The Daily Stoic - The Perspective Shift I Had in Australia (A Stoic Lesson)

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Why does everything feel so much worse when it’s happening close to you? In this episode, Ryan shares a simple shift he noticed while traveling in Australia that changed how he sees the news, stress, and everything happening around us. He also sits down with Brigid Delaney, author of Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times, to talk about what happens when you actually try to live like a Stoic in real life.Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🇺🇸 USA dates:Portland, Oregon - June 8 San Francisco, California - June 11Minneapolis, Minnesota - August 18 Chicago, Illinois - August 19 Detroit, Michigan - August 20 🇳🇿 NEW ZEALAND:Auckland, New Zealand - October 13 🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA dates:Sydney, Australia - October 16 Melbourne, Australia - October 18 Brisbane, Australia - October 20Perth, Australia - October 21 📚 Book Mentioned: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson🎥 VIDEO EPISODE| Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGij35sCHw🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee 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, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Okay, so funny thing happened. So people from Australia came out to the bookstore over the weekend. And they were shopping and then all of a sudden the people at the bookstore started to close up. They said, hey, we're going to close temporarily.

And people say, no, no, no, sorry, we came all the way from thousands of miles away. Do we have to close? And they said, yes, sorry, there's a protest down the street. And Ryan's speaking. We want to come watch him speak. My employees wanted to see me speak at No Kings Day. But why don't you just come with us? You can actually see Ryan talk.

And they were like, oh, my gosh, that's amazing. So I got to meet these two guys who'd come all the way from Australia. They saw me talk. It's like a delightful little small town thing. Put the politics aside. It's like you're on a historic main street. and then you walk over to the county courthouse and there's a political rally going on.

I'm speaking under this gazebo that's been there for 100 plus years. It's like small town democracy, small D democracy at its best. And so anyways, I was talking to these guys and I said, hey, just so you know, I'm going to be in your neck of the woods in October. I'm doing Oakland, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Perth.

So they were like, oh, my gosh, we're totally going to go. From that encounter, I sort of thought I'd put down in Australia-deemed episode of the podcast. You can come see me, by the way, you just got to grab tickets at Dailystoke Live.com. But I was in Australia back in July of 2024, and I did their version of the Today Show. Here's what I said. We're very excited to have our next guest here with more than three million books sold worldwide. Ryan, Holiday, is a leader when it comes to teaching self-control. Well, now he's here down under on a speaking tour, and we're thrilled to say he joins his life in studio. Ryan, good morning. Hey, Ryan. Thank you.

Great to have you here. You've got a lot of Australian fans. A lot of your work, of course, focuses on stoic philosophy for the uninitiated. Explain what that is and how you became so involved in it. Yeah, when you start to talk about an ancient philosophy from Greece or Rome, people's eyes glaze over, I sort of say stoicism is this idea we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, which is what human beings have always struggled with in the ancient world in the modern world and the Stoics have a lot to teach us about, you know, how to manage a frustrating, confusing, overwhelming world. So you've got a new book out as well as your third book, I believe, called There Is a Right Thing Right Now. Tell us about the virtues in this one

and what the focus is. Yeah, the four virtues of Stoicism, the idea was that everything was an opportunity to practice courage, self-discipline, justice, or wisdom, or all of the above, right? That's what life presents us always the opportunities to do that. And so I've been writing about, in this most recent one, the virtue of justice, which when people think justice, they think the legal system, as opposed to, like, what standards do I hold myself to? What's my sense of right and wrong? What am I obligated to do in each and every situation? Not what's legally allowed, but what am I okay with? What do I think the right thing to do is? I think stoicism has had some misconceptions around it for a long time in terms of being detached from emotions, being strong and not vulnerable. How does emotion, how does vulnerability play into stoicism? We have to make a distinction between lowercase stoicism, right? The word stoic in English, which means like has no emotions invulnerable.

And I think the philosophy that we're talking about, which is about courage and justice and discipline and wisdom, discipline is part of it. but just stuffing things down and pretending they don't exist. That's not dealing with them. They're going to come bubbling out at some point. So I think about stoicism more as processing one's emotions, thinking about them, figuring out what they mean, figuring out the response that's best in a situation, as opposed to just being ruled by them.

So feeling angry is different than doing something while you are angry. And I think that, to me, that distinction is where the stoicism comes in. All right, let's take this a little bit more, like, wider. here for people to understand at home because I think that sometimes we get bogged down in sort of the the guys in togas. But like there was one thing that you talked about recently was about um, Stoicism like the Stoics knew about knowing when was enough for you in your life. Yeah. Not desiring other things. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Because I think those sort of things really resonate. Yeah, the Stoics say that, you know, the greatest empire is command of oneself. So people always want more and more and more. And really wealth, self-control is, is understanding like, what's enough for me? what am I good with, what do I actually need? And so it's so fascinating. On the one hand, you have a stoic like Marcus Aurelius, who is the most powerful man in the world.

Then you have this other stoic named Epictetus, who Marcus Aurelius admires, Epictetus is a slave. And who is actually most in command of themselves? Who's in command of their desires, their emotions, their fears? So it doesn't matter how much you have or how little you have. Stoicism is this sense of, here's what I need, here's who I am, here's what's important to me. Following the Joneses.

Exactly. And social media, a world of social media where you're constantly bombarded with what everyone else is doing, you lose track of what you're trying to do, what's important to you, what's possible for you. Know your own needs. Yes. So you're taking this to the stage to your Aussie audiences. Tell us what everyone will take away from these nights. Well, we tend to think of philosophy as this abstract theoretical thing,

as opposed to something that really helps us with our real world modern problems. What's so great about stoicism is that it's timeless. That's why it's endured for all these centuries. So I want to help people see philosophy as something that can help them with their actual life, just as it helped the most powerful people in the world and some of the most powerless people in the world. Stoicism has always been this thing that's helped us, not just survive the ups and downs in life, but thrive whatever circumstances we happen to find ourselves. I think what you're teaching is really useful, and I really appreciate you being here today.

One of the things I found while we're in Australia, you know, this is a chaotic time. This is the run-up to the 2024 election. I think Biden dropped out. while we were there. Stuff was going crazy in America. But every morning we would get up and we'd go to this coffee shop when we were staying in the rocks in Sydney,

we'd go to this one coffee shop. And then when we were in Bondi, we'd go to a different coffee shop. But we just had this morning routine. It was like we were living there. And I would see the news while I was there. And I'd sort of see America through the lens of Australia,

but I'd also see Australian politics through the lens of the Australians. And it helped me not go crazy. And that actually inspired a little, email I wrote for the Daily Stoic email from a book that I'd read on the plane. This is Bill Bryson's in sunburned country, one of the great classic Australian sort of travel logs. I wrote actually a couple of emails inspired, but this is the point that it inspired. This will help calm you down. If you read the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. Political incompetence, political

corruption, rise in crime, depressing economic news. The future looks dark. People. seem awful. And worse, it's happening near you. Are you in danger? Should you be scared? Is there really nothing you can do about it? In the hilarious book in a sunburned country, and you can grab a copy at the painted porch, it's wonderful. Bill Bryson speaks about the joy of reading the news in Australia, a country many thousands of miles from his own. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with the local paper, he writes. I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find

a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts and communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith. What he was experiencing, of course, was the wonder of perspective. He was taking Plato's view, the 10,000-foot view, the one that Marcus Aurelius talks about in meditations. Two armies battling each other is a horrible thing up close. From the top of a mountain, it looks like ants going after a piece of food. News near us is alarming, frustrating, disappointing.

News from far away is funny, absurd, and riveting. The turmoil of ancient Rome provides us moral lessons. The turmoil of our own time simply makes us queasy. Bryson, who no doubt had problems with politicians at home, noted the hilarity of two feuding Australian ministers who were literally named Abbott and Costello. The point is how we look at things matters. And sometimes by noticing how we might look at something while we're on vacation or through the lens of a foreign language or culture can give us a better insight into how we might

better look at things at home. And so while we were in Australia between those two shows, I only did two while I was there, We got to see huge chunks of Australia. Went to the Blue Mountains, spent a couple weeks in Bondi. I got the whole Sydney experience. Now I'm excited to do other parts of Australia. I jetted down into Melbourne, but the family didn't come with me. But one of the things I was able to do while I was there was I interviewed Bridget Delaney,

who wrote this wonderful book called Reasons Not to Worry, How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times. She'd actually been super skeptical of Stoicism for a long time. She also has a great Netflix show. That's sort of a spoof of the wellness industry. It's a great writer. And she decided she would let Marcus Aurelius guide her decisions for a year of her life, sort of a gonzo journalism take into stoicism.

And I thought that was great. So here's a chunk of she and I talking. So how did you come to the Stoics? So I was a columnist at The Guardian. And I have a weekly column. One week I just listened to Joe Rogan nonstop. And I wrote about that. another week I'd, you know, wake up at 4 a.m. and, you know, act like a CEO. So it was a lot

of gonzo stuff. And Stoic Week was happening in the UK. And a friend of mine who's an editor sent me the press release and said, live like a stoic for a week. I was like, oh, I'm more an Epicurean. And so I did it. I did Stoic Week. I was hung over. I was thinking, you know, I missed a few of the lessons. I didn't really like it. And I wrote essentially a piss tank. saying, oh, Stoics, you know, they're so po-faced and boring. And, you know, this is, I was too hung over to take this seriously. And I got a lot of pushback from people within Stoke week, but also Stoics, who said, it's a real shame because it's a great philosophy and you, you could have actually got something out of it. And I took that on board. And the following

year, I did Stoic Week privately. I did it with some friends. We formed a WhatsApp group. I didn't write about it. I just showed up, did it and really, really liked it. Like the second time round, I got it. And I was telling one friend in particular about stoicism, it just chimed with him and we decided to sort of undertake a project where we would do some reading and then meet and talk about stoicism when we did it each week. So we had a kind of almost a dialogue, a stoic dialogue. And I'd go and see him and say, I've had this terrible week. I got turned down for a pay rise and I'd be really frustrated. And he'd say, well, was that within your control to?

And so we started applying the stoicism like it was the medicine to each other's lives. And we were out one night talking about it at the pub. And there was a publisher sitting, a publisher that I was acquainted with who was sitting behind us. And she said to me later on, you should do a book about this. I said, I can't, you know, I can't write about stoicism. I did one year of a philosophy degree at university and dropped out because it was all mathematics. And we're about it also. Yeah.

And didn't feel like I had the permission to enter the space. But my friend and I kept going with our stoic journey. And then the pandemic happened. And I started writing. It just clicked in. And it came out, like Australia had some very severe. lockdowns. And so people felt like they didn't have a lot of control. And the book came out after all of that, but people were kind of in a space where they thought, if this happens again, I need to

have some sort of framework that's going to help me understand or help me accept a reality that I don't like very much. And so my book did really well in Australia. It's sold in like more than 20 different countries. So it's been, and now I'm doing another one, which is more of a fable. And it's a dialogue between a seeker and a sage. So that's really cool. And I found myself practicing it. So the books were a way, the books and the reading are a way of reinforcing stoicism in my own life. I think that's really important, right?

Like stoicism isn't this thing that you read one time. It's not a thing that you get a degree or a certification. And it is a thing you are doing. It's a verb, right? Yeah, absolutely. And the writing about the Stoic, you can't write and talk and, and think and read about this stuff and not have it seep into you in some way. And that the longer you do that, the more you do that, the more able you are to draw on it in

moments big and small in your life. So if you see Stoicism as this thing that you are studying, as opposed to a thing that you studied, you're a bit closer to what it's supposed to be. And by the way, that's what Marcus Reelis is doing. That's what Seneca is doing with his friend Lucilius, is this kind of ongoing dialogue practice process that's helping them get a little bit better every day at the thing. Absolutely. And you have to keep doing it. Yes. Because you drop it.

It's like going to the gym. You stop going. My big thing that I'm struggling with at the moment is if people are rude to me or if someone's, if I'm having to deal with someone that's obnoxious, I get reactive back. and I get shitty with them and I ruminate. Yeah. And stoicism has been, you know, you go back to the, what does stoicism say? Oh, you can't control them? Oh, of course.

You know, I have to control my reactions. And it's never wrong. You know, I don't always like stoicism. I don't necessarily like the fact that it's a bit unforgiving. Yeah. But it hits real, you know, and. You know what's funny? very forgiving to other people. It's not forgiving to you, right? Like the passage that I have helped

popularize this one for Mark Surrealis about how the obstacle is the way. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what he's specifically talking about is difficult people. He's talking, he's saying that they are the opportunity for you to practice the stoic ideas. You know, it's so, so you could be trying to have a wonderful, loving, friendly conversation with someone. And then they can make that impossible, but they can't take away from you the opportunity to practice some other kind of virtue, patience, forgiveness, empathy. And I try to remind myself that that's, when the Stoics say the obstacle is the way they're not talking so much about pandemics or car crashes or injuries or bankruptcies. They're mostly talking about day-to-day interactions with annoying, obnoxious, frustrating, evil, stupid people. And Marcus actually put it very plainly in his book, you know, each day you will wake up and there'll be annoying people.

And it's like, oh, of course. And I love the quote by Seneca. We are bad men living amongst bad men and only one thing will calm us. And that is we must go easy on each other. Yes. To me, that's, you know, that's the great calming quote. Because I think if I was to diagnose one of society's biggest problems right now, it's anger. Anger seems to me, you know, there's a huge sort of increase in reporting of domestic violence in Australia.

I'm sure those statistics are across the board. Road rage has gone up, assaults. Also, every shop you go into, little signs saying don't abuse the staff. It's insane. So it's like, okay, we have an anger problem. Stoicism is so explicit in how you handle anger and how you, you know, stop yourself from becoming reactive. And I think if there's one thing I want the world to take from stoicism at the moment, it's just dealing with anger. There's a wonderful woman named Ashley who does the customer service for Daily Stoic.

Oh, right. And you should see some of the emails that she gets from people who ostensibly know and understand and follow Stoicism, people who just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we don't control the post office. Yeah. We're not the reason your package is delayed. That was the storm that you just experienced. That was the ocean that it had to cross. That was the person who stole it off your porch.

It wasn't us. And yelling at this poor lady doesn't do, does it magically make it go away? And it's been illustrated for me because like I get to the airport and then the people tell you that the plane is delayed. And, you know, like I feel that. And I've certainly acted in ways in the past that I'm not proud of. But just this process of.

yeah, hey, is this what in my control? Is this who I want to be? What is, what opportunity is this presenting me? I think that passage from Mark Surrealis that you mentioned, the famous one about how today the people you will meet. And he lists all the shitty things that people are going to be and do. But I think it's so easy we forget the second half of that, which is he goes, and why are they like this?

No, he says, because they don't know any better. And he says, he says, what they can't do is implicate you in their ugliness. Like you, that's the choice that you make that parts on you. And he says, by the way, we're meant to work together. We're meant to be together. We're two rows of teeth in the same mouth. It's beautiful. I mean, it's great writing.

And it's such a profound insight that the quote can work on this superficial level to the, to the frustrated person who's just pissed off at humanity. And then also the second level, the wiser, more philosophical level of like, okay, I've calmed down a little bit. here's how I should think about this. I think also just thinking about anger is that not being angry may not necessarily, you might not get on the plane earlier or whatever, but I think you're creating a situation where if you bring the temperature down

in your own interactions, it does have a knock on effect. One of my, I had breakfast with a friend yesterday who works as a volunteer counselor for Lifeline, which is the suicide hotline. Yeah, suicide hotline. And I always like asking him when I see him, what's the main kind of thing that people are calling up about at the moment? Like what's the big issue? Previously it's been addictions.

During the pandemic, it was like drinking too much. And now he's saying he's seeing a big rise in loneliness and that people feel like they don't have anyone close to them. And they also don't have any interactions necessarily that have got warmth in them either. So I think part of being a stoic is not just to not be reactive, but also to be aware that if someone's angry at you or they're in a bad mood, what's behind that, you know? I think about those videos. They're very popular in the U.S. because we're awful to each other.

But it's, you know, some lady or some man freaking out at someone at the store. They're basically screaming, berating. Sometimes they brandish a weapon, whatever. But when I would first see them, I would be like, fuck this person. And then I've gotten better at going, what is that person's life like? Why are, why did they break in line at the supermarket? What happened? Why did somebody cutting them off in line?

Why did this thing not being on sale? What is happening? Their life must be a pressure cooker of stress and dysfunction because this is not how they want to be acting. Yeah. You know? Yeah. This isn't normal. I think underneath a lot of anger is a lot of suffering.

So, you know, there's no compassion in stoicism. That's, you know, something that I grapple with. You know, it's not a stoic virtue. You don't think it's in the virtue of justice? So my read on compassion is that compassion is wanting something better for someone else, and that's outside your control. So if you are, if you have strong emotions of compassion, you are actually wishing for something that you can't change.

Yes. I know the golden rule seems to me to be the definition of justice and is rooted in the sense that how do people deserve to be treated. Yeah. And there is a sense, to me that seems rooted in compassion in some way. Okay. Well, maybe I can incorporate that into my interpretations. I think for me, the gold in stoicism has not just been controlling my own sort of worst impulses, but it's being able to see the suffering and other people.

and try and show some sort of kindness to others. I think that's where stoicism stops being this thing, which is which people accuse it of, which is being just all about you and your responses, and being actually, look, it's probably a bit more, almost more Christian than, you know, most interpretations of stoicism is, but I think it does, and it should have that element.

Have you seen the circles of concern, the idea from Hierocles? Yes. I think to me that's about compassion. Why would you be expanding the circle? the circle if you didn't care. Yes. So for people don't know that basically the Stokes say like, look, we're born selfish. We have self-interest.

But we start to care about the people who raised us, the people were related to, the people who live near us. And then they say you can imagine the world being this series of concentric circles. And he says that the purpose of philosophy, but I think namely the virtue of justice, is about pulling those outer circles inwards. And he said this is like a beautiful madness to care. about someone that you've never met. It's not like you that you're not related to. To me, that's rooted in compassion. So I think it's there. It's just not, it's not what

attracts us to stoicism. It's not its, it's not its most salient feature. But I think it's, it's there. Marcus Aurelius could have been so much worse. Yeah. You know, what, what's, what's the governor on that? It certainly wasn't the guardrails of the Roman system. It was some sense to him of other people's inherent value and worth. And also our own nature. I think, it feels good to do good. And it feels bad to do bad. And that's the kind of interesting thing about how we are in the world. You know, we have these.

I did a chapter in the book on how to be good. What does it mean to be good? The writing in it was quite, you know, wasn't fantastic because the only thing I could come up with was we want to be good because it feels good. You know, it's a, yes, it's a duty. But also, you know, I get a bit of a buzz when, I've done something for someone else. You know, it's nature.

It's something working within us that it doesn't really have a lot of language around it. I definitely get the sense that Seneca saw really shitty people up close. Epicetus saw awful people up close. Mark Surreali saw awful people do awful things. And I think they get the sense and I'm sure you've met people like this where you go, oh, wait, they're not getting away with anything. It's awful to be them also. Yeah.

You know, like that it's not just that being good feels good, but that being a selfish, merciless, you know, evil, vindictive, angry, you know, insert your adjectives their person is a real hellish way to live. I agree with you, but I also think a lot of people would see that in this world in in current times, you're not necessarily punished for being bad and you're not necessarily rewarded for being good. And, but I think they're saying when you're at home with yourself at, night. They're not saying

karma exists and that society rewards good people and punishes bad people. I mean, there's a great line in meditation and remarks really says to be a good king is to earn a bad reputation by good deeds. So he saw like, hey, I could be, I'm doing my best here and I'm taking all this heat for it. I don't think they minted in that sense. I think there's this famous passage of one of the middle stoics. He's at the deathbed of this

Roman general named Marius. And That's the one that Seneca says Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius. Yeah. And the Stoic basically sees the most powerful man in Rome in his last moments. And he realizes he's sort of in and out of it. And he's kind of commanding these troops that no longer exist. He just goes, oh, all of it was hollow and empty and you're a sad, dying, vulnerable man. Do you think everyone has that on their deathbed?

Like, do you think there is a moment where? where people are conscious of their actions throughout life? Or do you think some people never have that reckoning? I definitely, I don't think, you know, you eventually get what's coming to you. If you're selling online or out of a storefront full time or a side hustle, you know it's a challenge. People got to find you. You got to wait for them to walk in.

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I don't like having to think about dinner. And I'm like, when it's time for dinner, I want that dinner. pretty fast. But then I also want to eat well and I like stuff that tastes good. That's like a pretty complicated set of needs there. And it actually fits perfectly with today's sponsor. And it's why we love HelloFresh. They take the mental load of what's for dinner off your to do list. HelloFresh makes it easy to do more home cooking with recipes that feel good and taste delicious night after night. They have more than 100 recipes every week. It doesn't matter what your allergies or preferences are, you can make something work. They've got three times the seafood with

no upcharge, and you can even have guess over, make them grass-fed steak ribbyes or serve seasonal produce like pears and apples and asparagus. We love HelloFresh, and I think you'll love it too. Just go to hellofresh.com slash stoic 10 FM to get 10 free meals and a free zwilling knife, which is $145 value on your third box. Offer is valid while supplies last. Free meals are applied as a discount on First box, new subscribers only varies by plan. Let's go back to anger for a second, because my wife sent me this tweet the other day that I thought I'd get your opinion on because I think I've been struggling with it. She says, it's from this guy, Tim Greerson. He said, being angry all the time is exhausting and corrosive.

Not being angry feels morally irresponsible. Yeah, that's interesting. How do you balance that? So that's a tough one. One of the things I struggled with most with stoicism was the approach to social justice. Yes. And my friend and I, when we were having our Stoic sessions, you know, we'd always come back to this, particularly the climate,

and we'd be, we'd wrestle with it, you know, like really wrestle. My thinking still hasn't, I still grapple with it. Me too. There's tension in Stoicism. You know, there is tension throughout the whole philosophy, and I think this is one of the main areas of tension. And also I would put Desire in this camp as well, you know, where there's stoic teachings and, okay, it makes sense,

but it also isn't necessarily human nature. But let's just stick with anger for the moment. The tension is that stoicism walks is that you can't control, like I can't control what happens in the Middle East. Yeah. So therefore, would me going on a protest or me doing some action or me getting angry, would that change anything? A pure stoic would say no.

Sure. But if everyone felt that way. If everyone felt that way. So same with the climate crisis. One of the reasons I was attracted to work in politics is that you're actually working, you know, it is a system where things happen. Yes.

It's the government. So I think there's ways of directing your impulses to make change. Yeah. One of them was working within a system, but people who think the system's broken would say, No, get angry. Stay outside the system. Anger can give you energy to fight, but it can also burn you up and mean that you're not effective as an activist. I think about it in sports. It's like what is the single best thing you can do to weaken your opponent? It's to make them angry. It's to get in their head and needle them and frustrate them and either make them give up or maybe.

make them overreact or distract them. And so it's like, I've come to think about it. It's like, okay, either the person that you're angry with, like your political opponent or whatever is either a good person who is misinformed and thus redeemable and informable. And so anger is probably not going to help. Yeah. Or they are genuinely evil and awful. In which case you need all your wits about you to be able to beat them.

And that anger, the Stokes would say is sort of the most irrational and the most difficult to contain of all the emotions. It's precisely what you don't need in either situation. And I think it's William Irving that talked, or Irvine, that talked about fake anger. So you use it when you're teaching, say, small children who might be, you know, mischievous. So you pretend to get angry. So you don't have, so you scare. You do this in sports too. The coach gets upset to rally the players, but they're actually still in command of themselves.

Yeah, they're acting. So the main thing's at araxia. Like how is your equilibrium? That's very important to me at this point in my life. If I feel myself getting angry, I can actually feel the chemicals, you know, leaving my brain, circulating around my blood. It's not good. It's very unhealthy. But the impulse of anger comes from a feeling of injustice.

Yes. So, you know, it's catching, it's getting that initial impulse, closing it down, which is what, Chrysippus or I'm not sure how you pronounce him, you know, like before the cart rolls down the hill with the dog attached to it. You know, you stop it before it takes off. So you recognize the impulse. You feel, oh, this is unjust, stop before you blow up. And then you think, well, what's in my power?

Yeah. But I am increasingly becoming more of a mainstream, like traditional stoke with anger, which is there's no place. Yeah. You know, I've recently read Deira, the Seneca book. You know, he is so unequivocal about how bad anger is. And I tend to agree with him. And it's just working out that tension between justice and control,

the control test that I think every stoic has to kind of deal with. Yeah, look, I mean, the. almost to a person, the Stoics are involved in politics. Absolutely. So this idea that they didn't think things could change or were worth trying or that there wasn't a responsibility or an obligation, sometimes people get mad into Stoic, I'll talk about some thing that's happening politically.

And they go, what would the Stoics think? They'd be like, they probably think I'm not talking about politics enough, quite frankly. Yeah, yeah. Like the idea that Stoicism is this self-improvement strategy divorced from the world that you live in is nonsense.

It's a way to let yourself off the hook to not have to face these things that are happening around you in the world that you have some ability to affect. You know, yeah, you don't control what happens in the Middle East, but you control who you vote for. And most people don't even fucking do that. Yeah. So you have, you have little ways to have influence. And then you have to content yourself with, have I at least done all that I can do. Yeah. And Mark's really says in meditation, he says, look, you can commit it.

an injustice by doing nothing also. And that's, most of us are guilty of those injustices of just, we could do more. We just make up excuses for not doing it. It's definitely nowhere near nihilism as a philosophy. You know, nihilism is all about, and I've had readers who've approached me off to book events and said, you know, I like the sound of stoicism, but it really, it's not what we need in this day and age because we, it's such an urgent time in history. And I said, well, when hasn't history been urgent?

You know, all through the 20th century, look at how many people were killed. Yeah. History is one urgent moment after the next. Yeah. How do we respond to that moment? When that tweet says the only way to respond is with anger, it's like, well, what does that look like if everyone's angry? Is it actually true that we need more angry people?

That's not what I would diagnose as what's happening. I mean, I think there's things that people are not as engaged with as they should, but I'm not sure anger is the way through them. One of the great things about stoicism is that it wasn't defensive. Seneca said this philosophy is open for people to change it depending on the new discoveries. I don't know the exact quote, but I've read it in your books. And it's some, you know, if someone comes along and says stoicism isn't working for these times for these reasons, I'll listen and really, you know, think about it. There's some fundamental things that we don't control us human beings, right?

We don't control other people. We don't control the weather. We don't control this or that and the other. But like we thankfully live in a society of much more dynamism and agency than the one where Epictetus is a slave, right? Or where Marxian is an emperor, right? So if you live in ancient Rome, you don't get to choose who the emperor is. We live in a society where we get to elect our leaders. Right.

So, so I think it's important to think as society has a. involved and invented things, we have more influence over things that 2,000 years ago, the Stokes were having to steal themselves to accept and be resigned to. And so, you know, slavery was a perpetual institution which no one could do anything about until one day some people did something about it. And now it doesn't exist, at least in the same way, the same prevalence. And so, yeah, I think seeing stoicism, stoicism as a way of thinking about things that there's some things that are in our control and some things that are not in our control, that is timeless and always will be true. What was in our control and not in our control was different in Zeno's time than it was in Seneca's time than it was in Marcus Aurelius's time.

More like society empowered, things changed, things were invented, mechanisms were created, new breakthroughs. happen. And so we should feel empowered to update and adjust Stoicism for a world where we have, thankfully, mechanisms to do things that were unthinkably out of everyone's control. Anyways, I can't wait to go back to Australia. I want to swim in the rock pools. I might try to drag my in-laws with us. The kids are very excited. And I hope to see you while I'm there. You can grab tickets at Daily Stoic Live. As I said, it'll be Uckland on October. October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, and Perth on the 21st. I haven't been to Perth in, when did I go? 2013. Wow. So I haven't been in quite some time.

So I'm very excited to go back to Perth as well. I hope to see you there. I might bring you some other chunks from the trip over the next couple weeks. But anyways, hope to see you in Australia.