Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Ancient Strategies For Managing Stress And Anxiety | Ryan Holiday

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Digging into the nuts and bolts of Stoicism with one of its best-known modern proponents.Ryan Holiday is a prolific author, whose books include The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, and Discipline is Destiny. His newest book, Right Thing, Right Now, comes out in June, and is available for pre-order now. Ryan is also the host of the Daily Stoic Podcast.In this episode we talk about:The history and theory of Stoicism, and some of its big names (including a former Vice Presidential candidate)Premeditatio Melorem, or thinking ahead to the worst possible outcome in order to avoid itMemento Mori, or being aware of the inevitability of one’s own deathAmor Fati, or “loving one’s fate” as a path to acceptance of realityJournaling as a key Stoic practice, of talking to oneself on the pageThe four Stoic values: Courage, Temperance, Justice, WisdomHow Stoicism and Buddhism overlap – and how they don’tRelated Episodes: The Dharma of Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Jasmine Wang & Iain S. ThomasSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/ryan-holidayAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang, how we doing? We talk a lot about Buddhism and meditation on this show, but today we're going to talk about another ancient tradition that has excellent strategies for managing stress and anxiety, Stoicism. Here's just one quote among many that stuck out to me from this interview. It's from the ancient philosopher Seneca.

He's a Roman, or he was a Roman. Here's the quote, he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than necessary. I love that. And it's really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to practical stoic wisdom. My guest today has done perhaps more than anybody to popularize and evangelize on behalf of stoicism. Ryan Holiday is a prolific author whose books include The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Discipline

is Destiny. His newest book, Right Thing Right Now, comes out in June and is available for pre-order. Ryan is also the host of the Daily Stoic Podcast. In this conversation, we talk about how Ryan got into Stoicism in the first place after a career in marketing, the basics of Stoic history and philosophy. We walk through several Stoic exercises, including premeditatio malorum, which translates into the premeditation of evils, which is designed to get you comfortable with all the hard things that might happen to you. We also talk about amor fati, loving your fate, which is about making peace with the hard stuff that has already happened to you. And we talk about memento mori, which is all about remembering the fact

that life is fleeting, that you and everybody you know is gonna die, which can sound morbid, but is actually, in my experience, quite the opposite. We also talk about whether the ego really is the enemy, what Stoicism teaches us about justice and why it matters. And we talk about the overlap between Stoicism and Buddhism.

Ryan Holiday, coming up. But first, a little BSP, blatant self-promotion. Two little things to tell you about, then one big thing. First little thing, if you go to danharris.com, my new website, there's a merch store up where you can get 10% happier t-shirts and sweatshirts and a tote bag. Also, if you go to danharris.com, you can sign up for my new newsletter in which I share the two biggest takeaways for me from the shows on any given week, plus three cultural recommendations,

books, TV shows, movies, TikTok videos, you name it. Okay, here's the big thing I really wanna promote. We've got a meditation party retreat coming up at the Omega Institute, which is outside of New York City, that's coming up in May. There's actually another one coming up after that in November. which is outside of New York City, that's coming up in May. There's actually another one coming up after that in November.

This is a weekend-long thing I do with the great meditation teachers, Sibene Selassie and Jeff Warren. It is not your traditional silent meditation retreat. We call it Meditation Party for a Reason. We do many sessions where we have a lot of conversation among the three of us on stage. We do some guided meditations. We take questions from the audience. It's highly interactive.

There's a dance party on Saturday night. We've got a great DJ, Tasha the Amazon, who's coming to play some jams on Saturday night. Come for this. The last one we did was incredibly fun, so we're doing two more this year. Go to eOmega.com to sign up or to the link in the show notes. Before I go, I just wanna say something

about the 10% Happier app. Many of you are familiar with the great teachings of Joseph Goldstein, the amazing meditation teacher. We've got six courses and more than 50 guided meditations from Joseph over on the app, including our free introductory course, The Basics. Download the 10% Happier app today, wherever you get your apps and get started for free.

I'll also link to it in the show notes. Hello, I'm Emily, one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. Some of them hit the big time overnight, some have to plug away for years. But in our latest series we're talking about a man who was world famous before he was even born. A life of extreme privilege

that was mapped out from the start, but left him struggling to find his true purpose. A man who, compared to his big brother, felt a bit, you know, spare. Yes, it's Prince Harry. You might think you know everything about him, but trust me, there's even more. We follow Harry and the obsessive, all-consuming relationship of his life, not with Meghan, but the British tabloid press. Hounded and harassed, Harry is taking on an institution almost every bit as powerful as his own royal family. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wandery Plus on Apple And we're the presenters of British Scandal. And in our latest series, Hitler's Angel, we tell the story of scandalous beauty Diana Mosley, British aristocrat, Mitford sister and fascist sympathiser.

Like so many great British stories, it starts at a lavish garden party. Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Mosley. She's captivated by his politics, but also by his very good looks. It's not a classic rom-com story but when she falls in love with Mosley she's on a collision course with her family, her friends and her whole country. There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organized by a great uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose between love or betrayal.

This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey from glamorous socialite to political prisoner. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan Holiday, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Long overdue. Once in a while I have a guest on and I'm like, why? Why is this only happening now? You are definitely top of that list.

Thanks for coming on. Let me just start out with a biographical question. How did you go from marketing to stoicism? I think it's probably a similar journey to you, which is you're doing your job and you are finding that you are struggling with the weight of that, the stress of that, the push and pull of it. And you look around, as I think people have looked around for help for thousands of years,

and you find there is this tradition, this way of thinking, this sort of set of advice that's existed for basically as long as there have been human beings. And you go, why did I not know about this before? Why was I not taught this in school? And I think for me, I mean, I wasn't just in marketing. I worked for a number of very dysfunctional,

chaotic companies in very dysfunctional, chaotic companies in very dysfunctional, chaotic environments. And so, and I did this very young. I dropped out of college. I was running marketing at a publicly traded fashion company around the time I could legally drink. And I was just in way over my head and stressed out of my mind.

And stoicism, this ancient philosophy that I now write about, is designed for those kinds of things. I mean, it's actually been, I think, battle-tested for much more severe and difficult circumstances. But I turned to it primarily for my own benefit and my own use. And part of the Stoic tradition is writing about it.

And so there really isn't this separation between sort of being a student of something and then writing about that stuff. And so that's what ultimately led to me writing my own books about it, but it started just because I needed the medicine, so to speak. You were unhappy and stressed.

This was the medicine that came over the transom for you, and you just went deep on it. That's exactly right. I mean, I read meditations when I was about 19 years old. I was in college, but I didn't hear about it in college. And reading what is essentially the private thoughts, the meditations of the most powerful man in the world, there's something about meditations that

I think is so fascinating because if you were to describe a work of ancient literature, you probably would struggle to come up with something that on its face could be more inaccessible, right? If I'm going to describe to you a work written roughly 2,000 years ago by an all-powerful emperor who rules over an enormous army, a colonial empire, a head of the most powerful army on earth, literally worshiped as a God in his own lifetime. And he's writing notes about an obscure school of ancient philosophy to himself in Greek,

never intending it to be published. The idea that this would be of use to anyone is absurd on its face. And yet when I sort of crack open this book in my college apartment in Riverside, California, it just immediately speaks to me. And it's been speaking to people for centuries because the incredible specificness of it

somehow creates a kind of universality and relatability about fundamentally what it means to be a human being in a world that you don't control. And to try to make sense of other people, try to make sense of your own desires and aversions and urges, try to wrestle with one's mortality, with one's ambitions, with one's self-doubt.

That's what he's doing in meditations. And I think that's what spoke to me there and why I saw it as medicine. And I think it's worth pointing out the Stoics designed Stoic philosophy to be a form of medicine. In meditations, Mark Sturlus compares it to this treatment for some, you know, eye illness.

He says, it should be a soothing ointment that should relieve the pain or the distress that you feel. That's what I was struck by when I read it. So even if this all powerful Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, is freaking out, then you shouldn't feel so badly about freaking out yourself. I think that's right. And I mean, one of the things that you find in meditations is that the philosopher that Marcus quotes the most is this guy named Epictetus. So you go and you look up Epictetus,

how do you pronounce that? Who is that? And you find out that Marcus Aurelius' favorite philosopher is a slave. And so inside these pages, you have this sort of guy wrestling with extreme success, relying on the advice of someone who went through extreme difficulty and injustice.

And you find that they're both effectively saying the same thing. In fact, in the beginning of meditations, Marx realized thanks his philosophy teacher for loaning him his copy of Epictetus, which the professor got attending Epictetus's lectures himself. You just get this sense that, okay,

this is a tried and true formula or way of thinking about not just a timeless set of problems, but a pretty wide array of human problems. I just fell in love with it. It was just, you know, it was everything that I needed in that moment. And then still now, almost two decades later, I'm still reading those same books and taking new things out of them. For people who are new to Stoicism, and, you know, on this show, I think we've only covered it once or twice, what are the basics of the history and theory? I think the founding story of Stoicism is interesting because it kind of gives you a glimpse into maybe what the philosophy is for and how it works. So there's a guy named Zeno.

He's a successful merchant in the Mediterranean. He deals in what they call Tyrian purple or the dye that would make the cloaks and the garments of the wealthiest Romans. And he suffers this shipwreck. So he loses everything. He washes up in Athens, sort of penniless. And he ends up in this bookstore.

And in the bookstore he hears the bookseller reading from the works of Socrates, actually Xenophon, one of Socrates' stories. Socrates doesn't write anything, but he hears this story about Socrates, and he walks up to the bookseller after, and he says, you know, where can I find a man like that? And that was his introduction to philosophy.

He goes on in the Athenian Agora to found this small school of philosophy on what they now call the Stoa Pochile, or the painted porch. That's where Stoa and Stoicism comes from. It just means porch. And so they're like in the busiest part of Athens, you know, not removed from the hustle and bustle of life, but right in the center of it, these people start to talk about how to deal with life, how to deal with things like losing everything in a shipwreck, how to deal with death,

how to deal with temper, how to deal with fear. And stoicism basically boils down, my sort of two sentence summary of it is, stoicism holds the idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. And Stoicism is this set of virtues or values that are supposed to guide that response. And I think we see that, you know,

in the founding of Stoicism, you had this guy rebuilding his life after it, he loses everything and he would joke later, you know, he says, I made a great fortune when I suffered a shipwreck because it closes one chapter of his life, but it opens another one. He literally loses a fortune, but he makes a fortune

in that it sets him on this path where he creates this sort of new way of living and thinking, which here we are talking about it, you know, 23, 24 hundred years later. So who were the other big names? Zeno's the first. I think it's a credit to Zeno that it's not called Zenoism. It's called Stoicism.

He doesn't make it about himself. There's a handful of scholar Stoics that follow Zeno. We have Cleanthes and Chrysippus, but the next sort of very well-known Stoic is a guy named Cato. Cato being the sort of mortal enemy of Julius Caesar. Brutus, who assassinated Caesar, is married to Cato's daughter.

She too, a famous Stoic. Cicero is who we owe a great debt to in terms of recording the wisdom from the Stoics, although he probably wouldn't have identified as one. And then later in the time of Nero, we get Seneca, who's a famous playwright and a political power broker, and then one of the more famous Stoic writers. Then we come along to Epictetus, who's, you know, living around the same time as Seneca. And then we get sort of the penultimate Stoic in Marcus Aurelius. And then if

I had to name a modern Stoic, Stoicism has a resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. Admiral James Stockdale, who's a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he spends about seven years being horribly tortured and kept in solitary confinement. He is introduced to stoic philosophy when the Navy sends him to Stanford for grad school. And when he is parachuting down into what he knows is gonna be a horrible ordeal,

he actually says to himself, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He then puts Stoicism into practice there and becomes sort of an evangelist for it and writes a number of really fascinating books about stoic philosophy in the middle of the 20th century. And then here we are today, it sort of has this resurgence, you know, largely, I think, due to social media and audio books, which has been pretty cool to see also.

And frankly, you but back to Stockdale, isn't that the dude who ran for vice president under Ross Perot? Yes, it's an interesting story. So Perot, people know as the businessman who runs for third party presidents, well so Stockdale and he have a relationship that goes way back because he was instrumental in the rescuing and the return of those POWs. So Stockdale owes this man a great debt, Perot asks him to be a placeholder as he's considering filling out the paperwork for running for president. It sort of gets away from him and he finds himself running for vice president. And then famously in the debate, he gets up there and he goes, you know, why am I here? Who am I? And this gets presented in the

age of media and mass television as like one of the worst debate performances of all time. He would later say, I was trying to be philosophical. I was trying to get to the fundamental question of why I am on this stage, which of course, you don't get to do in a world of soundbites. You don't get to start at the beginning with existential questions. And there's a great bit from the comedian, Dennis Miller, who talks about Stockdale. He says that, you know, Stockdale commits the one mortal sin in our society, which is that he was bad on television. And it sort of stains him in the minds of most people as this sort of, you know, fringe political figure,

when in fact he was a profoundly wise and brave and courageous man who endured unfathomable difficulties there. Famously wins the Medal of Honor because when the torture in the camp gets quite bad, he attempts to kill himself in protest of what his captors are doing to other people. And then famously when they try to send him on camera,

his captors try to parade him in front of some television cameras to show, hey, look, no, we're treating the prisoners just fine. There's no torture going on here. And he says, hey, I need to go into the bathroom for a minute. Can you let me go to the bathroom? He walks into the bathroom and he grabs a stool

in the bathroom and begins to beat his own face into a bloody pulp. So he cannot be used as a piece of propaganda. So just an absolutely incredible figure. I interviewed a man named Captain Dave Carey, who was one of the POWs in that camp with Stockdale. You know, he's like a 21 or 22 year old fighter pilot who gets shot down and he was telling me he finds himself in this

cell and they would communicate to each other in these cells through tapping. They would tap this code through the wall so they could communicate and their captors wouldn't know what they're saying. They called Stockdale CAG, which was the name of the commander of the air squadron. And he gets this tapping message and the tapping message is the worst moment of his life. The message says, Cagg wants you to remember what Epictetus said.

And he goes, what the hell are you talking about? He has no idea who this Roman philosopher is. And what Stockdale was passing along was this famous message from Epictetus that basically there's some things that are up to us, being a prisoner is not up to us, but how we behave, how we act, the standards we hold ourselves to that is up to us. He was saying, remember there's some things that are up to you and some things that are not up to you, which is one of the most basic bits of stoic philosophy. And there they were, you know,

in this stone colonial French prison, tapping this message from a Roman slave from 2000 years ago. And so the idea is simply bearing that in mind, that there are some things that are up to you, and some things that are not just the way we would with the serenity prayer, which is damn close, you know, the wisdom to know the difference, that is an ointment. That is a bomb.

You don't need to do more. I think that's totally right. I mean, what's so fascinating to me about the serenity prayer, I forget the exact year that it was written, but Reinhold Niebuhr, who comes up with that prayer, if you had asked me to date the serenity prayer, first guess might've been like in the 1500s,

the second guess might've been in the 1800s. I wouldn't have guessed that some guys scribbled that off on a train in like the 1950s. The wisdom of that idea is so timeless and so essential. It seems like something that must go to the core of our understanding of a sort of human wisdom and the human condition. And it does in the sense that the Stoics

have been talking about it for a long time, but that particular wording about, you know, the wisdom to know the difference, the courage to change the things you can is so amazing. And it is, it's a relief, I think. There's a reason that in recovery, the first thing, one of the first things they're teaching you is the acceptance of a higher power.

It's not so much a religious thing as it is relieving you of the burden of believing that you are the higher power, that you're in charge, that you're a God, right? Which you are not. And I think Eastern and Western philosophy, the core of it is the humility of understanding that you're not the main character.

It feels like you're the main character of your life and of the world, but understanding that you're not the main character. It feels like you're the main character of your life and of the world, but in fact, you're not. And you're basically this powerless plaything of forces vastly outside of your control. And the second you accept that, you know, there's a bit of a smallness to it. But the bigness is, well, now I can focus on what is in my control. Yeah. I mean, I think about that a lot. There are a bunch of things in my life that I worry about and spin out about. And in my better moments, I remember, okay, there's not much I can fucking do about this.

And so what I know is that I can do the best possible, whatever happens. Yes, yes. And that I control who I am inside of that. You study history and you realize, like it's pretty much always been bad. And it's pretty much always felt like the world was falling apart. And that the bad guys were on the verge of winning

at any given moment. And in fact, for large periods of time, the bad guys were winning and were in charge. And so you wake up and you have some existential dread or a pit in your stomach about how things are going to go in November, or where things are trending. I think what I take from my study of stoicism is a sort of a reminder of first off, I'd much rather be alive now than pretty much anytime in human history, that things are better now than they were then and that Although I have some ability to influence those events, right? I think stoics have always been involved in politics

They voted, you know, they've run for office. They've participated in the debates of their time, but Mostly when things happened they tried to make sure that those things didn't corrupt them, didn't break them, they tried not to despair, they tried not to fall prey to, you know, whatever the mob was doing at any given moment. And so I think what you take from it is this idea. It's again, it's a shrinking in some respects, because it's reminding herself that being anxious for the next six months isn't going to direct things one way or the other, right?

Just as nervously waiting at the airport doesn't make the plane go any faster or slower or make the weather lift or stay. But what you really wanna be preparing for and thinking about is what you're gonna do, who you're going to be if this, you know, nightmarish outcome potentially happens. Is there no amount of stress that makes sense? Is there no amount of worrying, plotting, planning in your view?

Well, I guess for the stoics, the idea is, is does the worrying prodding you to do anything practical or are you simply emoting about the problem. Seneca says, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. And so some of the times I find myself, it's the anticipation of the thing, which could be quite likely,

but it's not happening now, right? And reminding myself that I don't need to borrow that in advance and feel it now before it's happened. And I do feel like a lot of the stress that we feel is that. I mean, I do think stress can also be instructive. Like when I journal and I find myself, I go, why am I worrying about this or that? Why am I feeling this way or that way?

It's a reminder for me to make changes in my life, like to stop doing things, to unload things, to change how I'm doing things. So I think stress can be instructive. And I think a stoic is not unable to deal with stress. It's just understanding how much of that stress is self-inflicted and self-imposed, and you could alleviate it if you so chose.

I sometimes talk about using mindfulness or self-awareness as a way to help you draw the line between constructive anguish, you know, stress that actually has some benefit, like thinking clearly about mapping things out, gaming things out, etc., etc. And then useless rumination on the other side, just feeling this anxiety and stress that, you know, I don't want to make this sound too easy because it's not like I've made all of my anxiety and stress evaporate. I have not. I want to emphasize that I have not.

But sometimes I can catch myself going down the toilet unnecessarily and change the channel in my mind. Yeah. In Meditations, Mark Cerullo says, you know, today I escaped anxiety, then he corrects himself. He goes, no, actually I discarded it because it was within me. Which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about it, right?

My wife said this to me one time. She said, I can't frustrate you. Her point was like, we're each responsible for our own emotions, right? That oftentimes what we do is we say that the other person is making us feel the way that we're feeling. No, the other person is an external, is objective,

is simply doing what they're doing. And then our emotion is something that we are providing. That isn't to say it's totally voluntary or that it's wrong. It's just the other person isn't offending you. The other person is saying something and you are offended, right? Like you have that, right?

And I think the more we can understand that these things that we feel or are causing us stress or distress are within us. They're our problem. You know, we have a better chance of mitigating them or regulating them or processing them or whatever it is that we're going to do with them. But it starts with understanding that it's your problem, it's not somebody else's fault. Do you ever find yourself on the wrong side of the

line? Stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, burnt out, et cetera, et cetera, not withstanding all of your years of studying Stokes. Every single day, every single day, of course. That's one of the things that is most striking about meditations compared to say, not just the other works of the Stokes, but I think almost all other philosophical works, right? Most philosophy is written as advice for someone else,

it's this is what we think, this is what we've discovered, this is what we've learned, this is how you should be, this is what you should do. That's what books are, I mean, you've written books, I've written books, you're writing for the reader, right? And so even if you are talking to yourself, there is inherently a kind of a performative elements to it, right?

You're speaking externally to someone else. For meditations to be Marcus Aurelius writing to himself and almost certainly not intending it to be viewed by anyone else, you get quite clearly the sense that he is struggling with everything that he's writing about. And so the reason he doesn't cover all topics, the reason he repeats himself, the reason he sends to dwell on certain themes, whether it's losing his temper or his looming mortality, whether it's frustrations about being misunderstood, it's managing his ambition, these are his personal issues.

He even says this at one point in meditation, he's like, you're an old man and you're still dealing with this. Because it doesn't matter that he's been studying this since he was a teenager, the best we can kind of hope for is a reduction, almost certainly not in elimination. Because these are things that go to our biology

and psychology, these are the earliest formed habits that we developed looking at our own flawed parents and teachers and the people around us. So I feel like stoicism has made me better at these things but by no means helped me transcend them. If you can show me a person that has, you know, I'll bow down and worship them. But I think we're all just trying to get a little bit better. I don't know who said this, has somebody in the Zen school, erring and erring, I walk the unerring path. You know, I'm a fuck up on a flawless path.

And that definitely resonates with me. Well, staying with these ancient anxiety and stress relief tools within stoicism, there's this concept of, I'm going to blow the pronunciation of this, but premeditatio malorum, is that right? I didn't take Latin in school either, so I usually just pronounce it as premeditatio malorum. And so what is that and how is that relevant to our current discussion? So this is an exercise in Seneca's writings most of all. He's basically saying what positive visualization is great.

You wanna imagine things going well, you wanna see success happening, of course, but he's saying that we should premeditate on evil as well, or evils, meaning what could go wrong. He says you're heading out on a journey by ship, which would have been the means of travel in those days. What are some of the possibilities here, right? We could sink, we could get attacked by pirates, we could be delayed, we could run into a terrible storm, you know, we could get sick,

right? Any number of these things could happen. And he says, you know, if you don't think about that, you are going to be caught by surprise when one of those things does happen. And basically the idea in Stoicism is that by thinking about it in advance, which I think is different than say ruminating or dreading, by thinking about it in advance, we take away some of the power of it over us when it does happen.

He quotes an ancient military strategist who says, you know, the one excuse that a leader can never have is, oh, I didn't think that would happen. His point is that we should always think about what the things that could happen are. And then we should think about what we would do if that were to happen. I think this is very different than ruminating, right? Like I'm flying somewhere on Wednesday night, I have to get somewhere by a talk I'm doing Thursday morning. So first off, I don't take the last flight out of Austin, because I know it could get delayed. So I take the second to last flight, but I know also I could run into trouble there, right? I know I could run into weather delays, I could get there very late at night. And so I just work through what could happen

as I'm heading to the airport or I'm planning the trip. I think about what these things that could happen are. And I sort of go, okay, is this something worth losing your shit over? Is this something worth being rude to the person working the counter over? Does that affect anything? I go, how prepared are you?

Did you pack a snack? Did you pack a book to read? Did you charge your phone? I just think about the things that could happen and then I go, okay, my main goal for this trip, of course I wanna get where I'm going, but I'd also like to not be miserable between point A and point B.

And I try to think about the strategies that I need to put into place or the decisions I need to make. So I can do my best for that not to happen. And I think that's just a really practical way of thinking about this. Obviously we're talking about Shipwrecks, right? Xeno, Sefer's one.

But they also lived in a time when, you know, there was an all powerful and often woefully unqualified, if not outright deranged emperor who had the power of life and death over all of them. And so there was a certain helplessness or powerlessness to the whims of someone other than them. And Seneca being in Nero's administration would have known this quite intimately. And so when we think about this pre-Meditational Milorum, they're thinking, I could be exiled at any moment. I could be executed at any moment.

I could have my property confiscated at any moment. And this is also a time when we could all die of the plague at any moment, or I could be kidnapped and held for ransom at any moment. So they lived in a world that was, I think, very, very unpredictable. And so this meditation on the things that could happen, it wasn't about anxiety, it was the opposite. It was about focusing on what they could control inside a world

that I think would be extremely stressful, and at other times outright terrifying. I find it like a non-pharmaceutical Xanax in some ways. My brain is naturally spinning out horrible scenarios anyway. My mind is naturally picturing all sorts of evils. This is a way to say, okay, well, fine, let's go there. Let's really go. What's gonna happen if X, Y or Z actually takes place? And you realize, you know what, it will suck, but I can handle this. And I suspect that in part is what this was designed

to help us do. Totally. And don't you find though also that a lot of the times you decide to go there and you realize it won't be fun but it's not as bad as you were thinking. You go, okay, what's the worst that could happen? And the worst that could happen is like, they'll laugh at me or I'll have to start over or I'll miss the thing, you know

or it'll take twice as long. And you go, oh, my mind was acting as if the realm of possibilities here was death or ending up under a bridge somewhere or excruciating physical pain. And we're not even in the ballpark of any of those things. These are like, the consequences are actually mild social embarrassment, slight FOMO, extra work. It's just not the catastrophe that your mind,

because you didn't want to examine it, because it was just sort of looming there on the horizon, you're not fully probing the thing. And sometimes you find that the thing, once you probe it, is significantly more manageable than that part of your brain was willing to allow. Coming up, Ryan Holiday talks about some stoic exercises, including memento mori and amor fati,

the stoic practice of journaling and whether the ego really is the enemy. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Alan Turing. Why are we talking about Alan Turing, Peter?

Alan Turing is the father of computer science and some of those questions we're thinking about today around artificial intelligence. Turing was so involved in setting and framing what some of those questions were but he's also interesting for lots of other reasons Afro. He had such a fascinating life he was unapologetically gay at a time when that was completely criminalized and stigmatized and from his imagination he created ideas that have formed a very physical practical foundation for all of the technology on which our lives depend.

And on top of that, he's responsible for being part of a team that saved millions, maybe even tens of millions of lives because of his work during the Second World War using maths and computer science to code break. So join us on Legacy wherever you get your podcasts. Saga. Last year we also started a second weekly show, Short Hand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction.

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get started today. In your many, many books, you cover other concepts that are kind of counterintuitive, ancient, anti-anxiety measures. Another of them is memento mori. Can you describe that? Yeah, memento mori is probably the theme that shows up in the stoic works, maybe more than any other. Maybe all philosophies share a preoccupation

with the one thing we all have in common, which is that we're going to die. And we don't know for certain what happens when that happens. And so there's the dread, there's an existential anxiety, there's an aversion to it. And so the Stoics say, you know, look, there's something that you can't not think about.

And in fact, the more you think about it, the less power it has over you. Mark Ceruleus talks about this quite a bit in meditations. Seneca talks about death so much that there is a translation or a collection of his works that's several hundred pages long, just called How to Die. Just Seneca's greatest hits on death. But I think this has come up with some really

interesting things. So first off, just the acceptance. Everyone born is going to die and we don't really control when that's going to happen. And we have to let that color what we do and say and think, the Stokes would argue. Like the idea that we're mortal and that life is ephemeral and unpredictable and fragile should make you not put things off, should make you not take people for granted, should make you not put things off, should make you not take people for granted,

should make you not tell yourself, oh, I'm gonna work for the next 50 years so I can enjoy the last 20 years in some form of retirement, right? It's changing the calculation. But my favorite insight about death comes from Seneca. He says, you know, it's wrong to think of death as something that lies

in the future that we are moving towards. He says, no, actually death is happening now. Death is what happens to the time that passes. This is the time that passes belongs to death. We are dying every minute. We are dying every day. And it's true, like I could think about myself as someone who has a certain number of years left, or I could think about myself as someone who has died a certain number of years, because I'll never get those years back, I've spent them already, it's gone.

And if you think about time in that sense, it again, it orients you towards the present and gets you thinking about how you protect your time, how you enjoy your time, how you experience that time, because that's really all you have. Let's tick through a few other stoic chestnuts. Amor fati, this actually gets us to Zeno in some ways. Amor fati comes to us from Nietzsche as he's riffing on the Stoics. So we talked about this idea of the Serenity Prayer, right?

How do you accept the things that are outside of your control? I think it's important that we see Stoicism as more than just this act of resignation. It's in fact, the embracing of the difficulties of life and seeing them as being uniquely suited to you and your purposes. I was just reading about this,

there's this species of pine tree, you know, drops a pine cone like any other pine tree. What's unique about it though, is that, you know, like for a pine tree to germinate, it has to open up, right? Like you ever seen a pine cone that's still green, it's all sort of tightly closed up. All right, for the pine cone to open up,

it has to be exposed to temperatures that are not possible in the course of ordinary weather. So it's only when the pine cone is exposed to the heat of a forest fire that it's possible for it to germinate and then regenerate. And I think this is kind of what the Stokes are talking about when they talk about Amor Fatih. Mark Sturlus says, you know, what you throw on top

of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. He's saying that we don't just accept the things that happen, but we embrace them as being suited to our purposes. So Mark Sturlus' reign is interesting. Rome is in the middle of what was then called Pax Romana or multiple generations of peace and prosperity. Marcus Serranius' predecessor, this guy named Antoninus,

experiences no wars, no natural disasters, basically nothing goes wrong. And then Marcus Serranius comes to power and almost immediately, the river that runs through Rome, the Tiber, floods at historic levels. The death toll is horrendous and does incredible damage. And then Rome faces a series of threats on its borders. And the Roman army goes to deal with it.

And that Roman army brings back a plague, which becomes known as the Antonine Plague, which is one of the first major global pandemics of the ancient world. Millions of people die, it lasts for like 15 years. Marcus Aurelius deals with multiple years of war. He buries the majority of his children before adulthood. He's betrayed in a palace coup by his most trusted general.

There's rumors that his wife is unfaithful. Basically everything that could possibly go wrong to this guy goes wrong for him. I guess it wouldn't be surprising if you read meditations and you just hear a guy complaining all the time about what bad luck he's had and how unfair this is, sort of cursing the gods. But instead you see this guy basically talking to himself

over and over and over again about, this is it. This is the hand that I've dealt. And here's how I'm gonna make the most of it. Here's how I'm gonna try to be good inside of it. Here's how I'm gonna try to do this job to the best of my ability. And to me, that's what a morifatih is. It's not this simple resignation to the moment that you're in,

but it's an embracing of it. Amor fati in Latin just means a love of fate. And Nietzsche is saying that we don't merely accept what is necessary, but we love it. We embrace it and we choose to do something with it. And to me, that goes to the essence of what the Stoics were trying to do. Stockdale, after he gets out of the Hanoi Hilton,

he's talking to the business author, Jim Collins, and he coins this thing that becomes known as the Stockdale paradox, which I think is the idea of a Morfati embodied. He says, I never lost hope in my ability to decide the end of the story. He says, I didn't know if I would get out, but he said, if I did get out,

I would try to turn it into something that in retrospect, I would not trade away. And to me, that's the art of life and the art of stoicism, that how do we take these things that happen to us, some of which are horrendous and almost unimaginable, right? Being thrown into slavery as Epictetus was, or being thrown into solitary confinement and tortured as Stockdale was.

And then some are minor, you know, you get fired, you get dumped, you break your leg. How do you turn that into something that in retrospect you see as a turning point in your life or something that in retrospect you wouldn't trade away if you had the choice? You've referenced Marcus Aurelius' book Meditations repeatedly, are there within the stoic tradition practices that I, coming from the Buddhist

tradition, would recognize as resembling meditation itself? Yeah, you know, it's funny, meditations in Greek, which is what the work was titled in, it just meant to himself. So I think for the Stoics, it's this journaling practice that Marcus is engaged in, that I don't think is exactly in the Zen tradition, the idea of journaling, but to me that is the central practice of Stoicism, this conversation with the self, usually on the page.

But Seneca talks about taking these long wandering walks to relax the mind. He says, if you put too much on the mind, eventually it breaks. And so I think he's talking about probably something analogous to a walking meditation. Marcus Rios in Meditations talks quite a bit about taking what he calls Plato's view.

So zooming way out, seeing yourself from above, seeing yourself from a distance, which I sort of would analogize to the Zen tradition in two ways. One, the physical act of zooming yourself way out, but also this idea that like these thoughts that we have, the core of Stoicism is, I think, similar to the idea that we don't have to agree with our thoughts. We don't have to accept them. We can let them sort of pass by. We can step back and see ourself

as a person having those thoughts, as opposed to a person who is those thoughts. And that kind of separation, that creating of some space between the impression, which is what the Stoics call, how we see and perceive things, the perception or the impression, which is what the Stoics call, how we see and perceive things, the perception or the impression, and then our assent or our acknowledgement of that.

To me, the Stoics have a similar practice there. I think they would have liked meditation though. Like I think if you could sit down with Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius and you say, okay, look, guys, not that far from here, right? It is really interesting. You try to wrap your head around how big the Roman Empire was.

I mean, it stretches from Britain to Africa. And in Marcus Aurelius' reign, the first delegation, they said they were sent by Marcus Aurelius, but we can't confirm this. But during the Antonine era a delegation of Romans makes their way to the Chinese empire and meets with the emperor. So these two emperors are meeting at the same time and and alive at the same time which is really incredible if you think about it. But I think if you could have communicated to Seneca, most of all, if you said Seneca, okay, look,

actually significantly predating Zeno and most of the Socratic thought, you had this other school in this other part of the earth that's coming up with this idea of meditation and thinking about one's thoughts. I think he would have been all over it. And the reason I think this is that Seneca writes a number of books, but

his most famous writings are these series of letters. He writes these letters to his friend Lucilius. And the philosopher he quotes to Lucilius the most is not Zeno. It's not Chrysippus or Cleanthes or Panathais or any of the other ancient Stoics, the philosopher he quotes the most is Epicurus, the rival school of the Stoics. And so he is intimately aware of other schools of thought at this time, and he loves quoting from them. He says, you know, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good.

He says, I read like a spy in the enemy's camp. And his point was like, he'll basically take anything from anyone provided it helps him get and be better. And so I am very certain that if you could speak to one of the ancient stoics about any number of the innovations before or since that they were not exposed to, I think they would have been all over it.

Am I correct in thinking that I've heard you maybe explicitly, maybe implicitly argue that journaling is a stoic practice? I would say that journaling is stoicism or stoicism is journaling. The conversation with the self about your own thoughts, about your own feelings and your emotions. That's what Marcus Aurelius is doing in meditations.

That's what Seneca is doing in his letters to his friend, Lucilius. That is the philosophical practice. The reiteration of the ideas in different ways, from different angles, to try to make it a part of your intuition, your implicit or your intuitive response. I think that's what we're doing. Pierre Hedot is a French translator of the Stokes

and wrote a bunch of great things about them. He had said that philosophy is actually a set of spiritual exercises. It's not like this thing that you read once. It's a thing you're engaged in. It's the reading and the talking and the writing and the applying. And then when you're reviewing yourself

at the end of the day, we were talking earlier about like, okay, I'm flying. How can I try to not be a mess, right? Maybe I'm scared of flying, maybe I get anxious, maybe I know I'm gonna be stretched really thin, I'm gonna be exhausted. It's not just the philosophical preparation for that activity, but then it's the debrief after

in the journal that goes, where did I fall short? How could I have been better? What did I learn? How do I now have a better understanding of what so-and-so meant a century ago or 10 centuries ago when they were talking about this exact thing? And then that sort of, that feedback loop

of the preparation and then the action and then the debrief and the distillation. That is what stoicism is. As I said before, you've written many books, The Obstacle is the Way, Stillness is the Key. There's one title that I found intriguing and I'm wondering whether maybe I have a minor disagreement with. Ego is the enemy.

I think it should be obvious that I'm I agree that the ego is problematic I'm just wondering whether calling it the enemy might be too hostile. I think The eastern bent would definitely say, you know, anytime you're calling something the enemy you're giving it power right, and you're probably thinking about it to antagonistically, which I totally get. The Stoics being a bit more Western,

obviously are sort of talking about warfare and fighting and battle and using all these metaphors in the same way that they also use sports metaphors, the same way that we still use these today. So I felt comfortable doing that. First off, I think we should probably just start by defining our terms. When we're talking about ego,

we're not talking about Freudian ego, right? Or we're not talking about literally a sense of oneself. We're talking about arrogance and we're talking about conceit and we're talking about entitlement and greed and superiority, all the very sort of natural, but I think largely destructive temptations that we feel as human beings,

particularly those of us who are ambitious or successful or driven or in positions of influence or power. So I'm really talking about that colloquial ego, right? The ego that nobody is glad to see, right? Nobody's like, you know what I love about Dan? He's like an egomaniac and it's just the best, you know? Nobody likes ego. It's the worst, right? So I'm talking about that ego, the ego that gets between us and other people, that gets between us and feedback, that gets between us and acceptance, that gets between us and I think the person that we want to be. Ego is protective and comforting, but I think

ultimately it holds us back. There's a great line in Epictetus, he says, remember it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And to me, that's the essence of why ego is the enemy. I mean, I think I agree with 98% of that. The only, and I don't want to be the guy who pretends to represent Eastern philosophy here because I have a minimal understanding of it, but to the extent that I understand it, I think the argument would be that if you make it bad, even the ugly parts, the destructive parts, you give it more power. Because it is trying that part of you, the ego, the destructive, arrogant part of that is in all of us, is trying to help us unskillfully.

The radical disarmament is to view it with some warmth. Anyway, I think that's the argument. Yeah, I mean, look, psychology talks about this idea of your inner child, which is, I think, often where we're coming from when we are in a place of egotism or when we're responding out of ego. It's usually to protect that wounded child, right?

And they talk about the idea when you feel that child sort of acting out inside you, you have to reparent that childhood. You don't beat the child, you reparent the child, right? So I totally get that. I would accept the disagreement over whether it's technically the enemy or not. But I'll give you an interesting dilemma

that I had to think about when I was writing that book. What I wanted to do was write a book about humility, which I think is important, I think is the basis of, most philosophical traditions, most breakthroughs, creatively, scientifically, artistically, just how you wanna be in the world. You don't wanna be an asshole, you wanna be humble and self-aware.

If I had written a book called, Humility is Great, Let's All Be Humble or whatever, right? First off, I couldn't even come up with a good title. But let's say I'd written that book aimed primarily at holding humility up. First off, that's kind of paradoxical, right? It's hard to celebrate humility. I'm also fairly certain it would have sold 16 copies, right? And so as I was thinking about this idea, I was trying to figure out which angle to come at it from, and I decided to come at it against ego as opposed to in favor of humility, even though ultimately the book is much more

about the upsides of humility and the downsides of arrogance. But I think one of the things that I sometimes find when I talk to people who are really interested in philosophy is they take totally for granted their interest in philosophy and think that it's somehow representative of where most people are in life, right? It's been funny as my books have gone on and been successful, you know, people have said,

oh, he's just a popularizer or something. And I go, yeah, do you know how hard that is? Like, do you know how hard it is to popularize an obscure school of ancient philosophy? It's not as if publishers were lining up to buy a book about stoicism. And then certainly a sequel and another sequel. What I've had to think a lot about

is how do you meet people where they are and make the ideas in ancient philosophy, not just accessible and practical, but also urgent? I was talking to a college basketball team last weekend, and I would tell you ordinarily, again, me being the exception to the rule, you're not gonna get a bunch of 19 year old jocks who are trying to go pro in basketball

to sit down and have an hour conversation about a bunch of Greek and Roman ideas. But when you talk about, you know, how ego is the enemy and it pulls teams apart and it prevents them from realizing their potential and learning and taking feedback and all of these things, well, suddenly it's right back to the gymnasia of old, the one that Marcus Riles would have been in

and Seneca would have been in and Zeno would have been in, the Olympic athletes of the past would have been in, and these ideas feel important and essential. And so part of what I'm doing with that book is going, how do I take this and make it feel like something you could actually use in your life, which is what philosophy should be. It's not something for the college classroom,

where at least it's not exclusively for that. Yeah, I mean, that all sounds totally right to me. I actually like the title a lot. I was bringing that up, not as a critique, but it just as an interesting nuance. And when I hear you talk about your role on the planet, your job on the planet of. Popularizing non in the pejorative. I mean, I think there's a lot of similarity with what I've been trying to do vis-à-vis a different tradition, which is Buddhism. Totally.

So another book title is Discipline is Destiny. What's the view of discipline within Stoicism? And I temperance, justice, and wisdom. I have them tattooed on my wrist here. Courage, I think straight down the middle, we get what that is. Basically every philosophical and religious tradition for all time is lionized courage. Courage is embodied by the symbol of the lion. Justice, we understand, we mean not just legal justice,

but how we treat people, ethics, et cetera, wisdom, right? Learning, education, we get it. Temperance on the other hand is, well, first off in English, not a great word. Like if people know what that means at all, they think of the temperance movement, which was responsible for the banning of the sale of alcohol in the early 20th century.

But temperance means moderation, it means self-control, it means self-discipline. The Greek word for this, sophrocene, means sort of not just doing all these things, but knowing like what the right amount of things are. And so as I was trying to think about, I've been doing this series on the four virtues, how do you write about that virtue? And temperance is just obviously not the right way to write about it if you want to reach people. And so self-discipline on the other hand,

I think is a much clearer way in. And discipline being, I think, core to the stoic idea. Epictetus was once asked if he could summarize stoicism in as few words as possible. And he said, I think I can do it in two. He said, it's persist and resist, which is effectively a way of saying self-discipline, right? What are the things that you push through and you do,

even though they're hard? And then what are the things that you push through and you do, even though they're hard? And then what are the things that you don't do because they're not right, because they're not good for you? And so if we see self-discipline as this idea of persisting and resisting, you know, it's getting up off the couch and going for a run when it'd be easier to lay there. It's, you know, the decision not to take the drink

or to smoke the thing or to do the drug. It's to delay the gratification, right? To be willing to do the work. It's sort of pushing through and doing what you're supposed to do. So when I say that discipline is destiny, I think what I mean is that, first off, discipline tends to be predictive, right?

Like the people who do the right things, who do the work, tend to succeed or end up where they wanna go. But I'm also saying that discipline is who you are. You're not doing discipline necessarily as a means to an end, right? It's not simply, oh, I wanna do all these things so later in the future, I don't have to do these things.

You're saying that these things are good unto themselves, being in command of oneself. Stoics call this the greatest empire. That to be in command of yourself makes you great, whether you're, you know, a lowly slave as Epictetus was, or you're Marcus Aurelius in the, you know, in the halls of power. It's easier said than done, of course, you know, not taking that drink, getting up off the couch, etc., etc. What do the Stoics recommend to get us there? Yeah, one of my favorite quotes from Musonius Rufus, he's Epictetus' teacher, he says, when you do something in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame remains. He says, when you do something difficult,

the hard work passes quickly, but the accomplishment remains. And I think that's the sort of the distillation of the stoic idea of discipline. It's thinking about how you're gonna feel after, right? We think drinking is fun and it is while you're doing it. It's how you feel in the morning after that balances things out a little bit, right? It's losing your temper feels cathartic in the moment, but you're very rarely glad afterwards, even a few minutes later that you did that.

And so this ability to go, how am I gonna feel when I get what I want? Or when I do what I'm about to do? Am I gonna feel good? Is that the person that I wanna be? Is it gonna last the way that I think it's gonna last? And then ideally we catch ourselves and we stop. And so look, I think it's a multi-part process.

It's what we do. It's also how we think about what we do. It's also the structures we build around ourselves, the environment that we put ourselves in that's gonna determine how much discipline we have. It's like, look, there's a great passage at the beginning of meditations where Mark Spreelis talks about

getting up early in the morning. He says, you know, not huddling under the covers and being warm, There's a great passage at the beginning of meditations where Mark Schreeles talks about getting up early in the morning. He says, you know, not huddling under the covers and being warm, because that's not what we are put here to do. You know, and the willpower to get out of bed in the morning, that's a matter of discipline, but that requires significantly less discipline

in my experience, if you had a little bit of discipline the night before when you decided when to go to bed. And so if we see discipline not simply as this brute force of pushing yourself past your limitations or your boundaries or your weaknesses, but as actually something closer to that balance, what they meant when they were talking about

moderation or temperance, you're probably gonna get a little bit closer. And that's what's so ironic about the temperance movement being associated with the banning of alcohol. The symbol of temperance in the ancient world was actually someone watering down their wine. So wine came very, very strong in those days. And so the person would still drink,

but they would just water it down. So it wasn't so strong. I think is actually a much more accessible and realistic, you know, metaphor for self-discipline than total abstinence. Coming up, Ryan talks about what Stoicism teaches us about justice. And we talk about the overlap between Stoicism and Buddhism. Behind every successful business is a story, and some of them may very well surprise you, like how Chobani's first yogurt factory was discovered on a piece of junk mail,

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You have a new book coming out soon called Right Thing Right Now. What's what's that about? So that's what I was telling him. I'm doing this series on the four virtues. I've done courage. I've done self-discipline. And then now I'm doing justice. And it's the same problem I seem to find

with all of my books, which is, how do you make something that people intuitively have an aversion to in any way interesting or palatable to them? And I think, you know, it says something, it's, I was thinking about this as I was writing the book, like when people hear the word justice, and that's what that third virtue is, when people hear the word justice, what that's what that third virtue is, when people hear the word justice,

what does it say about us as a society that our first image is like the legal system? Like we think justice is whether or not something is illegal, like whether it's literally allowed or not. Like we think justice is something we get, right? Like the system of justice, as opposed to justice is something we do, right? Like the system of justice, as opposed to justice is something we do in how we live and how we treat other people in what we choose to be involved in or not involved

in. So the third book in the series is about that sort of what are the personal ethics by which someone lives their life? And then what are the causes that we decide to be involved in, the Stoics believing quite deeply that we couldn't simply sit on the sidelines and read our books while the world turned or burned. And then finally, I think at the highest level, we have these examples of the Stoics and their supreme sacrifices, whether it's resistance

to tyranny under the regime of Nero, or the creation of new nations, the founding fathers of America, all being sort of steeped in Stoicism. So I'm just writing about that. How do we use these ancient ideas to guide us through the most modern of problems, which is like, how should a person be in the world? Where do you land on what specifically can or should be done?

I'm sure it's a whole book, so you've got a lot to say, but what comes to mind when it comes to operationalizable ideas? Yeah, I'm not saying, hey, look, here are the stoic policy positions that you must adhere to. But I do think it's really important that we don't propagate this myth of the detached, disassociated, aloof philosopher. Obviously this is a stereotype that I think Eastern philosophy deals with too. The monk in his monastery, they're not thinking

Confucius, you know, going from prince to prince, trying to teach good governance. But that's as much a part of the Eastern tradition as it is the Western tradition. And Seneca's big beef with the Epicureans was that Epicurus was saying, hey, look, the world is broken, the world is frustrating, the world is corrupt, retreat here to my garden, drink and be merry, have fun, ignore what's happening out there. And I think the Stoics would have believed that to see the field, to disengage, means that somebody else either has to

or will step up to take your place. So to me, I really do think it's important that like beyond any specific like would they have done this or done that, it's the decision to get involved and to be active in the issues or the debates of your time. I've been reading and writing a lot recently about this guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was a contemporary of Emerson's, they both go to Harvard. He's a translator of Epictetus, he's the first American author to translate Epictetus.

But he doesn't just think of stoicism as this thing you write about. He's a friend of John Brown, he's active in the early protests about the Fugitive Slave Act. And then when the Civil War breaks out, he volunteers and leads the first black regiment of troops, largely freed slaves, for the Union Army. And so again, I think it's really important that we see the Stoics as the man or the woman

in the arena, the people who are involved, who are trying to make a difference, who are trying to make the world a little bit more fair, a little bit better, they're trying to help people. That's my view of stoic justice. So it can be so easy for people who are into self development or self improvement to develop kind of a narcissism about it, right? To be like, oh, it's nasty out there.

I don't control what's happening here, over there. I'm just gonna focus on what's happening in here inside my own head. I mean, I think there's a place for that. And at the same time, if you simply allow things, you might've been able to influence or by you coming together collectively with other people might've been able to improve,

that I think you're complicit in that thing happening. Because we're so interconnected, it's a losing strategy to pretend that if you don't get involved in what's going on out there, that it's not going to impact you. It's bringing to mind a couple of the other stoic concepts, like I think it's called sympathia, developing just a warmth toward other people. And then there's another one, some umbonum, probably mangling the pronunciation of that, but like thinking about the common good.

There is like an enlightened self-interest at play in all of these. Yeah, there is. And it's not easy to get to, right? I think it's a lot of work. There was this early stoic, or this middle stoic named Hierocles. And Hierocles basically said, look, we're all born inherently

self-interested. We care about ourselves, right? We have an instinct for self preservation. And then we have an affinity for the people that look like us, that are related to us, that are from where we're from. But he said, so he said you should think about it as a series of concentric circles. So you have this inner circle that is yourself. And then there's, you know, your immediate family, and then there's your extended family, and then there's your town, then there's your state, then there's your country, then there's your, you know, the east or the west, then there's the world, then there's animals, then there's, you know, the people of earth, right? But he said there's these circles, right? And he said the work of philosophy

is about pulling those outer rings inward. This is the evolution of Stoicism itself, right? The early Stoics, Zito is influenced by the cynics who were sort of innately selfish and were sort of rejecting society and obligations. And as stoicism evolved into the sort of reigning civic religion of the empire, that was no longer palatable. And so the stoics were in positions of influence and power and administration.

And you know, Marcus realized talks in meditations. He's like, I'm not a citizen of Rome, I'm a citizen of the world. And this idea that he had an obligation to human beings in general, not just to the Romans, not just to the Romans against the barbarians or whatever notions they had at the time, but that we're all sort of connected with each other

and that our fates are tied up with each other. Martin Luther King would talk about how it's all this giant bundle of humanity that we're tied up in and that you really can't separate one human being from another. And in fact, I think most of the terrible things that have happened in the last 100, 150 years

have originated when one group of people said, I don't care about that. It's not happening to people like me. And then in due time, that cancer metastasized and did ultimately affect them. And that's a very big part of the stoic virtue of justice is getting over that prejudice or selfish inclination. Ryan, this has been really fun for me.

Is there a place you were hoping to go that we didn't end up going? No, I don't think so. I mean, I'd be curious from you, like when you're hearing me talk about Stoicism, where do you think that Stoicism and Buddhism overlap? I mean, I think there's a ton of overlap. These notions of developing sympathy toward all beings, thinking about the greater good, I mean, that's right there in Buddhism in a huge way, not believing your thoughts, not letting your

equanimity be at the whim of external forces. What I like about Buddhism is it gets way into very detailed practices that, you know, train the mind and brain. But you know, this journaling that you're talking about, the walks in nature, carrying coins in your pocket like a memento mori, something to remind you that you're gonna die. You've, I know, made special coins to help people remember lots of these stoic virtues and stoic concepts. So, yeah, I think there's a huge amount of overlap. I have a bias toward, you know, on the cushion meditation practices, but that's just my thing.

It seems crazy that two things with so much overlap could have evolved entirely independently of each other. And as far as I know, there isn't really any great or clear links, at least not in the ancient world, where they're like, no, no, no, so-and-so had this book at this time, and that's when the two strains intersected with each other. But maybe that's the point,

is that they developed independently, but because they're rooted in similar truths, you know, about our powerlessness over external events, about where happiness actually comes from and how we alleviate suffering. That's how they came to independent conclusions. Like sometimes you'll find two authors will come up with the same idea or two scientists will discover the same thing almost simultaneously.

You wanna think there was just something in the air, but in fact, it's more a result of they were following the same process and the scientific method is what's responsible for that or evolution is responsible for that. Yeah, I agree it's wild and I am definitely not a scholar of comparative religion, but it seems to me that you've got traditions that are inclusive of Stoicism, Buddhism,

but also the mystical strains of the Abrahamic faiths, Shamanism, all sorts of indigenous belief systems that are arriving at essentially the same conclusions. I mean, for example, there was an AI, a large language model that somebody loaded in all, you know, the great works from all the different traditions and asked, you know, what do they have, what do these all have in common? And every single one whittled down to love. And so it's all just kind of what's's the expression? All spokes lead to the hub. Ooh, I like that. Yeah, it's funny, when I was doing the justice book,

it's hard to find a religious or philosophical tradition that as far as sort of justice or ethics is concerned, does not boil down to some phrasing or iteration of the golden rule. And so these things seem so basic and yet the pinnacle of all of these different schools is that conclusion. So maybe it's not basic at all.

Maybe it's the height of cultivation. And then what does that line, everything that rises must converge. You know, at some point they all lead to the same thing. I don't think that's a coincidence. No, I don't either. This was, like I said, really fun. Before I let you go, can you just remind people,

I'm sure it might be a feat of memory, but can you remind people of all of your books and like where they can learn more about you, your website and socials, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so I wrote a book called The Daily Stoic, which is one page of stoic philosophy every single day. And then for the last eight years,

I've kept that going on a website, which is dailystoic.com, which is now like an email that goes out to about a million people every single day. It's the largest community of stoics that ever existed. And I've written a number of other books. I'm in the community of stoics that ever existed. And I've written a number of other books. I'm in the middle of this stoic virtue series. So Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, Right Thing Right Now is the third one. And yeah, you can check them out

on Amazon or I have a bookstore here in Austin, Texas named after the stoic poquile called The Painted Porch. Amazing. Ryan Holiday, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Ryan. I'll drop some links in the show notes to the one previous episode we've done on the subject of Stoicism with Nancy Sherman. Check that out in the show notes.

Before I go, I also wanna thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, and we get additional production support from Colin Lester Fleming, Isabel Hibbard, Carolyn Keenan, and Wanbo Wu. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

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