization, and Memento Mori, and Amor Fati, and like all these things that you've written about, and we've heard in these different places, and I basically went and tried to look where those originated, and interestingly, most of them originated prior to stoicism. Like there were, they were these threads that he pulled from all these different places. The exception is there is one stoic philosopher who did originate a number of practices, which surprised me, the one it was. It was not Xenos who originated a lot of the practices that we associate with stoicism, but most of them actually came from either Plato or the cynics, or Aristotle. The other thing that I uncovered is that, and I don't know, I didn't go deep on this, so I don't know how true this was, but one of the things I read was that, you know, Plato and Aristotle were dead at this point, and so there was a little bit of a leadership vacuum that was going on, and what I read was that the academy, Plato's academy, at this point was kind of obsessed with metaphysical truth and like logical proofs of what the ideal, you know, what the form of the universe was and all this stuff, and it was like completely detached from any sort of practical, usable advice that anybody would use. And then meanwhile, like the Parapetetics, which is the Aristotelian School, they had kind of this obsession of like documenting and cataloging, they're like the Google of like ancient Greece, like they wanted to catalog every species of fish, and they wanted to document how every plant grew in every environment, also completely detached from people's everyday concern. So to your point about Epicureanism and Stoicism are rising in this period, it's like you have all this strife in the background, and then it's like the schools that were kind of filling that void, I guess, for the previous centuries, were a little bit checked out, like they were nerding out. Was that a leadism yet? Was there like a problem with the leadism at the time? That's kind of what I had my reading of it anyway. I think you can kind of just end up living in your own head, and I think a school just naturally kind of goes that way. It becomes obscure, it becomes specialized, and then it sort of becomes irrelevant. And there's something, I do think that felt refreshing and urgent about Stoicism when it's sort of being originated. And there's something, you're right, it's taking a lot from the other schools and kind of pairing them down. It's like Aristotle has like seven or eight virtues, and then Zeno's like, "Oh, let's just four. "Let's just put them in a subcat." So there's this kind of refining process that's happening, I think, it did feel like Zeno was a regular dude. He's coming to philosophy from business. So Zeno is actually where this concept of indifference or detachment comes from in Stoicism, and which is really about just not trying to worry about things that don't matter. It's not necessarily being robotic, it's not about numbing your feelings. It's just simply being good at letting go of the things that don't actually matter. And with Zeno, this really originated with this idea of acting in accordance of one's nature. He saw the universe itself as a rational order, and so he saw each individual's actions and behavior as part of that rational order. And so his whole point was just, don't fuck it up. But the interesting thing about Zeno is that we actually don't have a lot of what he wrote. Like we don't really know exactly what he said. Basically, nothing he wrote or said survives. We have like five quotes. Diogenes Leartis, who wrote this biography of most of the philosophers, I forget when he's writing, but he's basically cataloging a list of everything we know about the major philosophers on this time. He gives us these sort of tantalizing lists of the names of the essays and books that people like Zeno wrote. Zeno wrote his own version of the Republic. - Oh wow. - But that's all that we know. And this could change because right now at Pompeii, I don't know if you know about this, but at Pompeii they have the scrolls, and they're able to hit them with these high powered cameras and then AI can like process it and they've thus far decoded one sentence from one scroll that it's probably a poem about Epicurianism, but like these works could be somewhere. But for the most part, what we have of Zeno and the first couple Stoics is just stuff from the later Greek and Roman Stoics who were quoting them in their works. So almost nothing we have directly from Zeno Spives. - How did the painted porch actually function? Like what did, what did it look like? Like was he, they barbecuing like what? - Yeah, it's a long patio with, you know, Greek columns along it. And it was like a public meeting space. It's now, so apparently they just built shops over it and like they've only recently begun excavating it and so you can see just a very small fraction of it. But there's another Stoa in on the other side. There's like, they also put a train through it at some point. But it's just, it's like your big classic Greek building or you know if you've been to like even DC which is sort of neoclassical architecture, those just kind of big long hallways lined with columns. And so I think it's just a public space and they kind of just hung out there and talked. I don't even think, it wasn't even like the ICM or Plato's Academy where it was like a very formal academic. setting that we might like recognize today. It's funny. David Mammott has talked about this dose a couple times and he's like, "They're just porch guys." That's an interesting read on it. I think it is. I think they're just sitting there talking in the way that you might sit and talk at a general store or like at the cafeteria at a university. It's not this sort of formal academic setting where they're engaged in this sort of very specific research. It's just kind of talking about things and so a lot of what we have from the Stoics even later is kind of like just snippets of conversation. But at some point he starts to see students there or maybe he's walking like Aristotle did and he starts to teach and I think these other spaces, you know, there's probably like, "You know, we're going to have a big class today. We're going to go over here." So I think it's just, it's a little more informal than I think we would think about these things today. And that becomes a little bit of an issue down the line, I believe, but we'll get to that in a minute. I want to talk about Zeno's framework itself. So he is this tripartite framework, the logic, the physics, and the ethics. Can you break down each of those? The physics part is nuts because like it is very weird to be reading a 25 year old, a 2,500 year old text and then they're talking about atoms. And he's like, "What the fuck is happening?" Because like, you're like, "I thought this was like very recent." Yes. And obviously they didn't know what an atom was. They couldn't see an atom, but they had some sense that, you know, life is made up of these tiny things that we can't see. So I think physics is basically their explanation for like why we're here and how the world works. And a good chunk of it is like obviously nonsense, and I'm pretty quick to kind of toss all that aside. Even the logic side of things, I mean, there was obviously a big emphasis educationally on like sort of how logic works, and you can see these kind of proofs and it kind of connects sometimes to the physics where they're like, "If this is true, then this is true, then this is true." I find that stuff holds up the least well, and is even when it does hold up, you know, like, what am I supposed to do with this information? That's never been what I've been super excited about when it comes to any of the ancient philosophies. But it is surreal. Like, these people were obviously geniuses in the sense that they had this whole sense of how the universe worked, and they were immensely curious. You talked about Aristotle too. You know, the scientific work that these guys were doing with the rudimentary tools that they had, it's pretty remarkable. I think sometimes people go like, "Well, I could have come up with this idea if I was alive 2,000 years ago or 2,500 years ago." And then you read some of the stuff and you're like, "Oh, no, no. They were obviously also just all around Renaissance geniuses because they were like deducing things about the universe that we weren't able to verify and prove until many centuries later." And then also, I think the psychological underpinnings of the ideas in the ethics and the philosophical component that they were just intuiting, but had not actually studied in any kind of experimental way is pretty mind-blowing. Yeah. Towards the end of this podcast, we will get into the influence that Stoicism has had on modern clinical psychology and therapy, and it's remarkable how much things like cognitive behavioral therapy owe to stoke practices that are over 2,000 years old. Yeah, so I mean, I'd be curious what your read on it is. Was it just, were they just seeing so much further than everyone else was the world so much? Obviously, we know it's not quieter, but like, were they just more focused? It's remarkable that they were able to deduce these things, again, not from, you know, reams of prior research that they're just kind of going, "I think this works because of this." And then they were like pretty close. They're in the ballpark with these kind of guesses about how the world works or why animals do what they do or why the universe does this. There's something just kind of mind-blowing that someone could do this. It is mind-blowing. I feel this way about a few schools of thoughts. Stoicism is one, Buddhism is another one that I'm just like, "How the hell did a guy figure this out?" Yes. Like, 2,500 years ago. It's a lot of sitting under a tree, right? It is pretty remarkable, but I also realized too that there's a little bit of a perceptual bias going on because there were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of schools of thought that were invented throughout this time. And all of the ones that gave terrible advice or were not verifiable or were not replicable were lost to the animal selection bias there. There's a little bit of a survivorship bias aspect to this of which the true ones are probably going to survive or the useful ones are probably going to survive. But it is even so, it is pretty incredible to think that it's just a bunch of smart dudes sitting on a porch. Passing out like, "Oh, your mind does this? My mind does that too." Maybe we shouldn't do it that way anymore. You know, and it turns out they're right. No, I do think there is the survivorship bias, and some of even, we're even, like I said, we're pretty kind in what we edit out, the nonsense that they believed and some of the beliefs were sort of preposterous. But yeah, they were just able, they were able to think and work out a framework for the world that is held up remarkably well. And then it's been subsequently verified either scientifically or psychologically. Like you read these scientific studies and you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's here in this epigram from this philosopher." And they didn't need to pay 200 grad students to jump through these weird hoops to verify it, but they just kind of intuit it. So there must have been just a lot of observation of human behavior. And I wonder if that kind of connects to the porch thing too. What blows my mind, honestly, is that so much of this happened in such a condensed area. Yes. And it was centuries, but a relatively condensed period of time as well, right? Like it's the fact that so many of these thinkers and philosophers were contemporaries in many cases. Yes. That's the part that boggles my mind. Yeah, like Plato has like one of my favorite anecdotes is Diogenes goes over to Plato's house. And he thinks Plato is like sort of stuck up and annoying. And you know, Diogenes, people that know Diogenes is a cynic. And he's kind of like, he's the rebellious trans, he's like the punk philosopher. He lives in a barrel. He rejects many of society's conventions. And so he starts like tracking mud into Plato's house and he's stomping on his carpets like to be like, you don't need this. And he says, I am stomping on Plato's vanity. And Plato goes, but how vain you are in acting like you're better than me. And so it's like they were not just friends, but also kind of like frenemies. And just to just to survive 25 just to have one person have ideas survive too long. And then they're just like two people that had dinner together. It's fucking crazy. And so it was it was a very small world like it greases both bigger than you think it is. And the empire contained way more people and way more stuff happening than you think. And at the same time was much smaller than you think. Wasn't it also the two there? I mean, it doesn't the stoic these stoic ideas get to something a little bit more fundamental at this point too because you're saying they're sitting around and they're thinking sitting under trees like the Buddhist and the stoics and whatever. They're actually not though. It's actually a very, very practical philosophy that comes out of this is, you know, and a shipwreck and, and, you know, adversity and all of this. So was it just that they got to the more fundamental aspects of this quicker because because they were actually like not just sitting under a tree. I do think what the stoics do somewhat of a reaction against the cynics who were sort of like closer to the the Buddhist or they were more munkish in their approach of like, hey, like dropout man, you know, like there's something to like that with the cynics. And I think Xeno coming from like had a job ran a company seems to understand and it gets very quickly to the world where where philosophy isn't this thing you do by itself as an end to itself, but as part of the toolkit for whatever it is you're doing. And so there is that I think Xeno is Xeno being immediately descended from the cynics is still part of that kind of early socratic diacinac school where the the philosophers is kind of weird guy that you would go to for advice and and actually create his wife whose name is escaping was also a famous cynic philosopher. So it's not just dudes, I think that's worth pointing out, but it very quickly the the philosophers cease to be these kind of figures outside society and the stoics pretty quickly become leaders of society who happen to subscribe to this school of thinking and living. And I think that's why it has to be practical because like they have day jobs and they need help with the job. - Yeah. I do want to comment very quickly before we move on. One of the things that I liked, I appreciated about Zeno's framework, 'cause like I've read quite a bit of Plato's work. I've read the Nicomachian ethics and on this podcast we Aristotle generally comes up as being the guy who was right about everything. - Pretty much. - I really appreciated how the elegance of the framework, 'cause like I read Plato and Aristotle, there's a lot of brilliant ideas, but they never seem to have like kind of this cohesive worldview that fit and makes sense with everything. Whereas this three part framework, it's kind of like the physics is the rational order, the predictable order of all existence. Logic is your faculty to understand that predictable order and then virtue is your adherence to living out through the reason and logic that you're able to perceive. And like that's just, I don't know. There's a part of me that just loves brevity and simplicity and elegance. - In lives of the Stokes. I have the metaphor they have, which is escaping me, but it's like there's the fence around the field and then there's like the crops in the field. It's like, the idea of them being these kind of interlocking ideas I think is, and then there's one where it's like ethics is the yoke and then there's the egg and then the shell. And so they did kind of think about them as these kind of interlocking interdependent things. So you couldn't just be a philosopher. You also had to have some understanding of the scientific basis and you had to have obviously, like this sort of strong logical mind that could help you understand how things work. So yeah, it was kind of this framework, which again, because of what survives to us from the Stokes, we don't have the same, like if you think about the famous Stoke works and obviously we'll get into this later, but it's worth pointing out. We don't have like, here's Zeno's explanation of the universe, we have a couple quotes and then we have meditations, which is like a handful of aphorisms and then we have Seneca's letter. Like we just have these smattering of texts. So we kind of only get people telling us how the Stokes thought about things as opposed to like the definitive Stoke text that goes like, this is what we think, this is how it works. This is what we teach people who are interested in Stoicism, none of that really survives to us. - It's also worth noting too, probably should have done this at the top of the show, but like everything we're talking about here is like early Stoicism, right? This is 200, 300 years BC. A lot of this is undocumented. A lot of what we know of Stoicism today, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. Like that's three, four, 500 years after this. And that's-- - Yes, before you, the names you've heard of are coming centuries after these people. - Yes. - And those are much more well-documented. A lot of the ideas are more refined by then. They've been battle-tested, in many cases, literally. That's kind of like the later Stoic period, which we will get to. (upbeat music) So Cleanthes was the successor to Zeno, correct? - Well, so in the wisdom book, I tell this story, Zeno has basically two promising students. He has one named Aristo and one named Cleanthes. And Aristo is the smart one, the brilliant one, the flashy one, the one everyone thinks will inherit the school, but is also much more interested in all the different schools. And he studies at the Lyceum, he says this, but he was sort of notoriously brash and egotistical, and he and Zeno clash many times. He is probably the recipient of Zeno's favorite famous line about how we have two years in one mouth for a reason. He is talking more than he is listening. And then Cleanthes, who again, sort of coming to philosophy from an interesting perspective, is a manual laborer. He waters the gardens of the wealthiest Athenians, and then he's a boxer. And he comes to the school probably later in life. And I think Zeno sees something in him. His nickname was like the Athe of Chethos or something like that, but like the donkey of the town he's from. And he says, "Yeah, I am like an ass in that I am strong enough to carry the load." And so he's, it's kind of, there's an interesting parallel here. You know, it's like sort of your classic tortoise and the hare thing. And ultimately it's Cleanthes who takes the school and how official this transition process we don't really know probably not so much, but it's not like a university endowment that you're taking over or something. But yeah, there's this kind of split in the school. And I think it goes much more to the everyday, to the practical, to the accessible when it gets handed to Cleanthes. - So it's with Cleanthes and his, I guess, kind of salt of the earth personality that you do see a lot of this celebration of voluntary hardship, emergence toicism. This ethos of doing hard things and not complaining about it. Seems to kind of emerge from him. And Cleanthes, despite not really being an intellectual, he did do some writing, but he's definitely not the person that we associate with a lot of the principles or concepts of stoicism today. He stood out to me as just an interesting, like in all my knowledge about like philosophical history, I can't think of another, I don't wanna say anti-intellectual, but non-intellectual person. - Yes. - Like, like, obviously an unintellectual person who has taken the reins of a major philosophical school or movement. And so I just see it as like, it's such a fascinating decision on Zeno's part to pick the unassuming guy who's like literally carrying jugs of water every day and has like no vanity, no money to his name. - He's your classic disciple, right? Zeno is the prophet and he is the apostle. He is like this smart guy, smarter than me, said X, Y, and Z. And I'm gonna do a good job explaining and evangelizing and keeping that flame alive. And he does write some interesting things, but he is not sort of slashing and cutting and breaking new ground as a philosopher, which is maybe exactly what it needed to remain a viable school. - Well, after him, we get chrysipus. - Yeah. - Who wrote over 700 books. - Yes. - Systematizing Stoic doctrine. And this is really the first time that we get, or at least of everything that we still have, like clear documentation of, what are the belief sets, what are we believing, what are we following, is this true, is that true? Here's the argument for this side versus that side. Tell us a little bit about chrysipus. - Yeah, he's the guy that comes in and cleans stuff up. The founder is sort of messy. He passes it to his chosen disciple and then now in the third generation, it needs someone to go like, okay, is this a real thing or not? What do we believe and what's important? And I think when people hear 700 books, again, that probably seems like impossible. And maybe there's an exaggeration in there. I assume this is mostly like essays and little treaties on things. But again, none of the 700 survived. So we don't really know. We just know that he's incredibly prolific. He's a fighter. Ironically, he's actually the boxer, but he's the fighter. Chrysipus, though, also practical, is a runner. And he competes in this Olympic event called the Bailegos or something. I'm always terrible at the pronunciation. But like, I thought this was remarkable too. Like, the Greeks didn't run in a circle. They, the Olympic running track is like about 200 meters long. And they would run back and forth back and forth. So he did this, he competed in this race. It was about three miles of windsprints. - Oh, wow. - So again, I think there's something like his, one of his famous analogies. He's like, life is like a race. You want to beat the other people, but you don't want to beat the other people by cheating. And like, you're like, oh, he's using a sports metaphor. From a sport that he competed in, not a person who occasionally watches it on TV or something. So again, there's this kind of practicality to the Greeks too, that it's not this sort of distinction between, you know, mind and body. Yeah, is it, is an interesting kind of combative guy who seemed rather difficult to get along with? - Insofarable. - Yeah. - Yeah. - He was constantly arguing, he would be an internet troll for sure. - Yes. - Yeah. - And then, and then famously dies of laughter on his upfront porch. (laughing) I read that he was laughing about a joke of a donkey drinking his own urine or something. - No, so as I understand it, And this is what Daryl Ginius Leartist says, he's sitting on his front porch and a donkey breaks loose, wanders up to the front porch, and begins eating figs out of the garden. And Chrysipus says, when the owner rushes up, he says, you should get that donkey some wine to wash down those figs. And then he begins laughing at his own joke, so hard that he dies. And I've asked many comedians, like on the daily show, quite a few years of David, any idea what this joke means, and no one can even begin to crack it. But I do think it's not, because there is some sense of the Stoics as being humorless, and I think when you read about Chrysipus' life, you go like, this guy must have been insufferable, and then you go, oh, but he obviously also had a sense of humor. And so I think this idea of the Stoics is having no emotion. We can only take a little anecdotes here there, but to me that's always been kind of something that undermines that stereotype. And then I think it says something that it was his own joke, but he's on the list of unusual deaths on Wikipedia, which is quite an accomplishment. That is, yeah. You got to work hard to get up there. I'll also add that, I mean, he really did seem to be a bit of an intellectual giant. He essentially invented propositional logic. A lot of early Stoicism involved a study of paradoxes, which is super interesting. I didn't, I actually didn't realize that before this episode. I always associated that with like a zen thing, but he very much like was very focused on creating a technical philosophical framework. And also he offered one of the first solutions on the free will problem in terms of answering. Like the issue of determinism, like if the whole universe is predetermined, how can you argue that you a free will or that your free will matters? And apparently he was one of the first people to attempt to answer this. Interesting. And that is a theme for the Stoics throughout, right? Because they did believe that we're sort of not in control and that kind of the universe is in control. And so does that mean that everything is predetermined? Does that mean that it doesn't matter what you do? Maybe it comes all the way from Xeno, but there is this sort of metaphor in the Stoics about that we're like a dog tied to a cart. Did you find this when you were reading? So that basically the Stoic view is that we're like a dog tied to a cart. And the cart's going where it's going. And the dog has two choices. The dog can cheerfully alongside or it can lay down and be dragged. And so the idea there is, I think it comes back to this even Xeno reacting to the shipwreck, which is like it happened, your life blew up, you lost everything. No amount of being angry about this, no amount of pointing out who's fault it was or how preventable. Nothing changes that it happens. Really all you control is your attitude about that thing, right? Are you going to cheerfully keep going or are you going to lay down and be like this is it for me? Now, obviously there is a certain amount of agency and choice and then he decides to become a philosopher. He rebelled his life in another direction after, but I don't think we have that free will about. We certainly don't have free will over what has happened, right? Because it did happen. It's done. And I think that's that is kind of the perennial debate in Stoic philosophy is like how much agency do we actually have and there is, I think a reasonable knock against the Stoics that like there is acceptance very quickly becomes resignation and do you want to live in a world where everyone is resigned and then how do you explain the fact that most of the changes that happened came from people who chose not to resign themselves to the status quo? I will add that this is a paradox in a philosophical issue that is in fact almost every school philosophy not just Stoicism and we're actually going to return to this later, especially with the Roman Stoics because it becomes actually extremely relevant in terms of a lot of their decisions that they chose to make. I feel like this would be a good place to go through the four virtues, talk through each of them briefly just get an understanding of like what are the kind of core recommendations of Stoic philosophy and then from there we'll move into kind of the later Stoic age. So the four virtues, courage, temperance, justice and wisdom, which one do you want to start with? This has been my life for the last six years as I've been working on this series on the virtues and I should add that you have written a full book on all four of these virtues with the fourth and final one coming out next week because wisdom takes work. So yeah, you're probably, but when you're like, which one do you want to start with? It's like, as you're, I'm writing this series, which one do you start with and which one do you end with, and then Xeno who lays these four virtues down, you know, points out that the virtues are independent yet inseparable from each other, which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about it. So the challenge on the series and then the challenge on even defining the virtues is like where does one begin and end and where does the other begin and end because, you know, courage, well, obviously you have to bring discipline to the courage and then what is the courage in pursuit of and then how do you know what to be courageous about? So all of them are related. But I think courage is the simplest, not simplest, because it is very complex, but I'll say it's the one that they start with. When everyone lists the virtues, courage tends to be the one that they start with. And then I think it's also worth pointing out, these are also known as the cardinal virtues in Christianity, not because Cardinal has any religious context, but it just means pivotal or it's, Cardo means hinge. Like C.S. Lewis writes an incredible essay on the cardinal virtues and Aquinas is written about the cardinal virtues. You've probably seen it in a Catholic church if you've ever been to Europe or something. It is, it's this sort of core framework for understanding the universe and what is obligated of a person. And then obviously underneath each of these virtues is a number of sub-virtues. So maybe you start with courage. What, how would you describe the cardinal virtue of courage? How is it different than what we think of as just kind of everyday courage? Well, when we say there's sub-virtues, right? I think we all understand there's moral courage and physical courage. So physical courage is running into a burning building. It's exploring, you know, a distant land. It's running onto the battlefields. And then moral courage is, you know, speaking truth to power. And yet, why is, does it require courage? It's because, sure, saying something unpopular is difficult because you don't want to be looked at, but if you said something unpopular to a tyrant in ancient Rome or ancient Greece, you were also risking your life. So it's very difficult to say where one begins and ends. But courage was, you know, the decision to be yourself, to think for yourself, to act alone if necessary, you know, many of the Stoics serve and fight in various wars. And also I would think you would just say like just being alive in the ancient world required a certain amount of courage. This is a much more dangerous place, right? But to me, courage is, like, if you're deducing it, it's like it's putting your ass on the line, right? Like, what are you willing to put on the line? And there is almost certainly no good or honorable life in which you don't do that. Yeah. I guess the alternative to courage, I mean, typically we would think of it as cowardice, but like from a more philosophical point of view, it is, it's actually just kind of a lack of living in general, right? Like, you're just, yeah, like you, you, the alternative is, is nothing. It's indecision. Well, the interesting thing about how interrelated the virtues are is Aristotle uses, when he's talking about the virtue of temperance, uses courage as the metaphor. So he obviously are familiar with the golden mean, but he's like, look, the opposite of courage is not cowardice. The opposite of courage is recklessness. Yes. And so the virtue is in the middle, right? There's too much courage, not enough courage to virtues in the middle. Yeah, the idea of, like, there's a famous story about a Roman stoke named Agrippinus who lives in the time of Nero. And you know, he's just, he thinks Nero is a clown, he thinks he's a legitimate. He doesn't want anything to do with him. And so he just, he's like, I'm not going to kiss the ring, right? And he doesn't. And so someone comes up to him and says, you know, hey, you know, why don't you just kind of go along with these things? Like, what are you doing? And he says, look, that's fine for everyone else. But he's like, I prefer to be the red thread in the garment that makes the garment beautiful. And he was just making, I think, a very stoke, but I think we can trace this back to the cynic school of, like. To be independent and to be yourself, like the courage to just be you instead of being like everyone else. I think we see this in most of the great stoics is that they weren't followers, they were just independent people. In a world that didn't always appreciate that. So courage is all those things. There's an interesting crossover as well, you know, there's kind of this idea of voluntary hardship. Like intentionally putting yourself in difficult situations and it's almost like that's like a training ground for courage. It's if you can do difficult small transgressions in your day-to-day life, then you will be prepared both mentally and physically to do it when it really matters. One of the stories we have about Zeno when he's studying under Cratees is that he's supposedly kind of socially awkward and very self-conscious. And so one of the tasks that Cratees gives him is he tells him to carry this pot of lentils through the Agora, which he is. And then he's doing this thing, he doesn't know why his teachers make him do it, and then all of a sudden Cratees jumps out from behind a building and he smacks him with his staff and he spills the lentils all over himself. And Zeno, as any sort of self-conscious or embarrassed person would be, is kind of mortified. And he says, "I need you to understand that nothing bad has happened to you." Like this isn't anything you have to think about or take seriously. So there is this kind of active training in the indifference to a thing we don't control, which is other people's opinions about us. And so, you know, is this encourage, is this in wisdom, is this in discipline, you could probably put it in a little bit in each of the buckets. But I just think the ability to be yourself unapologetically is obviously a key philosophical value and virtue going back at least to Cratees. And I don't think it's something you're necessarily born with, or if you are born with it, then it's not a virtue for you, right? It's a thing you have to train and develop. Where's the line, though, with Brecklessness, and you talked about people, mean there, where's that line? Well, the line is probably Diogenes, who's like an anti-social wacko, you know, like he's masturbating in public and you know, he lives in a barrel and doesn't have a job, like even, you know, maybe even the line is Socrates, right? Socrates is so obnoxious that they kill him and someone with a slightly more social acuity could have probably escaped that sentence. I don't know about you, but like I didn't become a writer because I wanted to like be in front of a camera a lot or give talks to people. That's like the opposite of why you become a writer, and then you realize, oh, first off, it could be lucrative if you do these things. But second, like if you care about your message, you have to figure this thing out. And so courage isn't always, you know, charging a machine gun nest. Yeah, it's just can you do a thing that is uncomfortable and scary to you because most of the most of the things you want in life are on the other side of those reservations that you have. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, let's move on to temperance. A very attractive word in the English language, for sure. It's fun. Yeah, you renamed it discipline in your book or to the title of your book. Yeah, when I hear temperance, I just hear like stop drinking. Yeah, the temperance movement, it is interesting internationally, it doesn't have the same context. Interesting. Because it just, it didn't work, it didn't happen in other countries. Yeah. But yeah, and then it's funny, I call it discipline, but we're really talking about self-discipline of all, it's a big bucket virtue, right? It's self-control, self-command, it is restraint, it's moderation, it's the ability to push yourself, the ability to do uncomfortable things. It's the kind of willpower that you bring to the other virtues. Do you see a golden mean aspect here as well because it's, especially this day and age, right? Like discipline, there's kind of two meanings of discipline. One is just like get off the couch and fucking do something, but then there's also like the hardcore, hustle culture, grind set, the grind mentality of, you know, you should be working 12 hours, you should be hitting the gym at 5 in the morning, you should be, you know, taking 50 grams of creatine every day, you know, like whatever the new thing on Twitter is these days, do you see that as a golden mean thing? Totally. Yeah. I think it was Confucius, you know, he tells this one student he needs to hurry up and do the thing he needs to do, and then he tells the student's brother that they need to slow down and take his time. And then the third student says, but these contradict each other and he says, yeah, well, he needs to speed up and he needs to slow down, and I think I think some people need the discipline period or the cell, you know, and then other people very clearly need more of the restraint. Yes. And I think we're all on that spectrum in the sense that in some areas we need more discipline and in other areas we need more restraint. Epictetus, somebody, one of the ancients sums up all of epictetus's teachings in two words, he says, persist and resist, and I think that weirdly captures the tension in the idea of discipline. Like there's some things you need to just do and do and do, and then there's other things you need to stop doing and stop doing and stop doing and stop doing. Like for me, discipline was the easiest of the books to write because I think it's one of the virtues I'm better at. But you're one of the most productive people I know. But when I think about where I need to be more disciplined, it's usually in the areas of restraint or pausing or recovering or slowing down. And yeah, so it's like, if you're a professional athlete, discipline is probably not like how do you squeeze more workouts in, it's like how do you slow down and pace yourself and work more sustainably. And then, yeah, if you're sitting under couch, it's probably you've got to get off the couch and do your thing. There's a life balance aspect to it as well, right? Like it's, you can be extremely optimized, say in your professional life, but if you're ignoring your wife and never seeing your parents and, you know, ditching all your friends, then that's, that's in temperance in a certain capacity. Totally. And it's just a more socially accepted or adaptive form of ill discipline, but it doesn't mean that it's not like the image on the front of discipline is destiny, which was a metaphor they used it was, is a chariot racer. And it's this idea of like, look, sometimes you're prodding the horses to go faster, but a lot of the times you're raining them in and especially when you're going around a sharp turn or, you know, you're, you're navigating some sort of narrow past, right, it's, it's about knowing how to control and command. And I do think it's also worth pointing out just like encourage with discipline, there's physical discipline and sort of mental or spiritual discipline, which I ended up spending a lot more time thinking about and I think is, is weirdly more relevant today than ever and not talked about enough, like we live in a world where often people who are very temperate or very disciplined professionally are just like all over the place with like social media, or they're emotional. And so just the idea of like, I have opinions, and I don't express them, you know, or like, like, I'm not going to hit send on this email until tomorrow, and I'm going to, I'm going to think about what I have to say, or I'm going to come back to this later, or you know what, this is enough for today. I'm going to put those all take a certain amount of self command that I think we don't celebrate enough in society. And I would argue too, and like the, you know, the 21st century, the, the importance of physical discipline, I mean, physically speaking life's pretty easy these days, like it's pretty low stakes, you know, you're not being chased by a lion, and there's no people aren't going to bayonet you, I would say the mental discipline, there are a lot, the stakes are probably higher than they've ever been before, because everything lives permanently online, because, you know, one awful text. Yeah, we'll sit on that person's phone forever, because things can be shared so easily, and come back to buy you so easily like it does seem like, and because of how many, how much addictive stimulation we're exposed to on a daily basis, like it makes sense to me that mental discipline, the stakes are probably higher than they've ever been. It's a good clip where Tina Fey was on Bowen Yang's podcast, and this is right after he had like, he had been talking shit on the podcast about, I don't know, Jennifer Lopez or something or someone, and then she was like coming on SNL, and, and so it was like this whole controversy, and she, Tina Fey came on the podcast and she was like, you're too famous to be saying your real opinions off, you know, like off the cut, she's like, what are you doing, like you can't say this movie sucks, you might want to work with that director three movies from now, and you are not think. She's not saying like don't be yourself, she's just saying like, there's more at stake here, and more that needs to be considered, then your knee jerk reaction to a thing that you have not studied fully, right, and that's something that you find out as you become more successful or more connected as you go, hey, like as a regular person, I can just like. Do it! whatever. But now these things are more interconnected than I would have thought. And there's more going on than I knew about. And you have to take the time and have the restraint to be able to go like, is this really my opinion? Do I really feel strongly about this? Is this actually constructive or helpful in any way? How does it help me with what I'm trying to do? And that's that to me is like, as the Stoics cease to be these fringe figures and start to become mayors and advisors and then ultimately senators and generals and emperors, the game is changing and they don't get to be diogenies stomping on Plato's carpets, right? Their words mean too much and the effect is too great to be that person. One of the things that too with discipline, where you're talking about the balance you're striking between persist, resist. One of the things that's helped me kind of navigate that though is thinking about the definition of discipline as correction, right? So if you discipline a child, you're correcting a child or self-discipline as you're correcting yourself. So it's an active, it's an active process. No, no, that's I like that a lot. And I think that's what sometimes people miss when they talk about discipline is they think about discipline in the sense of like a Marine core general screaming in your face. That's discipline. Self-discipline is when no one is watching and when you can do whatever you want, what do you do? Right. And so when you think about the Stoics, like we'll talk about them later, but you think about a Marxist Realist, no one can tell Marx Realist what to do. He is the most powerful person in the world. So this is where the virtue of self-discipline becomes so important. You can, but you shouldn't. And I would argue in today's world, this is something we very much missed in a lot of our political discussions. It's a lot about like whether something is legal or not or allowed or not or what the Constitution says. It's like, yes, the First Amendment allows you to say more or less whatever you want. But there's a whole bunch of things you shouldn't say or you're a shitty person, right? And again, should someone who does say them go to jail? No, that's a very, that's a, that is a, that is a legal and sort of social contract discussion. But should you be the kind of person that says mean things at people for the sake of hurting their feelings? No, right? This is where restraint comes in. And so self-discipline is something you apply to yourself. And then the tension there is it is very hard as a self-disciplined person to accept and come to terms with the fact that other people have different definitions of self-discipline. And that it's not your place. One, to enforce it on them. And then also do have the self-command to be like, I'm not even going to judge them for doing it differently. This is, I think, I think that, I mean, certainly I struggle with it, but I think all discipline people struggle with it. It's interesting. So we just, we just recorded our episode on resilience last week. And at the end of all of our episodes, we do, we do a, a section of trade-offs of like, okay, if you, if you, if you develop a lot of resilience in your life, what are actually like the hidden costs of that? What are the downsides of that? And we listed that as one of them, which is that the more, the stronger and more resilient you become as a person, you can say this about discipline two, the more disciplined you are as a person, the more you're able to manage your thoughts and feelings and behaviors, the less empathetic you're going to be for people who don't or can't. And I've definitely run into that quite a bit in my own life. And it's, it's like, it is a hard trap to not fall into. You tend to see this in like, like the first woman to do X or the first man to do, like when, when someone's like a minority and then they break through, you would think they would be very sympathetic to the people who didn't break through, but actually they tend to more identify with the group that was just trying to exclude them and make their life harder. They have a, they have a, it's called the adversity paradox or something like that, where you tend to go, if I did it, everyone can do it. And to some, to some extent, that's inspiring and true. And that's what people who break class ceilings and barriers do. But then also it's hard for them to go like, well, maybe I broke through for fluke of reasons or maybe I, maybe it shouldn't, it didn't need to be this hard and all this. And yeah, you can tend to be very unsympathetic to other people. And, and to me, that's, that's a failure of both discipline. But then it leads us to the next virtue, which is justice, which again, people think is the legal system. But no, it's, it's your ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and go, no, they're just having a hard time. And I'm, I'm indulging them only making that harder. Yeah. Like what, what are the stoic precepts of justice? And I, I asked this totally understanding that any sort of ethical philosophy of conversation is messiest fuck and gets gets very convoluted quickly. But I'm curious if you were to like summarize what is the stoic position on justice? How would you describe it? Well, I do think it's, justice is a tricky, again, how we render these words can sort of preclude people from being interested them. Like, so it's, it was very obvious to me that justice should not be in the title of the book on the virtue of justice. Because when people hear it, they think, yeah, law, they think the legal system, they think politics, they think social justice warriors. Yeah. But again, it says something about our society that that that's like a bad thing to be as a warrior. Yeah, when you can't put justice on the cover of your book, you can say it's an indictment of our society. The virtue of justice is really the ethics that we are talking about earlier at the core of the sort of stoic big three is this idea of ethics. So what are the ethics? It would be nice if some 10 commandments from Zeno had been passed down to us, but they didn't. And again, we see the stoics over, you know, almost a 500-year period, even the norms of what's okay and not okay is changing over the course of this. So it's hard to be like, well, the stoics say this is really important. You can see this from their actions. And that's like they also own slaves, right? So what once we get into the Roman period, it's going to, this is going to get very messy. It's complicated. But there was this middle stoic named Hieracles. And he, he talked about this idea of the concentric circles. So he said at the beginning is us. We're born as a baby. All we care about is surviving and all we care about is ourselves. And then we attach to mom and dad and we care a lot about them. Then we have siblings. Then we have an extended family. And these are rings, right? Then we have, you know, our neighbors. We have the citizens of our city state. Then maybe we belong to an empire. Then it's all a humanity. And then, and then you could probably add some rings that they didn't explicitly talk about. But I think our obviously logical extensions here, which is like animals. And then you could put like people you've never met. You could put like people who've never been born, right? But the idea Hieracles said was, was that philosophically, how do you pull these outer rings inward? And that he said there's a beautiful madness in doing this. And I think this is so important because it is very clearly a counterbalance to those first two stoic virtues and so much of the stoic thinking, which is primarily about the individual orienting himself in opposition to a world that is indifferent to them. So to then have this other virtue that's saying, well, like other people may not give a shit about you, but you have to give a shit about other people. I think was kind of radically transgressive and really, really interesting. So I think fundamentally, there is this idea that we were in stoicism that we were made for other people that we were made to treat them well, that we were made to and that we degrade and harm ourselves when we act with dishonesty, when we act with cruelty, when we write people off. And so I do think there is something pretty similar to the sort of Christian ethic in the love thy neighbor, be of service, be a person of honor and integrity. That to me is like what we would categorize under this virtue of justice. We're going to come back to justice a lot when we talk about the Romans because they've got some interesting ideas about it. There's a lot of interesting decisions that are made as well in consequences of decisions. All right, let's finish up with wisdom, which is the new book. It's coming out next week. It's funny because I didn't say anything because I would have just interrupted you six times, but as you were just scribing the context and the situations in which the other virtues are applicable or make sense, almost all of your explanations, I was like, oh, yeah, that's wisdom. Yes. Yes. The line I've been saying is that no one is born with wisdom, but all the virtues are born from it. So wisdom is the work to understand history, to understand human nature, to understand the world, to understand other people. It's this sort of getting all this shit in your brain. And then that's how you know what to be courageous about. That's how you know what the right amount of something is. That's how you know what the right cause is. The thing about wisdom is there's a lot of definitions. It's many things. Again, I think we can say, we know for certain it's not something you get for free. You earn it. But it's really this idea of discernment. What is what? Do you know how things work? why they work, what works, you know, it's this kind of, this, and this is why I think it's so often associated with old age, is that it's, in large parts, something you accumulate slowly over time, not just from experiences, but from, you know, exposure, both in learning and in fact, and then the interplay between these things, and that is a slow and steady accumulative process. You can be born smarter than other people and you can get off to a pretty good start, but I think wisdom is something that's much more of a slow burn, but it informs all the other virtues. Yeah. I also feel like wisdom kind of unlocks or properly explains the still a concept of indifference, because like the simplistic view of indifference is being robotic, is just being not giving, not giving a fuck about anything, right? We had to go there, but it's like the example with, with the lentils in Xeno, it's, you know, wisdom is that ability to differentiate between, do I control this, or do I not control it? Does this matter? Does it not matter? Is it worth getting upset about? Is it worth investing myself into, or is it not? And, and I really think that, that stoic practice of indifference is that ability to understand where your attention and effort, where that boundary should be, right? Of like understanding, like, oh, okay, that, that is something that I have absolutely no control over and doesn't affect me. So I'm just not going to worry about it. Yeah. One of Marx's realises lines, he, he says, to be indifferent to the things that make no difference. And he's like, oh, that's the key. In difference, generally, or universally, that's, that's to totally miss the point. But you're being indifferent to the things that are outside of your control, or that don't matter. Yeah. And, and that's where wisdom comes into, should really know that. And, and you, the things you cared about when you're younger, some of them you, you continue to care about, because they're really, really important. And then other things are like, why did I make such a big deal about that? And, and it's, both, like, how do you know the difference? It's like, some of its experience, some of its, like, studying the experiences of others, some of its, like, having great teachers, like, great teas, who are, like, forcing you in that process. And then you kind of figure about as you go. Where, where do you feel like you've developed the most wisdom? I mean, you've been writing about stoicism for 15 years now. So like, what, and what areas of your life do you feel like you've developed the most wisdom over the last decade plus? Yeah. I mean, I, I do think you're point about, like, discipline, like, what are you, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? And then to go, like, hey, I'm going to pull this back. I think, I think a lot of it for me has been dialing. It's like, where do the dials go on these things? And I think I've gotten better at kind of finding those different dials over the years. I think I, I understand people in history and the world better. And like I'm, I'm reading this book right now about this sort of mid 20th century kind of political figure. And then I'm like, oh, like, I understand what's happening right now, like so much better because this person who I knew existed and I thought was one thing was actually this other thing. And now it's unlocking all this stuff that I understand about now. And so I think, I think just as I've slowly read more and then experience more, it's the interplay between those things that you, you go, okay, I, I just kind of, I, I know what's happening. You know, that's, to me, what wisdom is, is like the ability to, well, epictetus is a wisdom is like, how many arguments are you getting in? Like the sign of progress is you just don't get in as many arguments. But I think that's part of it too. Yeah. You're just like, oh, no, I understand what's going on here. And I understand what I actually should do in response to it. I'm thinking of it. I'm probably thinking about this just because I've been thinking about AI a lot lately. But, you know, when you're, when you're prompting an AI, the more context you give it, the better the result is. And I feel like wisdom is that, like what you're describing, right? Like reading books, having life experiences, getting in fights with people, seeing what's stupid, seeing what's not stupid, seeing what matters a year later, seeing what doesn't matter a year later, that's all context building. And, yeah, it's funny. I just made that connection of like relating, like wisdom is just, it's having context. No, wisdom is having what context are you bringing to the situation? And, and I've been thinking a lot about how, if you don't have a lot of context, if you don't have a lot of experience, you don't have a lot of wisdom, it's going to eat you alive because it's wrong so often, or it's incomplete so often. And so, like I just, I was just using AI out, I needed some fact for this thing I was writing and it, I asked it this question. And it started to solve, like, it's, the solution was, the, the, the logic was sound, but it was starting from a, a faulty assumption at the beginning, which I spotted immediately. But it didn't and I said, no, this is wrong for this reason. It says, oh, I'm sorry. It's like an approximation. And I was like, okay, but, but the approximation, again, flows from a flawed premise, you know? And, and I guess the point is, to me, a big part of, of wisdom is not always knowing the answer, but knowing what's bullshit. Yes. Like, I, I don't know, like, I see this even in my business where it'll be like, I'll ask someone something and they'll be like, I'll be like, how big is that segment? And they'll be like, it's a thousand. And I go, it's not a thousand. And they go, well, how big is it? I go, I don't know how big it is. I just know that that number is wrong. Yeah. And that's context because I have, I, I can't tell you the exact thing, but I can tell you what it's not. And so the ability to spot bullshit, to spot misinformation, to spot, uh, flawed thinking or whatever, that to me is a lot of what wisdom is. And it comes from experience and knowledge and understanding where you're just like, I can see this. And so I think people that don't have that are going to get, how do you know when it's giving you a totally flawed answer? Yeah. I think that's going to be really hard for people. It's, there's an irony in which that like, AI has all the knowledge and very little wisdom or it's wisdom is dependent on the wisdom or the context you give it. Yes. I'll actually give you a really fun example from this morning. Yeah. So I was doing some last minute prep and I went to Claude and I wrote in, I said, uh, I'm doing a podcast. Um, I need, give me some example questions with, uh, Seneca, Marcus Relius and Epictetus. And then it generated podcast questions as if I was interviewing Seneca Epictetus and Marcus, or it was like, so you've been an emperor now for, uh, 12 years. Like what do you think about? And I was just like, what the fuck, man? Right. This is, you know, no human would ever make this mistake. But it's, um, there's a funny thing about how like, knowledge is that, uh, tomato is a fruit and wisdom or, or, uh, yeah, wisdom is knowing that it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. Yes. I could very easily see Chachibitee giving me a tomato-based fruit salad thing because it doesn't actually understand. It's just grabbing different things and throwing them together. There's not this extra filter. Um, and this is timeless. There's a story that I tell in the intro of who was in book about Seneca and this wealthy Roman who just hires these slaves to, uh, give him the answers to all the questions that come up at dinner parties. And, um, and so one of his friends comes up to him after to this, this Roman and he says, you know, this is a great party. He says, if you thought about becoming a wrestler, because why would I become a wrestler? I'm an old man. And he goes, but your slaves are still young. And, and the point is like, you can't have anyone do this stuff for you. Yeah. Um, if you have, if you have your own knowledge and conducts and understanding, you can have people help you who give you information that you then filter synthesize and make decisions on. But you're never fully going to be able to outsource this stuff to anyone other than you. Yeah. That's wisdom is the ability to do that. We're, there's a lot of pressure to not be wise right now, right? There's, it's a lot of pressure to, um, hop on the bandwagon of things that maybe you can't control, right? Okay. So Mark and I, we talk a lot about how we, um, we think a lot of people are under indexed on the local and over indexed on the global, right? So just global events you can't control, but everybody's like, and I talk to people about this and I tell them this. And then I immediately get a lot of pushback. Well, well, you're super privileged because you don't have to think about that, right? And I'm like, no, you can focus on your local communities and environments and make more impact there and not be just beside yourself and out of your mind. Half of the other time. What do you say to that? I guess when, no, I get that a lot. People will comment, they'll go, oh, this is easy for you to say, right? You just think we should do nothing. Right. And like what I've come to, this person was already doing nothing. Yeah. Exactly. Inside of this person was running this major activist organization that's desperately trying to recruit people and, and like by telling them to focus on equanimity and poison restraint, you're, depriving them of, you know, like valuable team members. It's this classic thing of conflating a moating about a problem and thinking about a problem with making a difference about that problem. And so there is a stereotype that the Stokes are not active or engaged, but when you look at the lives of the Stokes, I have done every single one of them was active and engaged like more so than your average person. And so, so what do they mean then when they say like you don't have to have an opinion about everything focus on what you control they just mean exactly what you mean when you say that that not giving a fuck is a subtle art. There's a bunch of things that you don't give a fuck about that you don't think about so that you can allocate those resources and energy towards the things that you should give a fuck about that you can make a difference on. And yeah, this distinction between global and local is obviously a very big one like even look at what's happening in the Middle East I think it's everything people are saying it is is that but but me saying that or thinking it is that changing it no but right now a person of that personality type that's doing that horrible thing overseas is running in a local election in your type. And you're not voting and so obviously that's a simplifying example but you get my point which is that like we are it's not just that we're over indexed on on the global and the national. It's that we're actively neglecting the things that we have like how many people have a hard have an opinion on like what the minimum wage should be. And then when they decide to hire someone are like well what's the minimum wage you know what I like like that's the great thing about being an entrepreneur being a person is that you get to make your own decisions and you can do whatever you want you know yes we should also band together and try to solve these problems and codify them in law but you could also be a good person in your local sphere and and that's those concentric circles again. Where do you think you've gained the most wisdom drew over your life where have I gained the most wisdom. I guess we might get into this a little bit more later but just like the acceptance in the indifference part I think as I get older the more like yes this discern the discernment that comes with that. Yeah I think it's you you go through enough iterations of that you go through enough relationships you go through enough on a people in your life and you just this doesn't does not matter and you're right it's an experience thing it's it's one of those things you can be born smart you can be smart about a lot of things gaining that was them yeah just having less opinions is like yes very much. By itself is I used to be very very opinion and I'm just like god I don't know anything yeah so like we heard that idea of not yucking someone's young yeah I was like I love that expression great fucking expression yuck my young yeah it's like why do I give a shit it's like like you're right in that you like that yeah you know and like but but the inexperience says like no no this is a statement about whether something is objectively good or not and that my inability and then the irony is my inability to let you like something you like. It's actually making me and like just the idea of being able to be like I don't you do you do you do you yeah what about you Mark. Are you fishing for us to ask you that question. No I'm just thinking about this I think I think Ryan and I are very similar in that we're both I consider as both like all gas no breaks guys yeah but in very different ways like you're you're very regimented and like incredibly. Consistent productive think mine is that might be a word. Wow you've come a long way that there is some wisdom there. I think on my side it was more kind of like a little bit more like chaos you know like I was always I wanted to try everything I wanted to experience everything I wanted to go everywhere I wanted to do everything. And I think that served me very well when I was younger but it it led to a very chaotic life and so I've really had to learn how to calm down. But I think in a different way than you I've had to learn how to like call my desires and my. My impulses you know just like I have a lot of shiny object syndrome yeah I think I've never heard about a trip that didn't sound cool. So it's it's it's taken a lot of time and work to like get me to step back and just be like you know. It's okay to chill out and just you know do the same thing every day for a few weeks like that's not going to kill you actually it might be really good for you. Yeah yeah my my eight year old one time I was like trying I was like come on dude let's take forever let's let go. And he's like we got nothing to do and nowhere to be. But it's like it's a Saturday yeah there's literally nothing we have to not only it do we not have to do it on Saturday but also like we're good. Like I don't have a boss I don't have to think about money like I can do whatever I want yeah and here I am going like we need to get there 30 seconds faster. Yes and I think with the wisdom of just like again understanding what's important what's like what's real and not like what's actually serious and what isn't is a big part of it. Yeah and I think it's interesting that all three of our examples were various forms of temperance. Yes right it's like the temperance is the the correction I like that definition of like it's correction and then obviously to know what to correct you need to have an understanding of justice. So yeah it's it does all tied together quite nicely. As we move from this early stoic period into the later stoic period there's kind of two major historical shifts or transitions that I want to talk through. The first one is the Roman conquest of ancient Greece which happens in 146 BC the there's a political fallout from this and there's a and this didn't just happen with the stoics but it's all of the major Greek schools of thought like suddenly now there are Roman patrons to impress to entice to I guess ingratiate yourself with. So I want to cover that and then the second major historical transition I want to talk about is the kind of civil war period of the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic which emerges with the Roman Empire because there's a lot of interesting stoic intrigue that happens during that period as well but let's start with the Roman conquest of Greece and the influence that it starts exerting on a lot of stoic thinkers of the time. Well Rome conquers Greece militarily but Greece conquers Rome culturally and there's a famous diplomatic mission where Greece sends like three of its greatest philosophers to Rome to basically plead with their new overlords they were used to being the deciders it's it's like it's it's Britain sending Churchill to America to meet with FDR during the early days of World War II because the balance of power has shifted. They send a diogenes different different guy same name a carnities and somebody else I'm forgetting. But basically it doesn't go over well at first Rome is like instinctively averse to philosophy and they particularly take issue with the way that one of the stoics or one of the philosophers who's more of a sophist argues one position one day in a in a presentation and then argues the other way the next day in the way that you know in a university context or a debate environment we respect but for the the Romans who are sort of much more literal this was repulsive. And actually Kato the elder is this famous Roman wants to ban the philosophers altogether from Rome he he would have hated the fact that his great great grandson. Kato the younger becomes maybe the most famous stoic of the age but but but it's this sort of slow acculturation where the ideas from ancient Greece in the same way that we look to them and admire them and are blown away by them and we look at these buildings we go how do they do this the Romans had the same reaction and so culturally. They the the Romans raid the Greeks of all their ideas and they they renamed some of the gods they pick some of the philosophers reject some of the others but Greek remains like the philosophical language remarks real is again hundreds of years later is writing meditations he is writing in Greek and not in Latin and almost all of the Roman emperors visit the Greek schools and hatred and famously listens to epithetists but but all the all the Greek emperors and thinkers and lovers of philosophy make their pilgrimages to Greece in the same way that we would today because it's where it happened it's interesting because I think. When I think about the early stoic period it's very cerebral like yes it's a bunch of dudes on a porch debating the nature of existence and like what is virtue and what is the right thing to do in this situation and I feel like the the later stage of stoicism is you get a lot more of the practicality and the implementation and I feel like. There seems to be a little bit of a shift or at least like it's it there's more of a focus that it goes gets a little bit away from the metaphysics and like resolving paradoxes and trying to understand the nature of the universe. Where is like when you read kind of the Roman era, Stoics, it's much more about, you know, what's the most effective thing to do in this moment or how to act in each situation? The word here I would use is engaged. The Romans are engaged in the business of running the world and the empire and the levers of power in a way that the Greek philosophers were not so much. And so the philosophy becomes about these questions of like, what do you do? How do you do this? What are the skills and attributes and virtues of a public man, right? A person who is ruling a province or leading troops in battle or is serving in the Senate or is a wealthy businessman? Like, what are the tools you need? And so they're engaged in life in a very sort of vital essential way that the, again, I think the earlier Stoics were a bit more on the periphery. So you see it, it's not that it's a softening, but it is sort of like an assimilation into the real world from the theoretical world that just wasn't as much a part of it before. Is there a clear through line of how so many of the Roman elite became interested in this philosophy? Because once we get to the Civil War and Augustus and everything, like, there are senators, there are like very prominent Romans who are a valid Stoics. So like, what does that bridge look like? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, and to go to this point about being engaged, like, I think it's interesting, like, Greece is trying to solve this political geopolitical issue, right? And they're like, who should we send to Rome? They're not like, let's send our strongest guy, let's send our richest guy, let's send our, you know, most illustrious, but they're like, let's send our philosophers. So there is this kind of entry into the global affairs that philosophy has, which I think is interesting. One of the big things, there's this group called the Scipionic Circle. So Scipio Amelianus, he's his famous Roman general, who he becomes interested in Stoic philosophy. And he sort of cultivates this scene of thinkers and doers, you know, summer in generals, summer politicians, summer historians. But they kind of just cultivate this club that talks about philosophy. And then they all kind of go back to their thing. And I think that's kind of in the way that we might look at sort of like the lost generation in Europe, post-World War One, where Samo Johnson's the club in line in England. It's just like scene that is kind of, it's like the PayPal mafia of Stoic philosophy. Like, all these people go on to do these things, then each under them have their own coaching tree. Yeah. And Cicero is particularly enamored with this idea of a Scipionic circle. He's who we hear about it from a lot. So from this period, once we get into, I guess, first century BC, we get into the Civil War era of the Roman Empire. And all the turbulence with Julius Caesar and what eventually emerges as the empire itself. I guess we can start with Cato the Younger since he is the most prominent story. Although there are other examples as well. Tell us about Cato the Younger. Tell us his story and then we'll kind of dig into the significance of it. So Cato has probably, you know, his great grandfather's rolling over in his grave, but has a tutor who teaches him Stoic philosophy. So he learns it at this early age. Again, we think of this as a stable, solid period. And it wasn't. There's a great book by Mike Duncan called the the storm before the storm. It's about the 100 years leading up to Julius Caesar. He doesn't come out of nowhere. The Roman Republic is struggling and sort of creaking under its own weight. Again, kind of like we feel today where it's like they can't pass laws. You're watching, you know, political violence and political dysfunction and the continual breakdown of norms. So Cato comes out of this kind of a throwback figure. Like he takes to Stoic philosophy with the kind of monkish devotion. And he doesn't write anything about it. We know him as a Stoic philosopher because of how he lived, scrupulously honest. There was a saying in ancient Rome, like a politician when they were asked to do something would be like, we can't all be Cato's, you know, he was like he's he's he's like an old school like conservative in the lower C sense. So as the system sort of creaks and groans under its own weight, and then you have the introduction of Caesar, the two are kind of these mortal enemies. One representing not just change, but an attempt to overthrow the old order and what the Romans who called the mosmeorum or the old ways. Cicero, Caesar, etc. These are like new men in the sense that they're a legion to a new order. And Cato is the thorn in their side. He's the the break. And it sets up this clash ultimately leading to the the civil war, which Caesar dies in or sorry, Cato dies in and then famously commits suicide in protest rather than submit to Caesar. He goes to his room, he pulls out a copy of Socrates or Plato's recounting of Socrates's last days, reads it, and then stabs himself in the chest. And then as the the doctor rushes in, they hear him fall on the clatter of the sword, they sew him back up. And then when he wakes up and realize he hasn't died, he rips the wound open like this and thousandself. But it's this powerful example of sort of stoic opposition to tyranny and power and change that sort of stands as the example that inspires like subsequent generations of Stokes. But but long story short, Cato is a philosopher not for his writing, but for his way of life. He lives the stoic ideas. He's literally a stoic martyr. Yes. Yes. And he's the first of of many because it's it's interesting over the following period. And it's probably worth noting too, you know, once we get into the Roman Empire, each emperor kind of had a different disposition towards being challenged, stoic philosophers. I mean, there was one under Demician. It's a Demician. I say Demician. Demician. Under Demician, even writing a biography, even writing about Stoics, was illegal. Yeah. He blanket bands all philosophers from Rome. Yeah. Just because it feels weird to think we don't think of philosophers as being transgressive today, but that that word was inherently revolutionary at this period in Rome. Just one sort of stoic after another is a thorn in the Emperor's side. But it doesn't, there's a brief period where that's not the case. The first emperor Augustus or Octavian is taught by two stoic philosophers, Athena Doris and Areas Dittimus. So there's there is this interesting debate even amongst the stoics of like, are we Kato's or do we accommodate and adapt? Right. And so I imagine there's a split, like you can persuasively argue it either way. But these two teachers, not from Athens, are the two main teachers of the emperor. And they they have some interesting stuff. You know, they're suddenly now, now the power is vested in one person. And it's really just the individual dilemma writ large. And so they're talking to him about, you know, what do you do when you get angry? You know, can the emperor afford to lose it? The emperor can lose his temper and do whatever he wants, but can the emperor afford to lose his temper? And how can this person who now possesses all this power learn the ideas of restraint and these virtues that we're talking about? So they're just, I think if you're sort of looking at the montage of this period, you're just noticing the stoics moving closer and closer to the levers of power and then moving, taking a resistance role when they lose the levers of power. Well, and it is interesting because there are examples of stoics on both sides of that equation, right? There are some stoics who quietly and try to subvert the power and resist, maybe not in a not so obvious way. And then there are like people like Kato who just overtly challenge authority repeatedly. And it's, I don't know, like it does raise an interesting question, especially in times like these, like, what is the most responsible thing to do? Totally. So Seneca is a senator, right? He's taught a stoic philosophy as a young man. He becomes a senator, so he gets to basically a peak of Roman life. And then based on these rumors that he's having an affair with the emperor's sister, which are probably not true, he is banished by the emperor Claudius, who was not a good emperor. And so he's banished to this rock in the middle of the ocean. And he spends like a good chunk of a decade there. And at some point, he is given an opportunity to come by Nero's mother. And Nero is then just a young man who's being groomed to be emperor. And so Seneca obviously doesn't know who he's going to become. But, you know, for a guy who worships Kato, this is like an interesting question. Do you serve the emperor? Are you an oppositional resistance figure? And he does. decides, you know, like, it's better to be in the room where it's happening than in exile. So he comes back and he tutors Neuron there. Neuron, when he takes power, actually people are pretty optimistic. And he has, there's a period they call it, the Quinium Neuronium. And it's the first five years, the golden years of Neuron. And he mostly listens to Neuron and his military advisor, Burris. And then at some point, you know, they say power doesn't corrupt it reveals. And power begins to reveal that Neuron is deranged. And at one point Neuron, Seneca has to remind Neuron that it's impossible to kill all of your successors. The joke being that eventually somebody does it, right? And, you know, he writes a speech after Neuron tries to kill his own mother. Seneca almost certainly is telling himself, he is the adult in the room. He is containing the madness. And on the outside, the other stoics, there's a number of resistance stoics, like Thrasia, who are senators who are like, no, no, no, you're enabling, you are complicit. And Seneca becomes enormously rich working for Neuron. And so it is this, it's a fascinating and eminently modern debate. Is it better to be on the outside or be on the inside? And Seneca chooses the inside, a number of other stoics in the same period choose the outside. And kind of depending on what side of the bed I'm on when I wake up, I can argue it either way. But Seneca is very, very fascinating in this regard because he is forced in a number of incredibly morally compromising positions. Yeah, it's, there's, he's full of contradictions. Much more so than probably any stoic thinker. It's, you mentioned briefly the wealth thing. Like it's, that's another aspect of him that is the second richest man in Rome, you know, which is mind-boggled. Yeah, as a philosopher. And, you know, he has this, and he can never, he can't talk about any of this, right? So he does write a number of like really dark, really fucking dark plays that where he talks about depravity and paranoia and stuff. And he's obviously sub-tweeting Neuro as he's doing this. But yeah, he becomes incredibly wealthy. And so he understood this was a charge against him even this time. And one of his essays, or this is an essay or a letter, I forget. But he goes, you know, can a, can a philosopher be rich? And he says, yes, a philosopher can absolutely be rich. He says provided that their money is not stained in another man's blood. And which is like an interesting, a very vivid, an interesting point, which doesn't give us any clarity as to his specific case, right? Like, like, like, because that's exactly why it's so complex, you know, Seneca is fascinating. He writes probably most beautifully of all the Stoics about Stoicism. I agree with that. And then also seems to be the most fun. Yeah. And modern of them. And almost certainly the, he and Cicero are both better writers than practicing Stoics. He's definitely my favorite of the Stoics to read. And it was interesting. I mentioned earlier that I did a bit of a deep dive on, I think it was eight common Stoic practices and digging up where they came from. Yeah. And I mentioned earlier that almost all of them came from Plato, Aristotle, or the Sinek's, with the exception of one philosopher, and it was him. So he is where negative visualization originates from daily gratitude practices. And then obviously he probably wasn't the first person to journal, but he was the first one who explicitly said that you should write down your thoughts every single day so that you can reflect upon them and think about them impartially. So for listeners who aren't familiar with what negative visualization is, basically, when you're stressed about something or worried about something or afraid that something bad is going to happen, the conventional wisdom is visualize what success looks like, visualize everything working out. But what Seneca actually said is to do the opposite. Visualize the worst case scenario. Visualize what it would mean if everything went wrong. And the point that he made, which is extremely profound, is that if you actually sit and visualize and think up through the worst case scenario, you realize it's often not that bad. Like when you run through the mental examples of all the horrible things that could potentially happen to you, you start to realize, wait a second, I actually think I'd be okay. And so paradoxically, it makes you more confident to do the thing. And even if it doesn't, it at least gets you in the mental practice of preparing for the worst. It's, he's such an interesting character because he is twisted up and tied up with all these. Like even the money thing, you could even make the same argument that by being the second richest man in Rome, you have more opportunity to influence good - Sure. - than if you were, you know, like Diogenes the same, right? - Yes. - Totally. - Living in a barrel or whatever. So we're here to go back to the period we were talking about first, right? So Kato is the moral enemy of Caesar. And then his daughter, Portia Kato, is married to Brutus, who assassinate Caesar, right? And Brutus is Stoic-ish. Shakespeare makes him more explicitly Stoic than he was. But like the Romans have a very real counter example to why you don't get rid of the emperor. Like, so they assassinate Caesar and then a civil war breaks out that ravages the kind, like, and then they end up with another emperor. It doesn't do anything. - Yeah. - And so I do think humility is the wrong word. There was a reticence for the later Stoics to go, "Hey, we would rather be a republic, but we don't know how to get from here to there." And we don't exactly have a playbook here and the revolutionary attempts previously have been disastrous. So I think Stoicism, like what do you do about a flawed status quo is a Stoic dilemma. And it wasn't a theoretical dilemma to these people. It was, "Hey, last time, what happened?" And there was, I think, a fear of that. - Well, and I think this is a perfect example of kind of that transition between early Stoicism, which was still very intellectual, cerebral, still worried about like the free will problem and determinism and this later period, which is like, okay, you can either, you have an Emperor who's fucking crazy and murdering everybody, but he listens to you. - Yeah. - So should you try to talk to him? (laughing) - Right? - And we can imagine Senuka being like, "Do you understand I next nine out of the 10 bad ideas?" And then you're saying I'm complicit because one of the bad ideas happened. The Senuka's of the world would say, you don't understand how much worse it would be without me. And then the outsiders, your Thracias and Helvideuses and Agrippinuses, the Stoics who are in this same period, but on the outside are saying, well, actually you're complicit and you're enabling, and we need to do something about this. And it's, these are no longer, these kind of black and white philosophical issues. They are pragmatic policy choices between evil issues. - Yeah. - Wasn't there just two, the Stoic idea that you play the hand your dealt, right? Like this is what it is. - Yeah. - Right? And so that is kind of the two sides of the warring camps there. - Yeah, but it's still, is this the hand that you're dealt? Like this out of your, I think that's what's in, right? Like we say that. And then obviously, if we said that all the time, nothing would ever change. And that is the trickiness of it. - It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, who inevitably do, right? - Yes. - Senuka's letters are fantastic. Like that between that and meditations, like to me, those are like the two entry points in the Stoicism. I don't know if you would agree with that, but for anybody listening. - Senuka's essays are also very good. You know, he has an essay called On the Shortness of Life, which is incredible. He has one called On Anger, which is incredible. He has one on Tranquility, which is incredible. And then he has a few on grief that I always recommend to people who, I just love my father and my mother. He's not just a political philosopher. He's also writing these deeply moving essays and letters about just kind of practical human problems. - And I would argue better than almost any philosopher in human history, which is what makes his story all that more compelling. So he was also, he also died by four suicide. - Yes. - Yeah, Senuka and Jesus are born in the same year, in different provinces of the Roman Empire, both become enormously famous philosophers, and then both die at the hands of the Roman state gruesomely. I've always been fascinated by that parallel. But yeah, at some point he tries to, he does what everyone says he should do, which is he walks away from Nero. And you could say it's too late, but he walks away from Nero. He tries to give all the money back and Nero goes, that's not how this works, you know? He's like, I'll let you live in exile, but I decide, you know, what happens now. And we're told Nero tries to kill him a couple different times and then finally in the sort of goons come and in those days they would give you As a courtesy they would allow you to commit suicide. And so yeah, they they allow Seneca to commit suicide and he tries to slow this risk. It doesn't work. He tries to take hemlock. It doesn't work It's this kind of gruesome thing Where where if he was the hypocrite and the charlatan that everyone Wanted to make him out to be I don't think he could have handled the scariest thing that happened to him in his life the way that he did And he supposedly handles it with the sort of like almost good humor and In the end he's he's suffocated to death in a steam room and and and yeah, he's he's killed by his his prized pupil right and in one of his plays in the SD is Seneca's line that crimes return upon their teachers and There's some poetic justice I think in being Killed by the monster you helped create honestly his life story could be a Greek tragedy like it is Yes, it is totally it's one of those if you didn't tell me this actually happened I would think it was made up well And it they thought it was made up for many years like first off What we thought Seneca looked like we only found out he looked totally different like 10 years ago Okay, like the famous sort of haggard picture of Seneca Mm-hmm is now known as pseudo Seneca because it's not a bust of Seneca and we found Seneca was much Plumper okay, and Epicurian looking okay, you know but but like Seneca the philosopher and Seneca the political power broker Then there's Seneca the playwright and it was you know all the Romans had like the same names Yeah, for most of the last two thousand years people just as most historians assumed that was at least two if not three different people mm-hmm and Only more recently have they did they really confirm that no he also wrote these play so it's like I don't know It just like think of the most powerful Unelected political official also your most famous self-help thinker and then also writing Blockbuster movies or like there's a line from one of Seneca's plays on the wall in Pompeii like so he was famous that people knew his stuff. Yeah, and He's just doing that on the side. So he's a genius. Did he do the plays before or after he got elected during? Oh, so so it what what they take it to mean is that this is where he is processing The moral injury and the trauma because all his plays are fucking dark. Yeah And like incredibly dark like he was taking the Greek tragedies and adding a brutality and a viciousness to them That wasn't it's not a stretch to be like oh this this is this guy processing what he saw his boss do Yeah, right. What are the the biggest lessons that you take from Seneca that you think are the best takeaways? Well, Seneca writes a lot on mortality and one of the ones I think about all the time he says you know It's wrong to think that death is something that we are moving towards that it Happens at the end his point was that we're actually dying every day Does the time that passes belongs to death and so Seneca writes a lot about as I said he has a cessacle on the shortness of life But he thinks about how time is our most precious resource But it's the thing we're worst at managing. Yeah, and he writes beautifully about what an active practice of meditating on our mortality gives us as far as perspective on how to manage our time Nice And then yeah, he writes a lot about tranquility. He writes a lot about controlling your temper is his essay on anger is very interesting again When you go, oh this guy is the Nero's But like Nero's advisor. He's like yeah, you can't just kill everyone you get mad at You know, and he but he's talking about you know how you manage the passions Which a leader has to figure out right you do not need a Degree in the classics to read Seneca. It is incredibly readable and accessible Yeah, that's why he's so very applicable still like anybody can pick it up and relate to it So really quick there are a couple other concepts that are Associated with stoicism Both of them are in Latin one is Memento Mori, which is literally means remember your death and Basically the Stoics argued that the more you think about your own death and your own mortality The more you appreciate what's in front of you the more you take advantage of the opportunities in front of you And the more perspective you have on what actually matters in your life on what to actually put your effort towards and the other Concept is a more Fati which literally means loving your fate and this goes all the way back to to Xeno and Chisapis and the the early Stoics a more Fati basically says Love whatever happens to you find a way to appreciate and take advantage of any circumstance that comes your way Basically don't resist the things that happens to you. Don't try to fight the nature of the universe. Don't try to Change the natural order of things instead find something to be grateful for find some sort of opportunity in the hardship and Look at your struggle in a way that you can love it like find a way to love the hard things that you're going through which is a very counterintuitive concept on the surface and I think It's people's natural reaction is kind of recoil to it But if you can find a way to do it It it is incredibly powerful and profound. All right. Let's move on to Epictetus. Yes. Tell us about epictetus. So if Santa is the privileged Man in Nero's court Epictetus is also a Nero's court on the exact opposite end of the spectrum But he's a Greek slave. Literally his name just means acquired one and he is owned by one of Nero's top AIDS secretaries, you know sort of administrators. So Epictetus is there watching these same people but from a very different vantage point and I think epictetus is main observation is Trasting his lack of freedom Which is legal with the lack of freedom that these Supposedly free and powerless people have like one of his most brilliant and I think vivid Observations as he's he talks about seeing this man sucking up to Nero's cobbler Like this guy is trying to get in good Be in the good graces of the guy that makes Nero shoes because he's both afraid of Nero and want something from Nero And I think what epictetus sees when he sees like these millionaires begging for favors or these people who are afraid to tell the emperor that he's wrong I think he just kind of goes like oh, I might be freer than they are Because I know what's good and bad I focus on what's up to me and I'm not hoping or wanting for anything and so he achieves this kind of freedom inside captivity That I think is a really important layer on top of stoicism That is the resilience layer that obviously Zeno begins coming out of a shipwreck but but is the most Has a large degree to do with why stoicism is still popular to this day and he is the He's the originator of the idea of focusing only on what you control. Yeah, he says that most clearly There's stuff that's up to you. There's stuff that's not up to you anything that's not up to you don't think about and You know, he goes he eventually goes on to be a philosophy teacher Then he's banished when all the philosophers are are banished and then you know It's funny how the tables turn towards the end of his life one day, you know the emperor Hadrian who loves Greek thought Is just there in necopolis listening to epictetus's lectures and to me I love the again the full circleness of like Well, doesn't that make him the most powerful man in the world if the emperor is coming to listen to you Because you have so conquered yourself and Found plenty in the midst of scarcity and all this like aren't you actually more impressive and then it is the lectures of epictetus He doesn't write anything down recorded by this guy named Aryan who's one of Hadrian's administrators That makes its way to markets realious. So that's the mode that now you have the the most powerful man in the world being directly influenced like the Epictetus is the philosophical Bible of markets really is way and what I'd be overstating it to thinking that like epictetus That represents a huge shift in the morality of Western thought wouldn't she say isn't is that well Because he's saying it's it's not about like the power that you have. It's about the virtue, right? That that morality or goodness or whatever you want to call it isn't derived from power. It's not derived from You know, whatever it is success power sure that all these emperors had or whatever It's more about who you are as a person. So you have this slave I think it's almost like a precursor to what Nietzsche ended up calling the slave morality Yeah, he's and could am I overstating how much epictetus had like an influence in that what epictetus remarking on the idea Back then that only the free were allowed to be educated makes this point that he's like no, no only the wise are free. And I think his point is that, you know, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you come from. Like it matters what you know and what you do with what you know. And so there is something kind of individualistic in in a kind of corrupt broken world that he's kind of turning around. And yeah, I think I think that's what so there's a reason he is so striking. Not just to, Epic Titus becomes obviously deeply influential in powerful people like Marx Realist, but then also like other people who are later political prisoners or experience, you know, incredible adversity or deprivation. There's just something about Epic Titus, you're like, this dude not only fucking said it right, but he gets it because he lived through it. Like he is the least privilege of all the Stoics, right? And then so you're like, okay, if he is saying this, like it's been battled tested. One thing I heard is that he would often use shocking language and harsh statements as a pedagogical tool. Yeah. I don't know what kind of fucking idiot would you do that? Yeah. He's he's a little bit more like he's he's he's a little bit of a throwback to the cynics. Yeah. In that he's like, you know, like even that story about the cobbler. He's like, he's making fun of people and breaking them down and kind of he's questioning your most basic bedrock assumptions, which is what great teachers do. Yeah. You think this and then he shows you why you don't have any idea what the fuck are talking about. What are the biggest or most important lessons you've taken from Epic Titus? I mean, obviously the dichotomy of control is like the core of Stoicism. I like his thing where he says it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. That's like that's the definition of Stoicism right there. Like the thing is all throughout Western thought. Of course. Since then it's like the thing is objective. The news it the news is and then we say it's a bear market. It's a bull market. You know, we're saying it's good or bad. Fair unfair. Epic Titus talks a lot about virtue and good and evil. So he's not saying there's no such thing as right and wrong. He's just saying there really is no such thing as positive or negative. It just is. And then his other one that I really like is it's impossible to learn that what you think you already know. Yeah. And so he is as a teacher in the same way that we get some good insights from Xeno on this. I think very much about breaking you down first and disabusing you of your notions and your faulty assumptions so then you can be remade in this sort of stoic mold. And that's why the most powerful Romans sent their kids to him to be educated. It's mind boggling that yeah, that the most powerful Romans would send their family to a slave. Yeah. And then actually learn how to live. But also, you know, to go to the idea of justice, right? I think it's really interesting that his teacher, Musoni's Rufus, not only teaches Epic Titus, so he's teaching this former slave or maybe he's still wasn't slave. But he also writes this fascinating essay on which survives to us on, you know, whether women should be taught philosophy. And he has another one about how whether virtue is the same in a man or a woman. And there is something really progressive about these people, you know, again, almost 2000 years ago going like, well, yeah, virtue is virtue. It doesn't have a genderedness. And obviously there there there's a lot of misogynistic things in all their writings, but they are starting to question some of the the earlier ideas and we're seeing, you know, threads that get picked up by other people later. So how does Epic Titus' work reach? Marcus Aurelius? Yeah, in meditations at the beginning of it, he thanks his philosophy teacher, Rufus, he says, for loaning me his copy, the discourses of Epic Titus from his own library. And so I just love that, you know, again, 20 centuries ago, like, hey, you might like this book. Yeah. And then it changes the course of Western civilization. Like, and I think everyone's had a book like that that someone was like, hey, this worked for me. It might work for you. And so you have this young man probably in his early 20s gets this thing. You know, he's not born to be the emperor. There's a series of Roman emperors who have to choose their air. And Marcus is chosen by Hadrian, but he has to choose someone in between them. So he chooses Antoninus who, in turn, has to choose Marcus, at some point in their Marcus reads Epic Titus. And then that's what sets in motion one of the only instances of a philosopher king in human history. And I think it's remarkable that you have in Marcus Aurelius, a guy who could do whatever he wants. And so the voice in his head saying, ah, that's not a good idea. That's not right. I don't think we should do that is the voice of this slave. And how powerful that is. It's notable. The two things that that kind of stand out to me within meditations is obviously the Momentumori aspect of it, but also his idea of the view from above, right, zooming out, zooming out across history and time and space and everything. And it makes sense considering where he's coming from. As you said, he's the most powerful person in the world. There's literally not a single soul that can tell him no. So the only thing that can potentially give him perspective or challenge his perspective is history and time itself. And so he has to regularly develop a practice of regularly zooming out and making himself feel insignificant to keep his head on straight. Imagine how even just like logistically, that's actually pretty groundbreaking. Like, we so take it for granted, it's like you get an airplane and you look down or you drive a car up to the top of a mountain and you look down, or you have a picture that they sent you from outer fucking space of this tiny blue marble that we look like. They didn't know any of this. So when he's talking about taking the bird's eye view, this is like actually an imaginative exercise. Yeah. And again, I was just at the acropolis and I was thinking it's like, no, he came here and he stood there and he looked down on this. And this would have been, he would have been looking down at the the sum total of the ancient, you know, world that he's so admired. And it's like he wouldn't get that view very often. But you do when I was just talking to this astronaut and he was saying, it's just incredible because the borders go away and time goes away and race goes away and all you're left with is like this sense of like everyone's in this together. And that's not a perspective that people who find themselves the most powerful person in the world are often naturally inclined to or get right. You know, right. So meditations was written was this a personal journal. Yeah. It was an ever meant to be published or seen by the world. You read it in college, I believe. And it had a profound impact on you. Yeah. Tell us about that. What was that? Well, just like somebody gives Marks realize epic teetus. Someone was like, Hey, you should read this book meditations, which I didn't know existed and I didn't know anything about it. Other than that's the old guy from the movie Gladiator. You know, there's nothing like it in any language, in any philosophical tradition, like almost every book. And I think you and I as authors appreciate this. There's something inherently performative about a book. You are writing it to be read by someone else. And so that's not to say you're not being honest and you're not pushing yourself, but there is. You're performing. You're putting on your best outfit. Yeah. You know, you're trying to make a good impression. Yeah. And so the idea that this guy who has a pretty busy day job is writing these notes to himself. And he's doing it in his second language. And he's doing it. Never intending it to be published. And it's so good that we're still reading it 2000 years later is incredible. But there's a, he says you. And when he goes like, you know, when you wake up in the morning and you want to stay in bed, you know, he's not thinking of you. He's thinking of him. Like he is struggling to do that. But from the specificity came this timeless universality. And it's him talking about controlling his temper. It's him talking about his fear of death. It's him talking about fear of losing his children, which he did. You know, it's fear. It's him wondering about legacy. And will he be remembered? It's him, you know, getting worked up about stuff. It's like just this very human book, but it's a human trying to transcend their humanist, but trying to get from the lower self to the higher self. It does seem what is so remarkable about it is that you would, I don't know. I think this is just like a natural human bias. We do it all the time with celebrities and world leaders and historical figures, but we assume that there must be something different about them. Like, oh, clearly, clearly, you know, Steve Jobs didn't have the same amount of hours in the day or didn't worry about the same things I worry about. So it is wild to appearance the mind of a Roman emperor, not just any emperor, but like at the peak of the Roman Empire and its power. And yeah, see passages about not wanting to get out of bed. And also though, like it's easy to read like a, But I don't know, Buddhist monks being like, "Power doesn't matter, fame doesn't matter, doesn't matter and it's like that's easy for you to say you've never had those things and you didn't have a shot at having those things. There's something unique about someone who's actually done it. This is why I think Ecclesiastes is the most interesting book in the Bible too. This is someone clearly talking from experience, not cynically tossing them aside preemptively, but going like no, no, no, no, I've been to the top of the mountain and it's not what you think. There's something very powerful and profound about. When Marcus goes saying something about Alexander the Great, it's like they're peers. He's not just some historian being like here's the fatal flaw of Alexander the Great. He's up there with them and I think that's what makes it such a remarkable book. So if Aurelius is kind of the anti-neuro. Yes. Is that reflected in their policies? I'm curious. How would you as a stoic? Yeah. You would love to see him have been the greatest emperor of all time, right? Like some George Washington figure that lays down power, which by the way, when Washington resigns his commission first from the army and then resigns the presidency, he's thinking of Cato and he's thinking of Cincinnati. He's like, he is steep in these classical ideas, but yeah, you would want you would want Marcus to be the Marcus Ruiz at the beginning of Gladiator where he's a Rome will be a republic again. He doesn't do anything like that, right? No, it doesn't. And part of the reason he doesn't do anything like that, although there's a couple like he he doesn't he ceases to let the Gladiators use real swords. And he does something. And he does some like little things like that. Yeah. But the tragedy of Marcus Ruiz and maybe it's also fitting is that basically the day he takes over just one fucking thing after another happens. So 20 years of peace and prosperity, Antoninus is his predecessor and his beloved stepfather. Then there's this plague, which is known as the Antonin plague. And then like the plague is put on like there's a flood, then a famine, then a plague, then there's wars, then there's a coup, then he has health. It's like it's one fucking thing after another. And so he's not. There's a Jimmy Carterness to Marcus Aurelius. It's better with me for a second. This might be the most fundamentally decent good person to ever get in this position of power. And then both events and the nature of the office conspire to make those things less of a asset than you would have predicted. Yeah. Right. And the most obvious example of this is five emperors in a row don't have a son. Marcus Aurelius has several sons. They all die except for comedists. And so now again, talking about like these aren't theoretical things. Sure, it's better to pick your successor than your son. But what do you do about your son? Yeah. And so he turns it over to comedists who is probably a sociopath or a psychopath or you know deeply unstable plus power corrupts. And almost immediately the era of Pax Romana ends. And you have to lay that on Marcus Aurelius' feet. Yeah. It is, oh, what's he supposed to do? You know what I mean? Yeah. What's he supposed to do? Yeah. It is such a, the Jimmy Carter reference is actually I think very appropriate. I mean it's, I think it's a hard pill to swallow just to get off onto a little tangent. But it's like we have this idea that being a great person should make you a great leader or executive or ruler. And I think history bears out that that's not always the case, right? Like the smartest person isn't always the best in charge. The most virtuous person isn't always the most effective leader. Shake it's complicated. You know, it's funny like the thing I took from meditations when I read it. And it still kind of sticks with me. It's just there are stretches of it that feel repetitive in a way. And it's interesting again thinking about the context in which it was written. It, I think it really drives home the fact that it's one thing philosophy in the abstract. You know, you can like solve a problem and, okay, good, we figured out virtue or whatever. But when it comes to daily life, you have to solve the problem again every single day. Yes. It's never permanently solved. You're going to have to face it over and over and over again. And there's no station and life that prevents you from being subjected to that. Well, I think this is the interesting thing about psychedelics, right? Because people like tell you this like thing that they learned, which is by the way in every philosophy book ever. Yeah. It's not the information that's important. It's the data. It's solving the problem again and again and again. Like Mark Smith obviously knows that he's going to die. And then when you die you're done, right? But like that doesn't change the fact that you wake up today and you're like, don't want that to be true. And so yeah, he's wrestling with these same perennial problems over and over and over again. Meditations is a book for the writer, not for the reader. So sometimes the criticism of it, I'm like, you're missing the point. Like he needed this. Some of it is incidentally beneficial to us. But yeah, I think it's important to understand that stoicism is not a thing that you have read. You shouldn't have read the stoics. You should be reading the stoics. It just like, oh yeah, I meditated. Yeah. It's like not a past tense thing. It's like, did you do it today? Right. Because it's always beginning a new. Yeah. What do you think he would think of his private journals still being read two thousand years later? Probably mortified at some level, right? Like I think I think probably didn't want them. I think they would be different if you wanted them to be published. Yeah. At the same time, I just read this book. Some of Joan Didian's notes survived. She wrote these notes as her daughter was dying of alcoholism. She was going to therapy every day and she would write these notes about the sessions to give to her husband. And it's like obviously on the one hand the most private thing you could possibly imagine. And clearly like not in the form of a book. On the other hand, you're reading it. And you're like, oh, she can't turn it off. Yeah. This is still Joan Didian writing notes from a therapy session is going to read like an epistolary novel because she's fucking one of the goats. She's Joan did. Yeah. And I think there's something about Marcus where on the one hand, he doesn't want it to be published. And on the other, probably understood. Seneca's letters are much more so like a performative medium. Yeah. But they're designed to read like a letter that was not meant to be read. I think meditations was not designed to be read, but like wink, wink. Hey, if you want to do something with those. Yeah. Yeah. Those scrolls over there when I'm gone, you know, check my check the left hand drawer. Yeah. There might be something. You know, who please don't go. Please don't go on. It has a title on it. And it's been edited. And, you know, is there any connection there with why you wrote in Greek instead of Latin? Greek was just the language of philosophy. So like as a lover of Hellenistic thought, like Latin is not elegant enough to render the philosophy. Okay. Okay. I find that fascinating too because so many so few people were literate. Yeah. And here he is, you know, navigating between two languages. Yeah. I mean, this guy's got the greatest philosophy teacher, the greatest rhetoric teacher, the greatest Latin teacher. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Last question for this section. What did you personally take from meditations? I know you've read it like a hundred times. Yeah. And it's designed to be read over and over again. And I feel like I take new stuff out of it every time. But the idea that here you have this guy struggling, he has a line in there, he says, I'm quite to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. And I think that's what meditations is. And that's what we're supposed to take from it too. It's like, we know what we're capable of being. We know this higher self. And then it's really on us. No one's going to make us do that. We have to do that work. I think that's one of the most beautiful ones. Here he has his famous passage. He opens book two. So book one is just a list of all of his debts and lessons, all the things he learned from people. It's very beautiful. And if that was the only thing that survived, it would be an amazing thing. But he opens book two with this like a list of how fucking annoying and obnoxious the people he's going to meet today are. It's a very famous sort of captures the cynicism of the stoic. He's going to be obnoxious and annoying and dishonest and stupid and then he goes, but you can't let them get to you and you can't let them make you like them. He's like, you know better than them. You know you were meant to get work together. So like suck it up and figure it out. And I think that it's like people think stoicism is the first part. And it's Ag! Actually, the second part, the first part is obvious. That's the cynic part. The second part is where stoicism evolved to. - So don't just put up with them. Find a way to live with them and work with them. - Yes. (upbeat music) - So coming out of the ancient world, stoicism persists throughout history. It's a philosophy in the school of thought that seems to sit with the elites throughout western culture. - It's like a secret weapon. - Yes. And it's, first of all, if you look at the enlightenment philosophers, a few of them talk about it explicitly. I know Nietzsche wrote very fondly of the Stoics, but you actually find out if you read their biographies that they were very much into stoicism and it was very inspiring for them. And it's similar with a lot of world leaders, a lot of very famous figures throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. So like, talk to me just about the legacy and influence through western culture. Like why did this, why did, of all the philosophies and all the schools of thought, like why did stoicism persist, especially among kind of the upper echelon of? - I wonder if a lot of it is like exactly why Roustic has given it to Marx to realize in his early 20s. It's like, if you have like a promising, talented person, you're grooming for success, greatness, power. You know they have a lot of the things they need, but they need this as like a governor. And so I wonder how much of it is like, it's like this kind of like open secret. Like, okay, but have you read this? - Yeah. - And that like the Stoics are not the thing that anyone is specializing in. It's not the sexy or the exciting or the groundbreaking field. And a lot of it is kind of intuitively obvious, but there's something inspiring and beautiful and like affirmative about it. And it's just always been there as this like person to person passing this along kind of a thing. - It's almost like history's self-help. - Yes, yes. - Like it's the sort of thing like, the same way people don't, or at least when we were growing up, right? Like nobody broadcasts that they were reading Tony Robbins, but like if you got one on one in a quiet room, you'd be like, hey man, you gotta check out this Tony Robbins guy, like it was completely life-changing. It seems like Stoicism was that, you know, for centuries. - And Sanica was more familiar than the other Stokes for a long time because his epigrams were often how you learned Latin. So you learn Cicero and Sanica as you were learning languages and obviously that sort of fell away. But you tend to see Stoicism resurgent in turbulent times. So Enlightenment thinkers, the founding fathers, there's a segment of it in the American Civil War. It's, I think it says, it's fitting that it's popular now too. It's like when the world feels like it's out of control, people are like, oh, I gotta get better at controlling myself. Well, what's the smartest stuff ever written on that topic? It's from Greece and Rome. - Yeah. - It also survived because it got co-opted into so many other philosophers, Christianity being the prominent one. I was kind of teasing earlier when I brought up Epochetus and he's kind of upending the moral order. Christianity did that in a big way. And I didn't really realize the influence that Stoicism had on those like Thomas Aquinas, for example. So how did it, I guess, there was early Christian years where Christianity was starting to take off. The Roman Empire is falling. What happens there? - So Paul studies Stoicism in Tarsus as Saul of Tarsus. And then famously, when he goes to Athens, he stops at the Stoepokile meets with the philosophers there and they walk him up through the Agora to the hill next to the Acropolis where he gives one of his most famous lectures. And so this was all kind of swirling about. I mean, Seneca's brother is in the Bible. He's a judge who lets Paul go. There's a series of fake letters between Seneca and St. Peter. So even in the early days, they were like engaging and interacting with each other less contentiously than we might imagine. And then I think obviously a lot of the ideas from the ancient world make their way through the Bible. Then obviously we have the dark ages where we turn away from classicalism. But the Renaissance is kind of the rediscovery of these ideas. And I think with the printing press suddenly, you didn't still elite-ish, but like regular people are getting some of these books in their native languages for the first time. And that's also the re-emergence of this idea. - You see it all throughout though. I mean, you've mentioned Shakespeare several times already too. In Hamlet, right? - Yeah. - The most famous line. Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it. So you've mentioned some of the founding fathers in the United States. The play "Kato" was played before Valley Forge. - Yes. - Right. The Battle of Valley Forge. George Washington was a stoic. - Yeah, this play "Kato" is like, I've said this joke so many times, but I think it's true. It was the Hamilton of his day. Like it's like, it's the play that everyone knows. And it's like in the way that a 15-year-old might not have actually paid attention in a US history, but they got the gist of what happened in the revolution from the play. They might not have read the stoics, but they knew stoic wisdom from this play. The famous line in the play "Kato" says that we have to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophy. And this is one of Washington's favorite lines that he says like, over and over again in letters. - Yeah, and the play was written in the 1700s too. And it wasn't like a throwback or anything like that. - No, it's during this Renaissance period that it was brought on, yeah. But I mean, you go all the way through, like I just found all these little examples of where stoicism just pops up, but it rarely gets acknowledged. And I don't know if it was like what you were talking about people were just like, well, there's just what it was. It seems to just be like this foundation of Western thought that has persisted and just it gets absorbed into everything. Like Christianity, like a lot of the founding fathers the serenity prayer, you get to that. That's very, very stoic. - I don't know about the serenity prayer. It's like if you just gave it to someone, you're like, what year was this written? You know, they'd be like, I don't know, the 1300s? Or like, is that, did Jesus say that? And you're like, no, no, no, some guy wrote it on a train in the 50s. But it's obviously the synthesis of, the accumulation of all this wisdom distilled down into its stoicism, Christianity, and Buddhism, like all mixed into one. - What was then the, you know, even go into that book by James Stockdale, the Vietnam? - So Stockdale, he, the Navy sends him to Stanford to get a graduate degree. And he is introduced to stoic philosophy. The professor gives him a copy of Epictetus. So he reads it and he kind of goes down this stoic rabbit hole and then he's shot down like, I don't know, two years later. But his copy of Epictetus is on, is like with his stuff. Like it gets mailed back to his family because it was on the aircraft carrier that he took off from. And supposedly as he's parachuting down into what he knows is gonna be in prisonment, possibly death, and he says, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. It's like, oh, these ideas that were theoretical. Like now, it shits about to get real. And you know, Epictetus is tortured by his slave, his master, he's like, he breaks his leg and he never fully regains the use of it. The same thing happens to Stockdale in this prison. So it's one of the, when we talk about like the resilience layer of stoicism, that's Epictetus and then it's Stockdale who was like, oh, no, no, this wasn't just true 2000 years ago. - It's now. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, it even comes, we want to get into the psychology part, how about two? - Sure, I mean, you really see it show up, it's highly influential on Aaron Beck. It's interesting, like Epictetus has this three part, little framework, I believe it's a desire, action, and ascent. - Yeah. - And they all work in cohorts. And you could almost copy and paste that in the CBT as the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, and how each one is an entry point to the other two. So if you want to, you can't, you can't single out any single one and only master that. You have to continually adapt to all three and work with all three simultaneously. And so it's, there's also a lot of stuff. I mean, they used to call it narrative therapy, which you actually, I forget the name of the journaling process that they studied, but it's like, you literally, I mean, it could come straight out of Seneca. It's basically, you write down your worst thoughts and experiences, and then you go back and reread it and do a reappraisal of the meaning of it. And it's like, there's all sorts of positive therapeutic outcomes that come from that. So it is, I mean, whether intentional or not, like whether the psychologist kind of came across the same truths independently or if they were reading tons of epictetus and Seneca and college. It's probably both. There's a shocking amount of overlap. They do credit them. Like, Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, who did our EBT rational emotive behavioral therapy, they do credit this story with a lot of that. It was kind of after the fact. One of the interesting things, I think, Beck and Ellis both came up with their frameworks which are very similar around the same time, the 50s and 60s. And it was during, so you had behaviorism, which was, you know, proving to be a little bit difficult in a lot of areas, you know, could everything just be boiled down to incentives. And then you had psychoanalysis, kind of the other side, everything's unconscious. What Beck and Ellis realized was that these people were not, they were psychoanalysis. They were psychoanalysts, so the unconscious played a big role. What they realized was these people weren't unconscious of their motives and desires. They were very conscious of it. They just didn't know what to do with the interpretations that they were giving it to, which was very, very stoic, which is what they realized. So it was, I don't know how much of it was after the fact. They write later about, yes, this was very much, these aren't new ideas, they're very stoic. But it was just interesting how that kept popping back up again. When you had to have, when there was a, kind of, rubber hits the road moment, this shit has to work. And then the stoicism comes back in to save today. I think there's something about psychology and therapy that's akin to the role that philosophy played in the ancient world. Yes. Yeah. Today we think it's like, people go like, oh, I studied philosophy, or I was a philosophy major, as if it's this like one time thing. And then you just go about your normal life, you're like, good, you got it. In the same way that like, I learned my multiplication tables and that's not what it was supposed to be. And when you hear about like the scipionic circle, or these dinners that Kato would have, it was like, philosophy was this thing you were engaged in constantly. People go and see Socrates and talk to them about their problems and shoot things, shoot the shit and get ideas and whatever philosophy was this ongoing thing. And more similar to what a therapist role is in someone's life and that you're like, I call this person, or I go to this person's office once a week or once every other week. Or support. Yes. I think 12 step groups are very similar to the stoic process of like, hey, are you sure that that assumption is true? Because like, what about this, this, and this? And like, here are some aphorisms or ideas that you can maybe try to replace that thought pattern with. And then here's a network of like-minded people who are all engaged in the same like, they're porch guys. Yeah. Totally. And we're going to meet twice a week to remind ourselves to do this stuff. Yes. Yes. As I sit here thinking about it, I feel like you could probably, if you took the stoics Aristotle, say, Buddhism, that probably covers 80 or 90% of psychology of like shit that actually works. Yeah. You even look at like a post-traumatic growth theory. It's very much to Deschen Calhoun, they very much credit the stoics with it, but then nobody acknowledges it after that. Yeah. And what's missing is like the mental illness side of things. Yeah. Like, it's hopeful but a bit naive in the stoics of just like, you control your mind, get to rationality and it's like, okay, but what if you were horribly abused or what, you know, how do you, what if you, you know, something happened, you got a head injury, but like, there's something missing there. Yeah. Like, I think the point, the 10 to 15% you're missing is for like the edge cases that are just like where, yeah, but it works up until a point. I personally feel that stoicism is best when it is kind of in psychology, it's called cognitive reappraisal where it's basically like you take the narratives and the shit that your brain, your mind is saying to you and then you like, take a step back and you reevaluate. Yes. You say like, what if that wasn't true? What if it was this way? What if we invert that? What if we pretend I'm the other person? I feel like stoicism is, is like the goat at that. Yes. I feel, where I feel it lacking at times is on the more of the emotional side. It's, I don't, I don't subscribe to the common criticism that it's, you know, stoicism is just telling you to be feelingless, emotionless, robotic and to be fair, I don't think anything in the ancient world really addresses this super well. When you are consumed frequently by anger or when you are so sad, you can't get out of bed. Like, how do you work with that? Right. Like, how do you, what is the process or procedure? And I, I really don't think we, we got anything cons, like, consistently replicable that could, like, address that probably until modern times. Yeah. And I would also say there, if, if your primary concern is like not being exiled, not being murdered, how do you deal with your, you know, infant mortality is 30%. Yeah, you know, there's a war every other year, you know, you're, you're primarily going to be thinking about like freeing yourself from anxiety and worry and anger and dread and what you're not like, okay, well, where do I find meaning? Where do I find purpose? Where do I find happiness? And, and sure, I think they do, they, they do have a definition of happiness and it's not, you know, I make a lot of money and I'm, I look great or whatever. But, but like, that's why I think it's a striking, you read Mark's realist and you read Seneca and you're like, which one would you rather be? Yeah. You know, Mark's realist is more impressive as a figure, but it doesn't seem like he's having a great time. No, he seems miserable, I mean, to be fair, Seneca, you know, it's not exactly a, a rosy picture either, but yeah, it's, it's, I think we've made, like, we made a lot of advancements in just our assumptions, like, there's just different, I just think about like how interesting it is that's like not until Gandhi that we're like, oh, you don't have to like kill and murder someone that you disagree with. There's like, other ways of producing political change, you know, like, like, like non-violence is literally an, not passive, non-violent resistance is an invention. Yes. That happens in the 19th century. Well, to be fair, Jesus invented it, but we immediately killed him. Yes. And we had to re-learn it, you know. Sure. That's right. 1900 years later. Yes, sure. But it's also, Jesus isn't proposing it as a political strategy. Yeah. He's proposing it as a mode of personal behavior, right? Yes. And so it's just like the idea of what a good life is was circumscribed, you know, like, it never occurs to Marx to realize that he doesn't have to be the emperor. Yeah. You know, like, he hates it. Yeah. And it's not conceivable to him that he would do anything other than this thing he was chosen for. Right? And like, I think we've made some developments as a society about like what your obligations are. To come back to the parallel between him and Washington, Washington fucking hated being president. It was miserable. He spent the entire time wanting to go back to Mount Vernon. And so to his credit, yeah, he stepped down, you know, and it's, it says something about his character. It's ironic that a philosophy that was popular with elites kind of becomes like to every man. Yeah. For modern day elites to properly mythologize and institutionalize. So yeah, you have like these college kids reading Plato when really they should be reading Marx, really, and then the grad student should be reading play, you know, like, like, which one is actually going to help you in your life? Like, I think, I think it's so interesting like to go back to the founders, we spend a lot of time thinking about like who inspired them from like a legal basis, which is like interesting. But again, if you're 17, what do you do at this information is much more of these classical ideas and these myths and these, like I didn't know who Cincinnati was until I was probably in my mid 20s. I mean, I obviously heard of Cincinnati, but I never heard like, but that's a story that for hundreds of years, thousands of years, everyone heard when they were growing up. Like, here's this guy. He's named dictator. And then he defeats Rome's enemies and then he retires to his farm. That's such a beautiful, inspiring story. And it's what it's foundational to America, but like we don't learn about that. And maybe you learn about Washington resigning this commission, you do learn about resigning after two terms. You don't learn the classical basis for it. So we've just been skipping that this was kind of the, it's like the Stoics, you know, that expression like your favorite rappers, favorite rapper. The Stoics were your favorite person's favorite philosophy. But like you kind of don't get back that far. And so people have been missing that this is the piece. And like, I think that's, if there's any reason my works and my writing is succeeded, I think it's because it kind of broke the floodgates of that a little bit and it kind of took this thing that people of all different types have already known about or been using. And then they're like, Oh, yeah, this is, this is an entry point into this thing. That's actually, because it is hard, you go, well, what is the best entry point into the Stoics? Is it Mark's release? Is it Epictetus? Is it Seneca? The answer is like kind of all the above. Sure. Much credit to my book agent who suggested an idea of the Daily Stoic, he was like, you know, there's not actually like one book that is the greatest hits of the Stoics. Yeah. And I was like, that's true. And it's like, yeah, it's true. And so that's where the Daily Stoic came from. All right. I was just saying, could it be all of that and? Yeah. that the stoics uncovered something so fundamental the human nature that we kind of ended up taking it for granted and just kept rediscovering it. Like for example, R-E-B-T with Albert Ellis and he's got this ABC model. You have this, the A is sometimes called adversity. It's an action event than the behavior than the consequence and he says, you know, like the human free will exists between the action and the behavior, right? Very stoic idea. - Sure. - Also incredibly obvious when you think about it, right? - There's something about it that's like, oh yeah, I think my grandma told me that. - Yeah, right? - And so what I like about it is you're like, no, no, no, no, this actually isn't some cliche that you saw written on the wall of a gym. Like this, somebody made this up for the first time and we know who it was. Like I was giving a talk to the Pittsburgh Pirates at Spring Training a couple of years ago and they had on the wall, it's not events that upset us, it's our opinion about events. And I'm like, you don't even realize that like, that's from the stoics. If you think I'm here to talk about stoicism, but you already know it. - Yeah. - You know, and that's like, that's stoicism all day. (upbeat music) - So let's back up. Let's talk about earlier in your career, used to write about marketing. And at the time, it's one of these funny things that you look back on at the time. You decided to take a huge risk, exhibit some courage. - Sure. - And write about this, I guess what you thought at the time was an obscure philosophy by writing obstacles the way in 2013. And then it did kind of blow up. So I'm curious, why do you think it's taken off the way it has in the social media age? Like what is it about this era, that suddenly has everybody calling themselves a stoic, following stoics, reading about stoics? - I don't know, I mean, it probably says something about how dysfunctional and weird things are. I think it says something about the tools that allow, you know, the repocularization of something in a way that can appeal to like, like my books have sold really well, but I've reached many, many, many millions more people on social media and the email and the podcasts and whatever, right? Because way more people consume those things than books. So I think it did allow this idea to break outside of just sort of people who read books about philosophy, right? Or even just people who read self-help books. So that was a big part of it. But I think, you know, I was mentored in top by Robert Green and what Robert Green is so great at is taking ancient ideas and then illustrating them with sometimes ancient stories, sometimes modern stories, sometimes literature, some of the sorts, but he's like, let me, instead of let me just tell you this idea, let me show you this idea of what it looks like. And maybe a story that you are familiar with or a person you're familiar with, but you didn't actually fully understand what this would look like. And I think what I have been able to do is take the ideas from the Stoics and illustrate them in a way that people go, oh, I get it now. And then I can give this to my 16 year old son or I can give this to this person who's struggling at work or a person who just found out they have cancer like. And then I think also what I've tried to do is I'm not writing about stoicism generally. I'm always writing about a very specific thing that stoicism can help you with. The obstacle is the way it's about dealing with problems. Ego's the enemy is about like, you know, obviously dealing with ego. And then still, this is like, how do you find peace in a noisy world? I'm not, I'm taking all the things that Stoics said plus a lot of other people and aiming it out of thing that there is a latent and perennial interest in getting better at. - And how do you feel? It's been interesting watching this philosophy blow up over the last 10 years. And I feel like we're now in an age where it's become so popularized and there's so many, there's now, we were talking over lunch, there's so many social media accounts now that are these faceless channels that are knockoffs and in many cases like posting absolutely terrible advice and calling it stoic advice, it's funny. There's like almost, there's a term I've seen thrown around a little bit of Brox, you know? - Broxism. - Broxism, like it's stoicism. It's almost been co-opted by some internet subcommunities that are-- - It's been co-opted and that's a problem. I mean, look, I also get it. Like why at 19 reading meditations, what lit me up? Was it the fact that he talks about doing good for the common good like 80 times, you know? Was it like his meditations on mortality and wrestling with our fear of death? Like no, that's not, like I'm like wake up early work harder, push yourself, don't be a bitch. - Yeah, yeah. - Like, so like I understand that that's the end, that's if you're a young dude or if you're any person in a sort of competitive environment of any kind, there's a lot of that the stoics teach you and I'm like, if that's what brings you in the door, welcome, you know, I think there's also been kind of an elitism backlash to it that I don't like either. Like I'd rather you be in the ballpark of stoicism than going the opposite direction. At the same time, I think if your interpretation of stoicism is that it'll help you be a better sociopath, you're getting it totally wrong, you know? It's, that's certainly not what the four virtues are about. - Yeah. - And that's certainly not what virtue is about. So, you know, you take the good with the bad. In the early days of something, you're just desperate for anyone to hear about it and take it seriously. And then you're fortunate enough to get a position where it's like bigger than you thought or there's a backlash to what you. I said this at this conference about stoicism, like almost 10 years ago now and people still, like thrown in my face, but I think it's more or less correct. Like if you took every person in the world who knew about stoicism and then you stack them against the people that are familiar with the ideas in Buddhism or even just let's just say Eastern thought generally or talking about meditation and such, it's like not even close. Like stoicism is a fraction of how big it could be. And I don't mean that from like a business standpoint. I just mean that like it can be really easy to be like, everyone's talking about this, it's popular. And it's like the vast majority of people think the word stoic means has no emotions and be a robot and they've taken it no further than that. And they, if they know the name marks the realist, it is from the movie Gladiator and nothing else, you know? And so I'm much more of the minds of like we should bring as many people in as possible 'cause even if you get only a few of the teachings, that's better than nothing. - And even if there's a temporary backlash or some bad actors or whatever, like this stuff is clearly timeless. - Yes. - It's been around for over 2,000 years. It will likely outlast all of us. - Yeah, look at this, so it's arguing about what stoicism was, right? Like you had Senica and Thrasia and there are different definitions of it. So I think that's fine too. But yeah, like if you ask AI what stoicism is, it's like this shredded Greek statue, you know, like decapitating his enemy with a sword or something. - Like feeling nothing about it. - Yeah, exactly. And that's to me, what I think about being that person who was attracted to the sort of muscular, masculine, productivity stoicism at 19, and then because I stayed with it, it works on you as you're working with it. And I think it's hard to actually read the stoics at any length and not be like these were thoughtful, fundamentally decent people. And it's not about whatever these other people are saying about what it, you know, it's the opposite of Andrutate or whatever. - How would you update anything in stoicism for today's? - I mean, I would love to hear them talk. First off, I would love to know what they would have said about the breakthroughs that we've had medically, you know, - Neuroscience too. - Yeah, like what would they say about this? And I, it's only a dead philosophy because they're dead. You know, like it's not like it's this and nothing else. It's not the word of God. You can add to it. And you know, Seneca quotes a lot from Epicurus 'cause he read widely. So I don't think it's a problem to update it. I would love to know, yeah, this line between acceptance and agency and where is it? 'Cause like, it's true. There's some things that are up to us and some things that are not. And then there's a lot in the middle. - Yeah. - You know, like you know, this is a writer, like you put out, like obviously you control the book and you don't control whether people like it or not. But you kind of control the marketing. - Yeah. - You know, like, so there's a lot of gray area between. And like, I think most people need the black and white thing first. Then once you've grasped the black and white thing, like what do you do in the middle? - Yeah, yeah. Which stoic philosopher would have the most Instagram followers? - Ooh, well, let's get into the hard-hitting question. - Mark really is the most famous and powerful. So maybe he's got the official Roman Empire account. - I wonder what the, I bet he actually does. - I wonder what color checkmark that would be. (laughing) - But Santa has the better writer. - He is the better writer. - So would, you know, [BLANK_AUDIO] who's been very popular with his other works. - Yeah, all right, I'm glad we got to the bottom of this. - Yeah, yeah, it's a funny question. - Any parting thoughts for people listening who this podcast is their first exposure to stoicism, what would you recommend? - Yeah, we usually do an 80/20, so maybe give us the 80/20, if that's even a thing. - Oh yeah, we should do an 80/20 of stoicism. Like what's the 20% of stoicism that will give you? - No, no, you don't control what happens, you control how you respond to what happens. It's all right, so the stoics believe that everything that happens, including obstacles, including adversity, is this opportunity. It's this opportunity for you to practice virtue, right? And there isn't a situation that you can think of that doesn't allow you to respond with courage, self-command, justice, or wisdom. And in fact, it's like the worst, the situation, the more-- - The more opportunity. - The more opportunity the virtue. So like when I wrote the obstacles away, I think a lot of people, and I think that's where I was when I was 24, 25, is like, hey, how does this help you professionally, right? Like how, and it's true, there's a chance to do that, right? That's what great entrepreneurs and creatives do. But what they're really saying is like, this is a chance for you as a person to get better or worse. What is it going to be? Because it's unfair to be like, well, a more fun to you have cancer, that's not what-- But they're saying it fucking sucks that you have cancer. If fucking sucks at someone to stole your money, if fucking sucks that you lost an election, whatever it is. And now, what are you going to make of this with whatever is feasible or possible next, which could be 24 more hours on this planet, or it could be 50 years of exile. What are you going to do with it? That's what stoicism is. The more trying the situation, the more impressive the virtue can be. But if you're asking me where I would go next, I mean, I would pick up meditations. I would pick up Seneca. I'd probably start with those two. I do Epictetus last. And I would make them your companions. Again, it's not a thing. I flip through it. I got it. It's like, no, no, it's a thing you come to. And you come back to. And my relationship with stoicism has changed. The words are the same, but what I take out of it, and who I am bringing to it, that's what's changing. And that's what great texts do, is they bring you something new every time. Nice. Ryan Holiday. Thank you so much, dude. Thanks for having me. We made it. We made it to the end. Damn, that was awesome. [MUSIC PLAYING] Cut. Cut. [MUSIC PLAYING]