The Daily Stoic - The Stoic Reminders Hiding All Over Rome

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

In Rome, Ryan could barely go for a run without passing a place connected to Stoic history. In today’s episode, he shares moments from his family trip, from visiting the places where the Stoics lived and worked to running a 50K route through Rome’s ancient Stoic sites.👉 The Stoic 50k video is out now! Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ 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/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are.--Wealthfront’s high-yield cash account: https://www.wealthfront.com/stoicThis experience may not be representative of other Wealthfront clients, and there is no guarantee of future performance or success. Experiences will vary. Ryan Holiday, who’s a client of Wealthfront, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for paid testimonials in his podcast, creating a conflict of interest. More details available via the referral link. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new clients) when you direct deposit $1,000 a month, plus open, fund, and maintain an investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms apply. Full details at wealthfront.com/promo-terms.The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. References to the APY for the Wealthfront Cash Account, including any APY increase, are to the APY paid by insured depository institutions that participate in our cash sweep program (the "Program Banks”). Wealthfront Brokerage does not pay interest. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY.Instant and same-day withdrawals use the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network or FedNow service. Transfers may be limited by your receiving institution, daily caps, or participating entities. New Cash Account deposits have a 2–4 day hold before transfer. Wealthfront does not charge fees for these services, but receiving institutions may impose an RTP or FedNow Fee. Processing times may vary.. Fees & Eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features.Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Securities investments are not bank deposits, bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value.--See 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. I am very much delayed in recording this. So some of my recall may be less than perfect, but last year we went to Greece for a chunk of the summer. my kids have gotten obsessed with Greek history. They love the creaking out podcasts. They love The Odyssey. And so we sort of planned this trip. We went to Athens.

We went to Sparta. We went to Olympia. We went to Delphi. We went to Ithaca. We did all the big stuff. It went great. My sort of theory is like a good trip is, do you want to do another one after? And on the sort of last couple days, my wife was like, I think we should do Italy next year.

And I looked at my kids. I was like, do you guys know what a big win that is for you? that at the end of this month-long trip, your mom wants to do something again with you at this level, that she's not like never again, which was moments that we felt during the trip. So we decided we do Rome and then maybe some of the coast there in Italy. So we flew to Rome.

It's 10 days in Rome. I committed to doing something crazy. When we were in Greece, I did the original marathon from Marathon to Athens. Got heat stroke. It was a bit nuts, but certainly a bucket list life. changing experience. And so I wanted to do something bigger. And I decided I would do a 50K.

I'd make up a course, but I'd do a 50K in Rome, mostly on the Appian Way, which I'd biked and run on on a previous trip and found to be very beautiful. But we took out from Austin, had a layover in Detroit, immediate travel delays, three, four, five hours, I think we spent in Detroit. But they had this cool, like, right next to our gate, they had this, like, I don't know, the store where you could, like, play old school video games. So my kids and I played. Street Fighter on Super Nintendo for an hour or two. That was pretty fun, actually. So we spent a lot of time just killing time in this airport lounge. And my kids were going a little crazy, right? Their kids are crazy. They're excited about this trip. They're hurry up and wait. And what were

they doing? They'd grabbed bananas from the, you know, the fruit thing in the lounge. And they were acting out gunfights like from the Old West. Like they were, you know, pace and then go draw and they'd shoot each other. I think they started with reenacting the Hamilton duel. And then they were reenacting the, you know, gunfighter scenes. And this lady comes over and says, why are your kids yelling? She's just yelling at these kids. This is a secalian lady. Why do you have to be screaming?

And they weren't screaming. They were just being kids in an airport lounge. And anyways, we de-escalated the situation. I think we handled it pretty well. And then I was like, guys, look, if you mess around, not everyone's going to appreciate it the way your mom and I do. And later, as we were finally heading down to of the flight, this lady runs up to us, a different lady. And she goes, hey, I think what your kids

are doing was totally fine. And just so you know, that lady that yelled at them, she was sitting over by me, and she was listening to an audiobook without headphones. My kids just thought that was absolutely hilarious. They're like, oh, she's a hypocrite. And I go, this is life, right? We fly to Rome, we land, we're exhausted. Airbnb was nice enough to sponsor us. That was fun. We stayed in this crazy Colazo in Rome. The apartment we were staying in was twice as old as America. Like, had a fresco on the ceiling. It was 500 years old. And just amazing. And then inside it had all these funerary stones or monuments, like this one from the first century AD, this one from the second century AD. Just like, that's just the thing about Rome. Like, this is an old by Rome standards,

and it's twice as old as America. Beautiful apartment. Did some great writing, working on the Stock Doe book while I was there, wrote some daily stoic emails that have been trickling out. You might have noticed them being a little Rome-themed over the last couple months. The first day we were there, we got one of those audiences with the Pope, the general audience, not the private, private audience. But you're sitting there, and then Bob from Chicago gets out.

Well, first off, he zips around in his G-wagon, Pope, And then he gets up there and he talks. It was surreal and beautiful. You know, Pontifex Maximus, the Pope of Rome, Catholic Pope, has the same job title as Marcus Reelius. There is in Hadrian's tomb, which is where Marcus Rios is also buried, there's this big sort of freeze of Marcus, the stone carving of Marcus in front of the temple of Jupiter, like essentially doing the exact same thing the Pope is doing, waving his hands, initiating.

the ceremony. It's just, I don't know, the full circleness of that in Rome was surreal to me. For sure. And then I read his encyclical, his thing on AI. I thought it was incredible, by the way. I talked about this actually when I was on Karish Wisher's Pocket. Let me run you this clip of it. Did you read the Pope's thing on AI? His essay? Of course I did. I did a whole show on it. Yeah. Yeah, what did you think of that? Magnificent humanity. I thought it was so fascinating because you know, for the last, for my whole life, but I think for a generation or so now, we've been looking at this technology and then asking ourselves, is it economically good or bad? Is it unavoidable or not? And what's so interesting about that work is, is you have

him looking at it from a moral perspective. Like, is this right and wrong? Is this the direction we want to go as a society? How will this change our obligations to each other? What are our obligations to each other? So I do think it goes to that idea of like, Like what, like, we just live in this, unfortunately, I think, like a fundamentally amoral society where we have stripped out the ability to even ask those questions about like, is this right or wrong? Should I be doing this or not? It's just like, hey, can this get funding or not? Will this go viral or not? And I think the Pope is sparking something there, which I think great philosophers and spiritual leaders are supposed to spark, which is.

go like, hey, that's all well and good, but there are some other questions to consider here. And these are, in fact, the most essential questions to consider. It's also not anti-tech, actually, if you read it carefully, if you read everywhere. And that's what I thought he didn't really. I wonder if the Pope is a stoic. He feels a little bit. You know, I was just in Rome, and we went and saw a blessing of the Pope, and you see him going around in the little Pope-mobile. And it was funny, you know, they'd be like, oh, you're American.

And you're like, Bob from Chicago, like the idea of the of the Pope being a human being that's accessible to Americans is interesting. I like to point out that Marcus Rilius and the Pope have the same title, Pontifex Maximus, that Rome as the Catholic Rome absorbs so much of the conagraphy and the names and the words and the titles of the Romans and then the Stoics. This sort of continuity is interesting to me. So if you haven't read that, you should. It's very good. It was funny to hear him referred to as Bob from Chicago by many, many people while we were there. You know, we had a couple tours planned. We did a tour of the Coliseum and the forum. We did a tour of the Vatican, which was incredible. We did all that. I would say, honestly, it was so hot. It was literally the hottest that it has ever been there. And because of all the marble and the stone, it would just, it never close. And it was like, really. So we took a complete beating, and my kids were total troopers about it. Did they want to go to McDonald's a lot more than I would have liked? Yes, and there was the American part of me that was totally ashamed. Here we are in this other country, this wonderful part of the world, with all these things and experience, and all they want to do is go to McDonald's.

The other American part of me was like, dude, their bathrooms are the best, their AC is the best, it's the cleanest, and also their French fries are very good. So, yes, we went to McDonald's an embarrassing amount of time, but I took that as a small compromise, getting these kids to walk miles and miles and miles every day, which we did. But while we were in St. Peters, our tickets allowed us to go up in the dome. And the kids were exhausted and were like, we're not going to make you climb all the way to the tippy, tippy top. And then they were like, oh, thank God. And then we got close to it. And they were like, you know what? We want to do it.

Race up there. And it is a lot more stairs that I would have thought. And every time you thought you were getting to the top, you weren't, and you finally get up there, it's so hot. I mean, you're just baking in this dome, and then you get up there and the wind. It's beautiful. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. And when a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. And when their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door.

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Chances are I was probably wearing something from today's sponsor, Quince. They make great sweaters. They make great t-shirts. They make great buttonups, great pants, just a great company. Their clothes are built to last, made with premium materials. They're the kind of stuff you reach for every day. Quince specializes in everyday staples that work harder. Ultra soft, organic cotton teas, Mongolian cashmere sweaters, everything in between.

Everything that Quince has is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find from similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories, cuts out the middleman so you're getting premium materials without the markup. If you're still hanging on to the same worn-out basics, Quince makes it easy to upgrade. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash stoic. You can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK to Q-U-I-N-C-C-E.com slash Stoic. So probably our favorite tour was this one we did of this crypt right outside the city. And all of a sudden, you sort of go in this little building, and then all of a sudden you're one story down, there's a church, and then you're two stories down, and you're on the ground.

And just hundreds and hundreds, thousands ultimately of Romans were buried here, particularly Christians, I guess. And they just sort of carved these little tombs out of the wall. But the incredible thing was just that it was an escape from the heat. the coolness of it was probably the coolest we were the entire trip even when we had air conditioning. And we're sort of going through these alleys. You're like in an underground city, but for the dead. And she's showing us this one and he's talking. And then my son goes, is that a skull?

And she goes, yeah, that's a skull. And then he's like, whoa, that's amazing. and they both like sort of light up about it. And she was like, I know what's there. I just didn't want to tell them because they're kids and I didn't know if it would freak them out. And they were like, no, this is the best part. So the momento moria lesson is not verboten in our family.

The kids thought it was the coolest thing. It actually reminded me when I was in Ireland, 10 and 11 years ago, you could go in this church that had a crypt and they had these bodies, one from the crusade that had mummified. They were there. They weren't buried or in a coffin or anything. They were mummies.

And the first time I went, they let you touch it. You could rub the finger of this man who had died in the crusades. I remember he was so tall, they had to break his legs to put him in this little area. When I gave a talk in Ireland two years ago, I brought my kids and I was going to show them. and it was closed. I couldn't figure out why. I Googled it. Some crazy person had gone in there and thrown lighter fluid on them and lit them on fire.

So, you know, one of the reasons to go on these trips, to go to these places, to do these things is you think they've been there forever. And in some cases they have, but they might not be there forever. Or in other cases, right? My wife and I went and toured the forum and stuff when we were there, 10, 10. plus years ago, and then we went with our kids, and there was new stuff. Like, Rome, this ruin had been there for 2,000 years. And in the last 10 years, a second in, you know, the span of Rome, it's now open. There was new stuff on Palatine Hill that was open.

There was new stuff in the palace that was open. There was just stuff that wasn't available before. I'm sure it reminds me of something I talked about on the podcast recently, with Peter Santonello that traveling is like reading, you go once and you read it once, it's great, right? There's all this stuff out there that you should read. There's all these places you should go. But then there's something about going somewhere again, right?

This is the stoic idea of you never step in the same river twice. And he actually had a really good answer about that, which I want to play for you. Travel is a little bit like reading in that there's all the places you want to go, just like there's all the books you want to read. And the problem is some places traveling to once or reading once is not enough. Right. Like it's hard to justify rereading when there's all these books that you haven't read. Right. But there's something about traveling to the same plate. Like we were just in Rome and it was maybe my fourth time. And it was

crazy to think I'm walking around on the forum. I could afford this time to hire this really good guy. And she's showing this stuff. And I'm like, I don't remember seeing this. And she's like, oh, this just opened. And I'm like, it's been here for 2,000 years, and I was here 10 years ago and I couldn't see this. Yeah. Like they just excavated it. So like 10 years is that in Roman history, but it fundamentally changed the experience that I was able to. So it's hard for someone to afford to go to Europe once. It's hard to do a family road trip across the United States once, but actually you have to do it like three or four or five or ten times to actually get it. You know? And so this, this tension between reading and rereading traveling and coming back is like, that's the tricky part.

That's a great comparison. Yeah, that one, I mean, it's a good problem to have, firstly. But I understand what you're saying. Like, I'm not trying to chew my horn. I've been 85 countries. I could have been all of them. But I went back to Istanbul 20 times. Yeah. Lived in Ukraine, wanted to go to somewhere warm in the winter. Two hours. Okay, cool. And I love that city. It's fantastic. In Italy, how is it? It's really hard not to go back to Italy. Sure. So I get you. The older I get now, it's I don't need as much adventurous stuff. Don't need to go to Pakistan again. Iran, I don't really think that would go so well these days. Right. But going back to some more stable and I'd say easier travel places as you get older makes sense. It's like, are you going to understand a handful of places really, really deeply? Yep. Or are you going to have been, like, you know, you hear they're like, are we going on this cruise and we're going to stop in 16. cities and you're like, okay, you got two hours here, one hour. I mean, it's better than nothing,

but like you skimmed the surface. It's go everywhere, see nothing. Yeah. And so that's a tough balance. And that's tough to sell to someone who gets two weeks. Like, if you're working the average job in the United States, what are you getting two weeks? Maybe. Right. And so Christmas, family, Thanksgiving family, you're lucky if you're going overseas. And so you got six days in L.A. Yeah. Do you just want to stay in Rome and just see Rome where you're like, I got to see all these things that was dreamed of going to. So then we did all this stuff. Basically, the rhythm of the trip is I would get up really early and go for a long run. I was running along the Tiber River, by the way, and I see this little

thing swimming and I go, is that a fucking Capi Bara? Am I looking at a Capi Bara? I had to stop, take a video of it. I uploaded it in a chat, GBT. I'm like, is this, could this possibly be a Capi Bara swimming in the Tiber River? Turns out, no, there's actually a feral Nutria population in Rome, just like there is in New Orleans. But there we go. I saw that. My kids are excited about that. So anyways, I would get up, go early.

I'd run up along the river. I did get in trouble one day. I was leaving the Airbnb. And I took my shirt off. I was so hot. And this police woman stopped. You can't do that in Rome. And I go, okay, sorry, I'll turn around.

But she didn't know which direction I was coming from. So I just, I finished the run. I went on the run because I did. just started, but I wasn't going to go back into the place and wake everyone up, you know, sneaking out. It was like Catherine Zeta Jones in that one movie just to leave this big, enormous creaking wooden door to get out of the apartment, not wanting to wake them up. So I did break that law. But no, I would run every morning, you know, you'd pass by Marcus's tomb in one direction or these great bridges or, you know, sites of naval battles or, you know, in another direction. It was just, I loved it

every morning. I couldn't go for these long runs I wanted because I was training for the 50K. But the training by myself in the morning, just having Rome, like totally to myself was a, just a wonderful experience. I recorded something while I was there about this. If you want to feel amazing, if you want to feel like a king, all you got to do is get up early. It could be New York, it could be Rome where I am, and you have the whole city to yourself. You rule the streets. I got up early, a walk down this hallway that was built. 500 years ago, and then I run through these city streets that are literally thousands of years old. I push myself physically. I challenge myself. And then I get to go have an amazing day.

If you want to start your day off right, you got to win the morning, get up early, get up after it. It's like that Longfellow poem about how great heights weren't reached by sudden flight, but while the others slept, they toiled through the night. But it doesn't just have to be the night. It can be up early in the morning, everyone else is sleeping, you get up and you get after it. I'd come back and then we'd usually they'd still be asleep and then I'd go sometimes record little videos that have been trickling out. Like here's one I recorded on the forum one morning while they were sleeping.

That's the Roman forum down there. Seneca would have walked through here on his way to try cases, on his way to sit in the Senate, on his way to advise Nero. He said that he pities people who hadn't gone. through adversity. He says they don't know what they're capable of. And I think that's what doing hard things is about putting yourself in situations where you get a sense. Okay, here's what I can do. Here's where I'm bumping up against my limits. Here's what I have to add to my game to be able to deal with situations like this. And there's no question. Seneca was was stretched to his

capacities, having to try to contain and control Nero, a deranged unsunged. stable, unsuitable leader if there ever was one. And so we challenge ourselves, we put ourselves in situations because life is going to do that to us. And that's what it's all about. And then here's one I recorded at the great Marx Reelius Sequestion statue while they were sleeping. It reminded me of one of my favorite essays. There's an essay by Joseph Brodsky about the Marx Reilly Sequestion statue that I just adore. So the great line about this statue from the Soviet dissident, Joseph Brodsky, he walked up here one early morning that was quiet, not like this, right, it was quiet, not unlike this. And he said, if Marcus Aurelius's antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.

I think he's just sort of marveling at this great man who 2,000 years ago in the pages of his journal, he was writing notes to himself. about controlling his temper, about getting up early, about quenching his desires, his urges, about being kind to people, about working hard. And he says, fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. He didn't want to be imperialized. He didn't want to be stained purple by all the accoutrema of power, the sycophants around him, people worshipping him as a god. He wanted to be good, he wanted to be decent, which is ultimately like the hardest thing to do in the world, especially when you are the most powerful person in the world.

I love the statue. It's worth a run anytime you're in Rome. You come up these big, gradual steps, and then suddenly you're at the top. There's also a quirk. This statue, that's not the original. The original's inside the Capitoline Museum right there, but it's a quirk of history that it even sort of,

survived. The Christians, who had good reason not to like Marksruis, they would have destroyed this that they known. They thought it was Constantine, the first Christian emperor, so they didn't destroy it, so they kept it. So there was something like 25 equestrian statues in antiquity that we know of. All of them are gone, except for this one. This one endures. And it's totally by accident. And then we go do, you know, our one or two activities for the day, and then we just relax. eat, have fun. We were having dinner one night at this little restaurant in Piazza Navano, I think, which is an old circular chariot racing track. And, you know, we sat down, asked for water, ask for water with ice, you know, and we're American. And, you know, they give you like five ice cubes,

which isn't nearly enough. But in between, like, ordering and the food arriving, I was like, hey, the team asked me to record this, like, quick video, some Stoic rules. I'm going to walk right over there, set the camera here and record it. And I did. You know, it took three or four minutes. That gets edited down to being like a two-minute clip. And then, you know, all the stuff goes on a memory card. It goes back to the Daily Stoak team.

They edited. They move it out. I don't control, like, you know, all the editing decisions. I don't control when things go up. That's the wonderful Daily Stoke team that does that. And Anna on the team cuts that one up, posts it far and away, the most popular thing we have ever done on. Daily Stoic. I think just on one channel it did six million views, which is just absolutely

incredible. Like, I want to say it paid for the whole trip because you don't get paid for the stuff on social media. But like, if you told me like, hey, you've got to fly the family to roam, but you're going to do this clip, but the clip's going to do six million views, I'd be like, oh, that's probably worth it, right? That's probably, that probably justifies it. And, you know, it just absolutely crushed. So that was really cool. Actually, a bunch of the stuff's done really well, I recorded something else while we were walking through the forum. You go up to Palatine Hill, where the emperors lived. The most haunting thing is just walking up the emperor's ramp,

which is this private corridor that Mark Surrealis would have walked many, many times from the palace to the forum or from the forum to the palace. You're walking up there. You see his private walking track. I wrote it David Stokey, I think about both of those, about the walking track. Like, Mark's real estate was so weird. He couldn't go on. walks. He had to worry about being killed or harassed. He had to have a private walking track. And so you'd

think, like, being the emperor would be great, but it was this kind of gilded prison. Like, he is walking a track like a prisoner in a prison would walk pace around the prison yard. I just found that so fascinating. I wrote an email about the emperor's walk, this little corridor. But I did something there up about, like, living in that palace, like how surreal it would have been to live in that palace. Let me play that real fast. This is where Marcus Aurelius lived, the imperial palace on Palantine Hill in ancient Rome. And he said of this enormous palace, all these rooms, all these luxuries, all of it just for him for exclusively his use. He said, you know, it's possible to live well even in a palace. What he meant is that living in a palace isn't good for you. Seneca would say

that luxury resides under marble and gold. He saw all this as oppressive. He saw all this as corruptive. He saw all of it as fundamentally not normal, which it isn't. And so in meditations, which he's writing here in this very building, he's trying to stay humble. He's trying to remind himself what's actually important. He's trying to avoid being stained, he says, died purple by the cloak of the emperor, but also the trappings of the palace. And we should remember this, wherever we live, however nice our dwellings are, that it's possible to live well anywhere. It's possible to be good anywhere, decent anywhere, anywhere, value the right things anywhere. And fact, it is sometimes in the most luxurious and exciting and beautiful of places that that

job is actually even harder. And then, you know, the run day was quickly approaching. Did I, did I sometimes hope maybe I'd get injured and not have to do it or that it would be literally too hot to not have to do it? Yeah, yeah, I did. I was dreadn't, to be perfectly honest, but I was also excited. And I set out on it. I left around 5.15 in the morning, I think. And the photographer, the videographer, met me. He was going to zip around on a scooter.

We had these sort of set meeting points. And then I started on the run. I went to all the Stoicites that I'd been seeing on the trip anyway, but just seeing him alone in the morning was just Marcus Rios' column, the equestrian statue, the tomb, the Colosseum, the Forum, the baths. Honestly, the thing that was throwing me the most on the run wasn't the heat. I knew that was approaching, but it was like stopping to do the parts of the video that we were doing.

It was screwing with my time a little bit. I would pause it, but I knew I could see the time tick-ticking away. At one point, my wife was tracking my location goes, you're only like 10 miles in. You've been doing this for two hours. What's going on? I was like, oh, you're right. I just got to keep going. But there was something magnificent and very moving to me about stopping.

and I had water in the backpack of the videographer, but there's just all these public fountains in Rome, and they're just bubbling up, you know, and you're just drinking water from these aqueducts, basically that the Romans bill, and you're just drinking this water. It reminds me of that passage from Marks, really, about how, you know, the good is in us.

It's just always bubbling up. He says it's like an underground spring. It doesn't matter what you throw on top of it. It'll keep bubbling up. And you think about all the centuries that have, come since all the terrible things humanity has done and this water just keeps bubbling up, as it always has and hopefully always will. Just struck so many times on the run, like running along the Appian Way,

running on these stones and there's just grooves from wagons, hundreds, hundreds, thousands of years. It could have been Marx's release as wagons. I mean, at one point you passed the tomb that they think is where Seneca is buried. I just found it just moving. And one of the piece of advice I talked to someone, he said, you know, just you're not actually doing a race. So he was saying, like, slow down and enjoy it, you know, appreciate how surreal and crazy the surroundings are. It's like, if you need to stop and walk and take it in, do it.

And I never ended up having to walk, but I did, I did just take it in. And one point I passed a place where Samantha and I basically first talked about getting married on bikes right after the obstacles way came out or right as I was working on the obstacles way. recorded something there. Somewhere around here, I have a vague sense memory of it. I was riding my bike with my wife along the Appian Way. He pulled over on the side. I hadn't planned it. We're just hanging out. We've been together a long time and I just said, hey, you think we should get married at some point? This isn't a formal ass, but are you seeing this go the same direction I am? And she said, yes, we've been married 11 years now. You know, when we talk about doing hard things, when we talk about courage, it's not just physical stuff. There's physical courage, there's physical discipline,

but also the moral courage to put yourself out there. Most of the things you want in life, most of the good things in your life, the best things in your life are on the other side of some little bit of moral courage. It's like that movie where Matt Damon says, all it takes is 20 seconds of courage, 20 seconds of insane bravery to change the course of your life.

You know, it's the decision to walk across the room and say hi to someone. It's the decision to raise your hand and volunteer for something. It's the decision to hit publish on something. It's the decision to go out for something, to ask for that promotion to put your hat in the ring, file those election papers.

It's the decision to tell someone that you love them, that you want to be with them. It's the decision also the day-to-dayness of sticking with it, even when it's hard, even when you go, what am I doing? Even when it's not totally what you imagined, right? There's the doing the hard things. There's the 20 seconds of insane bravery and commitment to leap. Then there's also the day-to-dayness of it. And I do think that's why exercise and physical challenges and doing big scary things is a great metaphor. It's the leap of faith, sure.

But then it's the not quitting. It's the not giving up. It's the staying at it. It's the getting through to the other side, getting through the valley. that it's all about it. And it's funny to think, you know, she's back at the place we booked on Airbnb, comfortable, cool, hanging out with the kids. It's not all easy. She's holding down the fort. She put up with a lot of long training runs. But me being gone, being a running widow, I guess. But it's a full circle moment to be back right here where that happened.

Anyways, I made it back. It was all well until basically the last mile. There's something crazy, I think, about, like, when your watch goes, oh, you just finished a marathon. You're like, that's the furthest I've ever run in my life. And you're like, but I still have six miles left to go. 50K is about 31 miles. And you're like, oh, that's not so bad. I'll get me all wrap this up. And then somehow it's always the last mile that hits you.

That's where I hit the wall on the Greek one, and it's where I hit the wall on this one. I literally had to stop at a restaurant and order water and sit at a table and drink it. I was that beat. And, you know, I ended up finishing my son, found me sort of towards the end with my wife and he ran the last few feet and finished that. That was great. And then that was basically our last day. The next day we got up and we went on to

Pompeii. And you know what? I'll do the rest of the trip in a part two of this episode here shortly just because, well, if you really want to know, I've been recording this for a while. And I asked my wife to watch the kids here back now. I have to go finish recording some of the audiobook for the new 10-year anniversary of Daly Stoak, which is in the works. I'll be announcing that here very shortly. And I want to use that recording time for this. So I'll record part two at a different time. But in the meantime, I'm going to go record that.

I hope you're liking this. And I'll talk again very soon.