The Daily Stoic - Live from the Birthplace of Stoicism | Ryan Holiday and Donald Robertson (in Greece)

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Follow along as Ryan visits the birthplace of Stoicism in Athens—where Zeno once taught beneath the legendary Stoa Poikile. Joined by writer and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist Donald Robertson, the two tour the ancient ruins, explore the deep roots of Stoic philosophy, talk about the surreal experience of standing where it all began, and share updates on their latest writing projects.Donald is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy.📚 Grab copies of Donald’s books, How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World, Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor and How To Think Like A Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius from The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎥 Watch Donald Robertson’s last time on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axnl-E1zc5U&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tDSubstackX: @donjrobertsonIG: @donaldjrobertson📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are

and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am recording outside on a roof just under the shadow of the Acropolis, which is beautifully lit up behind me, because I made it, I did it. I had to finish the, what are called the second pass pages. That's more or less the last time I will see Wisdom Takes Work. That's the new book, the fourth book

in the Wisdom series before. It goes to the printers. I finished it literally as we were taxiing on our plane out of Austin. I finished up doing my last edits to the afterward of that book. I might have a few things here, there that I get to tweak. And then when I sit down and record the audio book,

I might do some stuff, but that probably won't even make it into the first printing. Cause that series, which I've been working on for the last six years, is almost finally done. I am almost seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. By the way, if you want those pages that I was editing, you can get them if you preorder, I think it's five copies of Wisdom Takes Work. So if you wanted to give them out to people in your office, it's a cool little thing.

You can grab all that at dailystic.com slash pre-order. We will almost certainly run out of those pages and almost certainly run out of signed numbered first editions. And you can do all that at dailystoic.com slash pre-order. But my point was, I had to finish those so I could do this family trip. My son is obsessed with Greek history,

as I've talked about, and Greek myths. And so we flew to Athens. We just arrived. And we're staying in a beautiful Airbnb, as I said, right at the foot of the Acropolis. And we've been going around. We went to the Acropolis yesterday. We did a nighttime tour of the Acropolis tonight, watched the sunset over it. And then I walked over to the painted porch today.

That's the foundation of Stoesund. That's where it started. That's where Zeno who comes up with the four virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. This is where it happened. And you know who I bumped into there? Well, not bumped into, because we scheduled it. I said, hey, I know you're in town.

Do you want to get together? And he said, yeah, I do. Donald Robertson is here. He spends a good chunk of his time in Athens. Usually he spends the win together?" And he said, yeah, I do. Donald Robertson is here. He spends a good chunk of his time in Athens. Usually he spends the winters here, he said, because he lives in Quebec and it's a smidge cold. But he is here. And so we linked up and it was just incredible.

He and I sort of looking out at the painted porch, you'll hear some of this at the beginning. I just pulled out my phone and hit record on voice mode because I didn't want to miss it. So it's not the greatest of quality, but I think it's not the greatest of quality, but I think it's a really good conversation. They're actually digging today at the painted porch, right?

They were excavating there. He told me just a couple of years ago, shops were built out over it and American University bought the shops, destroyed them and has been digging down. And he pointed out what he thinks are the steps, the steps that Zeno himself would have walked up. Coincidentally, there is a bookstore

on the other side of the square. It was just a lovely experience. We had a nice lunch, chatted, talked stoicism, talked books, talked Athens, talked publishing, talked life, bunch of amazing things. And then he went his way. My wife texted me and said, hey, the kids are having a meltdown.

They were in the National Botanical Gardens. They wanted to see the turtles again. And then lost it on the way back. So I had to go link up with them and we got some food in them. Then tonight, as I was saying, we went back up to the Acropolis. And I was telling my son, we're standing up at the top of the Acropolis. And I show him, hey, look, way down there, that's the Painted Porch.

And St. Paul, the Christian saints, he comes and visits Athens, and he links up with the Stoics at the Stoa, at the Painted Porch, and then they take him up to this rock, which we then came down and watched the sunset at. And St. Paul gave one of his most famous sermons there. And then later, as I've told this story before, it's Seneca's brother who lets him go when he's arrested by the Romans. Like, all this stuff

happened here. All this stuff happened here. It's been an amazing trip. And I wasn't planning on recording or doing any of that kind of stuff while I'm here. This just happened. That's why I was frantically trying to finish those passes as I was gonna take some time off. Well, I feel like I'm honoring that. I just got to have lunch with an awesome person. And if you ever wanted to have lunch with me

and talk philosophy, well, this is a way for you to be a fly on the wall for that. Donald's books are amazing if you haven't read How to Think Like a Roman Emperor or How to Think Like Socrates, or his book, Mark Sturlus, The Stoic Emperor, and his biography of Mark Sturlus. Those are all three absolutely incredible books. We have the same agent, Steve Hanselman. I am a big fan of Donald Robertson.

He's a great guy, a great steward of Stoicism. He told me he's taking some students out to see Plato's Academy tomorrow, so that's pretty cool. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was a treat. One of the things I love when you have friends all over the world is that when you travel, you get to, hey, who do I know in this city? Who can I link up with?

And so this was an unexpected little treat that I now get to bring you. I'm gonna split this up into two parts because it was a pretty long lunch. And I have some more to say about this trip. But in the meantime, here is me talking with the one and only Donald Robertson. Again, apologies for some of the audio,

but I think it's good enough. Anyways, follow Donal, listen to this episode. I'll talk to you soon for part two. So we think that's the left-hand side of the Stoa Poickaly, and see how it extends, see that little ridge with the bushes on it and stuff. So it's just the end of it that's exposed at the moment. It is crazy to walk through the modern Nagora.

It reminds me of people, like whatever you visited Times Square as a kid, that's your version of it. And anything newer is trashy, but it was always trashy. Do you know what I mean? And so it's like you're walking through and it's souvenir shops and tchotchkes and whatever. They didn't keep people's stock shops on and stuff. You know, they didn't, people still shopped and stuff

cause they never even thought the ruins were that much You may notice, like they built in like 1870 or something. They built a railroad track through the middle of the Yeah, what they must have had to destroy. Cause they think of that as the Agora archeological site but the railway line actually cuts through the middle of the ancient Agora. Imagine that, imagine going,

let's just build a railway line here, no cares. Think of this stuff they had to toss aside that was getting in their way as they were doing it. I'm not sure why they couldn't have just built it a little bit over. I know. It seems really weird. What, an Antoninus restored it somewhat, right?

I was reading a plaque over there, yeah. Maybe. Were they a gold rock? Oh yeah, possibly, I didn't know about that. Maybe possibly, I don't know. I mean, you'll see Hadrian's name everywhere. Right, yeah, here's the train just running through. Yeah, going through the middle of the area.

And there's probably still stuff under it even now. Oh yeah, and well, I mean, everywhere in Athens, pretty much there's stuff under houses and buildings. And the worst thing, they were telling me when they built these houses they just poured concrete into the ruins. So a lot of the archaeological relics are encased in concrete. And they have to like, the biggest problem is just chipping all the concrete off it. They're totally unnecessarily, it was kind of just poured into the ruins. Have they found anything interesting yet?

Do you know? They may have. I mean, if you were here, maybe another time, if you come back and hook you up with the manager of the American school, and he took me down once and showed me the laboratory where they took the stuff and the research and the things that they found. So I mean, when you speak to Greek academics

and people that work in the institutions here, they really give you the scoop on stuff like that. Like that you wouldn't even be reading about in journals and things like that yet. But yeah, they would probably know that. I don't know of anything specific that they said. By that it was funny, I ran this morning down to where Plato's Academy was.

And like, so- Oh did you? Did you go through some sketchy areas? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. But Academy was. And like so... We should go through some sketchy areas. Yeah a little bit. But it was interesting, like they just put up a sign near my house commemorating the house of Texas's first female engineer. Right. And it's a huge sign and you're like okay so obviously this lady broke through some glass ceilings to become a first female engineer. She's from Plato. It's much bigger than the sign for Plato's Academy, which isn't even like an archaeological site. Just the blase-ness of it made me just

like, yeah, this is where it was. When I first came here, it kind of really amazed me. Well, when I first came, we were running, we ran a Stoicum conference here, and I was kind of organizing other events and stuff. And I thought, wow, the first thought that came into my mind is it'd be cool to run a conference here. So then I started looking into it, and I was kind of organizing other events and stuff and I thought wow The first thought that came into my mind is it'd be cool to run a conference here So I started looking into it and I was like there's nowhere that you could do there are no hotels here There's no infrastructure. There's no event space. I can't be the only person Yeah, that thinks it would be really cool to attend the conference at the original location of Tytles Academy Yeah, that seems like a no-brainer brainer. You'd be able to market it internationally.

And everybody wants to come to Greek. They didn't even have a picture of, here's what it looked like. They model it out. It was just like, oh yeah, we think it was here. It's kind of like this. It's a little bit of a Greek thing, or Greek political thing.

You'll find a look a lot. There are reasons in every country why things the way they do so Long story short it becomes a little bit of a political football and then it can I ends up just in limbo? Yeah, basically that's a short and it's also probably a surplus of riches where it's like you got to pick what your This is too much. There are too many ruins. So you maybe notice that some of the ruins are just completely exposed. And people even graffiti them or just sit on them and crack a beer open. Which would be unthinkable in other countries. Right, because it would be their only thing.

It's detected. Yeah. Like St. Paul gave a sermon up there. Yeah. When he spoke to some stoics. Yeah, well, there's a sign over there that says that St. Paul may have spoken at the Painted Porch. I emailed Steve about it and he said it's not confirmed. Yeah.

There's kind of a lot of things that go under the radar a bit because they don't... most tourists aren't interested in it bit because they don't, most tourists aren't interested in it so they don't really highlight it. Yeah, it said their discussions likely took place around the Stoic Oculate or the Painted Colonnade as the seat of Stoicism. In fact, it was the Stoic Philosophers who led him up there to where he gave his famous speech. Or they think the Stoics led him from the Stoic Oculate up to the Archaeological Archives.

Yeah. Okay. It doesn't say that in the Bible, it just says he... I mean, that makes sense that he would have met them at their school, right? We're also told things that make it sound like Aristo had loads of followers and Clantres didn't have very many. So at one point, the majority of Stoics were following this kind of renegade, re-growing school. Yeah, it's fascinating. I talk about him in the new book a little bit

because he's the antithesis of Zeno's idea of listening more than you talk. Like I think there's this interesting, it's like Cleanthes is the, it's a tortoise and hare situation. One is flashy and brilliant, but obnoxious. The other is quiet and plotting and not that interesting. But it's ultimately the

anthes who takes it over and who knows where it would have ended up had it gone the other way. So do you think they owned the porch? Like how does real estate work? Or they're just gathering there? They just gathered. There was a public building that they just hung out. There would have been maybe even vendors on it. There was a shrine inside. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around like, yeah, they're just kind of hanging around in this public building, but then you get around to the time of the Roman stoics and the amount of wealth that these guys have is staggering. Yeah. Like we're going, we're going to see a concert tomorrow night at the Herodian. You know the Foo Fighters played there? I did, but the idea that Marcus's You know the Foo Fighters played there? I did, but the idea that Marcus' rhetoric teacher just built that and it's still here

2000 years later, you can still take it. Like just one person, I mean it's be like, if you're like, oh yeah, he built the Super Dome. You know what it's like? How does one person just building a theater that seats thousands of people just this- He meets this super rich on Foo his day and the Athenians kind of hated him. Yeah right. But yeah he definitely left his mark on a bunch of things. He's kind of the most famous Athenian Roman right? Yeah he's like he was the

greatest or maybe the second greatest sophist of the Roman imperial period. He's like also like a really unlikely friend for Marcus to have. Yeah. Well it sounds like maybe there was some... Well you notice he doesn't mention him in the beginning of the meditation. Yeah. But what's kind of interesting as well as he says, he learned a lot from a childhood tutor who was probably a slave. He doesn't mention his name. So some kind of slave tutor whose name he doesn't know taught him a lot about morality. It didn't take anything from the road he's asking. That would have been really scathing in Roman eyes if people had

read that. Well, it is interesting to think with that. It's like, you know when you read the acknowledgments on a book, you're only seeing the people that they're thanking, right? But unless you really know them in the behind the scenes of how the things, you're not seeing like, okay, they didn't mention their publicist here, or they mentioned one of the editors of the book, but not the editor's boss. There's all these politics involved. They think their third grade teacher, they think all their teachers except their fourth grade teacher. So unless you know what you can't notice what's not there.

And so it is interesting to think. I think Romans are more sensitive to that actually, like than we are, like they would pick up on that more. Sure. But the other one that's not in it, the two main ones that are in there are Hadrian. You pointed out to me how conspicuous the Hadrian thing is in there. That fact appears basically nowhere in meditations. I think he mentions them very briefly,

but only as like an example of somebody who is very powerful and has no dead. Yes. So this is not really much to say about it. Let me say, no, yeah, like he's. But it is weird, on the stove over there, they have an Antoninus statue and a Hadrian statue, and you just think like how remarkable it is that this guy chooses this guy choose this guy just

how strange that is. That shapes everything. Totally. So why do you live here? You live here part of the year? What do you do? Yeah like I stayed here during the pandemic for about a year and I got my residence cards for Greece. Yeah. And then I came back I was planning on spending about three or four months each year. But then we had a baby. Oh, congrats. Thanks. Hello.

He's one and a half now. Oh, wow. Yeah. So. Born where? He was born in Quebec. OK. In Montreal.

Guess he's going to have to speak French. And we don't. So we might have to learn French to speak to him. There's a Nate Bargetzi joke where he talks about how he and his wife lived in New York, but they went home to Nashville to have their baby because they didn't want their kid to grow up thinking he was better than them. And how much time do you spend here?

I know it varies, but like last year I was here for like probably three or four months. I came twice. It seems to be getting a bit more expensive for the flights and stuff. I guess it depends what time of year I'm twice. It's just been getting a bit more expensive for the flights and stuff. I guess it depends what time of year I'm coming. But ideally the plan logically would be that we come here in the winter to avoid being in Quebec in the winter. Yes.

Because it's pretty brutal. What are the winters like in Greece? Like autumn, like pretty. It snows once every five or 10 years or something. Like if they have snow in the Acropolis it's like a big event. Yeah sure I mean I bet it's gorgeous. It's like once a decade or something you have snow. So it really just feels like you can walk around. I remember one winter I was like I'm just walking around without a jacket or anything really. Yeah well there is

that story about Cleante's that he's walking around and then the wind blows open his cloak Yeah, he has nothing on underneath it and people are clapping at his display of strength But then when you actually kind of look at the weather, it's not that impressive. It's like it's not like in Quebec or something the sad thing about Diogenes embracing a statue in the winter as well and like that wouldn't be Unless it was unusually cold that year. I know. Right, you decide to get rid of all your possessions

and I'm gonna live on the street or whatever, but then you choose Santa Monica, California. It's not quite the same as, you know, Boston. Yeah, definitely it's a lot about that front. Being home once in ancient piece of art. Well, also, yeah, also thinking like, what is the palace of the richest Greek look like? Their mattress is probably not that comfortable.

Obviously, some of them, there were all sorts of wonderful luxuries, but at the same time, as technology and culture has evolved, the differences between the comforts of the lowest and the highest, the Gulf widens. Yeah, and most people would have slight and pretty basic houses. Yeah.

So it wouldn't have been that much difference. That's what I mean. Like the difference between, you know, private jet and walking is enormous. The difference between walking and riding in a wagon or a litter is not that much. It's nice to come here and you know a lot of processes. I've spent my entire life writing about ancient priests and never actually come here. Yeah this is my first time. I've been to Rome and all over Italy but I've never actually been here. Well there's a funny thing, what's the guy's name?

Oh you know Victor Davis Hanson? He's a military scholar. His political views are nonsense and he's more of a pundit than a historian. But he wrote this book called The Western Way of War, which is about sort of a lot of our theories of Greek history and stuff. And he sort of, he goes to one museum and he has them put on a, he puts on a helmet, right?

And then he realizes there's no ear holes in the helmet. And so one of his things is like, our understanding of these speeches that the generals gave. He says, just think about thousands of people with shields and swords. Like just, he's like, just think of the clatter and the noise. You wouldn't have been able to hear anything.

So these speeches either had to be written down and passed out, or there was one speech that he gave to 10 lieutenants who maybe gave the rest of it. So that one was interesting. And then the other one he talks about in the Peloponnesian War, you know, it's like the Spartans laid waste to the olive fields or whatever. And he goes like, he goes and he's like, I'm gonna destroy one olive tree. And he goes and he tries, it's like impossible to uproot one of these trees,

because it's not like they would have had tanks and you can't light them on fire very easily. The point is he just actually went and- It's harder than it sounds. Yes, and so you think about how this myth has been passed down for generations. When was the last time somebody had any direct knowledge of how hard it would have been to do one of those things?

And it's a really interesting sort of- It does change, because it's also like, the Athenians seem quite tolerant of the fact. It's like they've got mixed feelings about it, but it may be that, you know, like they weren't doing as much damage. Yes, his point is that it's much more a show of force. We come over here and do this,

you come over here and do this. The other thing I learned is that they've got replicates right here. You can actually go on it. Where? The Greek Navy will own it. You can pick it for events and stuff like that. They have it down at Piraeus at the harbor. We went and we walked up and down the deck. They said it was too Piraeus at the harbour and we went and we walked up

and down the deck. They said it was too windy to go out the harbour in it. And they were telling us like you can't see anything unless you're standing at the bay. Like a handful of guys on the deck, but most of them are rowing underneath. If you're rowing you can't see anything. So like you'd be in a battle maybe with 150, 200 triremes on the ocean and all these guys are like, I've no idea what's going on around me. I'm just hearing what they're shouting. Yeah, the terror and the lack of visibility

and you're just getting hit and then there's smoke and blood and oh. We saw that Madea play on the rooftop over here. It's over here, like Webster University owns a building and they do a play on it. So we took my son to see, they did like some trumps of the building and they do a play on it. So we took my son to see, they did like some trumps of the Odyssey and it was cool.

But they did it in the traditional Greek masks. And they were explaining that the reason that they do it in the masks is that like some of these theaters fit like 15,000 people. So you're like, oh, okay, like you couldn't have seen the faces. So the mask was a way so you knew who the characters were and you go, oh yeah, these are like technical problems that they're having to solve and the solutions

are pretty good. And then you see these men playing an old lady like because they did part of the women and it's a big beefy dude. It's obviously a dude, but the mask is so striking how quickly you can suspend disbelief. But anyways, it's just thinking it's obviously a dude. But the mask is so striking, how quickly you can suspend disbelief. But anyways, it's just thinking it's like, we're doing the same play now, but it's about the actor in the face because the camera makes the face an important part of it. Instead, it was like,

let me just show you who I am. Then, so you realize what a stronger emphasis it puts on the dialogue. Then I guess the mass also help amplify the voice. Yeah, everything suddenly makes more sense. Yes. Then there's so many things where like, even today we don't understand why they did things in

this weird way that there was probably a reason for it. Yes. Well, have you ever heard that expression that tradition is usually a solution to a problem we've forgotten about? And yeah, there's all these traditions. You don't actually understand how or why they did it a certain way, but it traces back. It's like 2000 years from now they're like, you know, why is a TV show 23 minutes? And it's like, well, they split it up in the half hours and then they needed seven minutes for commercials.

You know, like there's just all these things that you can, totally. Even with books, like they like them a certain length because that's what they feel like they can charge for them. ["The Last Supper"] Have you read Irene Bulejo's book, Papyrus? Oh, you gave me a copy of her book. I haven't read it yet. Incredible.

One of the things she's saying is that, so the boxes they would store the scrolls in, you could store like seven scrolls in. And she's like, it's probably not a coincidence that a lot of the authors, we have seven books from. And so she's like, what are the chances that they only wrote the number that fit in the box? It's there's probably more just one of the boxes was just like, there was, yeah, maybe it was 10 books, but the half box got destroyed. Do you know why Los Angeles, like Athens, Los Angeles is a big port city, but it's nowhere near the port. Do you know why that is?

So the Spanish, which shuttled Los Angeles, were tired of being raided by the English and the pirates in the Caribbean. So the Spanish had a law that said all new settlements had to be at least 15 miles from the coast. And so the city of Los Angeles is not near the ocean for that reason. And so you know you're kind of like wait why is why is LA so far from the beach? You know or why is it so far from Long Beach which is a big you know great port? And it so far from Long Beach, which is a big, you know, great port? And it's like, oh, it's because pirates and some other part of the Spanish Empire were

a problem, and that settles down to this Western American settlement, and you just don't think about it that way. Yeah, often things are shaped in, you know, weird ways, like, oh, definitely. So what's the next book? I want to write one about anger. Oh. Because I felt like I was turning into something like, um, Yale wanted me to write another biography and I kind of thought, not really a biographer though, or a classicist. You know, I kind of stumbled into doing that a bit.

I thought, do you make books more about psychotherapy? Like, that's my original thingy. More personal development than history. Yeah, more about psychology and stuff really. Right. I mean, I can draw on the classics, but I kind of wanted to kind of drag it a little bit more back in that direction. And for a long time, I felt like anger is somewhat neglected.

Psychological issue. There's a lot, there's tons of research on anything like that. Anger is somewhat neglected, psychological issue. There's tons of research on anything like that. There's loads of research on anger, but it's not really disseminated. It's also the problem, it's one of the most common problems that people have. Nobody's like, I wish I was angrier.

Yeah, like, our faces through social media and politics. In a sense, politics is all about manipulating anger, exploiting it. And yet we know... That's what demagogues do. Yeah. Here or in America, 2500 years later. There's so much that we know about it from psychological research that should influence the way that we think about what's going on in politics and the media, but we don't. I tell you, my favourite example is whenever, just by chance, because I've spoken about this a lot, whenever I talk to dudes that are in special forces and I mention anger, they always say they think anger is a good thing. Yeah. And it's good to be able

to channel it. And that doesn't make that much sense from a psychological perspective, because even if you channel anger, you're still going to have the cognitive biases and stuff to go along with it. So I'll usually have a bit of a back and forth with them and say that there's some problems with anger, but they'll go, no, no, no, they'll dig their heels out and say, you know, it's really important to be angry. It can save your life in a difficult situation. And then I'll say, do you know there's a ton of research that shows even low intensity anger causes people to underestimate risk.

And it's well established that people that underestimate risk and are angry behave more recklessly, like injure themselves more often, expose themselves to more danger, and other people around them. And when you frame it like that, you can see the kind of cogs turning, and they're like, oh yeah, if the guys fighting

alongside me were exposing me to danger because they were angry, that would be like a bad thing. But they've never thought about it from that perspective. Well, I was talking to Brad Stevens, he was the coach of the Boston Celtics, now he's the GM. And I was talking to him about anger because I was like, you know, you often see the anger, like the image of the coach getting really upset over a bad call. And I was like, you know, you're rallying the troops, you know, you're getting people

excited, you're sending a message to the ref and he's like, the reason I don't do that is you said, I'm not really that into the business of giving points to my opponent. Yeah. The point being that a technical foul in basketball costs you a point, right? So when you sort of think about it, it's interesting, it's like if you were trying to screw up your opponent, if anger was a good motivator, you would spend a lot of time trying not to make the athlete you were against angry. That's kind of undoubtedly your opponents and be assured of it.

In fact, you know that getting inside your opponent's head and getting them angry makes them worse. And then we fool ourselves and go, oh, but when I'm angry, it's a good motivator. Yeah. There's definitely a bias in that regard. Nobody thinks that other people's anger is unhealthy. Same thing with ego. We can see how ego holds other people back very clearly. And then with us, it's not there. I think that's a good call for you because I think some people have made this mistake

writing about stoicism. Obviously, the people who want to read biographies about the stoics and are really interested in stoicism itself, it's a big group, your books have sold really well. But there are way more people that have an anger problem than people who are into Stoicism and want to know what the Stoics have to say about anger. And so like I went, when I was going to do the Daily Gather, my parenting book, the publisher was like, I think it should be called The Stoic Parent. And it was like, okay, here's the circle

of all the people who are parents, and then here's the much smaller circle of people who are parents and interested in stoicism. And so that's how I thought with my books, is that my books are influenced by stoicism and have stoicism in them, with the exception of the daily stoic, but that's a slightly different story,

is here's what the stoics can teach you about solutions to this problem. But they're precisely, they're fundamentally about this problem or this thing that people are struggling with, whether it's overcoming obstacles or ego or stillness or whatever. It's about the thing, not stoicism on the thing.

Yeah, I think there's things that we can do. We should be reaching our wider audience and introducing stoicism to them, not just focusing the people that are already into Stoicism. Yes. 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. You