The Stoic Reminders Hiding All Over Rome

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 a50K route https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI through Rome’s ancient Stoic sites. 👉 The Stoic 50k video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI is out now! Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 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/stoic This 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  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 podcast. 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 of 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?

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  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, 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're in Greece, I did the original marathon, from Marathon to Athens, got heat stroke, 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 by do a 50K in Rome, mostly on the Appian Way, which I biked and run on on a previous trip and found to be very beautiful.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  But we took off from Austin, had a layover in Detroit. Immediate travel delays, three, four, or five hours, I think we spent in, in Detroit. But they had this cool, like right next to our gate, they had this like, I don't know, this 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. But 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 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 then shoot each other. I think they started with reenacting the Hamilton duel.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  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. It's like Italian 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, we de-escalated the situation and we handled it pretty well. And then I was like, guys, like, look, if you, 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 go to the fight, 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.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  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 palazzo 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 isn't old by Rome's standards and it's twice as old as America.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Beautiful apartment, did some great writing, working on the Stockdale book while I was there. Wrote some, some daily Stoic emails that have been trickling out. You might've noticed them being a little Rome-themed over the last couple of months. The first day we were there, we, we got one of those audiences with the Pope, that 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 Mobile. 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 Aurelius. There is in Hadrian's Tomb, which is where Marcus Aurelius is also buried.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  There's this big sort of frieze of Marcus, this 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 circle-ness of that in Rome is, 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 Kara Swisher's podcast. Let me run you this clip of it. Did you read the Pope's thing on AI, his essay?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Of course I did. I did a whole show on it. I did. Yeah. Yeah. What did you think of that? Magnificent humanity.

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  I, I thought it was so fascinating because, you know, for the last, for, for my whole life, but, 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, what, like, we just live in this, unfortunately, I think, like a fundamentally amoral society, where we have stripped out the ability to, to even ask those questions about like,

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  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, and I think the Pope is, 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, and these are in fact, the most essential questions to consider.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  It's also not anti-tech, actually, if you read it carefully, if you read every word. Because, and that's what I thought he did and really, I wonder if the Pope is a Stoic. He feels a little bit.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I was just in Rome and, and we went and saw Blessing of the Pope and you see him going around in the little Pope Mobile. And it, it was funny, you know, they, they'd be like, oh, you're American. You're like, Bob from Chicago. Like the idea of the, of the Pope being a human being that's accessible to Americans is, is interesting. I like to point out that, that Marcus Aurelius and the Pope have, have the same title, Pontifex Maximus, that Rome, as the Catholic Rome, absorbs so much of the iconography and the, 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.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  It was funny to hear him referred to as Bob from Chicago by, by many, many people while we were there. You know, we had a couple of tours planned. We did a tour of the Colosseum 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 cooled off. And it was like radiating off. So we took a complete beating and my kids were, 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 to experience and they, all they want to do is go to McDonald's.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  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. Peter's, our tickets allowed us to go up in the dome. And the kids were exhausted. We're like, we're not going to make you climb all the way to the tippy, 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 than I would have thought. And every time you thought you were getting to the top, you weren't.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  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 underground. 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, was that it was an escape from the heat. The coolness of it, it was probably the coolest we were the entire trip, even

• 9:44Ryan Holiday?

  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 she'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 memento mori lesson is, is not verboten in our family. The kids thought it was the coolest thing. It actually reminded me, when I was in Ireland, 10, 11

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  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're 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

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  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 had toured the forum and stuff when we were there 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.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  There was new stuff in the palace that was open. There was just stuff that wasn't available before. Sure reminds me of something I talked about on the podcast recently with Peter Santinello, 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.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:45Ryan Holiday?

  But there's something about traveling to the same place. 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.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:08Ryan Holiday?

  Like, they just excavated. So like, 10 years is that in Roman history. But it fundamentally changed the experience that I was able. 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 10 times to actually get it, you know?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  And so this, this tension between reading and rereading, traveling, and coming back is like, that's the tricky part.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  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 toot my horn. I've been 85 countries. I could have been all of them.

• 13:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  But I went back to Istanbul 20 times.

• 13:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  So I get you. And 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.

• 14:10Ryan Holiday?

  I know.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Right? But going back to some more stable, and I'd say easier travel places, as you get older, makes sense.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, are you going to understand a handful of places really, really deeply?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Ryan Holiday?

  Or are you gonna have been, like, you know, you hear, they're like, oh, we're 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.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  It's go everywhere, see nothing.

• 14:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  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?

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Right? And so, Christmas, family, Thanksgiving, family, you're lucky if you're going overseas. And so you got six days in Italy.

• 14:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Do you just want to stay in Rome and just see Rome, where you're like, I got to see all these things I've always dreamed of going to?

• 15:05Ryan Holiday?

  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 capybara? Am I looking at a capybara? I had to stop, take a video of it. I uploaded it in a chat GPT. I'm like, is this, could this possibly be a capybara 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. 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 policewoman stopped. She goes,

• 15:46Ryan Holiday?

  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'd just started. But I wasn't going to go back into the, 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'd pass by Marcus's tomb in one direction, or these great bridges, or, you know, sites of naval battles, or, you know, and in another direction. It was just, I loved it every morning. I'd go for these, I couldn't go for those long runs I wanted, because I was

• 16:27Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 16:39Ryan Holiday?

  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. Got up early, walked down this hallway that was built 500 years ago. 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

• 17:23Ryan Holiday?

  while everyone else is sleeping. You get up, and you get after it. And come back. And then we, 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, here's where I'm bumping

• 18:06Ryan Holiday?

  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, having to try to contain and control Nero, a deranged, unstable, unsuitable leader, if there ever was one. And so we challenged ourselves, we put ourselves in situations, because life is going to do that to us. And that's what it's all about.

• 18:38Ryan Holiday?

  And then, here's one I recorded at the great Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue, while they were sleeping. It reminded me of one of my favorite essays. There's this essay by Joseph Brodsky about the Marcus Aurelius equestrian 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, it was quiet, not like this. All right, it was quiet, not unlike this. And he said, if Marcus Aurelius is 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

• 19:17Ryan Holiday?

  of his journal, he was writing notes to himself about controlling his temper, about getting up early, about quenching his desires, his urges.

• 19:33Ryan Holiday?

  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 accoutrement of power, the sycophants around him, people worshiping 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, I love this statue. It's worth a run anytime you're in Rome. You come up these big gradual steps and then suddenly you're, you're at the top. There's also a quirk, this statue, that's not the original.

• 20:16Ryan Holiday?

  The original's inside the Capitoline Museum right there, but it's a quirk of history that it even survived. The Christians, who had good reason not to like Marcus Aurelius, they would have destroyed this had they known. They thought it was Constantine, the first Christian emperor. So they didn't destroy it. So they kept it. So there were 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, and then we'd go do, you know, our one or two activities for the day and then we'd just relax and eat, have fun. We were having dinner one night at this little restaurant in Piazza Navano, I think, which

• 21:01Ryan Holiday?

  is an old circular chariot racing track. And, um, you know, we sat down, asked for water, asked for water with ice, you know, and as we're American and, uh, 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, I did, you know, it took three or four minutes. Like it's 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 Stoic team. They edit it, 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 Stoic team that does that.

• 21:42Ryan Holiday?

  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 don't 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 got to fly the family to Rome, 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, um, 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,

• 22:27Ryan Holiday?

  where the emperors lived. The most haunting thing is just walking up the emperor's ramp, which is this like private corridor that Marcus Aurelius would have walked many, many times from the palace to the forum or from the forum to the palace. Walking up there, you see his private walking track. I wrote a Daily Stoic email, I think about both of those, about the, the walking track, like Marcus Aurelius's life was so weird, he couldn't go on walks. He had to worry about being killed or harassed. Like he had to have a private walking track. And so you 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.

• 23:10Ryan Holiday?

  I wrote an email about the emperor's walk, this little corridor, but, 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 Palatine 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.

• 23:52Ryan Holiday?

  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, dyed 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, value the right things anywhere. In 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, uh, did I sometimes hope maybe I'd get injured and not have to do it?

• 24:35Ryan Holiday?

  Or that it would be literally too hot to not have to do it? Yeah, yeah, I did. I was dreading it, to be perfectly honest, but I was also excited. And I set out on it. I left around, uh, 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, I started on the, on the run. I went to all the Stoic sites that I'd been seeing on the trip anyway, but, but just seeing them alone in the morning was just Marcus Aurelius's column, the equestrian statue, the tomb, the Colosseum, the forum, the baths. Honestly, the, the thing that was throwing me the most on the run wasn't the heat. I

• 25:17Ryan Holiday?

  knew that was approaching, but was like stopping to do the, 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 gotta, I just gotta 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 like, there's just all these public fountains in, in Rome and they're just bubbling up, you know? And you're just drinking water from these aqueducts, basically that the Romans built. And you're just drinking this water. It reminds me of that, that passage from Marcus Aurelius

• 25:59Ryan Holiday?

  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 Marcus Aurelius's wagons. I mean, at one point you pass the tomb that, 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."

• 26:44Ryan Holiday?

  So he was saying like, "Slow down and enjoy it, you know? Appreciate how surreal and crazy the surroundings are." So 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 at one point I passed a place where Samantha and I basically first talked about getting married on bikes, right after The Obstacle is the Way came out or right as I was working on The Obstacle is the Way. I actually 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. We pulled over on the side. I hadn't planned it. We're just hanging out. Been together a long time. And I just said, "Hey, you think we should get married at some point?" This isn't a formal ask, but are you seeing this go the same direction I'm, I am?

• 27:26Ryan Holiday?

  And, uh, 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.

• 28:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's the decision also the day to day-ness 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, the leap. Then there's also the day to day-ness 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 valleys that, uh, it's all about. 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, uh, me being gone, being a running widow, I guess. But it's a full circle moment to be back right here where that happened.

• 28:54Ryan Holiday?

  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, um, you're like, "But I still have six miles left to go." 50K is about 31 miles. And, uh, you're like, "Oh, that's not so bad. I can real 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, that beat. And, you know, I, 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.

• 29:38Ryan Holiday?

  And then that was basically our last day. The, the next day we got up and we went on to Pompeii. And you know what? I'll do, 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 in Austin. I have to go finish recording some of the audiobook for the new 10 year anniversary of Daily Stoic, 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 we'll talk again very soon.