The Daily Stoic - Julia Baird on Accepting Responsibility and the Strength of Forgiveness

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

While we aren’t the ones to blame for the mistakes of our ancestors' pasts, we are responsible for what we do today to combat the repercussions of their actions. Julia Baird and Ryan continue their conversation today about how forgiveness and grace have been a pivotal character trait for many great people throughout history as she discusses in her new book, Bright Shining, which Ryan called “a powerful book from one of my favorite writers on something we all need more of...and could give more of.”Julia Baird is an author, broadcaster, and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. Be sure to check out her books, Phosphorescence: A Memoir of Finding Joy When Your World Goes Dark, Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire, and Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything. 🎙️ Be sure to listen to Part 1 with Julia Baird and check out her first interview on the Daily Stoic Follow Julia on Instagram @JuliaBaird and on X @BairdJulia Looking to record a podcast in Sydney, Australia? Be sure to check out Wisecast Studios!🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right now on audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30 day audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing right now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with

me when I went to Australia, when I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So we're not staying in a hotel, we're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location.

You can find something awesome. You wanna stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels.

So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show. And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics, something to help you live up to those four stoic virtues

of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare

for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. One of the things about travel is it gets you away from, you know, the sort of day-to-dayness of your life. And then it's an opportunity to sort of see your own country and another country from the perspective of someone who's not from there. We would go to this little coffee shop when I was in Sydney every morning with the kids for breakfast and I was helping my son try to read the headlines of this sort of tabloid newspaper that was always on the table. And it was fascinating to watch like the craziness

of American politics from thousands of miles away. It was fascinating to see what they thought was a big deal in their own country. And I just really took a lot out of that experience. It helped me turn down the volume on what's happening here in America now that I'm back in it. And it's funny, Bill Bryson actually talks about this in his fascinating book, In a Sunburned Country,

which is one of my favorite books of all time. We carry it in the painted porch. Two other books that I love, actually three other books that I love, we carry in the painted porch, were written by today's guest. She has this awesome book called, Victoria, the Queen in Intimate Biography

of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire. And she wrote this book called, Phosphorescence, which is really a very obstacle is the way-esque book. And then she has this new one called, Bright Shining, How Grace Changes Everything. I'm talking about Julia Baird. She comes from this prestigious political family

in Australia. She's this great writer. She's a very important journalist, newscaster and biographer. And while we were there, I was fascinated with Australia's relationship to its own history, like how it understands itself as this penal colony, its relationship to indigenous people.

They talk a lot about sort of, they kind of do this, what's that called? We don't do them here in America, so I'm forgetting the name, but the sort of land recognition or acknowledgement. And we talked about that because it connects to her new book, this idea of forgiveness, how we give grace to others

and how we can be worthy of it ourselves. And people are so sensitive today, they don't even wanna admit wrongs that they are themselves not complicit in, like I talk about this in the Justice book, like Virginia apologized for slavery in 2008, they were the first American state to do so. Just like how mind blowing that is.

But we don't give ourselves grace. We certainly don't give other people grace. We're just sensitive. We feel guilty. We lack the confidence and security to sort of own our own mistakes. I loved this conversation with Julia. I booked a studio while I was there.

I've been a fan of her work for a studio while I was there. I've been a fan of her work for a long, long time. And I wanted to have her on while I was there in the country. We rented this cool studio, a guy named Thomas. He was great. He actually filmed my talks that I did there in Sydney and in Melbourne. So if you've been watching clips on YouTube or social, he shot all those. He did a great job. Speaking of which, I am going to be in London, Dublin, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Vancouver. I'm looking for videographers. If anyone's interested, you can email info at dailystoke.com.

That would be helpful. Or you can just come see me, ryanholliday.net slash tour. You can grab the tickets. I hope to see you. We're doing a private Q and A beforehand. So a bunch of awesome stuff. So like I said, I'm gonna be in Europe and Canada, just like I was in Australia back in July.

I had an awesome trip. My kids are still talking about it. I'm reading another book about Australia right now. I've been talking about it with some of the guests. I just, I love that country. And like I said, reading this book I'm reading about Australia right now, called The Fatal Shore,

it's fascinating because again it's just the wicked, complicated, confusing, contradictory, dark history of another country. But because it's not your ancestors, there's no guilt, you're just able to see it from a distance, which is kind of what Stoicism is all about. And so as I'm learning about this other country, it's allowing me to understand my own country from a different angle. And when you do that, there is a responsibility. That's what I talked to Julia about, but there's also kind of a release of a burden

that comes with that too, when you really understand it. And then you can focus on how to do better in the future, which is what I'm mostly interested in. Seriously, read Bright Shining, great book. Read Phosphorescence, incredible book. And then if you want a big, thick, long biography, so many of these epic biographies are almost always about dudes.

If you like Robert Caro, if you like David McCullough, if you like Ron Chernow, if you like those big biographies and you're like, I wanna read one about like an epic female character, Victoria the Queen, just absolutely incredible. I loved that book. I'm a big fan of today's guests and listen to part one of the podcast

and come see me when I am in your neck of the woods. Let's get into it. Well, cause I was struck you have the sort of the land acknowledgement at the beginning of the book. And that's a thing I've seen all over Australia. That's not really an American thing. We're very much in denial of our past. And it's not just a singular denial but a sort of an ongoing perpetuation of that denial. And I was sort of struck by the choice. What does that mean to you? How does that connect to Grace?

So it's an acknowledgement that right now we are on the land owned by the Eora people, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, which was not ours and which belonged to First Nations people before we came. And we've had a horrible and difficult history that it's taken us as a country a long time to reckon with. The massacres, the poisoning, the dispossession, the stolen generations. And I spoke to the dispossession, the stolen generations. And I spoke to quite a few members of the stolen generations from my book being taken

away from your families and being told that you basically have to be white. You speak your own language, you'll have your mouth washed out with soap or with poison, with cleaning detergent. You stripped of all of your identity, of your family, of your culture, of your language, and you, that was supposed to be trained usually to do domestic work. And the trauma that goes on from that generation to generation that we're still living with today, what happened, the fact that so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people came together as elders and said, we want to have a Makarata coming together after a period of struggle and walking

together to a better future. To me, the grace in that is astonishing and undeserved. So we have a national sorry day, which is a day which recognized the first report into bringing them home into the stolen generations. And a former prime minister a few years ago said, okay, it's one thing to say sorry, but what you guys really need to do is forgive. Like that's the really hard thing. That's the really important thing here. And their response was, of a lot of elders was, get in the bin.

Like you can't have a powerful white man telling us, literally as the prime minister, that the onus is on us to forgive. That's our burden. You owe me. Yeah, when you haven't done anything really to fix it. And so that was a big issue in coming up to the voice vote, which we had at the end of last year, which was about whether we had an Indigenous-voiced

Parliament, just an advisory group that would advise the Parliament on what each bit of legislation would mean for First Nations people. Yeah, there's one of those long German words that I won't bother to pronounce, but it means something like wrestling with the past. And have you seen that art, there's an art project in Germany, and I guess it's all over your, the stumbling stones, the sort of the raised reminders. And so on the one hand, I think about that a lot

because it's, they're annoying, they could hurt you, right? But that's the point. The point is that your inclination is to smooth things over, to pretend it didn't happen, to pretend you didn't come from people who did things like that, or just to even pretend that people can do things like that. And obviously denying or acknowledging the past, it doesn't change whether it happened. It happened, but it's in the acknowledging and the process, these things that maybe seem sort of empty or performative, you know, you're going to

acknowledge this before a performance, I'm going to, before the meeting, we're going to acknowledge the land we're on, or a state's going to, in America, going to apologize for slavery, or we're going to teach these things. It can seem performative and meaningless, but it's not about the past at all. It's about the reminder and the understanding of what people can do at their worst so you don't do it again, so you can be changed in the future. That's at least how I see it.

And so there's something obviously powerful about grace, but there's also something powerful, I think, about taking responsibility and staring truth in the face. Because it's a gift, that's as painful and as much of a stumble as that can cause. It's also an incredible gift because it's allowing you to learn and to grow into not these monstrous acts.

Because you can't, you like prevent yourself from repeating if you don't acknowledge what happened. Exactly, and you're more likely to, if you don't acknowledge what happened. Exactly. And you're more likely to, if you're in denial of it, that's how you do it again. And it's always puzzled me as a historian, and you must be the same as well, when people say, oh, how can you bring that up? That's so negative. You know what I mean?

Why? You're like, that's, it's history. It happened. It either happened or it didn't. Yeah. I heard a historian say you don't have guilt, but you have responsibility. Right. And that distinction.

So there's nothing to feel shame about because you didn't do it. Like my ancestors weren't even here when this happened, right? Yeah. But I do reap the benefits. Yes, that's right. Of what certain people did.

Exactly. You know, my grandmother went to a segregated school in Arkansas, like Little Rock High School. My grandmother went to that school while it was segregated. She's an, it's eight year old. She didn't choose any of this. Her parents maybe did, but like that confers benefits to her, to my father,

and then to me in a way that had it gone differently or if I had been a different race, I wouldn't have gotten those same benefits. But so acknowledging this, which obviously no one in my family ever talked about, right, it's a thing I discovered on accident. But acknowledging it doesn't change whether it happened or didn't happen.

It doesn't make me guilty or I don't have to do a sentence about it, but it does allow me to understand the present better. And it helps me understand what the right side of issues are because I have an awareness and an understanding. And again, it's not a shame, but it is a reminder of, at that moment, there was a choice choice this way or that way and they went the wrong way.

And now in my own choices, am I going to go the right way or the wrong way? I think the shame is more in concealing as opposed to acknowledging and recognizing it happened. I mean, you speak about smoothing over like to me, because I was really wrestling with what is grace. And so many times I know that it is about a smoothing over and making things easy for people. And like often it's gendered and that's something that women should do.

And we should all just like, let's just move on. And actually I see grace as a slightly more ferocious iteration of that, because I see it with justice in the sense that it's a reminder that we can be better and we can do better. And if we don't hold onto that, then how do we go forward? Yeah. When you quote Amazing Grace in the, as the epigraph of the book, right?

And like just reading about, I'm forgetting the name of the man who wrote that song, but he was a slave trader. And you think about who became an abolitionist. And so there's also this element of, which I think we're wrestling with as a society, I think a lot of the complaints about cancel culture and are totally overblown,

but when you write people off as irredeemable or incapable of change or improvement, you're also making a fatal mistake because you see how many good things formerly or largely bad people went on to do. And there's something very fitting about the person who writes Amazing Grace being in such desperate need of said grace. Like the ultimate kind of grace. Exactly. And I think so many interesting things about that song, because I found a lot during my research and I still, I found another, another occasion yesterday,

there was a police officer killed in America and another policeman at the, at the, his funeral saying that, and he changed some of the words to talk about policemen dying and I found that in times in history when people don't know what to say, they will sing that. So the book is called, my book is called Bright Shining from the line in Amazing Grace, but when we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining like the sun, because I see grace as being very much like the sun. That line was put in by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

That was the first time it was recorded because it had been a spiritual, had been sung by African Americans and was very much linked to abolitionism at that time. And then it became an anthem of the civil rights movement. So when Obama stood at that funeral of Reverend Pinkney, there'd been another mass shooting and he said that he couldn't quite There'd been another mass shooting. Um, and he said that he couldn't quite bear to, he says this in his podcast with Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen renegades that after Sandy Hook, he's like, what do I have even to say anymore? If, if we don't do anything when, you know, 26 year olds are gunned down. And he'd been corresponding with Marilyn Robinson about grace and grace being, you know,

the extraordinary kind of goodness that goes beyond the everyday. And he pauses and he just sings it. And it's so, you'll remember that. It was so powerful because you could see people stand around him. You could see their faces change. Some are weeping, some are being more joyful. But you know, at that moment, he's telling them that we have to hold on to what is good because we can be and do better. And because if we lose sight of that, then it's the darkness. And I know he's been a man that's kind of very about hope. And he said that after Sandy Hook, that was the closest he ever came to kind of losing hope.

I'm sure he might've been tested a bit recently as well. But I just found that moment really staggering because I think we ache and yearn for those moments. We do. And what's so hard about them is as beautiful and as moving as that moment was, you feel everyone's on the same page about this. There's a huge chunk of the country that I'm from that's not on the same page, you know, that basically sees that same thing and says like, that is sad. That is bad, but I'm not gonna do one fucking thing about it.

And so how do you maintain that good or that sense of, I think we saw this during the pandemic too, where you go, people are doing and saying just monstrous things, just the sort of prevalence of cruelty, I think in America, you're seeing a version of Christianity that has been stripped of all the grace and obligations and you're basically seeing Christianity stripped of love and it becomes sort of a fundamentalist.

You know what else I'm saying? I actually realized this watching the RNC is that there was a long time there when I'm going to guess around the 2000s when evangelical Christianity in the States was really looking for hyper-masculine kind of bros and charismatic figures to lead them and talk in a certain way. And it was that whole thing about don't make Jesus sound like soft dude. He's more like John Wayne and he's more. And when I was watching the convention, I was like, oh, that has actually combined with the vision that those people around Trump are providing

in America. The only time Jesus gets mad in the Bible is at the money changers. Turning over that. You know, the only people he doesn't like are selfish rich people. And somehow you get an inversion of Christianity. I mean, it's starting to get extreme, but I think there's an argument that this version of Christianity is closer to being one that like the Antichrist would have asked for, than the actual Christianity of Jesus,

which is about love and compassion and forgiveness and grace. And, and yeah, you see what a hollow, empty thing becomes when it's stripped of that, because it becomes a mechanism of control and domination and power, and yet othering and who's entitled to heaven and who's not, you know, who's the sinner and who's not. Exclusion. Yeah. And it's a very, I think what I struggle with is how do you have compassion for people who are in the sway of that, right? Like, if we think about grace as being this thing

that's so important, and then you watch people acting without grace, trying to not, like I was saying recently, like the main struggle of our time is to not let the assholes turn you into an asshole. We're not- That is a big struggle, totally. That's the struggle of our time is to not let the assholes turn you into an asshole. That is a big struggle, totally. That's the struggle of our time. Because that's the wisdom that that's what will win. We're actually taught now that us, Holary, will triumph. Yes.

And it's like, when do we talk about better angels? Or as one of our prime ministers here, Paul Keating, used to say, we need to pull on the golden threads in the community. Like, which leader is doing that? Yeah. Pulling on golden threads. Yes. Um, on how we can be better or love better.

I think it's important to though, step inside, just step into other people's shoes. I think we're seeing a lot of bizarre behavior from some Christian groups who are seeing Donald Trump more as a kind of, well, as a martyr, but an anti-hero, actually. So he doesn't have to be perfect. He can be all these other things. Well, look, if you, if, first off, if you watched a lot of cable news, it would not be good for you. And then if you watched specifically a certain kind of cable news that basically just lied

to you all the time, Australia's worst export, You know, it would destroy your brain. Yeah, you feel persecuted. I mean, there's a lot of very legitimate things people are feeling like, look at what happened after the global financial crisis. Look at who's really the hollowing out of the middle class, inflation, poverty. there's so many, the housing crisis, but you're right. I mean, it's the loss of truth in the middle of all of that. But I think when I was watching the Republican National Convention and I was seeing people like Franklin Graham up there and I was hearing people talk about Trump has been saved by God and by the grace of God and he will get them through.

There's a lot of people who feel that they've been diminished or overlooked or sidelined or like, you know, the number of people going to church is going down. They feel kind of very persecuted. And so it's a return to a more combative and fundamentalist form of faith. Whereas I actually think a lot of people respond most positively to faith that they see in action. Like that's what polls here show in terms of caring or looking after people or being so sacrificing. And I do think, you know, we were talking about history earlier, I think that a lot

of progress has been made in sort of showing what actually happened historically and not the sort of propaganda mythological version of history at the same time. What we've also done for generations now, is strip people of those inspiring examples. That, as you said, when you see, when you hear, you're like, they did this. When you think of Cincinnati, he's made dictator of Rome,

he saves Rome, and then he returns to his farm. He lays down the power. The power of that example is what inspires George Washington to resign his commission, to leave after two terms of... The 200 plus years of peaceful transitions of power in America come because of an ancient story of a guy who probably didn't actually even exist.

But the power of that story told to the generations is a moment of sort of profound inspiration and meaning. And so, yeah, what do you do when you have a society that can't choose heroes or examples to celebrate and hold up to reinforce these lessons of what actually should fill us with awe and inspiration? And then you put on top of that, you have a media culture

that it's constantly talking about the worst people doing the worst things. It becomes a very wicked feedback loop that I'm not sure you can pull out of very easily. Hello, Matt and Alice here, the hosts of Wanderers podcast, British Scandal. Our latest series, Peru 2, begins on the sandy shores of Ibiza. Michaela McCollum should have been having the summer of her dreams, but it all went wrong when she met the gorgeous Davy in a

bar. Think less holiday romance, more recruitment for a drug cartel. She agreed to team up with another young Brit, fly to Spain to collect a drugs package then head straight back. However, only at 30,000 feet does Michaela realise she's not on the way to Spain, she's heading for Peru. And when they get there, they find out it's not a small drugs package, but 11 kilograms of cocaine. The summer holiday turns into a spell in a Peruvian prison and a story that becomes an international media sensation. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. The leaves drift to the ground, the wind rises. Pull up a chair by our fire and listen to stories from the darker side of the past. I'm Maddie.

And I'm Anthony. And on our podcast, after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal, we tell stories of villages and the death of queens. Of Tudor ghosts that will not sleep and of murder among gravestones. For spine-tingling history from the darker side of the past, listen to After Dark from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Brett Goldstein, did you watch Ted Lasso? Of course. So Roy Kent, he's here, he's there. The actor who played him went and saw this movie one time and I think it was a really

grueling assault of some sort, found it horrific. He came out of it like feeling like he'd been run over by a truck says to his friend, that's entertainment, but what? And then, and then he's thought about it. And he said, you know, he really felt that that was like bad art because even in the middle of anything horrific, you speak to survivors, you speak to people who've had terrible diagnosis, you read their accounts, you read history. And you'll know that even in the most awful and challenging of circumstances, there'll always be a moment of connection. There'll always be a

moment when people put their arms around each other. There'll be a moment of humor. And if you haven't seen that, then you haven't observed life. And it's also about the stories that we tell, as you're saying, like so COVID, so many people behave so weirdly and I still as a consequence of that. But here, neighbors, we're dobbling in neighbors for doing, saying that they're having too many people over or they're like, whatever. It brought out a lot of smallness. But then we have these two women who I talk about in the book from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and it was just rampant COVID running through through, um, the country at that stage and the health system was overwhelmed and the wards were all packed and they didn't have enough

supplies. And, but one thing they found really, really grueling was the fact that when people were there and they were ill or they were dying, they couldn't have their loved ones with them. I remember how bad that was like, and a lot of nurses found that quite heartbreaking. And there were these two women who were nurses, and they went out on their lunch break and were talking about this. And they were like, what about that old technique we heard about one time in medical school?

And they came back, and they got two gloves, those rubber gloves that you get in hospitals, filled them with really warm water, knotted them together, and put them over people's hands. So it was like one warm hand on the top, one warm hand on the bottom. And they found that that was, had an immediate impact on people's vitals, um, on their oxygen levels, on the profusion. And they repeated it in other hospitals and they had the same things. And it's situation of like, when I tracked them down, they said they were so amazed by the physical impact of it. But you know, these are bits of rubber filled with water.

Sure. But it's also a way a stranger is loving another person. I think about that woman, Dr. Katalin Kuriko, the one who's research on mRNA is what basically unlocks the vaccine that saves hundreds of thousands, millions of lives. I mean, she's a Hungarian immigrant fleeing communism. She ends up in America in the eighties.

She never makes more than like 40 or $50,000 a year. Her husband manages an apartment complex as like a superintendent. And she's repeatedly passed over for promotions. She has to constantly reapply for her job. She never has tenure, but she just like chugs away at this little bit of research that was fascinating to her that she thought had potential.

And then, you know, she changes the world with it. And you have the examples of people who did amazing things in the teeth of incredible adversity or discrimination or doubt. Like we don't have the stories we need to make people think, oh, that's what human beings are capable. We're constantly reminded of the horrible, selfish, stupid,

ignorant things that humans are capable of and not enough of true human greatness. I did find when writing this that people would struggle. I'd say to them, when was the last time you saw an act of grace in the public? A lot of people really struggled with that. They would talk about Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, who was, after they had a mass shooting there, was just very inclusive, wore a hijab, like was just very, spoke of real unity at a time that she could have really politically capitalised on it, which I think was people's favourite. That choice, the choice between dark energy and light energy is a choice that we don't often acknowledge as a choice, and then we don't often celebrate the costs that it takes to make the right choice.

Yeah. And how you have to sometimes repeatedly make it. Yeah. You know, when they go low, we go high, is a great example. When you look back to the way John McCain was, and you see people interrupting him when he was running for president saying, oh, I know that, you know, Barack Obama was an Arab and a terrorist. No, ma'am. We want to- He cares about this country. Yeah Obama was an Arab and a terrorist. No, ma'am. He

cares about this country. Or an incredible moment of grace. I mean, you know, he could have left the Hanoi Hilton. He's in there with Stockdale. So his father is the theater commander of all naval operations in that part of the world during the war. And so when the prison guards discover that they have his son, obviously one option they could have tortured him even worse or killed him, but they decide that the most insidious disruptive thing they could do would be to give him preferential treatment as a profound, to his way to demoralize the country

and all the soldiers. And so basically they offer him a chance to leave. And the rule is it's supposed to be first in, first out. So he wasn't in line to be released. And so they say, you can skip the line, you can go home. We won't torture anymore, you can go home. And he chooses to stay. Says, no, I want the regular rules to apply to me.

And so yeah, those sort of moments of superhuman strength and character and the decision to say, why should I be exempted from the rules? Why should I get preferential treatment? Is just, like, as a society, we celebrated kind of the manliness of like he endured the torture and survived.

And we actually miss the truly profound bit of human greatness in that story, which was the sense of honor and fairness and integrity that he stuck with when it cost him. I mean, he basically loses the use of his arm for the rest of his life. Probably had demons the rest of his life. Yeah.

And you think about what that cost him, but that's what that sort of culture is supposed to inculcate. Don't you find when I hear stories like that, like, I just feel such relief. Yeah. Not all is lost. People like this exist in the world. I honestly think we hunger for that. Well, you quote the road in the intro of the book and that idea of carrying the fire

is to me one of the most beautiful memoirs or beautiful metaphors ever to exist in fiction, this idea of carrying the fire. And that's what, those are reminders that the fire is not out, I think, that it remains lit. And that that's your sort of primary job as a human being.

Carry the fire. Yeah. And to pass it along to your children. But I think once you start to think about it, even though we're seeing this real poor city of it in the public realm, you see it in people around you all the time. Sure. Like, and I don't mean that in a glib way. I mean in hospitals when you're completely desperate. You can see some of our medical staff working under absolute horrendous conditions, long hours,

completely exhausted, and there's those moments of like tenderness, which can blow you away. Public school teachers. Public school teachers, people who work with, um, people with disabilities, uh, aged care homes and like blood donors. I had a whole section on blood donors because the more I thought about it, the more it kind of amazes me that you can devote your life. And I spoke to a bunch of super donors and we're doing it for like 50 years and every two weeks and when they go on holidays and all around the US and stuff

when there are holidays, they go and have a stranger put a needle in their arm and ask them a bunch of intrusive questions and have their actual blood drawn out. And they don't know who it's going to. It could go to someone who votes in a way that they find completely abhorrent. It could go to a clown face. His fashion sense is dreadful. Who loves reality TV.

Who, I don't know, whatever. Whatever it is, you just define what a good person is. Could go to a complete jerk. But you know there's a human who has a need and they need to be able to walk or to live a little longer. And I find that actually incredibly profound. No, I read this article about someone who gave their kidney to a stranger.

And I was talking to my wife about that. I was like, I would love to do that. That would be amazing. And she was like, sure. But have you ever given blood before? And I was like, no. She was like, why don't you just start there? Start small.

And it is. It's a very small thing. I've done it ever since we had that conversation And it is, it's a very small thing. I've done it ever since we had that conversation. I've done it every two months. And it takes 30 minutes and it's an amazing thing. You feel literally your life force leaving your body and you have this sense that it's going into someone

who needs it at an incredibly vulnerable. And I've had it, I've had a lot of blood transfusions. And I remember my very first one going, I was so drained and exhausted. And if you've never had one before, you're like, oh wow, weird. And then I just was fading. I remember this nurse was leaning into me,

she was whispering into my ear and she was just talking to me about writing and all the different things. Like it was like we're in this little cocoon. She was so gentle and sweet and when it was coming through me, it was like I felt life running through my veins. And in a short period of time, you're actually stronger. It's kind of magical. It is. There's this little story, it goes viral on Facebook, and I guess before that it was probably in emails,

but it's about that, I almost cry every time I hear it, even though I know it's not real. It's about the little boy whose sister is sick, and the doctor tells him that she needs a kidney transplant or a liver transplant or whatever, and they said it's gonna hurt, it's gonna take a long time, but she really needs it.

And he says, okay. And they put him under, they do the operation, and then he wakes up and then he just says, so when do I die? No, that's so beautiful. You know? And the idea that you can do just a minor version of that that costs you nothing.

And yeah, the cost is like, you have to drink water after, you know, like how little it takes from you. It's almost giving blood almost feels like a problem they would have solved already. Like that there's not some synthetic chemical replacement, but no, like actually they need human beings on a regular basis to go to a place

and just put some of their blood in a bag in a bus. In the US, there are all of these buses that pull up and you go in the bus and you do it and then the bus drives away. And it's like guaranteed to save someone's life, right? And they have to like pay you with like gift cards in the US to get people to do it. Do you know what like?

I think you just get a little cookie here. In the US you get like a cookie or a gift card or something. But yeah, it's like you think about, I think everyone, especially men probably have some fantasy of saving someone's life. There's a shooting or someone falls into a river and you have to save them, right? And you go, what would I do if I was, but-

That's what you're doing. Yeah, they call this moral luck. Like would you ever be in a situation where you would be called to save someone from train tracks or something? And you probably won't be, but you're actually on a daily basis turning down the opportunity to do something like that. It's really good for introverts as well.

Yeah. People who don't really want to go out on committees and go out like glad-handing people, they just quietly can serve in that way. Like it's a really, it is a really beautiful form of altruism, I think. I just, I do, I mean, having spent like quite a lot of time in the medical system, I do think that that is where you can actually see so many acts of grace.

You've got people who are broken, bunged up, completely vulnerable, just a bunch of busted humans in hospital beds, right? It doesn't matter who you are, what you've done, nothing. That's what you are. You are down to your bones and your veins and your basic functions. And the way people will come in and care for you will kind of wipe down your body, will mop your brow, will give you a special hot blanket to be tucked in to try to just and try to give you hope, try to anticipate pain when they don't see it. and infighting threatened to tear the colony apart. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry's podcast American History Tellers.

We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, after their arrival, English colonists in Jamestown quickly established a fort, but their pursuit of gold and glory soon put them on a collision course with Virginia's native inhabitants and the powerful Chief of Chiefs Powhatan. Before long, violence, disease, and starvation would leave the colony teetering on the brink of disaster. Follow American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus.

Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of Sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing the Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bolder-est takers who brought them to life.

Like did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala. From Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans, discover the surprising stories of the most viral products. Plus, we guarantee that after listening, you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It's just the best idea yet. The American medical system is also the most wonderful embodiment of the idea of a melting

pot that you can imagine. Yes. Because it's a profession that tends to pay well and doesn't require a ton of education, like at the sort of nursing level. I mean, obviously I'm not saying they're not educated. I'm just saying it's accessible. And so, yeah, if you're a racist, don't ever go to a hospital.

Do you know what I mean? Like, because what you're forced to confront is just the full spectrum of the different types of people from every imaginable corner of the earth who now hold your life in their hands and how wonderful that actually is as a metaphor and an example of like what society truly is. Yeah. And it's not even, I agree with that.

It's exactly the same here. It's not even though just physically patching you up, like the way that they can accompany you or the quietest of gestures, or sometimes you have to break horrendous news to people or like there's just, it's a very raw and real place to be. And you'll often find people, patients who've had terrible news, worrying most of all about the people around them. You'll often find people, patients who've had terrible news worrying most of all about the people around them. You'll often have them looking at the doctors. So, um, cutting people slack when they can't get their frigging catheter in right.

Um, cause it always often takes so many goes after you've had big surgery. Yeah. So when I've sat in hospital beds or laying in hospital beds for long stretches of time, I've watched all of that around me. And I have found it has been one of the things that has kept me going. And yeah, to come back to Florence Nightingale, just I mean, Wellington described those soldiers as the scum of the earth, right? And here she is treating them as human beings, people worthy of saving, people who were, it was possible to save,

who shouldn't have been written off as lost causes. And you just think of the tangible impact of that work, both literally the lives saved and then the mechanisms and the systems that get set up. Like, I mean, just the profound impact that that has, it ripples through the entire world. Yeah. And that comes because she has the courage

to answer the call and to not let what other people think, hold her back. That's what the voice, the second time she hears the voice, it says, are you gonna let what other people think hold you back from my service? And she realized that's what she had been doing. She'd been letting her parents' opinions about what, you know, a well-to-do daughter of an aristocratic family should be doing hold her back from saving people from suffering and death.

And, you know, what an amazing way to spend your life. She also just hated the waste of time that was involved in like her- Sitting around, what am I supposed to do all day? Yeah, like that you just go to drawing room after drawing room, drop into people and sure, that's a very privileged existence in so many ways for those times.

But it was like, she burned to work. Yes. That woman, she burned with a desire to go and help people. One of the things in that book that I loved is, so on the one hand, her parents are idle and basically contribute nothing to society, but if you went back a generation or two, there'd been these sort of abolitionists ancestors

and activist ancestors. And so I also loved the idea of like sort of deciding, Seneca has this great line, he says, we can't choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we would like to be. And she basically chooses which side of the family tree she's gonna be descended from, you know? And so it doesn't really matter where you come from or what you did or what your parents did.

You have this ability to sort of choose whose footsteps you're gonna follow in. I love that idea. Yeah. So where do you see grace with stoicism? I mean, one of the things Mark Sturlus talks about a lot is this idea of revenge. And he says the best revenge is to not be like that.

This sort of pinultimate moment in his life. So he's ill and near death and his most trusted general basically sensing that the emperor was weak, names himself emperor. So he starts a palace coup and Marcus is not as sick as they thought and he recovers. And so now he's faced with this terrible dilemma. There can't be two emperors and this person has put everything into danger and turmoil. And so, I mean, we know what his predecessors would have done in this situation.

Hadrian comes to power and just liquidates, you know, and Marcus decides not to do that. He can't ignore it. He can't just let this happen. But he decides, he says, this is an opportunity. He says, we can teach future generations there's a way to even deal with civil wars, which I just think is this amazing sort of way of thinking about it. And they go to restore order. And ultimately the other general,

this guy named Davidius Cassius is struck down by an assassin and they bring Marcus Aurelius' head. And they think the emperor is gonna be happy and reward them. And he breaks down in tears because they've stolen from him the opportunity for clemency. And so he sends this message to the Senate and he says, not a single person is to be put to death

for this rebellion. He says, do not stain my reign in blood, let it never happen. And just this idea, when Marcus really says the obstacle is the way, people have taken that, because that's how I wrote the first book, they've taken the obstacles away to mean,

here's how you get ahead in business. Here's how you deal with these little disadvantages. You turn them into springboards. And that is part of it. But that famous passage in meditations, where he says, you know, the impediment to action advances, action what stands in the way becomes way.

He's talking about other people. He's talking about frustrating, obnoxious, dishonest, evil people. He's saying that, he says, bad people are an opportunity to practice virtue. And so I think to me, grace is only possible if there is first the thing you don't want to happen. You know, like if everyone was wonderful to each other

and everything went perfectly, there would be no opportunity for grace. And so I think stoicism would say that these things that you don't want to happen, these things that shouldn't happen, these things that are unfair to happen, these awful, dark, terrible things that human beings do to each other, the only good thing about them is who we can be in response to them. If we don't let them destroy our character and make us like the people that did the thing. So it comes down to choices, as you're saying.

I think it's interesting, there's a man here, Danny Abdullah, he had three of his children and one of his nieces were out walking at night. And there was a driver who was intoxicated, I think drunk as well, who they were, these kids were just went out to, they were all a bunch of primary school age kids. They went out to get an ice cream and this driver ran him over and killed them all. And they decided quite quickly to forgive that guy.

There's absolutely no reason to do that. They'd been an incident before, you know, not long before in the Western suburbs of Sydney where a woman was dropping her kids at school and she leaned down to get a water bottle and then got in the car and got the accelerator brake confused and went into the kindergarten and killed two children. And she was absolutely like just bereft and yet got a lot of attack from the school community. And there's a, this footage of one of the parents, one of the children who was killed and they're in the hearse and his little green coffin is in the back and the father has set up the camera on the, on the dashboard and is saying, I don't want any hostility to this woman.

She's a widow. She's got all these kids on her own. She's got kids at the school. They've got developmental disabilities. I want you to all know we forgive her." And it was such a touching thing. And especially because we know that when the trial then came, the daughter testified and says, my mother wishes every day it was her that had gone. She had to live with this incredible Sure. But when we look at this, the Abdullah family, it wasn't, you know, it was like a guy that was being completely reckless and was fully responsible for what happened.

But Danny, the father, says he has to get up every morning and make that decision. Like, so you don't just go, OK, we're all good now. You're fine. Right. Still something that will torture you and you'll wrestle with, but you have to keep choosing

to be the person that will forgive. Well, and it's so easy to be glib about it, but I think the idea is like, does this person also get to steal your life from you? Exactly. And that so it should say, you don't control this horrendous tragedy that happened. You have no say over that,

but you have some say over who you are today. And I like the idea of seeing it as this thing you do day to day, that there's no magical insight or meditation or psychedelic you can take that can strip you from the anger and the grief and the pain that you feel. But you can- I want some if you find it though.

Yeah, but you can choose in individual moments to have the moment or not have the moment. That's the one part we control. Yeah, exactly. Well, this was amazing, thank you. It was so good to talk to you. I like one of my favorite people to talk to. Well, I love your books.

And so they're very popular in our bookstore. Are they? Yeah. Oh, good. Yeah, I'll have to carry the new they're very popular in our bookstore. So, yeah. Are they? Oh good. Yeah, I'll have to carry the new one. It's out this fall, right? It's out just a month before the election.

October 8th. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

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