Modern Wisdom - #226 - Ryan Holiday - Taking Wisdom From The Lives Of The Stoics

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Ryan Holiday is a marketer and an author. Stoicism is the hot new girl in school. Increasingly we're being exposed to the lessons of ancient Athens 2000 years ago but without the context of knowing the lives that these philosophers lived, our insights can hit a ceiling. Expect to learn Ryan's 3 favourite stoics of all time, why the stoic writings still sound so relevant today, why ancient Athens was an ideal place for philosophy but an awful place to live, what the stoics would be most upset by in modern society and much more...  Sponsor: Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X at https://www.reebok.co.uk (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Lives Of The Stoics - https://amzn.to/2S57MKh Check out Ryan's website - http://dailystoic.com/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is the one and only Ryan Holiday. Marketer, author and all-round legend. I feel very fortunate to have got him on the show. Today we're talking about his new book, Lives of the Stoics. Now typically we'll discuss stoicism with regards to the concepts and how does the philosophy advise that we live our lives? What does it mean to live a good life? But rarely do you actually get the wider context of the sort of environment

and world that the people writing this philosophy were living in. And I really think that it adds another layer of nuance and insight into what we can gain from the stoic philosophy by understanding the world that it came from. Even if you're quite familiar with the learnings from stoicism, I think there'll be a lot to take away from today. Ryan definitely is worth his salt when it comes to being called an authority on the stoic philosophy. Also, if you enjoy this episode or any episode on Modern Wisdom, please share it with a friend. That is the only way that this show continues to grow by people like you, sharing it to other people like you. You might have started listening to this precisely because it got posted in a group chat or one of your friends

said, oh, check this podcast out. You listen to podcasts. I've listened to this. Do the same. If you love an episode, the best thing that you could do to support me and the show and make me very, very happy would be to just find someone else that you think would enjoy it, copy them the link and get them to listen. But for now, it's time for the wise and by Ryan Holiday. Ryan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to have you on, man. Can you explain why stoicism is having such modern day popularity at the moment? It's not like I'm seeing tons of people turn into Taoism

or Confucianism, but stoicism's like the hot new girl in school at the moment. Yeah, I don't know exactly why that is. It's been an interesting journey. I mean, I've been writing about stoicism for almost 15 years. So even in my own time writing about it, I've seen some sort of peaks and valleys. But I think ultimately it comes down to stoicism as a philosophy designed both around and for dealing with adversity. So I don't think it should surprise us that it tends to

pop back up when things are difficult. I mean, Marcus Aurelius is writing meditations during the Antonin plague. So the idea that it would have something to teach us during the COVID-19 pandemic, I don't think should be that surprising. You're totally right. It does read very modern. Why is it that Stoicism reads like it was written two weeks ago and not two millennia ago? Well, even when you think about how Marcus are realist is writing, so he's writing during the Antenine play, but his book Meditations, it translates, he was writing in Greek instead of the less formal one, and he was writing, the title of it translates to himself, so he was writing his book to himself.

It wasn't ever intended for publication. And even Seneca's writing, who's probably the most accessible of the Stoics, a good chunk of it survives to us in the form of letters he wasics, you know, a good chunk of it survives to us in the form of letters he was writing to his friend, letters of a Stoic, letters from a Stoic is really sentica writing to his friend Lucilius. And so if we can think of the literary implications of that that instead of trying to sort of get down this brilliant theory or to perfectly craft their words in such

a way that it's accessible. And that's what I love about the Stoics is that, again, it's not a collection of theories, it's just, you know, real people talking about real problems. And as it happens, the problems of the ancient world, although unique in many ways, we're not that different than the problems of the ancient world, although unique in many ways, we're not that different than the problems we have today. People are people, we get jealous, we have urges, we have ambitions, we make mistakes, people are people.

I understand that. Yeah. I did some research. In the time that most of the stoics were alive, the entire global population was somewhere between about 150 and 330 million people. time that most of the Stoics were alive, the entire global population was somewhere between about 150 and 330 million people. So at most, it was like the same as today's population of the United States. Given that there's so many more people alive today, why aren't we finding an epic teetus in every country? Have all of the struggles of how to live been

worked out or is no one asking the right questions anymore? No, I mean, what's interesting, yeah, you're right, that that's the global population, but a very large chunk of even that population rested inside the Roman Empire. You can make this, you go, oh, the Stokes were dead white guys, but what's to me so fascinating is just how diverse they were. and make this, you go, oh, the Stoics were dead white guys. But what's to me so fascinating is, is just how diverse they were. Obviously there were some female Stoics, but, you know, Seneca is from Spain.

There were Stoics from modern day Turkey and Iraq and, you know, Greece and all over the Roman world. So I don't think it's that, you know, why haven't we covered, you know, uncovered any more Stoics? I think it's more like, the Stoics are basically saying that history is this sort of loop on repeat. And so if we get to a sense that what was happening in the ancient world is the same as

what's happening today and that it's the same thing over and over again, it sort of helps explain why it doesn't feel like there's any of this some new exciting voice. I mean, you have epictetus who's a slave who has his legs broken, who's clapped in the irons. And then, you know, in 1960, 1964, 1965, James Stockdale shot down over Vietnam a fan of epictetus. He actually is repeating epictetus to himself as he's

you know, heading down into this camp, has his leg broken, you know, his clapped in irons, comes to a lot of the same conclusions as epictetus did. So in that sense, like, you know, I think it sort of confirms the idea that, that, you know, again, people are people in history as history. What was the unique insight that we had in ancient Rome and ancient Athens? Well, I mean, I think that the core premise of Stoicism is basically, look, we don't control the world around us, but we control how we respond. And that seems very common, sensible, but if you actually look at how most people go through their lives,

we spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on stuff that's not on our control. And I did this this morning, I got off the call, I was on a conference call with someone I got off. And the first thing I did was call this other person, we complained about how ridiculous the other person was being, and it's like, what a colossal waste of both of our times,

you know, instead of focusing on what we're going to do about it, you know, we did the easier thing, which is try to blame or whine or, you know, it's just like people wake up and they're upset that it's raining, you know, and the stokes would say it's raining. What do you, you know, what are you going to do about it? New book, Lives of the Stoics, The Out of Living from Xeno to Marcus Aralius. Why did you write this?

Well, I've written a lot about stoicism and I've written a lot about what the Stokes have said. I've tried to illustrate these ideas in the past through, you know, through stories from sports and history and war and business. But I really wanted to, and it hasn't existed, and so that's why I decided to do it. The actual stillyx themselves have always been kind of a mystery. They were not super famous in their own time. It's a lot of conflicting sources and

it's sort of all, you know, there's a little bit here and a little bit there. And so what I wanted to do is create as, as I've, you know, been lucky enough to help popularized toicism, people go, oh, but who were these people? And so I wanted to write a book that really puts like sort of, you know, not faces to the name, but puts events to the name and the face. And at the core of it, stoicism is supposed to be a philosophy that you do, not something you say. And so I was also really fascinated with, and I remained fascinated with, especially

with someone like Seneca, is it actually possible to live up to this standard and how does a human fair trying to actually live by these teachings? It says something about where philosophy is today that does anyone care what the life of a Harvard philosophy professor looks like. No, because we've kind of made this allowance that philosophy is the theory and then the person's life is irrelevant, but in the ancient world, that was just not how it was. Yeah, I totally get that, man. The armchair philosophizing, unfortunately, appears to be a little bit of a curse, especially in the modern world. Everyone has that friend that loves to talk a good game. He loves to always

be on it, talking about their plans. This is what I've got coming up and then never, ever get skin in the game and actually goes and does it. It certainly had a degree reading about the ancient Stoics in real life seems to give some extra depth to them and the historical context. Do you think that sort of helps us to give some extra depth to them and the historical context. Do you think that sort of helps us to understand some of the lessons that they taught by understanding that broader environment? I think so. And look, I think there's another part. It's not just like, hey, you can talk with a game, but did you live it? But also like, if you live a boring, sheltered, you know,

false life, you know, how could you possibly understand what the world is and possibly teach or explain anything to people who are out doing those things, right? T. Lawrence talks about this where he's saying like, no, to translate the Odyssey, you have to have actually traveled, you have to have led men into battle, you have to have experienced some of the deprivations that Odysseus went through. And so I think one of the things that's most compelling to me about the Stokes, even when they were somewhat hypocritical,

even when they fell short, there's not a single Stoic in the book that did not live an interesting life, right? And that's not just me choosing who I wanted to put in. I mean, there were a few boring Stoics that, you know, or only boring, only what's boring as far as what we know about them that I didn't include. But for the most part, every one of them was a soldier or a diplomat or an artist or a world leader or a business person or what I love about the Stokes is that they were there

when it was happening. They were there as Rome was being overthrown and the Republic transitions into an empire. They were there at the assassination of Julius Caesar. They were at Octavian who succeeds Julius Caesar's right hand. They were literally advising him. And then this goes all the way on down to Marcus Aurelius who was literally running the known world and being a philosopher.

So again, I just contrast this to, you know, I get the purpose of academic tenure, but I somewhat reject the idea that someone who has job security for life can tell me a person who does not have that that how the world works. That's a great point. I have to say I'm quite wistful for the ancient world when reading this book. It seems like ancient Athens and Rome would have been a wonderful place to have lived as an aspiring philosopher. For instance, you got that story of Clienthe's getting a round of applause from the crowd around him because he wasn't phased by an insult from some playwright on stage, which just seems like the

opposite of the pop mob culture that we've got now or other things like the prominent sort of master slave relationships. To me would just be prime tools for identifying themes in human behavior. But how much do you think that the culture of the ancient world helped to foster this environment of where philosophers could learn and thrive? Is there anything else? You've got these plagues going on. You've got the overtaking of different countries and falls of the Roman Empire. That must have been a beautiful breeding ground for it.

Yeah. I mean, look, I'm endlessly fascinated with Greece and Rome. And like, I can go to Rome or Greece and imagine myself there and I love it. And then, and then I also have to remind myself like as bad as things are in this moment, like they would kill to be alive today. You know what I mean? Like, like COVID-19 is absolutely nothing compared to the Antenine play, which killed millions of people at last. For 15 years, it caused all sorts of civil unrest. It was a disaster of epic proportions.

And I think that's one of the problems too with history. When we read history, we go, oh, I would have been a senator alongside Julius Caesar. Maybe I would have helped in the assassination, or I would have, I would have, no, like at best we would have been like a slave like Epictetus. The vast, vast, vast majority of people led, Brutish, Brutish, sorry, Brutish and short and nasty lives, they were the literacariors and they were digging horrible minds and dying of the plague or they were being sold into slavery or thrown against a wall of barbarians in some horrible war.

Or just died from getting their finger cut because we didn't have antibiotics to fight infections. Like as much as I am fascinated by the ancient world, I try also to sort of feel grateful for the incredible pleasure and gifts and luxuries that we have today. You're right, we can romanticize all we want about the ancient world, but it's been cleaned up since then. So I spent my birthday this year at the Stoa Poecle.

Like I actually was there. Like, truth, birthplace of stoicism. Beautiful. I'm sure that you have seen it, and it's beautiful and clean, and it is wonderful. The weather was great, and I went for a coffee and you told you right, looking at it in this very rose tinted glasses view is nothing like what the world would have been then. I mean, it's like, why did they have the plague? Why did these diseases spread?

It's because people shitting the streets and there were, you know, like, you know, it was, it was, like, actually, I opened stillness, you know, stillness is the key with this sort of story that Seneca writes in one of his letters, you know, he's sitting in this sort of apartment in Rome and he's trying to write. And he's just describing like the worst noise you can imagine, right? Like, noise that would make New York city seem quiet. And so that's the other thing is like, yeah, when we walk these city streets, they're empty and cleaned up and preserved.

And you see these ruins, what you don't get this sense of the grime and the dirt and the animals and the, you know, like, the, the, just, I mean, just imagine, like, if the population of Rome is 50 million and 5 million people dying, like, just imagine one in 10 million people dying, we're having trouble in the United States, like, they're having to bring in freezer trucks for the bodies from the coronavirus pandemic.

Imagine what they had to do then, and actually that's one of, I don't know if you've had Donald Robertson on, but he wrote this great book about Marxerrelius recently, and he describes, and I rely on it in Lives of the Stokes, but he sort of, in Rome during the Antoinette and Plague, they thought that incense could ward off the spread of the plague. And so Rome was this smell of like putrid bodies and incense, and then you can imagine the heat and no air conditioning and ventilation. I mean, it would have been, the stench would have been overwhelming. And so, you know, it's fascinating and endlessly, you know, intriguing, but I think we have to remember. And this is something I try to remind myself to, you know, when

people say, oh, aren't you picking and choosing from the philosophy. I mean, these are people that did not understand biology. These are people that had no understanding of psychology. You know, these like in some respects, they were so far ahead of their time. And then in other respects were primitive, really. And so it's just a unique situation to be sure. Wasn't Aristotle that thought the only purpose of the brain was to get rid of heat out of the body? I mean, Santa-Ka in one of his things, he's, you know, he sort of, you know, he goes into this big defense on bloodletting, like on how you, you know, you cure diseases by, you know, cutting people open and letting them bleed, which was stupid then. But like people continue to do for another 1800 or so years,

right? When you just, when you realize like how, I think that's the other thing, we have trouble just even wrapping around, wrapping our heads around how new found a lot of the progress that we have. Like we don't, as human beings, we don't often give ourselves credit

for just how recently we've pulled ourselves out of this muck, so to speak. I agree. So we're going to play a game. It's top of the pops, Ryan Holidays, Stoic Philosopher Edition. Okay. What I want you to do is give us your top three favorite characters, featured in the book, an lesson, or a story from each which explains why you're such a fan of them. All right.

I'll give you, so Marcus, to realize, is my favorite, of course, which should I go in from top to bottom or bottom to top? Oh, well, yeah, let's go. We'll work reverse. We'll work in reverse. Okay. So if we're going from reverse, so let's start with Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. Again, for people who don't think this is modern, I mean, he's a merchant and he's leading a convoy of ships filled with dye and he suffers a shipwreck and a storm and loses everything.

And you might think this is the worst thing that ever happened to him, but in fact the disaster is what leads him to Athens where he discovers philosophy and then ends up founding. Stoicism and his quip about this was, you know, fortune gave me a great fortune by, you know, destroying my fortune. Or he says, you know, I suffered a great, you know, a great gift by this shipwreck. His point being the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him. And so, you know, I think it's quite fitting that Stoicism would be founded, you know,

in a moment of extreme adversity. And as a writer, you know, I love the idea that he's introduced to philosophy in a bookstore in Athens. So cool. Yeah, it's amazing. So the next one would be Rutilius Rufus, who is not a particularly well-known Stoic, but someone I ended up wanting to focus on. He's like sort of an administrator. He's like the equivalent of a governor in United States terms, but maybe actually more of a, he's the governor of a colony, right?

So this would be, you know, he's often one of the far-flung provinces and he begins to institute a whole bunch of reforms. And these reforms are designed to prevent the Romans from essentially looting the provinces. Obviously, this is the history of the British Empire. It's like these far flung outpostings, the business people come in, and they bring home enormous fortunes, but at the grave expense of the people there. And so Rutilius starts to institute just some pretty basic reforms, nothing radical, but you can imagine even this tiny bit of fair dealing is cutting into the profits of the robber barons making their fortunes there.

And I think this has some similarities to our moment today. So, what do they do? They bring him up on charges of corruption, right? He's sort of trumped up charges of corruption. He's forced to defend himself, but he refuses. He knows he's totally innocent. He knows this is a complete farce. So, he refuses to offer even one word in his own defense, sort of just stoically takes the injustice. And so at the end, the pronouncement is that his property is to be confiscated

and he is to be exiled. And the one bit of clemency or mercy that the judge offers is that he can choose where he will go into exile. And so he chooses to go back to the colony that he had been accused of stealing from. And that colony, knowing that he is innocent, receives him with open arms and offers him honorary citizenship.

And he actually never returns to Rome. And so I just, I love the idea of kind of the last honest man, you know, the even in times of corruption, endemic corruption, and crime, and an avarice, you have sort of one stoic figure, sort of above the fray, doing the right thing. And, and, and, you know, we have this idea that you'll be rewarded for doing the right thing.

And unfortunately, that's not often how it goes. And then the final one I would do, I would do Marcus, I really is, just because he's my favorite and I think sort of the penultimate example of stoicism. But in the darkest days of the Antenine plague, there's tribes have rebelled the border, there's an invasion. It's as bad as it can get. Rome is essentially bankrupt. And what does Marcus do?

I mean, we know what people with absolute power do is they may get somebody else's problem, right? They invade someone or they plunder something or they kick the can down the road or they levy high, unpayable taxes, whatever it is. Marcus instead goes through the palace and selects the finest of the imperial treasures, and he sells them on the lawn of the palace,

paying down Rome's debt with the treasures that he has no use for. Could you imagine Donald Trump doing a car boot sale on the front loan of the White House? Just selling a pen. Here's a pen. Here's a daughter. Do you want a daughter to give away? It's so funny because in a sense, Trump is the opposite of Marcus Aurelius in literally

every way. And it's not only can you not imagine him doing that, he's doing all the things that I said, you know, what do people with power do, right? People with power don't take responsibility. People with power, you know, force the suffering upon, you know, the most vulnerable in society because they have the, you know, the least amount of influence, right? They run up huge bills that somebody else has to pay. They don't suffer a while.

They eat well while everyone suffers so on and so forth. Yeah, I think Marcus really is in that plague is sort of a paragon of what leadership in turbulent times is supposed to look like. I love that, man. I really do. Which Stoic do you think struggled the most with living their work? Stoicism, as you've said, it's a philosophy of action. It's one that you don't just learn.

You have to live it. If there's someone who was particularly defeated by vices in real life. Well, sure. I mean, I talked about a stoic named Dio Timis who is sort of guilty of this kind of literary crime. But, and so there's some failures like that. But I think Senica is kind of the ultimate example of the tension of a worldly philosophy, because here you have this guy who writes these beautiful letters about virtue and about courage and about moderation. And then, you know, he works for Nero. He's Nero's top advisor.

And he throws these Gatsby-esque parties and he's one of the richest men in Rome. And so it's this question of, is he a massive hypocrite? Or is it more complicated than that? Is he working for Nero because he doesn't believe any of the things that he's written about or is it that he feels that in working for Nero, he is containing Nero's worst impulses.

So much of this is obviously unknowable, but I think Sennaq of all the Stoics raises the most interesting questions. Yeah, you mentioned that apart from Epic Teet, the most of the Stoics were rich or famous or powerful. Why were rich men talking about resilience? Is it just armchair philosophizing about problems that they had the luxury not to encounter? I mean, maybe a little bit. I mean, look, even the richest man in Rome would have had to be far more resilient than

probably your average person in this case. Yeah, you're right. I mean, like, if Marcus really just wanted to read at night, that was a big operation. That involves torches and slaves and, you know, unrolling scrolls of writing. And, you know, you can't just like open the kindle up and crack on. Yeah, I mean Warren Buffett has talked about this. He's like, look, like a poor person today is warmed during the winter and cold during

the summer. You know, that's something that Louis the 14th couldn't have said, right? So I think resilience was a real fact of life. And as rich as they were, most of them were at the whims of you know of a Seneca is working for Nero, but he's you know, he's he's riding the tigers back there. I mean ultimately he's killed by Nero right? So these are capricious uncertain chaotic times even for the rich and privileged

So I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is, you know, when the stills are talking about resiliency or freedom even, you know, they're talking about that not just literally but also figuratively. So, you know, Epicetus is watching these incredibly rich people in neurosurvis, you know, kissing the feet of this madman and, you know, forced to put on elaborate parties and events like it was a, it's not that it was a grind in the way that working in a, you know, in a diamond mine is a grind, but it was a grind in that nobody was actually free to be who they wanted to be.

It was privileged relatively, but also by no means an easy life. I mean, look at the sycoph in a circle that Adolf Hitler had. Of course, sure. And that is the norm, not the exception for absolute rulers. Yeah, yeah. The thing that strikes me is so interesting about stoicism are these universal truths about how to live a good life, right? The fact that kind of the same as mathematics, there's this knowledge which is to be discovered somehow and there's this universal thread

that ties all humans together and the fact that you can go from a pre-Christ era where, as you say, there's people dying in the streets and we think that Trapanning will help to relieve a headache or that the brain is getting rid of heat out of the body all the way up to the 21st century where we're consuming the world news in immediate time and flying off into space and yet the challenges that we face are still the same ones. Well, what I'm fascinated by is Seneca and Jesus are born in the same year in different provinces of the same empire and are walking around for a good chunk of their lives,

you know, in the same planet, in the same universe. I mean, Seneca's brother is in the Bible. So the idea that this wisdom is somehow just the word of God. It's what I love is like, there are quotes that come out of Marcus realist that you sound like this should be in the Bible. Just as there's quotes, you know, Ecclesiastes and Marcus really sound very similar at times. But by the same token, there are also things that Confucius said, centuries before Marcus or stoicism was even a thought.

And that sounds really similar. So I think I sort of like in it, because I did enough exploring this in my book on stillness, but I think what it is is like when you're responding to the same fundamental problems, there's only so many solutions, right? And I sort of liken it from an evolutionary standpoint, like we're just evolving similar adaptations. We might come from different ancestors, but flying makes sense, right? Or an opposable thumb makes sense, or eyesight. It makes sense, right? And you can see why from different sources, you could get somewhere close to the same outcome. We've been asking these questions for a long time and I think the

Lindy effect, which everyone who's listening should be familiar with, but if you're not, it's the life span of a non-perishable goods of, for instance, an idea. And the presumption is that newer is always better. I think a lot of people in the modern era get seduced by that. Right? You have the newest this thing. I think the newest iPhone is different, but has trickled down to well, this book is more recent, therefore it should be better, but the classics are the classics for a reason. I can't remember who it was. It might even I might even be quoting you back to yourself here, but that you would sooner read the hundred best books a thousand times than read a hundred thousand books.

That's that could definitely not me, but I agree with the taking right. a thousand times than read a hundred thousand books. That could definitely not be, but I agree with these. It's taken, right. You can have that one. That'll be yours. Well, no, I mean, look, I think about that because when I set out almost 10 years ago now to write my first book on stoicism,

and I was actually just, I had my editor at portfolio, Penguin, on my podcast, and I was actually just, I had my editor at portfolio, Penguin, on my podcast and I was like, what did you think when I came to you with this book proposal about a book about, you know, an obscure school of ancient philosophy? And she was like, honestly, your marketing books had done well. And so we were thinking, well, maybe he'll just get this out of his system. Oh, God, yeah. It won't do well. And then he'll go back to his other stuff. And the reason why I knew better and I knew differently is that this stuff had a 2,000 year track record,

or a 2,500 year track record almost. So I think what the Lindi Effect helps you with, and it's a concept I'm very familiar with and very fond of, what the Lindy effect does is essentially vet things for you. So, you know, if I had come up with some totally new philosophy that was, but at its core, identical to stoicism, you would have no idea, You'd have to take my word for it. These are the virtues. You'd have to hope that either I'd have to be a very seductive, compelling writer or you'd have to be very gullible to take that seriously. But when I say, hey, look,

this isn't me. This is me, slightly updating, or organizing, like my book, The Daily Stoic, is not me coming up with principles of stoicism. It's just, I said, hey, wouldn't it be convenient if there was a way to just read one quote from the Stoics every day? So the reason that book worked is that, you know, obviously there was some sort of organizational innovation there, but the

reason that book is sold a million copies is because it was vetted by millions of people for 2,500 years. And those weren't even ordinary people, right? Like Marcus Aurelius is stressed testing these ideas at like the absolute testing point of the human experience. Like, you know, he's not like, oh yeah, this held up pretty well at my job at, you know, this toll booth or something, right? You know, he's running an empire of 50 million people and he's given absolute power. And so if the ideas don't work there and if they don't work in the laboratory of Epicetetus's experience, we'd have known about that.

It's like the equivalent of evolution, right? It's a Tim Ferrissism, the good shit sticks. Yes. And one of the things David Parell passed modern wisdom guests and good buddy, he has this really interesting insight where he talks about the vast majority of the content that people now consume has been created within the last 24 hours.

It's like we have a society which is wrapped around being anti-lindi. That's totally right. And I did a piece about this a while ago, I said, look, if you want to understand what's happening in the world, you've got to stop watching the news and you've got to start reading books. If you want to understand the geopolitical jockeying between, say, America and China, you should study the jockeying between Athens and Sparta, the ascended empire

and the declining empire. If you want to understand Russia today, look at Russia a thousand years ago. Because people are people, cultures are cultures, and I think people are, you know, like for instance, in the United States, we're having a reckoning over race. And a lot of people are rushing out to buy these books, buy these gurus, you know, whether it's white fragility or whatever. And it's like these are management consultants, you know, putting in our books to capitalize on a trend.

Meanwhile, you know, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is one of the greatest novels ever written. James Baldwin is one of the greatest writers who ever lived. You can read Frederick Douglass. You can go directly to the source in a lot of these instances and learn so much more.

And most importantly, it's stripped of the modern assumptions or biases or interpretations or speculation. And so like, that's what I often tell people, the role of my books are, my books are to capture someone's interests, and hopefully the next book they read after mine is something from the original canon. I take almost as much pride in how my books have done as I do, you know, every few months, there's some trend piece about the sales of the ancient Stuart texts. And having seen, I watch a lot of those sales come through my websites and links that I put out.

I know that what I'm ultimately doing, what a real important contribution that I'm making is driving people to the classic text, which is, in a sense, me paying forward the break that I got when someone did that for me. It's a shame that Marcus Aralius can't get you on an affiliate deal. If you were the lead magnet for Marcus Aralius, he'd be both be laughing. It'd be brilliant. I mean, I'm more think about, I wish that someone that I'd been on a track where I could have learned Greek or Latin and done the translations myself.

Are you tempted by that? I'd been on a track where I could have learned Greek or Latin and done the translations myself, you know. Are you tempted by that? I mean, am I tempted in my 30s to learn Greek or Latin and become a classic scholar? Not as much. It's a fantasy, sure. What do you think the ancient Stoics would be most and least proud of about modern society? We're talking about how those ideas now map onto our experience today. Well, you know, I was, I was, I was, I was been fascinated in writing a lot. I think early on my writing about the Stokes

was primarily about the resiliency we talked about, productivity, about success, about, you know, self-discipline, but, you know, there's probably no concept that Mark really talks about more than justice. He refers to the idea of the common good, something like 40 or 50 times in meditations. And I was rereading one of the, here, let me see, let me actually see if I can find it out. I'll read it. It's pretty beautiful. He's thinking sex-diss. Okay, sorry, he's thinking his brother Severus, who's not really his brother, just a friend.

He says, to love my family, truth and justice, it was through Severus that I encountered Thrasia, Helvides, Cato, Dion, and Brutus, and conceived of the society of equal laws governed by equality of status and speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. And so obviously a bunch of those names are people I profile in lives, but the idea that what Marcus is idea of justice and equality and freedom and a ruler that respects their

subjects. That was an idea only in its infancy, just in Thomas Jefferson is writing about that all men are created equal. It's only the subsequent generations that managed to get even remotely close to realizing that idea. So I'd like to think that the Stokes would be, you know, impressed and encouraged by our ability, you know, our ability to get from where they were to where we are now. You know, Senika talks about slavery and Xeno talks about slavery and although they sort

of accept it as a, accept it as an assumption of their time, thereby no means making the sort of defenses of slavery that even Aristotle is making. And so I'd like to think that from the Stoics would be impressed with our sort of progress. They'd probably be disappointed conversely with our 60% of America is obese, that what percentage of marriage is in divorce. They wouldn't be looking at these things from the perspective of sin and the way that a Christian, if you pulled St. Augustine from around the same time and brought him to today, I think the Stoics, you know, had this key virtue of

moderation and self-discipline, and I think it's our abundance and our, you know, our, our, the bounty of the modern world that they would be disappointed in our inability to manage. Absolutely. It's a Navarre-RavaCantism where he says that all of our problems in the modern world are problems of abundance and not scarcity. Yes, definitely. It's bizarre that for almost all of our evolution, we wanted more than we had. So it's kind of not that surprising that when we have more than we need, we're going to binge.

Another Stoics were very anti-information overload as well, weren't they? And I think they'd probably have a lot to say about us spending five plus hours per day connected to the rest of the world through a device in our pocket. Yeah, I mean, Marcus, I realized I'd probably say, like, look, I managed to run an empire of 50 million people, you know, through careers who, the penis of pirus, yeah, exactly. He was weeks after it had happened. You know, yeah. The idea that you need this real-time breaking information when you're not ahead of state

or running a hedge fund. Obviously I talk about this in my first book, my book on media, but what are you doing with this information? You're not doing anything. It's just trivia. It's just in the same way that you don't need to eat that bag of cheetos. You don't need to watch MSNBC tonight, but you do it because, like I was thinking about this today,

like why am I gonna watch the presidential debates? Like, because I'm not a shitty person, I already know who I'm gonna vote for, and why would I, like why would I consume this mediocre entertainment? What do you disagree with about stoicism? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, look, I think the Stoics have a,

someone conflicted on this idea of predetermination, for instance, you know, like they're, I think the Stoics, because of the world that they lived in, had a very realistic pessimism about human agency, right? Although markets really does say if it's humanly possible, you can do it, so on and so forth. I find it illustrative that epitetus, thus slave, doesn't say anything about slavery. You know what I mean?

Even he doesn't question the moral legitimacy of slavery because it's so ingrained. It just sees it as an immutable part of human life. Yeah, and look at, right? He's just sort of chosen for it. And then, and then he doesn't see, like even as his son is drifting towards taking over and is sort of proving himself to be an apt, it doesn't occur to Marcus Realis that

he can do anything about it. So I think the human agency is something that I would probably ultimately disagree with on the Stelox., but I, you know, I credit that so that the progress we've made as a human species, like, I don't think they quite believed in human dynamism in the benefits of a dynamic fluid society of a meritocracy. You know, these were things that, you know, in England, you know, they didn't even fully understand until, you know, probably the second world war, right? Like, we just, we, we had some unquestioned beliefs about how society should be organized, just as we have them today and are, you know, sort of struggling to wrap our heads around them, but I think that would certainly be an area for improvement for them.

Yeah, for sure. DC, stoicism is a spiritual practice. I mean, is it a religion? No, and I like that about it. You know, I like that the Stoics aren't saying, God, you know, said, this is true. Therefore you should believe it. But I do think there is something deeply spiritual about it. And I think, honestly, if you study anything enough, it takes on a kind of a ritual and a profundities. So I think you get out of it what you put in it. If you read it once, it's not going to be a particularly spiritual

experience, but if it's something to really turn yourself over to, I think it will be immensely rewarded. I like that. I like the fact that if you dedicate your interest, your curiosity to anything, you find people who find gardening to be like almost spiritual. It's like you're planting plants. They're not even conscious. Yeah, I mean, physics can be spiritual. You know what I mean?

And religion can be very unspiritual. It can become wrote and, you know, traditional. And yeah, or you could do it for some, you know, evil reason too, right? So I think it's about what you bring to it. And I think it's ultimately about how you practice it. For sure. Speaking of the words practice, which stoic practice do you find most useful in life? I mean, journaling certainly, you know, and I have a somewhat

expanded version of journaling. I mean, I journal, but then to me, writing about stoicism is even my books is a form of journaling and discussion. And so I think, you know, the Stoics were writers. Almost all of them were writers. And it was a tradition that survives to us because of the writing. So I think writing about it is a big one. Probably Momentumori is the kind of the most profound for the Stoics. There's no theme probably that in the Stoic works more prevalent than the reality and inevitability of death. And that's something I try to think a lot about as well. Yeah, it's a great way to start the day, isn't it?

One of the first. I wanted to ask you this for a long time. I heard you speaking to Greg McEwan about this recently, past Modern Wisdom guest and wonderful guy. How do you balance the desire for excellence with not being too hard on yourself? Yeah, it's a it's tough. I was thinking about this last night. I've been burned out a little bit

and I was like, why am I you know why am I losing this way? And it's like, oh wait, first off, it's a pandemic. I've not had a break since March. I've got two kids at home, no childcare. And I'm two thirds of the way through my next book. And it's like, oh shit, that's why I feel burned out. I'm literally burning the candle at both ends, right? That's why I feel that way. So I think part of the way you have to do it, you have to realize that you're not a machine.

Or if you are a machine, you have to take care of it. You have to keep it in, if it take good care of it. But I think the, what I've really worked on more is just becoming more and more detached from results. So excellence, on this book, excellence is like, what does it look like on the page? Did I get there? Did I succeed within the bounds of what was conceivable

for that project? And I'm sure my publisher doesn't want to hear a bit here, but I really don't give a shit how it does. Do you know what I mean? Like it won't affect, it could certainly affect the bottom line for me, but it doesn't affect my day-to-day perceptions of myself or the project, because like, I know it's good.

I know what it does that it's supposed to do. And I know that for the people who will read it It will do that for them. And so I think I you know, this is something harder for me to understand in my career But like you really as you do get closer to mastery of something and and close can be relative I just mean as you get closer from you know Complete hack to you know as you get closer from, you know, complete hack to, you know, let me come to the sector.

Yeah. Yeah, as you get on, as you get there, you become less obsessed with results, or you become less obsessed with what other people define those results as. It's far easier to transcend, to fulfill our material desires and it is to transcend them is a quote that I've been thinking about a lot this year.

What does that mean? So the fact that it's much easier for you to drive around in a bashed up pickup truck if your last car was a Ferrari. I think that there are, I wonder whether Ryan Holiday, the no-times bestselling author, would be able to be as a economist about the success of his next book. Sure. Yeah. No, I know exactly what you mean.

I think about this, like, with my parents. Like, would my parents, like, my parents are proud and happy with my career, if I was just as fulfilled and happy with it, but was a starving artist, would they be able to understand it the same way? Probably not. And I'm not sure I would be able to actually get there either, right? So yeah, there's a, there's a play. It's like when you win a Super Bowl, you can go like, it's not whether you win or lose. It's how you play. You know that that it's like it's much easier to get there at

the same time One of the reasons you're able to get there is Because now you know, yeah, you know what I mean like yeah when when what's been weird for me is my books have been successful But but for a long time they were successful but, but without. So they had the impact. Like they were selling, they were reaching people. I was hearing the people that it reached and what they were able to do. And yet some of the external markers of success were lagging indicators for me. So like the obstacle is the way had sold probably 600,000 copies before it hit a single bestseller list, right?

It was, I think still this is the key was my ninth book, maybe my tenth book, I don't remember. But the point is, that was my first, not just my first New York Times bestseller period under my own name. I've ghost written books that it did, but that was the first time my books hit the bestseller, listen to it, debuted at number one, which is great. But then like two weeks later, you know, Donald Trump Jr's book hit, the bestseller, like took the number one spot. And it was revealed that he cheated his way on the list, right? So like, you, I think

So like, I think that was illustrated for me in a lot of ways. One, that you know, critical or, you know, verifiable success, external success in that sense, is not the same as actual success. And then also that actually getting those markers, winning those awards, or getting that recognition getting those markers, winning those awards or getting that recognition or whatever It's a lot more anti-climactic than you would think right and that it doesn't doesn't really solve your problems It doesn't really so I think there's a Jim Carrey Quoery's like I wish everyone could be rich and famous So they realize that it doesn't mean anything now

That's kind of like the ultimate privilege thing to say and like, you know, preposterous or whatever, but there is an element of truth in it and that like when you actually get the things that you think you wanted, you realize that they were never capable of giving you what you thought you wanted. The sad fact is that it's so hard to internalize that lesson without

having been. Imagine the view of the mountain, mindfully you're there, you can fill the wind on your face. But if you haven't gone to the top, there's always that, we hate open loops. There's I can't affect humans hate open loops. And I think a lot of these unfulfilled desires, which is one of the reasons that I've been trying to advocate to my friends and everyone that listens for a long time to try and front load the discomfort and the socialized objective measures of success in life, because as far as I'm concerned,

the sooner that you can do that and tick that box, the sooner you can get onto what actually matters. So over time, you see your grandparents, you know, they don't care about the car that they drive, they don't care about the brand of shoes that they wear. So you know that's the trajectory that you're on. Everyone's on this same trajectory. That's why you're gonna end up

because every grandparent kind of doesn't give a shit. And it's kind of a little bit disgruntled and kind of just wants to spend time with their family. That's where you're going to end up. So, front load the stuff that you can do and get it out the way. No, that's totally right. When they do studies like old people tend to associate happiness with contentment, young people with achievement, and obviously you need a certain amount of achievement to be content or, you know, you live under a bridge somewhere probably, but yeah, front

loading is important. And then I think where people can be a little blasé about it, they go, oh, you only know that. You're only saying it doesn't matter, because you have the success of being the number one. That's all right. So the reality is life is constantly teaching us that lesson. It's like, you thought, hey, if I can get the popular girl to go out with me, then I'll feel good about myself.

I won't feel like a, you know, I won't feel like a loser. And then you got it. And it turned out actually she was awful. And, you know, it wasn't that awesome. Yeah, or whatever it is, like you, you, you are constantly being caught that lesson. And then we plug our ears and close our eyes to the message. So like, you know, they're, as I was about Superbowl, plenty of people have been there. Like they've, they made it to the top of the mountain, and they won a Superbowl, and it was anti-climactic, and they didn't, it didn't trigger self-awareness.

What it triggered in them was the idea that, oh, it's, I have to win back-to-back Superbowls, right? Like, oh no, you're going to back soup balls. Right? No, you're going in the wrong direction. Right, because people will go, oh, if you do it once, it doesn't feel good because it could be a fluke. You have to prove, you know what I mean? The dose wasn't high enough, yeah. Yeah, the mind insidiously manages to always find a way to motivate us to go forward.

And we can understand why from an evolutionary standpoint, this is perfectly logical, but from an individual standpoint wants to be happy, it's a recipe for misery. I don't know if you're familiar with Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism Is True? Yeah. Yeah. I love his evolution books too. He wrote a great book called The Moral Animal. Dude, everyone that's listening, there we go. That's Moral Animal Bingo for you today. I must

talk about that book every single podcast and thankfully you've brought it up on this one so I don't need to. Okay. In that he talks about the translation of life is suffering and the word is duke, but some scholars can test that it's not suffering, but unsatisfactoriness. And holy shit, man, when I read that, I just thought it fits in so neatly with everything that we know about, hedonic adaptation and the present self versus the remembering self. Like, it was just, I love when things fall together like that. I thought it was a really beautiful idea. So I've got two quick things that I want to go through. One of them relates to what we were just talking about.

And it's an idea I've been playing around with since a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago. I'm a big fan of trying to lead a consciously designed life. I want to step into my programming as much as possible. I don't want to be constrained by societal norms or genetic predisposition or the way that I deal with past traumas or any of that. I want to be as conscious as I can with the actions and the thoughts and the words that I do. But I had a conversation with a guy called Justin Toese, a philosopher from the University of Texas tech, and he advocated instinct a lot more. He was like, dude, you have to remember

that your body doesn't awful lot correctly, unconsciously. And it actually gave a good counterpoint to this kind of super consciously designed life riff that I've been on for probably the last 18 months. And it's given me a second pause to think, actually, hang on, should I be consciously looking to design every single action that I can? Should I be second-guessing all of my choices and virtues?

What do you think the Stoics would say about that? What do you say? Well, this is actually a big debate amongst the Stoics. And early on, it's kind of a hard fork between Zeno and Clientys. And then one of the other early Stokes, a guy named Aristo. And the early Stokes, and some of the later Stokes are really interested in like precepts, like great quotes, reminders, this is what the writing was all about.

Do this, don't do that, think about this, think about that. And he was like, that's not how it works. You have to do the reading, do the work, but he says, the wise man knows, you know, that a lot of this comes ultimately from a place of intuition and instinct. I kind of, you know, split the difference kind of a thing. I think, like, look, if you're, if you're constantly referring to some sort of rulebook, you know, if you're a slave to like a set of constraints or systems, you're probably, you know, not as fluid and, and, you know, free flowing as you ought to be. At the same time, you know,

some of our instincts are bad, you know, and so I think it's kind of a mix between the two. I like making it kind of a muscle memory that you can rely on. At the same time, I think it's so easy to go astray that it's really important to have the reminders. Like my desk and the walls of my office are covered in pictures and quotes and statues and I carried these challenge coins in my pocket. The reminders are really, really helpful to me. I get that. I'm just about to pull up one of my favorite quotes from Confucius. And it's part of an article that I found through Kyle Eschenroder, who is this wonderful writer.

I brought him on the podcast. I loved his. I love Kyle. It Kyle's just, I mean, what a guy. I brought him on the podcast, I loved his. Okay. It Kyle's just, I mean, what a guy. So he says, in the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the lengths of steps with which he is to enter a room.

His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigour and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort. Yeah, that's right. And I think that what is that term like spritzetura

or whatever, the highest form is effortlessness. And I think that's where you're trying to get. And that's what all the efforts are aimed at, that sort of effortlessness. Final question, what area are you hoping to improve on most over the next year? That's a good question. I think as always, temper, you know, temper,

and you know, I never, I feel like I'm never proud that I've lost my temper. I find that I, you know, I get angry or more than I need. Not a lot. I just, you know, things piss me off as they do for all people. I think, you know, to just sort of be able to flow more naturally to things and not, you know, the stokes talk like, why are you asking why, you know, it just, it is what it is, right? I think getting there is a big one. And then I think the thing I, we're talking about afterlessness, the thing I struggle

with is, and obviously it's why I wrote a book on it, but, you know, the ability to not do is in some cases the hardest thing to do. And I'll find myself, things have been easy or clean or simple, and then the next thing I know, I'm in the middle of something. And when I really trace back how that happened, I invited myself into that. I saw it out.

It didn't, it's not like this thing dropped in my lap. And so I think one of the things I've taken from the pandemic is just how much less I need and how much simpler and better life is when there's less going on, but but maintaining that is really difficult and it's like you cut out drinking and then the next thing, you know, you're smoking and then you cut out smoking and you the next thing, you know, you're smoking and you cut out smoking and you're doing, you know, whatever. You know, like, it's sort of like whack a mole with our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Life is unsatisfactory, Nusman.

That's sadly what it is. Ryan, I have a door today. Thank you so much for coming on, man. Lives of the Stoics will be linked in the show notes below. Where else do you want to direct people? DailyStoic.com? Yeah, and then we do an email every day about Stoicism at DailyStoic, and then YouTube videos at youtube.com slash DailyStoic. Do you want to check them out? Link in the show notes below. Ryan, I'm going to have to get you back on. Whenever this next book

book is out, wherever you two-thirds of the way through, we're going to have to get you back. Yeah, and hopefully my internet connection will be better next time. That will be wonderful. For now, man, thank you so much. I appreciate it.