The Daily Stoic - Meditations Isn’t Just for Philosophers

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

What do an A-list actor, a four-star Navy admiral, and a world-famous magician have in common? Meditations by Marcus Aurelius has profoundly shaped each of their lives—proof that a Roman emperor’s private reflections still resonate 2,000 years later.In today’s episode, Ryan speaks with actor Patrick Dempsey, director Francis Ford Coppola, Professor Jennifer Baker, magician Derren Brown, bestselling author Donald Robertson, Admiral William McRaven, and voice actor/musician Troy Baker about their personal connections to Meditations.🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations.Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th!Get all our Meditations offering and learn more at our official Meditations Collection at dailystoic.com/meditations todayListen to the full episodes 👇Patrick Dempsey: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Francis Ford Coppola: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTubeJennifer Baker: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTubeDerren Brown: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTubeDonald Robertson: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTubeAdmiral Bill McRaven: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Troy Baker: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube🎙️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Daily Stoke early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery's Business Movers. In our latest series, young British entrepreneur Richard Branson launches a music retail store, but he ends up behind bars when authorities discover he's not paying taxes, forcing Richard to rethink his rule-breaking approach to business. Listen to Business Movers, Virgin Territory on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Stoic Podcast. I didn't know it at the time. I don't think that's what we think about, but when you pick up a book, especially a really old book,

you're sure part of an unending chain or a long standing chain of people that brought you to that book, right? Somebody read it who told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told somebody, right? Somebody read it, who told someone else, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, and here you are, right? I got recommended meditations by someone

who in turn got recommended it by someone who in turn got recommended it by someone. Back, back, back to Mark Shreelis writing it after Rusticus passed him his copy of Epictetus from his own library, right? after Rusticus passed him his copy of Epictetus from his own library, right? This is the beauty of books. They spread primarily by word of mouth and it's primarily one person saying to another person,

like this worked for me, maybe it'll do something for you. And over the years on the Daily Stoic podcast, I've asked a lot of people, like, so how did you hear about the Stoics? Right? How did you hear about meditations? Or I'm sort of reaching back, oh, that reminds me of this quote from meditations.

And then they tell me how they heard about Marcus Aurelius for the first time. I just, I love those origin stories. Like, how did you come to this thing? What was your moment, right? You know, everyone sort of has their road to Damascus moment where it hits them, where they get it. Maybe it was an introduction,

or maybe it was many years later, the ideas, it's like, oh, that's what the Stoics were talking about. And as it happens, Paul studies Stoicism in Tarsus. He's known as Saul of Tarsus for that reason because that's where Stoic school was based at that time. Which brings me to today's episode. I wanted to talk to a bunch of different folks about their relationship with meditations and how they came to it, how it changed them, what they took out of it. And it's a pretty, I wouldn't say it's a murderer's row, but it is a pretty impressive list, pretty diverse list,

different people, different walks of life about how stoicism impacted them, what they took from it. We're gonna hear from Francis Ford Coppola, Patrick Dempsey, Professor Jennifer Baker, the magician Darren Brown, one of my favorite writers, Donald Robertson, Admiral McRaven, Troy Baker. These are sections from some of my favorite conversations

about meditations, what it means to them, what they took out of it. And the reason we're doing this is we're sort of doing Marcus Relius month here in April, because 1905 years ago, this month, Marcus Relius was born, the philosopher king came into existence. Although obviously he didn't, right?

Because he was not fully formed. He wasn't even the kid who had been introduced to stoicism yet. But that's the theme we're doing. The reason we're doing is we put together this cool sort of book club about how to read Mark Sturris' Meditations. We're gonna be doing a Q&A about it on April 26th.

We'd love to have you. You can check that out. Plus I just did a forward for the new Gregory Hayes translation of Meditations, as well as the paperback, and then we have our Leatherbound edition. So we're kind of just doing a Mark Cirillis themed month. You can check out all that stuff

at dailystoic.com slash meditations. But if you have yet to dive in this book, maybe these origin stories will help you get started slash serious there. And then I hope you will join us in the how to read Mark's really is his meditations club guide course, whatever you want to call it. But it's going to be awesome. You can check all that out at daily stoic dot com slash meditations. Or if you are a member of Daily Stoic Life, you can get this

and all your other stuff for free. Let's get after it. How would the stoics approach something like that go either going into battle or you're going into competition in some way Well, we could imagine that that's what Mark Cerrillo's is doing in meditations, right? Like this is what's weird about meditations is that it's not a book for the reader It's a book for the writer. Right. Like he was writing it.

He was getting his thoughts out on paper. Yeah, and we know for a fact that he wrote a significant chunks of it while leading the Roman army. So he's, you know, maybe it's the morning before battle, maybe it's the evening afterwards, and he's just sort of sitting in this tent, writing things down. And so I think journaling is a big part.

Like if you can take, you've got these thoughts that are just kind of pinging around in your head, the act of writing them down creates even just a few feet of distance, which is really powerful. So I think journaling would be a way the stoics would do that. I'm a big believer in walks.

Like when I'm sort of feeling that, like I have to walk, like I pace before I give talks. Like when they're like, oh, will you just sit in the audience and then we'll call you up when it's your turn? I'm like, no, I have to walk, like I pace before I give talks. Like when they're like, oh, will you just sit in the audience and then we'll call you up when it's your turn? I'm like, no, I have to be pacing nervously in the back for like the next 30 minutes. And I try to listen to music. I have a similar thing to what you're talking about,

which are like, what are a few like sort of mantras or just reminders that are really clarifying and sort of allow you to lock into the thing in front of you. It's funny to think how timeless that, that I have to go do this thing in public or I have to go do this thing that's dangerous. I have to go do this thing I don't want to do. And how do I calm down this part of my mind that's racing so I can be totally present and clear? How do you take so I can be totally present and clear. How do you take something from what you're feeling and use it as a,

because I think people think of stoicism as, by definition, the act of either never having felt the emotion to begin with, or stuffing it down and suppressing it. Right, well, when I first came across the book, I was in Rome. I was doing a movie called Devil's, a financial book, and I was walking around and I was like,

you know, I hear so much about this meditation, Marcus Aurelius, I'm here in Rome, and I'm starting to and I was like, you know, I hear so much about this meditation, Marcus Aurelius, I'm here in Rome, and I'm starting to read them like, well, I get stoic, you just don't feel anything, you're not supposed to allow any emotion to come up, and then suddenly you're getting into it, and you're like, oh, that's not it at all. I'm totally misunderstood.

So I don't think a lot of people understand what stoicism is. And I think that's what's so great about your work is you have distilled it down into a way that is applicable today to using it today. For the sake of what we're doing, what is Stoicism and what does it really mean? Well, it's a philosophy.

It originates in ancient Greece. It makes its way to Rome. And it's this way of sort of living and being. It's not about emotionlessness, I would say, but it is about, I think, being less emotional about things that you don't control. So the idea is like, hey, how do I focus on what I'm gonna do about this

or how I'm gonna respond to this as opposed to spending a lot of time lamenting that it's not the way that I want it to be, right? So one of the early passages in Mark's Meditations, the most powerful man in the world, he's writing this, he writes this great little riff on how he's like, the people you meet today are gonna be annoying and obnoxious and dishonest

and frustrating and all these things. And he's basically going like, it's on you if this surprises you. And then he's like, your job is to not be implicated in this. Basically your job is to not let annoying people make you an asshole and that your job is to not be implicated in this, basically your job is to not let annoying people make you an asshole and that your job is to work with them. And so it's this really interesting way of thinking about philosophy, not as like these big abstract texts

or these sort of singular books, but instead kind of this process of how we take what we all feel and have always felt and you kind of turn it around and you process it and then you go about your life. And you think about Marcus, he can do whatever he wants but he realizes like, if I'm not in command of myself it doesn't matter how powerful I am, this isn't gonna go very well.

And so that's kind of what to me stoicism is is this command of one's self. That doesn't mean that you're an emotionless robot, but it does mean that you're not ruled by, they would say you're not ruled by your passions, which would mean your urges, jealousy, anger, fear, et cetera. You're a person who's like, do I really wanna do that? Am I gonna regret doing that?

What's the best way to respond to this situation? That's what the philosophy is and has been for now. Right. Thousands of years. So I'm in Rome, I'm shooting in Italy. Total chaos when you shoot there, right? We're first weekend, I had a little bit of time and now I'm getting into your books, right?

And also I'm dyslexic, right? So reading for me is painful. So all the audio books now are fantastic because if you're jet lagged, I'm gonna put it on, and I have my storytelling, and you start to go, okay, I'm gonna digest this, and then I go back to the book, and then I'll start to go, I wanna focus on this chapter, and I wanna really look at it, I'm gonna underline it

and do the technique that you have with your cards, right? So that's reverse engineering. And I'm in this situation on this production, and that's driving me crazy. I'm going, I'm going to lose my temper. Like if you lose your temper, then you lose control and then you lose respect. So I kept returning back to that and I go, this is going to be my challenge. This is my obstacle through this entire production is to keep in control of my emotions and to kindly direct the energy and create the culture.

And I'd come home and my head would be splitting because I was just holding so much in to stay calm. But as the shoot went on, everything started changing. And vibrationally, probably I started changing too, where I was a lot more cool about it and like, okay, it's all right, we got it. Guys, let's stop the take. You can't talk right now, okay?

I know we're all hungry. I know we're well past lunch, but let's just get this one take and we'll get it. And then you kind of get back into it. And it was really fascinating to see in Rome of all places, this thing started to come up for me. I think it's fitting. I mean, there's no way that Marcus Realist

does not have an anger problem. Like he talks about temper and losing your cool and your emotions too much for his private journal, if that's not something he's actively struggling with. Like my reading of it over and over again is like, the reason he doesn't say like jokes are funny, or sex feels good, is he doesn't need a reminder of that. Like he's got that covered.

The book is him really trying to remind himself of what he keeps forgetting. There's an interesting passage where he's talking about, he's like, you know, it's not manly to yell at people. And we can imagine his predecessor, the Emperor Hadrian, once loses his cool at a, like a secretary or scribe, and he picks up a stylus and stabs it in their eye. And this is something the emperor can get away with, right? Like they're like, sorry, you know?

And maybe Marcus witnesses that or he hears about it, right? Like for him, he has this weird duality where like people will indulge anything from him. He can do whatever he wants. But he decides that's not who he wants to be. And maybe he had embarrassed himself at some point or maybe it caused problems for him, but it's very clear in meditation

that it's something he's working on always. And that he's not perfect at it or it wouldn't come up more than one time. Cause he's not saying, hey, this is what I want my son to know, or this is what I want you, the aspiring stoic to know. He's saying you Marcus Aureilius have to stop doing this. And so it's so interesting that like,

it's been this sort of timeless battle. And then what great art is, is usually it's so specific that it becomes general. And so his specific struggle with this temper thing is 2000 years later in the same city, but in a way he could never have comprehended of value to someone else. Right. And also too, as an actor, you have comprehended of value to someone else. Right.

And also too, as an actor, you have to generate a certain amount of motion. Maybe that scene requires you to be angry. So I guess it's like what Kate Winslow was saying. It's like, okay, that's the GIF, right? How am I gonna use this? And it's like, okay, what's pissing me off today? How do I focus in on that

and be able to channel that into the scene where I'm not losing control, but at least I'm fired up. ["The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe"] The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake presents The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. Filled with breathtaking battles, mythical creatures, and unforgettable characters. This new adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic will mesmerize the whole family. Don't miss this epic adventure, The Lion, the Witch and the

Wardrobe, this season at the Shaw Festival. For tickets, go to shawfest.com. Some people get a wild haircut or book a spontaneous trip when life throws them a curveball. But Molly? Well, she dove headfirst into a world of no strings attached sex, secret rendezvous, forbidden affairs and unforgettable adventures. And together we tell every juicy detail in Dying for Sex, Wondry's award-winning podcast that's now streaming on a TV near you, starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate.

And to top it off, we're dropping brand new bonus episodes where I sit down with the cast to spill all the spicy secrets. Desire, friendship, self-discovery, and the ultimate bucket list of pleasure. This is a story that had everyone talking. Listen to the original Dying for Sex and brand new episodes on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge the original series before anyone else and completely ad free on Wondry Plus. What's your relationship with Marcus Aurelius' meditations? He's quoted a number of times in the movie. I wrote down every time.

There's a beautiful scene where the father and daughter are sort of the Cicero scene. She says at first, it is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices. And that's sort of appropriate for the Kathleen character who's a futurist. And then she looks to her father and she says, "'The object of life is not to be on the side

"'of the majority, but to escape finding yourself "'in the ranks of the insane,' "'which is very appropriate for today. And then she kisses him and she says, finally, the universe has changed. Our life is what our thoughts make it, which is Marcus Aurelius, the great Marcus Aurelius. It is.

What a great emperor Rome had. And what a terrible son he had. Yeah, you could argue that Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus is maybe too generous, like he was actually worse. He was worse. He was worse than Caligula. If anyone could be worse than Caligula, or Nero. Yes. I'm fascinated with that. How does such a great man raise such a terrible son? Well, it comes down to how many wives did he have? Who was Comedus's mother?

Faustina. Marcus only had one wife. We're told he loves her deeply. There's some rumors that she's unfaithful, but we're told he loves her deeply. The problem, I think, is Marcus Aurelius buries six of his eleven children, which I don't know how a family could possibly withstand that kind of tragedy. You know, in the old days, I mean, a generation before us, people usually had six, seven, eight kids, and they'd lost two. I lost one son, and I tell you, it's a sentence of 30 years before the first thing you think in the morning, did it happen? Did it really happen? And it's only after 30 years that it wasn't the first horrible

thought I had in the morning. It made me think of that great Escalist quote, there's an Escalist quote about how the pain drips on you drop by drop until by the awful grace of God. It took me 30 years for the horror of realizing I lost my son to not be the first thing I thought of in the morning. I've sort of thought that when people say Marcus Aurelius' writing is depressing, I think that this guy got out of bed at all in the morning after the tragedy and death and pain that he felt. Actually, he must have been the most hopeful, optimistic person who ever lived.

I lost his wife of 60 years and it's sort of devastating, but there was a Marcus Aurelius quote that really lifted me, which was, if you lose, I don't know it literally, but you'll know it. If you lose a loved one, honor her, and in a sense, try to be more like her, and then she'll live in your actions. And so my wife was very good, and I just try to be like her. And when I try to be like her, I, you know, like she was very, if someone was alone or sick or something, she'd call them up and be comforting to them and I'm not like that, you know. So I started to do that. People that I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren are just there and call them up and say, how are you? And being like her.

And they were so pleased and said, oh, it's so kind. And I keep my wife in my life with Marcus Aurelius advice by trying to be more like her. I find that absolutely beautiful. How many years have you been married? I have been married for, I think we're approaching 10, but I've been with my wife for 20 years. We met in college when we were 19 years old.

In my movie, they ask in the story, she says to the character, of all the institutions, your utopia wants to preserve which is the most important to you, and he says marriage. You know, marriage is going to change because everything around it is changing, but I do hope we can preserve it because there's something so more beautiful about it than meets the eye at first glance. You know, it's funny, I had first read Marcus Aurelius in college a few weeks before I'd met my wife. And I remember we were on our first date and I was telling her about this book that I'd read. We were talking about it.

So many years later, I go to the shelf to pull down a copy of Meditations. I was gonna get something out of it. And I found a receipt inside. And I learned in that moment that my wife had went and bought herself a copy from Barnes & Noble like a few days after we had met.

How wonderful. There was one effective altruist I was reading about who was saying that things should be priced in terms of how many children's lives could be saved at the same amount. So if you're buying a $200 backpack, but you could also for $200 buy a mosquito net that would save the life of a child in Africa, are you telling yourself it's $200, this backpack? Or are you telling yourself that the backpack

is actually one dead African child, which is philosophically and rhetorically quite provocative, also would be impossible to go through life if that was one's frame of view. Yeah, we would have no markets. I mean, the Stoics are pretty pro-market, I think because of the benefits of general affluence. I mean, that I understand better than Seneca's hypocrisy

or misdescriptions of himself. Yes. I just think of markets as like natural phenomenon. You know, I mean, it's not gonna, they aren't gonna be ideal. The people we want to win aren't gonna win, but they are sustaining when it comes to, you know, just a general affluence, general survival, as strange as they are.

Well, no, I think that's an interesting point in the Stoics and the markets because the Stoics were in the market, right? The Zeno sets up the Stoa in the Athenian Agora, right? In the literally in the market. And the difference I would say between that choice and the choice of say the cynics is About participation, right? Do you do you look at this thing and you say this is hopelessly corrupt and broken and and actually the only moral choice is to is to Opt out entirely or do you try to find kind of a

out entirely or you try to find kind of a reasonable and practical middle ground within a complex morally fraught world and and do the best that you can I I would argue the stoics say that Marcus and meditations because stop going around expecting Plato's Republic right yeah right right well one of the things I think about too is it's like you can accept the market as a mechanism, as a means of pulling people out of poverty, creating global affluence, all of that, and you can see it for what it is. And then I think the Stokes would say, just as the Stokes would say, look, there's this institution and Marcus Rios probably would have preferred Rome to be a

republic, but it wasn't so it's Seneca. But then one has to one gets to the Stokes would say, decide how you are going to behave as an individual inside that system. So how are you going to behave as a business person? How are you going to behave as a customer? This is where we have the most individual choice. And at least that's what I try to think about with the stuff that I make is like, okay, how am I going to make it? I just went through this choice where we do these, we're actually just rolling out a leather bound edition of meditations that I got the rights to.

And I had a manufacturer in Belarus that could make them quite affordably. We had a great relationship. I like the quality of it. But then Belarus is indisputably complicit in the invasion and looting of Ukraine and the decision about, well, do I want to do business with a person in that country? No, but that decision to switch to a different one means that I now pay about One no two and a half times as much per copy And so I think to me that we're like I don't control what's happening in Ukraine. I don't control

where like I don't control what's happening in Ukraine. I don't control globalization. I don't control any of that, but I do control who I decide to do business with within reason. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, that's exactly what I was hoping happened if people thought like stoics about markets. One of the things that Gregory Hayes points out,

that's my favorite translation of the meditations and I liked the one that you just did, but one of the things he points out in his foreword or his introduction is that there's nowhere that Marcus Aurelius explicitly identifies as a Stoic. He never says, I am a Stoic. He never says, I am a stoic. He never says I am a student of stoicism. Hayes says that probably the closest you would get Marcus to admit to was that he was a philosopher, that he was a student of philosophy. It just happens to be that what he writes

about illustrates a lot of stoic thinking and he quotes from a lot of stoic philosophers. But I would suspect that he too saw philosophy as the larger umbrella and then he's grabbing from the different schools in the different situations that he's in. There's just something interesting about meditations in the sense that it's what he was writing to himself at these different moments. And so we don't know all the other things that he thought that he cared about that he used. It's just what happens to survive. It'd be like if someone got a hold of my journal, they'd think all I think about are these handful

of things. But those are just the things I needed the most help with. Exactly. Which makes it very easy to criticize for reasons that feel unfair for exactly that reason. Yeah. And also means that its weaknesses are its very strength. The fact that it isn't a book written for a readership, it's written as notes to himself,

means of course that it lacks any, really any coherent or obvious structure. It repeats itself again and again in a way that might, you know, you might find a bit ties him after a while. I don't think it is, but you know, you might see it like that because we instinctively want to read it as a handbook and it just isn't. But the strength of that is that slowly, almost subliminally, this really human picture emerges and the fact that he isn't just, he isn't telling us how to live and he isn't presenting this kind of glorious image of a enlightened sage or anything. He's just a man struggling and on top of that, of course, part of its perennial

appeal is that we're listening to an emperor talking to himself and yet we're finding we're relating on so many levels. And I love that. Because I think an issue with Stoicism, well, not really with Stoicism, but the communication of it, is that when you've got somebody telling you, why are you thinking like this? You should think like this instead. That's a difficult line to tread without it seeming preachy. And I think we're much better at sort of taking in ideas when they're not being communicated at us, but particularly when they're, you know, if we're sort of almost over, almost eavesdropping on a

private conversation. I often find myself being interviewed about stoicism. I can hear myself saying things like, oh, you know, it's fine, pay no attention to those things. These things aren't as important, you know, just let it go. And I realize how glib that will sound, but actually those are such key important messages, but you don't want somebody telling you that. You know, we spent half our life wanting our problems to be heard and appreciated and recognized. We don't want somebody telling us they're our own fault, however it comes across. Yeah, I suspect that's why no one else

has published a book like Meditations. There's something, as you said, its bugs are its features and its features are its bugs. Like, if you sat down to write a Meditations, or even in the style of Meditations, there's already something artificial and performative about it. It's the fact that it's the emperor of Rome

writing a book, almost certainly not intending to publish it, artificial and performative about it. It's the fact that it's the Emperor of Rome writing a book, almost certainly not intending to publish it, and it's surviving, perhaps even to his mortification. That's what makes it so special. And that's a bit of magic that you, you can't recreate. It is a singular piece of literature, certainly of philosophy. And although it's rooted in rhetoric, of course, because that was his background on a big part of his life, it isn't doing what any other book with a kind of normative force telling us how we should live would do, which is creating a much neater, polished, ultimately unrealistic at some level version of what it's trying to sell. It's not really trying to sell anything. He's just

talking to himself where he needs it, which of course means that sometimes the things you're saying sound exaggerated. Or if you take this bit out of context, why would you want to live like that? Of course. But that's, as you said, if you read your own, if somebody read your own diary and took bits out of context, they sound ridiculous too. But in those moments, these are the things that he needs to hear. But you are also, it's also allowing for all sorts of, there are things that contradict each other. There are things that seem kind of a bit unpleasant or a bit unclear from time to time.

You wouldn't have that in a handbook that would be selling you something that you know is not giving you the whole story. You'd be looking for holes in it. I think we just instinctively do that, don't we? We work away from what we're given. And somehow having this very personal dialogue with himself, because you can't argue with that. You might not resonate with his view of the world, but you can't argue with that. You might not resonate

with his view of the world, but you can't argue with the message because it's just back at himself. And so I met people who read the meditations and I talked to them about this and they say that they hadn't even noticed that Marcus is talking about justice and society and natural affection. And I thought, how is it possible? Like, it's kind of the May, he goes on and on and on about it. It reminds me of this quote from William Blake that says, we both read the Bible day and night, but you read black where I read white. I can't think, how could you have not noticed all of the references, you know, to not being alienated from your

fellow man and, you know, having love? One point at the beginning, Marcus says that he's describing the ideal stoic. He's talking about Sextus of Chaeronea, like Plutarch's nephew, who was one of his stoic teachers, and he describes him as being free from passions. And he mentions anger, so free from passions such as anger, and yet full of full of love. Yeah, this is one of my favorite passages. Full of love. Why, kind of brotherly love he's talking about. Full of love is what we translate as natural affection, but it means the love of a parent

for their children. It's kind of like paternal love, we might say platonic love, brotherly love. He thinks that's the pinnacle of Stoicism. And yet people think, have this kind of atomistic, individualistic view of it that's just about, it's almost more like nihilism, the way that people realistic view of it that's just about, it's almost more like nihilism, the way that people interpret stoicism in many cases. And I really think if Marcus Aurelius was around, he would think this is more or less the opposite of what I thought the human ideal was. You guys are completely alienated from other people around you and the rest of society. And I still want to reverse that. They want us, in a sense, I think Stoic virtue, particularly in Zeno

and in the early Greek Stoics, it's tied up with their pantheism. And I think one of the starting points is this idea that they want us to be more at one with the rest of the universe. They want us to realize our oneness with the cosmos as a whole and with our fellow men, like with other human beings. It's extraordinary, by the way, just as a slight aside to that. Marcus mentions being a Roman citizen a couple of times in the meditations. But other than that, when he talks about overcoming anger, feeling love, overcoming alienation, he's talking about people in general, not just Roman subjects or citizens. And the people that he's dealing with as he's writing that are often, and what the Romans would call barbarian envoys.

Why, you know, it's strange to think that it might be again, we flew sight of that unless we imagine him writing the meditations in the evening after he's had a meeting with a bunch of foreign envoys in the in the morning. And then also he'd been surrounded by a foreign as all the auxiliary units would have been Germanic tribesmen and people from other parts of the empire. He's not just talking about his fellow well-educated, rich Roman senators who went to the same schools and had the same...

He's not talking about our brotherly connection as he spent time with a couple hundred people exactly like him in a beautiful marble palace. It's in the mud of a quincum, right? Like it's far away and he's surrounded by salts of the earth, regular ass people. He says at one point, actually in Meditations 2.1, he says that he says I'm not talking about a bond of seed, i.e. like family or blood, i.e. race. He specifically says, like, and it's odd that he would say that because it really highlights the fact that he's talking about brotherly love towards the people he's at war with. Yeah. Which is, you know, I think becomes highlighted more

if we really try and visualize the historical context in which he's writing this. If we are to believe Lucian, the chronology of this, annoyingly, is there's some debate among scholars. But one interpretation is that 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed in a single day at the beginning of the Marcomannicic War at Carnuntum, where Marcus then stations himself. That would have been one of the biggest defeats in Roman military history.

And then Marcus goes there and stations, which must have been incredibly risky. So knowing that he's in this place where loads of Romans have been slaughtered by the Germanic tribesmen, he's telling himself, nevertheless, I have to view these people as my brothers and sisters. Yeah, he's being tested at the realist level because the preservation of the empire is at stake, public opinion is at stake. He's just witnessed a horrible atrocity and he's trying to go back to his philosophical first principles and go, not what do I emotionally think in this moment, not what is politically convenient to think in this moment, not what will rile the troops up in this moment, but

like what on my bedrock values as a human being do I want to believe in this moment? And that really reminds me of something that I wanted to mention actually. And we kind of came close to earlier when we were talking about how often he'd been bereaved and lost all of those children, but also many other friends and family members that he'd lost. And only as I was working on the graphic novel and again, like trying to really visualize Marcus's life, did it really dawn on me? I just, I remember just kind of setting up one day and thinking it really hit me for the first time suddenly that Marcus Aurelius during

the plague, surrounded by people who at one point increasingly were probably plotting to assassinate him. Also many people assumed that Marcus Aurelius was going to die because he looked very frail. Stationing himself at the frontier where he was risking his life. All of these things combined when I really just started to picture it, I suddenly realized he really must have woken up each morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, and I'm actually still alive. He was living on borrowed time. He really must have felt that, and even beyond the like, all the, like, again, all these

people around him were gossiping about they thought he's not going to last much longer. And he had that going on for at least a decade, I think. Like people speculating about his impending death. What must it be like to kind of know that that's the gossip and that some people in the wings are just waiting for you to die? Like he's constantly his sense of his own mortality. I really think must have been much more pervasive and intense than it would be for most of us. Whole Foods started in the counterculture city of Austin, Texas, and it took pride in being

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Bollin's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Bollin's Medical Mysteries on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Spotify or Apple podcasts. To your point about sayings, I mean, you think about, you know, Marcus Aurelius' meditations, I mean, they're all kind of- It's a bunch of aphorisms. Yeah. That's kind of what it is, you know.

My father taught me this, my mother taught me this, you know, this guy taught me this. Here's what's important, you know, be people of integrity, you know, don't do this, don't do that. It's pretty simple, but it's who's speaking it that gives it credibility too, you know. Well, what's interesting about meditations is that it's a series of aphor simple, but it's it's who's speaking it that gives it credibility to, you know. Well, what's interesting about meditations is that it's a series of aphorisms, but he's not doing it in the way that a typical leader or a philosopher or a general would do it in that you're writing these aphorisms down for other people. Right. What's interesting is writing them for himself.

He's reminding himself, you know, you can live good anywhere. You know, we're made. He says, we're here to help people are put up with them. You know, he just saying these sort of things. And you can imagine that he's doing it in the moments when he felt like doing the opposite or he did the opposite. And he feels bad about it. And he's like, hey, why did I leave this person hanging? Why did I lose my temper?

You know, it's sort of a debrief of himself every day. Yeah, I don't I don't remember how long it took him to write. I mean, it's over obviously all of these campaigns and, but what's the, I don't know the historical context of, was this written over 10 years, 20 years? And we don't know. No. And we, what's interesting about meditation is like you mentioned the gratitude that's at the beginning, but like we don't have the original. So that could have just been a later editor could have said,

here's all the different places he thinks people I'm going to move that to this. That makes the most sense. There's two books that have a Geo graphic location attached to them. And we vaguely know that they can sort of discern from certain mentions like when wars happened or what was selling them somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

They have a vague sense like when they have a sense of when it must have started. And then we the last meditation, I mean, this is an interesting, the last, the last meditation, we know Marcus dies of the plague or dies of some illness. And so the last entry in meditations is you've lived as a citizen in a great city, five years or a hundred. What's the difference? The laws make no distinction. But he's like, oh, I've only gotten through three acts. He said, well, this will be a drama in three acts, the lengths fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine.

So make your exit with grace, the same grace shown to you. So was that did he write that the day that he died? You know, he could have sure could have. Or he was doing a pretty good job meditating on death. And it was years, years later and someone moved it. But it is interesting to think that we don't really know. We know he wrote some of it at a quincum, which is this camp outside Budapest.

You know, he almost certainly did not do it, the most of it from the comfort of his palace. Right, no, sure. But yeah, it's such an interesting book in that we don't know what it was for, who it was for, except for it seems to have done him a lot of good. Yeah, sure. It's a journaling.

Yeah. Did you keep a journal? I wasn't that disciplined. Yeah. I thought about it at one point in time when I went back as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, I thought, I'm going to do this and I'll just, I'll tape record it every night on events

that happened during the day. Yeah. But then I realized the tape recorder then was classified. Oh, sure. And so I was like, how am I going to do this? So I said, that was Helen. It's too hard. I have a little aside and he goes, the enemy. I love George Marshall and George Marshall during the war.

Someone says, you know, you got to keep a journal. And he decides not to because he felt like it would make him. He felt like the journal, unlike this, where it's totally private and he's he thought it would be kind of inherently performative. And he felt like it would almost like contribute to ego. Like I'm writing the first draft of history kind of a thing, which, you know, people do. It seems they're doing the thing with the eye

of doing the memoir about it later. Of course. Happens all the time. You know, one of the other expressions, I think is an issue and you know that saying, and it starts as a Latin saying, but fortune favors the bolder and favors the time. You know, one of the other expressions, I think, is an issue. And you know that that saying and it starts as a Latin saying, but fortune favors the bolder and favors the brave. Sure. That's from a naval officer. Do you know that story?

Remind me and I'll probably remember. So Pliny, the elder, is a naval admiral in the the Athenian Navy. And he hears there's been this explosion. It's the explosion at Pompeii. And he his his friend is trapped there. And he's like, we got to go been this explosion. It's the explosion at Pompeii and he, his friend is trapped there and he's like, we got to go rescue this guy. And they're like, no, you're going to die. This is a horrible idea. Don't do it. And he says, fortune favors the bold. He says, head towards Pompeii and his friend who's there. And so, so that, what I love

about that expression too, you know, now we use it to, you know, someone's fortune favors the bold. I'm, I'm going all in on this business venture. On FTX. Yeah, right. He's saying, no, fortune favors the bold. I'm going to go save my friend. And the tragic part is he does save his friend, but he dies. So fortune favor,

I think that's the other interesting thing that the emphasis is on favors. It does not guarantee success. You know, most, probably most of the time it doesn't. But I just love the idea that some guy jotting off some letter, you know, coins a phrase that we're still repeating, you know, all these years later. Yeah. If you have surrounded yourself with things that do not serve the public good, as again,

he talks about in meditations, you want to do what is good for the people. If you're not doing the things that we know to be good behaviors, honest, you know, noble, honorable, humble, respectful, sooner or later, the edifice will crumble and what's left of you, if you haven't been that person, will not be standing very tall. It's easy to skip over it, but Marks has the same power that Saddam Hussein has. Absolutely. That's my point. Yeah. But he lived a good life because he tried to live the stoic life. Yeah. In all the best.

Now, he wasn't always successful. I mean, he wasn't a perfect guy. You know, we know what his shortfalls were. But in general, he was part of that epic time in Rome where it was, you know, Pax Romano for a very long time. And he may have been the last leader, I guess, that really kind of represented that error, I think. Well, yeah, there's this. Because his son comes after him, right? Or just as a disaster, as I recall. Well, that's what I was going to say, right?

Like you have these five emperors in a row. None of them have a son. So they choose their successor. And it's this sort of accidental process, not accidental, but it's a quirk in history where you don't get bad, absolute rulers for the most part. And then Marcus hands it to his son and then we revert to the rule that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And yeah, you think ultimately, I think this is true at the individual level. It's certainly true at like the highest levels of being a head of state, which is you get to the place where no one can really tell you what to do. You're in control of your own life and there needs to be the final check and balance inside a, whether it's a constitutional mark, monarchy, a democratic Republic, or just you as an individual is what does your individual conscience or set of virtues or values allow you to do or not? The Stokes say, you know, you have to command yourself first.

Of course. And, you know, Marcus has that. And then other people find themselves in that position because they're parents or a coup or, you know, they're chosen, they're elected for it. And if they don't have those values, it does seem to corrode and corrupt remarkably quickly. Remarkably. Yes. Again, and I've quickly. Remarkably. Yes. Again, and I've seen it with Saddam, I've seen it with lesser autocrats and authoritarians

and people that are just- Happens in middle managers too. Happens in middle managers. You're right. So, if your North Compass isn't in the line properly. You know, eventually, you know, again, all you have to do is take a look at the companies around, whether it's, you know, FTX or Enron or Lehman Brothers or universities that are chasing a championship,

but their recruiting policies are not right or they let doctors get away with things that they shouldn't and et cetera, et cetera. It never ends well. And yet we continue to seem to learn the same lessons again and again. Yeah. And meditation, he says, be careful that you are not Caesarified and stained purple because the, the emperor wore the purple clothes. And I've got to imagine in military circles, the, the,

the stars or the bars, they can change a person. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you like to think by the time the person gets to that point in their career. So, you know, for me, it was 26 years into my career. Then I get my first star, but it does change. I mean, because you, now you have kind of excelled probably past the point where most of us thought

we would ever get to, but it is also humbling. And you need to take it with a little bit of humility. Waking up every morning and reading Marcus and meditating on this, reading your books, listening to the podcast, this whole thing. And again, what I can comparison, all of a sudden I found this parallel between, okay, so I was raised in the church and there was a system that was given to me where here are the tenements that you live by.

Here's the belief system. Here are the 10 commandments. And at one point, those I said failed me. So I played 52 card pickup with my entire religious and philosophical beliefs and said, what else is out there there and that's led me to this journey. Yeah, what I realized is that Those systems didn't fail me nor did I really even fail them

It is that's the gig great start all over so what I did was I brought out and I went all the way back to the very beginning of Meditations, so is that two one in meditation? Yeah, man. I wake up every out and I went all the way back to the very beginning of meditations. So is that 2-1 in meditations? Yeah man I wake up every day and I read it. The people today you will meet are jealous and surly and stupid and annoying and blah blah blah? All of these things happen to them because they're ignorant of what is good and evil but you were I who have seen that the nature of good is beautiful and that the bad is ugly and that my kinsmen, the same

nature exists in all of us. And to me, it's not just, this is what I learned from that passage, entry, whatever, is he woke up that morning and that was a real thing for him. Again, it wasn't the sage like, zen like pontificating. It was like, yo man, you need to begin every day by telling yourself, you're gonna meet the person

that's gonna piss you off, frustrate you. And I understand, I understood then that anger comes in many different flavors. And there's the anger that was demonstrated to me by my dad, which was yelling, and that's how you asserted power, was by whoever was loud as one. Or throwing things, or there's a physical demonstration

of anger, or there's the very passive, what I did, which was I grew up and I was this gangly, awkward teenager. I was never going to win a fistfight, but I will eviscerate you with my words. I will cut you down. So there's the verbal anger. There's frustration where I've seen it in my son, where if I get frustrated, I see myself in him. I see this mirror of myself. He goes, oh, come on. I'm like, you got that from me. 100%. It's like a Christmas story. Where'd you learn to curse like that?

Yeah. I couldn't tell him it was from them. Fudge. But only I didn't say fudge. I just said the real thing. All of those systems, I realize I'm like, oh, this is how I'm now imparting them onto him. And there's some things where you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I can't put the genie. This has been my, you'll hear me do this a lot. My therapist, I said, you know like when you find yourself, they're like, who, me? I went, what? She goes, you said you, are you talking about me

or are you talking about yourself? I was like, no, I'm just talking about people in general. She goes, why are we bringing people in general? I mean, they're not in this room, it's just you. What do you do? And. You know how everyone's exactly like me. Yeah, and we can just all kind of bring everybody

down to my level real quick for a minute. Makes me feel way better about myself. My favorite part of that Marcus quote is towards the end, right? Cause it begins, actually when I was on The Daily Show, he asked me if I had like an inspirational quote that I would replace or live, laugh, love with. And I said that quote, I said two, one for medicine.

Did you really? Yeah, because I think it's funny, right? Cause it ends or it begins it's funny, right? Cause it ends or it begins so darkly, right? The world sucks, people suck, your day is gonna suck, right? It lists all the, all the shitty attributes of the people and the worst people you're gonna see. That you will meet today.

And then it kind of about midway through, it takes this surprising turn, which is he goes, but you can't hate them. And he says, you can't- You can be angry with them. Yeah, you can't even be angry with them. And he says, and you can't let them implicate you in ugliness. And he says, we're made to work together

like two hands or two rows of teeth. The upper and lower rows of the teeth. We are made for cooperation. And so I think that it's like, what that quote gets at is I think actually is itself kind of a microcosm of Marx's realist and meditations, which is at first glance, it's dark and depressing and resigned. And if you only skim the first part

and you don't let the second half sink in, you get the wrong impression. But if you read it all the first part and you don't let the second half sink in, you get the wrong impression. But if you read it all the way through and you sit with it, and most importantly, you try to apply it, it's actually beautiful, it's actually inspiring, and it's actually profoundly hopeful, right? Like a depressed, resigned, positive person doesn't go, look at how shitty people are,

but I'm here for them and we're gonna do good stuff together and I don't control the things they may or may not do, but I do control whether I let the bad stuff in this world drag me down. If I control whether I am jealous and surly and anxious and awful and all of these things. And to me that is, the whole of meditations could just be that passage

that to me is almost a perfect definition of stoicism as a whole. There's also this notion of, you chose this, I chose this. If these people are in front of me, because at any moment I can abdicate from this, I can abdicate my throat if I want to. But if I showed up, this is the gig. So I have forfeited the right to complain.

Yes. You knew, I knew going in, these are the people that I'm going to meet. So remember. Or just stay in bed today. Just stay in bed? Yeah, exactly. Just don't do anything.

So that is why, I love that that's, the reason that literally the second I got back, I was like, I gotta get this because I need to look down and go, and it's on my right-handed dominant, travelers left-handed, we think, who knows, all that I'm beside. But this is on my weak hand. And to me, that is reminding myself,

that's why can't wait is on my hand that I greet you with, it's like, I can't wait. So these two things go hand in hand or wrist in wrist rather. Well, there's something where Marcus talks about that and meditations. Maybe you missed it, but he talks about how he's practicing using the reins, holding the reins to his horse in his non-dominant hand. So he can get better with practice. And so the idea of like you put on the face, you try the thing that's outside your comfort zone, you strain to do the thing that you're not naturally suited to do,

that you do it the way that's not easiest, and that's how you get better. This is interesting, I'm looking at you, you have paper on the right hand which tells me that you're right handed, but you're holding the pencil where you're left. No, no, I'm looking at you, you have paper on the right hand, which tells me that you're right handed, but you're holding the pencil. No, no, I'm left handed, I'm very left handed. Interesting. Yeah.

But that is it, I remember early on, there was some, like my son was using his right hand, and it looked maybe like he was left handed at first, and I remember going like, are you sure? And then my wife was like, why do you have an opinion about this? And I was like, you're right, why do I have an opinion about this? And I was like, you're right, why do I have an opinion about this?

Not only like, it is what it is, and are there some benefits they think, creatively to being left-handed, maybe, but like pretending to be left-handed doesn't give you the benefits, right? Like it's like you're either wired to be, you know what I mean? Like geniuses choose green, but you didn't choose them.

Yeah, it's like in fight clubs, sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken, right? Like pretending to be left-handed doesn't give you the benefits of being left-handed. And also when I think about it being left-handed is also sucked like scissors suck and getting you know the ink smeared on the side of my hand. Why like why am I forcing it one way or other? Like it's another thing to not have an opinion about and when I think about this as a parenting thing I've been I think it's in the daily dad a little bit but like the source of conflict between parents and children so much of the time is about parents having opinions about things that they don't

have to have opinions about and if they didn't have an opinion about it things would just be and how much of the conflict I had even with my own parents that in retrospect seems silly because like I don't care about it anymore. But why did they care about it at all? And it's it's which is a very stoic idea in meditation. The Marxist says something like, Remember, things are not asking to be judged by you. Or he says, you always have the power to have no opinion. in. 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 it would really help the show.

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