The Oprah Podcast - A Doctor Says You Need 17 Minutes Outside Every Day. Here’s Why

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

BUY THE BOOK!The Indoor Epidemic by John La PumaDr. John La Puma joins the podcast to discuss his eye-opening book, Indoor Epidemic, and the life-changing research behind it. We now spend an astonishing 93% of our lives indoors and according to Dr. La Puma our health is paying the price. The good news? Just 17 minutes a day of intentional time in nature can improve sleep, sharpen focus, lift your mood and reduce anxiety. Also, just eleven minutes of daily, intentional engagement with nature can lower your risk of premature death by 23%. Dr. La Puma’s outdoor prescription is simple, free and potentially life-changing. As Oprah says, it’s a formula for making your life better.00:00:00 - Welcome John La Puma, author of “The Indoor Epidemic” 00:04:40 - The indoor epidemic defined00:06:10 - 17 mins outside improves this 00:07:00 - This lowers your risk of premature death 00:12:20 - Trees and our immune system00:14:10 - Forest bathing 00:16:30 - Anxiety and hiking 00:19:00 - Movement is medicine 00:22:30 - Overstimulated and tired 00:29:15 - CEO reset00:31:22 - One thing to help you reset 00:32:45 - Breathing exercise 00:36:00 - Being indoors is impacting kids 00:37:30 - Nightfall ritual 00:40:30 - Why John wrote the book Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social:https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLIhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381

People think stoic means has no emotions. I sort of define stoicism as this idea that we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens. Do you think that the stoicism's principles of ancient wisdom are relevant for our times right now? The popularity of stoicism is a reaction against what's clearly not working for us and clearly making us miserable. We're all obviously just overstimulated and stressed and overwhelmed than trying to make sense of the world.

There's nothing so bad that you can't learn something from it. It's in those moments that I think we're really being tested. We have an opportunity to learn what we're made of. I love that. Nothing is wasted.

Unless we waste it. Unless we waste it. Hello, and thank you for joining me on the Oprah podcast. My book club selection this past April was Go Gentle by novelist Maria Simple. And in the story that she tells, the lead character practices and teaches stoicism.

But before I read Go Gentle, the novel, I think I had a vague idea of what stoicism was. I thought it meant grin and bear it, stuff your feelings, tough it out. But the more her character spoke of stoic principles in the novel, the more interested I became. And then I started ordering books about stoicism. So I wasn't just reading the novel.

I was reading books about, what the character in the novel was talking about. And then I hear this ancient philosophy is having a big comeback, even among younger people. So I invited the man who has written 15 books on Stoicism, including The Daily Stoic and really one of the most popular, The Obstacle is the Way, which is sold millions of copies and has been published in 40 different languages. He is a podcaster, he is an author and one of the leading voices behind the modern stoicism movement. Welcome to my front porch, Ryan Holiday. Thank you so much for having me.

This is a total honor. So tell us how that became an interest for you. Yeah, I don't think when people think of ancient philosophy, they think, oh, this will help me with modern problems. And so I had an experience, a guest, that people have been having for thousands of years, which is you pick up Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, Epictitious. And you go, wait, this can't possibly be from 2,000 years ago. Those are all famous Stoics you just named. Yes.

I mean, there's a passage in Marksrealist's meditations that I remember reading as a college student where the most powerful man in the world is talking about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning because it's nice and warm under the covers. And in that second, all these centuries, you know, disappear. The different cultures is totally, you know, surreal circumstances disappear. and you realize like human beings have been struggling with the same things for all time. Yes. And actually that's what philosophy is about.

Philosophy isn't riddles and, you know, names you can't pronounce. Philosophy is designed to help you live a good life, to fulfill your potential, to get up and get after it and to deal with the ups and downs of what they would say fortune could throw at you. So 15 books you've written about this. What is stoicism and how do you explain it? Well, I think the stereotype you mentioned is a good place to start. People think stoic means has no emotions, invulnerable. That's what we would call lowercase stoic.

That's what the word means. And it was just like Epicurean means loves food, but it's actually also a 2,500-year-old ancient philosophy. And so I sort of define stoicism as this idea that we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens. And the Stoics believed that everything was an opportunity to practice virtue. And those four virtues for the Stoics were courage, temperance or self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. And so the idea is that life can throw a lot at you, but it can't prevent you from acting with virtue. That's something you could do in prison. You could also do as the Emperor of Rome.

And so Stoicism then is this sort of toolkit for dealing with a world. where the vast majority... So it's not a religion? I don't think so. Yeah. It's a way of living, and there have been... The Stoics lived in a world of the gods, and there have been Stoics since, you know, God. It's, I think, perfectly compatible with a variety of different faiths.

But it's mostly a way of living, a set of ideas. Now, when I read Obstacle is the Way, I was struck by how simple the idea is, and yet how radical it also becomes when you actually try to live it, that the very thing, y'all, blocking your path might actually be the path. So Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome

around the year 170 wrote, what stands in the way becomes the way. Yeah. Yeah, and I had not come across that as a philosophy or if... How does what's standing in the way become the way, Ryan? I think what he's specifically talking about makes it very clear. So the obstacle he's referring to because he's writing in meditations,

which is just his private thoughts. So he's not saying it to us. He's saying it to himself. Yeah. And he's talking about difficult and annoying people. He's saying difficult and annoying people can get in our way. They can cause problems for us, right? Our opponents, our competitors, anyone can cause problems for us.

But they can't prevent us from moving forward because they're actually presenting us a new way to move forward, whether it's patience, whether it's forgiveness, whether it's creativity or perseverance. So for the Stoics, when they say the obstacle is the way, sometimes you can transform what you're dealing with into some huge opportunity to move forward in a professional capacity.

Yeah. But always in a personal capacity, we're being challenged and tested. We're given an opportunity to practice some, kind of excellent, some reach for us that maybe we wouldn't have done under ordinary circumstances, but this circumstance we're in gives us the chance to do that. That's what he means. So you write about persistent, directed action, and you say action is a solution and cure to our predicaments. How do people take action when they're stuck? When they don't know what to do,

Most people don't take action because they're stuck. One of the Stoic philosophers, Seneca, he said that the one thing all fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start. So we say we're going to do it later. We say we're going to do it tomorrow. We say we're going to do it when things go back to normal. All fools have this in common. I was thinking, okay, I'm in that fool category.

Me too. Me too. I'm getting ready. Yeah, we're working ourselves up to it. Yeah. And really, we got to get started. We got it. What's the smallest thing? What's the next right thing that we can do? Yeah.

One of my favorite writing rules is just a couple crappy pages a day. Yeah. You know, just get started. Don't overthink it. Don't let perfection be a form of paralysis. Yeah. But what can you do right now that at least makes a small positive difference? Yeah. So even if you're tired, even if you're discouraged, you still take action no matter what. Well, that's what discipline is, right? Doing it when you don't want to do it or you don't have to do it or you have a good excuse to not do it. Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the sentences, the first sentences that stood out for me is it doesn't matter what happens to us. It can be for the best if we use it to be better for ourselves and others.

Yeah. I think that's true. Mm-hmm. Sounds crazy, but also really challenging to apply. And in order to make it real, you organize the book around the three principles, perception, action, and will. Yeah. Okay. That's how the Stoics try to approach every situation.

there in. First, how do we think about this? What's the story I'm telling myself about it? What's my view on it? The Stoics remind themselves that, you know, it's not things that are the problem. It's our opinion about those things, right? How we, the story we tell ourselves about it, you know, this was unfair, this was cruel, I was humiliated. These are all subjective interpretations of an objective event. So first, how do we see this? That's really, really essential. Well, that's so interesting because since reading so many of your books and other people's books about stoicism, I now ask people, I used to say, oh, say, tell me what happened. I now, I've now caught myself saying, what's the story you're telling yourself about this?

Do you know what my therapist said to me once? I said, you know, it gave some interpretation of an event and she corrected me and she said, no, no, no, what you make up about this is. Yes. Right? It is. And then what I make up about it is my interpretation. That's right.

So what is the story you have made up about what is actually happening? Yes. Yes. And so stoicism is training to be able to see things as objectively, as dispassionately as possible, not in the sway of our initial impression or our emotions or our bias or whatever pattern we have followed our whole life. Okay.

Could you give me an example using perception? Yeah. Okay. first and foremost, something happens, and then we say, this is bad. Yeah. Or this is unrecoverable from, you know, my reputation has been damaged. That interpretation. And stepping back and going, no, no, no, no, no, somebody else might see this totally different.

Or had I not known that this happened, had someone said that rude remark to you, and you just didn't hear it, or your phone deleted the email, would your life be ruined? No, it's just that you know about it. and then you have an opinion about it that is the problem. So we're trying to step back and see the thing first and foremost objectively. And then I think what we can get better at is going, hey, if I have the power to tell myself a negative story about this, I also have the power to tell myself a positive story about this.

And that's where when we say the obstacles, the way, what we mean is, hey, this is a chance for me to do something that I couldn't do under ordinary circumstances. So how do we, Ryan, train ourselves to see, clearly when emotions are running high, how do you, so in every situation, you first do the assessment and you sort of step back and you don't shut down your emotions or do you shut down your emotions? I don't think you shut them down. I think the stereotype.

You repress your emotion. What do you do? Having the emotion to me is different than acting on the emotion. Lincoln famously would get upset, as all leaders do. and he would write these letters, but then he would put the letters in a drawer and not send them. Right? You can be angry.

You don't have to hit send because you can take a minute to think about it. So to me, stoicism is that reflection, that pause after the initial impression. The stoics are talking about taking every interpretation, every view, every instinct, every impulse, and putting it to the test going, hey, how am I going to feel about this later?

Am I sure I'm not going to regret this? Is this actually making it better or worse? So the stoic philosophy is not to act, not to react emotionally, is to take a moment, take the whole thing in, and try to look at it from the perspective of what is actually happening here and not just the story I'm telling myself

about what's happening here. Yeah, it's that pause between the stimulus and the thing you do. Everything I do begin with intention. You become exactly what you believe is possible. Especially the Oprah podcast. You're doing good, A. I believe when people share their personal journeys with authenticity.

Never thought of it like that. I love that. You've never thought of it that way before. And with intention, something beautiful happens. We recognize pieces of our own lives in theirs. We realize that actually helps, right? We are not alone. Life is a journey.

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To help guide you with insurance designed to keep you covered through it all. Because life happens in ways we can't always predict. And with the right support, we keep driving forward. And that, dear listener, is everything. Okay, so is the obstacle always meant to be overcome when the obstacle is the way? Or is it meant just to be understood? I found that, you know, when something goes wrong or is challenging, if I can ask the question, what is this here to teach me?

Yeah. What is this here to teach me? It eases the way and clears the path for moving forward. So are we supposed to always move the obstacle out of the way, or are we just supposed to understand why it's there? I think it's all of the above. I mean, look, sometimes you face a problem or an obstacle, and what's being demanded of you is persistence, perseverance, determination.

You've got to knock this thing out of the way with sheer force. That's what the opportunity is. And you're going to get stronger, just like lifting weights, for having had to wrestle with this thing. Epictetus is one of the stoic. He says, you know, pretend you've been, you're an Olympic athlete, and you've been paired with a strong sparring partner. Like, you're wrestling with this

and you're both getting better because it's hard. So sometimes it's like that, but you're right, sometimes it's actually not a surmountable obstacle. Sometimes it's just an obstacle there that's there to teach you about yourself, to teach you about the world. Is everything there to teach us something? I think there's nothing so bad

that you can't learn something from it. I think that's, that is the ultimate way that we turn the opposite. into an opportunity as a learning experience, if not in our own lives, how can, if we've screwed up horribly badly, how do we at least codify what we've learned so our children can benefit from it

or people we know can benefit from it? I'm so interested in this principle of living your life from the point of view of understanding what you can control and what you can't control. I'm not a stoic, but I think I have understood that for a long time. We have a few practicing stoics, zooming in with us. Dr. Dan Dworkis is an emergency room physician from Los Angeles. Welcome, Dr. Hi, folks. Thanks for having me. How do you use these tenets of stoicism in the ER?

Absolutely. I mean, I really came to stoicism through medicine. And when you work in medicine, you are exposed to this really raw, very vulnerable part of humanity, right? You're with people as they suffer. You're with them as they survive, and sometimes you're with them as they die. And there are days when you and your team, you just give everything you possibly have and it's still not enough, right? And somebody dies. And you go home from that and you realize your limitations, how small you are, that there are these obstacles that there is no way around. And what do you do with that, right? So you have to find some method of a how and a why to come back tomorrow and to try harder and to do better. And so as I was wrestling with that, I really found the stoic

principles to be incredibly helpful about making meaning out of that. So this idea of operate where you have control or play the hand of cards you're dealt, you know, to find a way to help that lean into as opposed to away from that raw, messy humanity. So for me, practicing stoicism became just a really critical part of how I practice and teach emergency medicine. So much so that when I wrote my book, The Emergency Mind, which is like lessons from an ER doctor on how to perform under pressure. I tried to think about this core concept of what is stoicism for emergencies and then build outward from there.

So I think it's really intimately tied to crisis, whether you're the one going through it or the one trying to solve it. Wow. I hear you have a question for Ryan. I do. And I'm very thankful to get the chance to ask it. I actually read the obstacles the way in between shifts when I was coming up and made a big difference for me.

So thank you for that. That is amazing. One of the things I really love about stoicism is that it's an and instead of an or, right? So you can be, as you said, religious and very deeply religious and a stoic or you can be not religious in all and be a stoic. You can be a teacher or an author or an ER doctor or anything and be a stoic, a Republican and a stoic, a Democrat and a stoic. And our culture these days doesn't really do and, right? We do a lot of or. Yeah.

We really want to divide people into you are this or you are that. And I think stoicism has this real ability to unite people around this and concept. So my question is, what do you do with that? How do you use stoicism to bring people to the understanding that we really can be an and instead of an or? I think even with the idea of what a philosopher is, right? People tend to think of a philosopher as someone who works at a university and discourses about philosophy, as opposed to he's a philosopher in the emergency room, right? philosophy is supposed to help you do what you do and do it better, do it with virtue, do it with courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

Dr. Dan is a philosopher in the emergency room. I can see that. It's something you put into practice that helps you with what you do. And I think if we can understand that we're all human beings dealing with that same fundamental limitation, Marcus Rios is the most powerful man in the world. Epictetus is a slave in the Roman Empire. One is extremely powerful. One is extremely powerless. but they're equalized by the fact that the vast majority of life is not in their control. And so in that, we all have this thing in common. We're all trying to respond well to the hand we've been dealt in life. That, to me, is where we come together and where stoicism is something that you could talk about with a professional athlete or an emergency room doctor or a parent with a toddler that's just trying to get through the sleepless nights. And how do you use it on a daily basis?

Oh, it's really hard to separate it out from emergency medicine because it's really just so ingrained. Seneca has this great quote I love, which is endeavor not to trip over something behind you. So you always want to keep moving forward and trying to figure out what comes next. And I think that's equally applicable if you miss an IV you're placing and you have to go place the next one. Or on a much broader scale, you have something just truly horrible happen. That next family needs you to show up for them with the. the same compassion and love and care and ability as you had for the case that just went terribly wrong, right? So you have to sort of endeavor not to trip over that and to keep moving forward with it.

Wow, Dr. Dan is a philosopher in the emergency room. Dr. Dworkis, that's wonderful. Wonderful talking to you. Thank you. Thank you for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love this quote. This is one of my all-time favorite quotes. Okay. Life will cut you open. like a knife. When that happens, at that exposing moment, the world gets a glimpse of what's truly inside you. So what will be revealed when you're sliced open by tension or pressure? Iron or air or bullshit? And you go on to say that the will is the critical third discipline. It is the one thing we control completely always.

Can you speak more about this? Yeah, when a lot of the obstacles we face are just the sort of pedestrian problems of life, right? Traffic, travel delays, you know, you wake up sick, you've got a problem at work. And then there are those sort of deeper, more profound problems, obstacles, a cancer diagnosis, a loss of a loved one,

an accident, bankruptcy, a theft, the real stuff. And it's in those moments that I think we're really being, tested, and we have an opportunity to learn what we're made of. The Stoics talked about how they sort of pity people who haven't been knocked around by life, because they don't know what they're capable of. That's right. And if you say to yourself, hey, this is me learning something essential about myself. This is a test. Will I rise to meet it or not? You write on page 155, love everything that happens, Amora Fati. Yeah. Yeah.

acceptance is tough right just acceptance explain this principle because that is tough well acceptance is sort of the the first level of it right uh the stokes called this the art of acquiescence understanding a lot of things are not in your control and you're going to have to come to terms with them reminds me of a quote from ecart toli in a new earth where he says life will give you exactly what you need for the evolution of your consciousness and how do you know it's what you need it's because what you're experiencing in this moment. This is the same thing, right? So you might as well just accept it.

Yeah. And then beyond acceptance is when you embrace it and you decide, hey, this isn't something I have to go through. It's something I get to go through. This is a transformational transcendent experience for me. I mean, this all sounds really good, very philosophical, like, but really hard when it is your life and you're going through the stuff. Yes, of course.

And it was hard for the stoics, too. It's easy to write it down. It was easy for me. It was easy for Mark Surrealis. But the putting it into practice, the struggling with it day to day is the thing. Your husband just left you. You lost a job. You have a cancer diagnosis, all these things.

But this is when the principles really come into play. And I think understanding that it's work. It's not, oh, I heard this idea once. I saw this quote, so now I get it. And now this thing isn't hard for me. Yes. It's the reminder of it day to day. If we understand what Meditations was for the most powerful man in the world,

it's him reminding himself over and over again. By the most powerful, you mean Marcus Aurelius, yes. Emperor of Rome. It's this totally unique historical document, Mark Surrelius' Meditations, one of the great texts, great gifts of civilization that this survives. But he says a lot of the same things over and over again, because it's not for you and me. It was for him.

He's reminding himself. He's writing to himself. Yes, and he's doing it during a plague. I had no idea we were going to be talking about it on my porch in 2026. He might be mortified. Yeah. He's doing it through a plague, through floods, through wars, through the loss of multiple. He attends multiple funerals for his children.

It is a deeply and profoundly painful life that he gets through. And he is having to work through it as we are all having to work through. So he leaves all of these writings. that later become of what we're now discussing. Yeah, look, it's the journal in the same way that I sit down in the morning and I go, hey, you didn't need to lose your temper like that yesterday. Don't you regret it? Why did you do that?

You know better than this. It's that sort of self-talk that is trying to get you back on track. So it's one thing to know it. It's another thing to know it in the moment. And it's a third thing to get back to it when you've done the wrong thing. Elle is a business owner in California. Hi, Elle. Hi, Oprah.

Hi, Ryan. And you were practicing stoicism. Tell us about that. So I'm an entrepreneur and I founded and was CEO of a baby carrier company called Solly Baby for over a decade. Now I do other things in business. I'm the host of a podcast called Down the Well with Elle for moms. And my husband and I invest in family-owned businesses. But back in the early days, a Solly baby,

I rode all the emotional highs and lows of the business. And the lows were not fun, but the highs actually drove and fueled a lot of my ambition, if I'm being honest. So over time, that roller coaster was really exhausting and I won it off. So inter-stoicism. I become a little bit of a stoic. Tell us how. Tell us what happened. Yeah.

I stopped trying to control everything. I looked at the experiences that I was having as for me and released kind of the outcomes. I let my ego die in a lot of ways, which, you know, the successive, ironically, like it made me much more successful and a much better leader, much better CEO, much better mom. And I got that kind of internal steadiness.

So what is it you actually? practice every day? Is it like, do you read the daily stoic by Ryan Holiday? Do you, do you meditate? What do you actually do? I mean, some of that. And also, I've actually built it into my religious practice as well. So, like, I see it all over the Bible. I see it everywhere. I think that these are really eternal, like, you know, lifelong principles that are really rooted in everything. So in terms of like a daily practice, I would say, I think Ryan just had mentioned this of really creating that space from when something happens to your reaction to that thing. I think it's as basic as that is giving, giving yourself some space there to respond.

So you get a phone call you don't like, an email that is upsetting, somebody saying something that is annoying, disturbing to you, and you do what immediately? It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with me. Even when he's got your name on the email. Right? I mean, I've definitely had my name on some things for some unhappy employees and customers and kids and all the things.

But yeah, it is a practice. is not. I would never say that I have done it perfectly or I'm, you know, some, I don't know what a perfect stoic would even, what you're sharing is that you stop, you read the thing, you take it in, you don't react, you then do what? You say, what is this really about? Or you say, yeah. I mean, you get back into the higher part of your brain instead of the survival brain that's saying how. I've got to defend myself. Yeah. Exactly. Of how can I align this with my highest self, with my most virtuous self, with a person who I want to be that I'm not yet. Do you have a question for Ryan? I do. So when I got off that roller coaster, definitely helped with the unnecessary suffering, creating that kind of internal steadiness. But on the flip side, I would say it has flattened just a little bit of that, that like intensity and drive and motivation that, that used to drive me. And I would say, like, I wouldn't trade it back.

But I'm wondering, is that a necessary tradeoff? Or, you know, can I remain grounded and feel deeply driven still? Or do you have to give some of that up, some of that ego? I do think we're trying to trade, take a little bit off the top so we don't get so low. Because the lows are inevitable, and I think often in business and in life, probably more common. The founder of Stoicism, his name is Zeno, he's a merchant in the Mediterranean, and he suffers a shipwreck. He loses everything. And as he washes up in Athens, that's where he's introduced to philosophy.

And he would joke that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck, because it sent him down a different path. So we don't always know where this is going to take us. That's one of the humilities of not saying this is the worst thing that ever happened to us because we don't know. But what I try to think about is instead of wanting my highs to be attached to achievements, which may or may not come, or recognition which may or may not come, I want to attach the highs from,

I just had an amazing day getting to do what I love. I just did my absolute best. I got better today. I did something that I wasn't capable of before. And so I want to take the wins, the excitement, the achievements in the things that are up to me, as opposed to waiting for somebody else to give it to me and then feeling good,

but then also feeling nervous because they can take it away. Or I can do everything right and not get it. And so to me, if we can switch a little bit towards identifying the highs with things that are up to us, not did you get the award, did you get the promotion, did the deal come through, but instead on the parts of it that are up to you, that's where the stoics are going to feel better and want to, you know, celebrate, is that you did what you were capable of doing. That's the win. I just wanted to say thank you, thank you, thank you for being so open and sharing that.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We live in a culture of instant everything, as you know and everybody knows. Social media, constant, everything, cycles of cancellation, everybody's outraged, everything. Do you think that the Stoicism's principles of ancient wisdom are relevant for our times right now? Yeah, I think in many ways the popularity of Stoicism is, is a reaction against what's clearly not working for us and clearly making us miserable.

We're slaves to the algorithm, slaves to desire, slaves, to all these things that we know, although they can be rewarding in the moment, they're ultimately very draining and empty. So I think stoicism has been popular for 2,500 years, but it tends to be resurgent in moments where things feel like they're not working. that's why the interest by so many younger people. I think so. Nikki, you've been interested for a while. Nikki's a mom of a tween daughter.

Hello. I hear you're always thinking about stoicism. Why? I think it started deeply in 2020 during the pandemic when nothing made sense to Ryan's point. And I had to figure out between a move from Oakland, California to Orlando, Florida. You know, an incredible sort of shift that I had to make. And I had to make that mental and internal shift as well.

I also was dealing with a health crisis, a breast cancer scare. And I knew that I had to make sure that I was anchored. I had to make sure that even though I couldn't control what was happening around me, I could control how I was responding to what was going on. And, you know, I think I've always been a stoic in that way or had a stoic sort of leaning because I always loved, you know, the incomparable Maya Angelou. And I feel like she was an absolute perfect example of a stoic mindset. I remember her quote about, you can be changed by what's happening to you,

but you don't have to be reduced by it. And that was my goal in really leaning into stoicism, is not being reduced by what I was going through. That's wonderful. Do you have a question for Ryan? I do have a question. As I am a mother, I have a tween and living in Florida, living in this climate that we are all in, regardless of where you are in the world, how do we raise our children, Ryan, to have a stoic sort of outlook, but not be disconnected or detached from their own emotions and certainly not from injustice as well? I think about this with my kids.

It's one thing to talk about this stuff. what do they see me doing? How do they see me losing my cool? They're throwing a tantrum, and then I'm throwing a tantrum in response to their tantrum, and they're learning that this is what you do when you're upset or when you're overwhelmed or you can't express yourself well. And so I think, obviously, first and foremost,

it comes down to modeling. But I think we want to teach via stories. What are the stories from history, from life, from literature, that embody these ideas, and then what are the stories, what are the stories from our own life that we can go, hey, I've been where you've been. And this is what I did. And this is why I wish I'd done it differently. So I think we learn from stories. But the idea of justice is a critical stoic virtue. You know, stoicism, we're talking

here about resiliency. We're talking about not being so triggered, not being so upset. I think the reason we're talking about that is so we can be of use to society, right? The stoic virtue of justice, you can't pick the other three and then not do that one. It's the most essential of the virtues. It's the virtue that all the others have to be pointed towards. And so, you know, over and over again, the Stoics are talking about our obligations to the common good, to not just our children, but to all children, to the future itself. And so there is this critical ethical core to Stoicism that, well, it might be popular with

athletes and special forces operators and CEOs. Isn't that what made this book so popular that athletes started using it? It was not the market I expected. Yes. But it's been interesting. That athletes. Yeah, athletes, police officers, firefighters, astronauts, fighter pilots, people in high stakes, high pressure environments obviously are drawn to stoicism.

But so we're single parents. So are, you know, kids. so are teenagers. We're all obviously just overstimulated and stressed and overwhelmed and trying to make sense of the world. So I think obviously there's going to be your sort of early adopters, but ultimately this is a thing that works for everyone. Have you found that it's helped you live a more calmer life, Nikki? I think so. You know, I think having that internal balance, having that internal rudder is what it is.

So even if a situation is out of my control, which most things are, very little, is that. in my control. I still know that I have myself. I have me, right? And that is, you know, another quote, right? You are your best thing, right? I know that all said, done. I have to have me and take care of me before I can do anything else. Well, thank you for joining us. Thank you for that. And proud of you raising, it's not easy raising anybody and certainly doing it in this climate, all the things. Thank you. Amen. If Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and all those guys were alive right now, what do you think they'd say about our relationship to distraction and validation and all that?

I think they would be horrified. This is no way to live. Nobody would believe it. Yeah. We probably get more information in an hour than the Emperor of Rome would get in a month. Just the sheer volume and noise. Like in a year. It's not human what we are subjecting ourselves to.

Yeah, it's too much. It's too much. So I've been collecting inspirational quotes for years. I remember 15 going home and literally coming from an assembly and putting quotes on the walls after hearing someone speak. But a lot of people hear the phrase, but then it's hard to actually put into practice. If there was one daily stoic habit,

from this book that you believed could truly change someone's life if they commit to it. What would that be? Wow. Epicita says it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. Oh. And when you realize that you can decide what this is going to mean for you, you can decide whether this is something that knocks you backwards or this is something

that you use to spring forward, that that is what is up to you. Yeah. You know, they say it doesn't matter what you bear. It matters how you bear it. You say in the very beginning of the book that, you know, you're celebrating the 10th anniversary of this book, but the past 10 years have put a lot of obstacles in your way.

So was your practice of stoicism put to the test? Always being put to the test. I mean, look, show me any 10-year period in history that didn't put people to the test. So we talk about how this is unprecedented, This has never happened before. It's very precedented. It's very happened before.

This is what history is. We are living through a historical moment, and history only looks quaint and certain, in retrospect. It's always touch and go. It's always scary. It's always alarming. And so, yeah, I had two young kids. I got married.

I built a business. I lost a business. You're always going through stuff. It's never going the way. that you want it to go. But then when I look back on that 10-year period, I see how each one of those moments was formative into making me where I am now.

And I sometimes wish, and this is, I think, a very particular part of the Stoke practice, go, if I'm going to feel better about this later, why am I torturing myself about it now? Yeah. Why can't I borrow that, take it on advance? Why don't I give myself the perspective of some distance and space now?

instead of feeling transformed by it a decade from now. Yeah. You learn to step into the space that allows you to have the space from it. Yeah. And recognizing it doesn't matter what happens to us, it could be for the best if we use it to be better for ourselves and others. One of the things I really appreciated about this book is that it does not promise an easier life because you couldn't, but it does, I think, promise a stronger sense of self,

a way of meeting life as it is and not as we would necessarily wish it to be. Yeah, do you want to pray for things to go a certain way, or do you want to pray for the strength to be able to handle them however they go? Epictetus was approached by one of his students, and the students said, you know, tell me what to do, tell me what to do. And he said, that's the wrong question. You should be asking me to help make you adaptable to circumstances, to be able to meet whatever the future brings.

And if we understand that we don't get a say in how the future is going to go, we only get a say in who we're going to be whatever that is, then we have a much better prescription for resiliency there, than needing to be so strong that we can make things be a certain way or be so lucky that they go a certain way. We want to be, whether for, We want to be ready for whatever the weather is.

I love that. Brian, thank you so much for reminding us that nothing is wasted. Nothing is wasted. That's what I say all the time. Unless we waste it. Unless we waste it. But your pain's not wasted. Your setbacks aren't wasted.

Not even your so-called failures are wasted. If you're willing to meet them with courage and clarity. Maya Angelou, she was just mentioning, used to always say to me that one of the stoics used to say, courage is the most important of the virtues, because you can't practice anything else without it. That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. Ryan's Stoic Virtues book set is available everywhere.

There's a whole set. If this conversation has interested you, his bestsellers, the obstacle is the way, the daily Stoic are available wherever books are sold. And then there's a whole set. Thank you so much to Dan and Ellen, Nikki, for zooming in, and to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time.

Go well. If this episode of the Oprah podcast has piqued your interest in stoicism, right there on your screen is a QR code where you can buy Ryan Holiday's Stoic Virtues box set. It's a guide to go even deeper, drawing from the four core principles of stoicism, wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. This collection invites you to live with more intention, resilience, and clarity. You can order it right now by scanning the QR code. on your screen. Order it for yourself or it's perfect as a gift to someone you know who would appreciate it. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day.

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