Stoicism (ft. Ryan Holiday), Solved

What does it actually mean to live like a Stoic? In this wide-ranging conversation with bestselling author and modern Stoicism evangelist Ryan Holiday, we unpack the origins of Stoic philosophy, why it exploded during turbulent times in ancient Greece and Rome, and how its principles—like courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom—still apply in a world filled with chaos, anxiety, and uncertainty. From shipwrecked merchants to emperors journaling their fears, this episode explores why some of the most powerful figures in history turned to Stoicism not just for answers—but for survival. We also dig into how Stoicism overlaps with modern psychology, why it’s gaining traction among young men, and whether its rising popularity is being misunderstood or misused. If you’ve ever wondered whether Stoicism means being emotionless, if it’s compatible with ambition, or if it actually makes you a better person, this episode is your one-stop masterclass. Get your free PDF guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/stoicism ⇨ Order Ryan Holiday’s new book, Wisdom Takes Work: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Takes-Work-Repeat-Virtues/dp/0593191730 CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:49 Setting the Scene: Ancient Greece After Alexander 00:06:44 The Story of Zeno: Founder of Stoicism 00:13:58 The Four Stoic Virtues 00:44:20 Virtue 1: Courage 00:53:17 Virtue 2: Temperance (Discipline) 01:05:01 Virtue 3: Justice 01:08:51 Virtue 4: Wisdom 01:25:51 Roman Conquest and the Spread of Stoicism 01:33:10 Cato the Younger: The Stoic Martyr 01:39:06 Seneca: The Conflicted Philosopher 01:55:50 Epictetus: The Slave Philosopher 02:07:28 Marcus Aurelius: The Philosopher Emperor 02:20:18 Stoicism Through History 02:32:45 Stoicism and Modern Psychology 02:41:09 The Modern Stoicism Revival 02:50:06 Final Thoughts and Recommendations ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG:⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠⁠ Solved IG:⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠⁠ Twitter:⁠ ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠⁠ LinkedIn:⁠ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠⁠ YouTube:⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson⁠

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Welcome back, everybody, to the Solved Podcast. I am your host, Mark Manson, number one New York Times bestselling author. I'm here with my producer, lead researcher, intrepid failed acrobat Drew Burney. Intellectual failed intellectual acrobat. I don't even know what that means. And we are recording a very special episode this week. It's the first time that we've brought in a guest expert to tolerate this madness. I am here with my friend, Ryan Holiday, Stoicism expert. I know you are a big endurance athlete. You do a lot of long-distance running. Have you ever done long-distance podcasting?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Well, you know, when, I don't know about you, but like when I started doing books, they'd be like, can you come on this show and do a five-minute interview? Or can you come to this 15-minute radio spot? And then it was like, no, no, there's this thing called podcasting, and then those were an hour. And then those became two hours, and now there's whatever this is.

• 0:58Mark Manson?

  Well, now you're stuck.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's just like, it just became bigger and bigger, bigger commitment.

• 1:04Mark Manson?

  Yes, exactly. You are known for many things, but I think the thing you're best known for...

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14Mark Manson?

  For those of you who are listening and can't see, I just, I put a stack of books on the table that are threatening to collapse the table. Ryan is the author of, by my count, 11 Stoicism books, nine Stoicism books? I don't even know. Do you know?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  I don't. I guess you could include The Journal, which has like 20,000 words in it, too. So, but yeah, those are all the Stoicism.

• 1:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we'll round up to, what is that? We'll round up to 10.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:42Mark Manson?

  And your new one coming out, Wisdom Takes Work, it's coming out, I believe, the week after this podcast is going live. Pleasure to have you, dude.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks.

• 1:52Mark Manson?

  This is, uh, this is gonna be fun. So, as listeners know, as Ryan knows, our goal with these episodes is to be as comprehensive as possible. The whole shtick behind Solved is that if you listen to, if you actually get through a full episode of Solved, this is the last thing you will ever have to listen to on the topic. So, for Ryan's sake, I hope that's not true, but...

• 2:16Mark Manson?

  Please go read his books, but if you don't want to read any books, then stick with us because we will get through as much Stoicism as possible. Also, a quick reminder, we do have a PDF guide to this episode as we do with every episode. So if you want to look up our citations, check our work and get a full summary of everything that we talk about in the show, go to solve podcast.com/stoicism. With that, shall we get into it?

• 2:49Mark Manson?

  Okay, my plan here, and we'll see how this goes. Okay. Because you know a lot more ancient history than I do, but I'd like to just kind of set the scene for people. Yes. And like, kind of set the context in which Stoicism emerges. I just want to talk through like, what was the state of ancient Greece around this time? So Alexander the Great, who had just conquered most of the known world at the time, dies in 323 B.C. Yeah. It leaves everything, the entire empire in disarray. It was completely unexpected. Generals are politicking, vying for control, territories getting divvied up, all sorts

• 3:31Mark Manson?

  of mayhem and political chaos is ensuing. What's interesting is that up until this point, Greece had always just been kind of a network of city-states. Everything was kind of self-contained and suddenly they found themselves being controlled or passed off between these large foreign powers. And so there's suddenly this international influence that's happening in Greek society and culture that had never really happened before. On top of that, you have merchants coming from the east, you have soldiers coming back from the east. So there's like all this exposure to all these philosophies and ideas that the ancient Greeks had never really been exposed to before. And I guess you could

• 4:14Mark Manson?

  say like, maybe there was a little bit of a crisis of culture and meaning within Greece. Like, it seemed like there was this desperate need for some sort of philosophical framework or understanding of this new world order. What was going on?

• 4:31Mark Manson?

  How do we make sense of all these different people, all these different walks of life? That's where we start to see these new philosophical schools start to emerge.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I think crisis is the right word because, and I was thinking about this because I was just in Greece, but you tend to think of it as this like kind of chill place. You're like, okay, obviously it was a long time ago and they wore togas and they didn't have the technology we did, but this was a relatively stable and cool place. Like, that's how they built these huge buildings. You don't think of it as chaos and dysfunction and like danger, which it was. So Alexander the Great dies, then all of his sort of successors are vying and conquering. And then there's this series of, they just call them like different, they're just these different tyrants, right? These kings from here, here, they're, they're ruling these different city-states and then the city-states are going to war with each other.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Like even Socrates, you think of Socrates like, oh, it must have been, you know, they, they had the luxury of just talking about these ideas. But like, you know, Socrates lives through this great power conflict between Athens and Sparta that lasts for like 30 years, the Peloponnesian War. At one point, when Athens loses this war, Athens is ruled by like 30 tyrants. It must have been similar to the feeling that we have now, which is like, okay, there are these institutions that we've had for a long time. Like, that's the other thing is you, you think of ancient philosophy as being this like period. But in fact, ancient philosophy existed for hundreds of years.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  And so Socrates is looking back to Herakles and Democritus and other philosophers as being like what Socrates is to us, right? Like, they're looking back hundreds of years to these ideas that people have been thinking about, just as Xeno is, is thinking back to Socrates. And then, you know, the Roman Stoics are looking back to. So, so there's, it's, it's similar to this feeling we have now where you have these ancient institutions that seemed like at one point they worked and now they've stopped working. And there is this thing happening and we don't know what's going to happen next. And I think a lot of the practical philosophy comes out of like, how do you figure out how to live in that?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And I think Epicureanism and Stoicism are the two, are two very different reactions to the same crazy world. Like the Epicureans go, let's retreat to this garden, let's just focus on our own stuff. And then the Stoics are a little bit more engaged and muscular, but, but they're both going like. The world is very scary. What, what do I cling to?

• 7:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Let's start with the story of Xeno.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:06Mark Manson?

  He's a Phoenician merchant.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:07Mark Manson?

  Shipwrecks, shows up in Athens. Tell us, it's like, it's interesting that an outsider is the one who kind of comes in and...

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yes, he's not an Athenian.

• 7:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  And, and also, yeah, you don't really understand that Greece is huge and spread out and include, I mean, I think Greece is like a thousand islands. And each one of those islands was its own country and its own culture. And they didn't always like each other and didn't always agree with each other. So these were foreigners. But Athens was kind of the New York City of that world, or the London of that world, where, where if you had talent, you wanted to be at the center of where stuff was happening, you would end up in Athens. But he's a, he's a Phoenician merchant. He's a dealer in what's known as Tyrian purple, which is the purple dye that they make from the blood of shellfish. So also, we don't think of it as this sort of global commerce empire, but it was.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And each one of the city-states tended to specialize in one thing, like olive oil, or this, or that. And so, yeah, he suffers this shipwreck. I think it's fitting that Stoicism comes out of a disaster.

• 8:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Uh, so he loses everything. He washes up penniless in Athens. And he's walking in the agora, which is like the meeting place or the marketplace. And he hears someone reading this story that we hear from Socrates. It's the choice of Hercules, which is about Hercules coming to the crossroads and choosing between basically the easy way or the hard way, virtue or vice. And Xeno hears this story and, and he goes like, what is this? Like, and he's told that this is philosophy. And he says, well, where can I find a philosopher like Socrates? And, and as it happens, a man named Krates, who's a cynic philosopher, is walking by. And, and the bookseller points at him and he says, you know, follow that man.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Krates is, is known as the door opener. That's his nickname as a teacher, which I also think is fitting. That's what great teachers do. Um, but, but he's introduced to philosophy there at sort of rock bottom. He rebuilds his life. His joke is that he, he makes... A great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck. He sets up the this school of philosophy on the stoa pokile, the painted porch. Which is the porch itself is not painted. It has a large painting of the Battle of Marathon above it. It's a public sort of meeting place. And again, we think of it as this peaceful. The Battle of Marathon is the an existential battle against the Persians, who are attempting to conquer and subjugate Greece.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  So anyways, he starts this school out of this disaster. And that school, you know, then we talk about the Roman Stoics, which I'm sure we will. But it's like 500 years between this moment and the Roman Stoics. So that's how that's the arc we're talking about.

• 9:49Mark Manson?

  Oh, and we will cover all 500.

• 9:54Mark Manson?

  I do want to back up really quickly because one thing that I wasn't aware of, or maybe I had forgotten until I was researching for this show, is that Zeno actually spent a lot of time kind of being that adherent of different schools within. So he was kind of this like seeking character. You know, he spent a bunch of time with the cynics and studied with them. And then I believe he went to the academy and studied with them. And it's kind of this classic story of of everywhere he went, he wasn't quite satisfied. Like, there was something missing. And so he would go to the next place. And he was even ridiculed by some as like, you know, just a dabbler in all these different schools.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  But that feels very modern to me, which is like you take a little bit from here. You take a little bit from here. You take a little bit from here. And then every once in a while, something new comes from this combination. And I think that's sort of what Zeno was doing. But yeah, we tend to see the schools as being sort of very distinct and discreet. But I think there wasn't that many people. So I think they're all just kind of talking and sharing with each other. And they're not that far apart from each other either. So, yeah, I think he's just kind of exploring and experimenting. And I also think it's interesting, the idea of him being sort of a dabbler. He doesn't. It's like the only school that's not named after the person. Or one of the few that's not, it's not Xenoism. It's called Stoicism from the porch.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  But I, there's something to me revealing about the idea of it's like, no, no, we just sit here and we talk about stuff. And I think that's kind of, that's probably how he spent 10 or 15 years, just sort of exploring and learning and talking. And then this, this school comes out of it.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  What were some of those other, so you mentioned Epicureanism, you mentioned cynicism. What were some of those other schools that he dabbled?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Well, obviously the Plato school is there, Aristotle's school is there. I think what he's doing is trying to, and this is, I think, what we do today, which is like, you get all the basics. You go, this smart person said this, and this smart person said this, and this smart person said this. And then you kind of go, they're all kind of dancing around the same things, but like, here's what I think's missing. And I got to imagine coming out of a disaster where you lose everything is maybe something that Aristotle and Plato and Socrates are not bringing, you know what I mean?

• 12:15Mark Manson?

  They didn't relate to, yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, there's something about, because that's so central to what Stoic philosophy is, that like, life happens to us and then we figure out what we're going to do about it. And that life can be cruel and unfair and things can get really bad really quickly. I wonder if that's kind of what he saw. In the same way that like, you might go listen to a bunch of academic philosophers and go, this is all great if you are a tenured Ivy League professor, but what about this?

• 12:44Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  And I think he brings that to him. But my favorite thing about Xeno, and I was, again, I was just there, is, so at some point in his journeys through the Mediterranean, he stops at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which is where the oracle is. And we're told that he asks, you know, sort of what is the secret to a good life? And the oracle may or may not be huffing these fumes from like this, this sort of vein deep in the earth gets high and then says this sort of mythical thing. And then you're supposed to figure out what it means. And the oracle tells him, you will begin to become wise when you start to have conversations with the dead.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And so he doesn't know what this means. And then he goes about his journey and it's not until he ends up in Athens and he suffers that shipwreck and he hears someone reading Socrates, who is at this point dead, that he realizes that that's what reading is. Reading is talking to the dead. And so it does seem like Xeno's journey was a long one. And it was kind of all these different threads coming together.

• 13:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It was interesting putting together this episode. One of the things I did is I made a list of all kind of the popular Stoic practices. You know, negative visualization and memento mori and amor fati and like all these things that we've, you've written about and we've heard in these different places. And I basically went and tried to look where those originated. And interestingly, most of them originated prior to Stoicism. Like they were, they were these threads that he pulled from all these different places. The exception is there is one Stoic philosopher who did originate a number of practices, which surprised me who the one it was. It was not Xeno who originated a lot of the practices that we associate with Stoicism, but most of them actually came from either Plato or the Cynics.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:41Mark Manson?

  Or Aristotle. The other thing that I uncovered is that, and I don't, I don't know, I didn't go deep on this, so I don't know how true this was, but one of the things I read was that Plato's Academy, Plato and Aristotle were dead at this point. And so there was a little bit of a, like a leadership vacuum that was going on. And what I read was that the academy, Plato's academy, at this point was kind of obsessed with metaphysical truth and like logical proofs of what the ideal, you know, what the form of the universe was and all this stuff. And it was like completely detached from any sort of practical, usable advice that anybody would use.

• 15:26Mark Manson?

  And then meanwhile, like the peripatetics, which is the Aristotelian school, they had kind of this obsession of like documenting and cataloging, they were like the Google of like ancient Greece. Like they, they wanted to like catalog every species of fish and they wanted to catalog, like document how every plant grew in every environment, also completely detached from people's everyday concerns. So I-

• 15:53Mark Manson?

  To your point about Epicureanism and Stoicism arising in this period, it's like you have all this strife in the background and then it's like the, the schools that were kind of filling that void, I guess, for the previous centuries, were a little bit checked out, like they were nerding out.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Was that elitism? Yeah, was there like a problem with elitism at the time? That's kind of what I had my reading of it anyway.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  I think you can kind of just end up living in your own head. And I think a school just naturally kind of goes that way. It becomes obscure, it becomes specialized, and then it sort of becomes irrelevant.

• 16:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  And there's something, I do think that felt refreshing and urgent about Stoicism when it's sort of being originated. And there's something, you're right, it's taking a lot of from the other schools and kind of paring them down. It's like Aristotle has what, like seven or eight virtues?

• 16:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And then Zeno's like, oh, let's just four. Let's just put them in the subcat. So there's this kind of refining process that's happening, I think. It did feel like Zeno was a regular dude. He's coming to philosophy from business.

• 16:56Mark Manson?

  So Zeno is actually where this concept of indifference or detachment comes from in Stoicism and, which is really about just not trying to worry about things that don't matter. It's not necessarily being robotic. It's not about numbing your feelings. It's just simply being good at letting go of the things that don't actually matter. And with Zeno, this really originated with this idea of acting in accordance of one's nature. He saw the universe itself as a rational order. And so he saw each individual's actions and behavior as part of that rational order. And so his whole point was just, don't fuck it up.

• 17:40Mark Manson?

  But the interesting thing about Zeno. Is that we actually don't have a lot of what he wrote. Like, we don't really know exactly what he said.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Basically, nothing he wrote or said survives. We have like five quotes. Diogenes Laertus, who wrote this biography of most of the philosophers, I forget when he's writing, but he's basically cataloging a list of everything we know about the major philosophers from this time. He gives us these sort of tantalizing lists of the names of the essays and books that people like Zeno wrote, like Zeno wrote his own version of the Republic.

• 18:14Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  But like, that's all that we know. And, and like, this could change because right now, like at Pompeii, I don't know if you know about this, but like at Pompeii, they have the scrolls.

• 18:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And they're able to like hit them with these high-powered cameras and then AI can like process it and they've thus far decoded one sentence from one scroll that is probably a poem about Epicureanism. But, but like, these works could be somewhere. But, but for the most part, what we have of Zeno and the first couple Stoics is just stuff from the later Greek and Roman Stoics who were quoting them in their works. So, almost nothing we have directly from Zeno survives.

• 18:59Mark Manson?

  How did the painted porch actually function? Like, what, what, what did, what did it look like? Like, was he, they barbecuing like?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a, it's a long patio with, you know, Greek columns along it. And it was like a public meeting space. It's now, so apparently they just built shops over it and like they've only recently begun excavating it. And so you can see just a very small fraction of it. But there's another Stoa in, on the other side, there's like, they also put a train through it at some point. But, but it's, it's just, it's like your big, classic Greek building.

• 19:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Or, you know, if you've been to like even DC, which is sort of neoclassical architecture, those just kind of big, long hallways lined with columns. And so I think it's just a public space and they kind of just hung out there and talked. I don't even think, it, it wasn't even like the Lyceum or Plato's Academy where it was like a very formal academic setting that we might like recognize today. It's funny, David Mamet has talked about the Stoics a couple of times and he, he's like, they're just porch guys. That's like an interesting read on it. I think it is. I think they're just sitting there talking in the way that you might sit and talk at a general store or like at the cafeteria at a university.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Like it's not this sort of formal academic setting where they're engaged in this sort of very specific research. It's just kind of talking about things. And so a lot of what we have from the Stoics even later is kind of like just snippets of conversation. But at some point, he starts to see students there, or maybe he's walking like Aristotle did, and he starts to teach. And I think these other spaces, you know, there's probably like, you know, we're gonna have a big class today. We're gonna go over here. So I think it's just, it's a little more informal than I think we would think about these things today.

• 20:56Mark Manson?

  Well, and that becomes a little bit of an issue down the line, I believe, but we'll get to that in a minute. I want to talk about Zeno's framework itself.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:07Mark Manson?

  So he has this tripartite framework, the logic, the physics, and the ethics. Can you break down each of those?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  The physics part is nuts.

• 21:15Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Because like it is very weird to be reading a 25 year old, 2,500 year old text. And then they're talking about atoms. And it's like, what the fuck is happening? Because like, you're like, I thought they, I thought this was like

• 21:32Mark Manson?

  A hundred years ago.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Very recent. Yes. And obviously, they didn't know what an atom was. They couldn't see an atom, but they had some sense that, you know, life is made up of these tiny things that we can't see. So I think physics is basically their explanation for like, why we're here and how the world works. And a good chunk of it is like, obviously nonsense. And I'm pretty quick to just kind of toss all that aside.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Even the logic side of things, I mean, there was obviously a big emphasis educationally on like sort of how logic works. And there, you can see these kind of proofs, and it kind of connects sometimes to the physics where they're like, if this is true, then this is true, then this is true. I find that stuff holds up the least well.

• 22:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  And is, even when it does hold up. You know, like, what am I supposed to do with this information? That's, that's never been what I've been super excited about when it comes to stoic, to any of the ancient philosophies. But it is, it is surreal. Like, these people were obviously geniuses in the sense that they, they had this whole sense of how the universe worked, and they were immensely curious. You talked about Aristotle, too. You know, the scientific work that these guys were doing with the rudimentary tools that they had, it's pretty remarkable. Like, they, I think sometimes people go like, well, I could have come up with this idea if I was alive 2,000 years ago or 2,500 years ago.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  And then you read some of the stuff and you're like, oh, no, no, they were, they were obviously also just all around Renaissance geniuses because they, they were like deducing things about the universe that we weren't able to, you know, verify and prove until many centuries later. And then also, I think, the psychological underpinnings of the ideas in the ethics and the philosophical component, that, that they were just intuiting but had not actually, like, studied in any kind of experimental way is pretty mind blowing.

• 23:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah. We'll, we'll get, towards the end of this podcast, we will get into the influence that Stoicism has had on modern clinical psychology and, and therapy. And it's, it's remarkable how much things like cognitive behavioral therapy owe to Stoic practices that are over 2,000 years old.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I'd be curious what your read on it is, like, was it just, were they just seeing so much further than everyone else? Was the world so much, obviously, we know it's not quieter, but like, were they just more focused? Like, how, how, it's remarkable that they were able to deduce these things, again, not from, you know, reams of prior research, that they're just kind of going, like, I think this works because of this. And then they were like, pretty close, like, they're in the ballpark with these kind of guesses about how the world works, or why animals do what they do, or, you know, why the universe does this. There, there's something just kind of mind blowing that, like, someone could do this.

• 24:35Mark Manson?

  It is mind blowing. I- I feel this way about a few schools of thought. Stoicism is one, Buddhism is another one, that I'm just like, how the hell did a guy figure this out?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:47Mark Manson?

  Like 2,500 years ago.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Just a lot of sitting and thinking.

• 24:50Mark Manson?

  Sitting under a tree, right? You know, it's a, it is pretty remarkable, but I also realize too, that there's a little bit of a perceptual bias going on because, you know, there were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of schools of thought that were invented throughout this time.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 25:06Mark Manson?

  And all of the ones that gave terrible advice, or were not verifiable, or were not replicable, were lost to the annals of time.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Selection bias there, yeah.

• 25:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah, so there's a little bit of a survivor by, survivorship bias aspect to this, of which like, yeah, of course, the true ones are probably going to survive.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:25Mark Manson?

  Or the useful ones are probably going to survive. But it is like, even so, it is pretty incredible to think that it's just a bunch of smart dudes sitting on a porch.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:36Mark Manson?

  Hashing out like, you know, oh, your mind does this, my mind does that too. Like, maybe we shouldn't do it that way anymore. You know, and it turns out they're right.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  No, I do think, I do think there is the survivorship bias. And, and some of, some even, we're even, like I said, we're pretty kind in what we edit out.

• 25:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  You know, the nonsense that they believed in, and some of the beliefs were like, sort of preposterous. But yeah, they're, they were just able, they were able to think and work out a framework for the world that has held up remarkably well. And then it's been subsequently verified either scientifically or psychologically. Like, you read these scientific studies and you're like, oh yeah, that's, that's here in this epigram from this philosopher.

• 26:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And they didn't need to, you know, pay, you know, 200 grad students to, you know, jump through these weird hoops to verify it, but they just kind of intuit. So there must have been just a lot of observation of human behavior. And I wonder if that kind of connects to the porch thing too.

• 26:40Mark Manson?

  What blows my mind, honestly, is that so much of this happened in such a condensed area.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:46Mark Manson?

  In a, in, it was centuries, but a relatively condensed period of time as well, right?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:52Mark Manson?

  Like, it's the fact that so many of these. Thinkers and philosophers were contemporaries in many cases.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:00Mark Manson?

  That's the part that boggles my mind.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, Plato has, like, one of my favorite anecdotes is Diogenes goes over to Plato's house and he thinks Plato is like sort of stuck up and annoying and, you know, Diogenes, for people that know Diogenes, is a cynic and he's kind of like, he's the rebellious transg- he's like the punk philosopher. He lives in a barrel, he rejects many of society's conventions and so he starts like tracking mud into Plato's house and he's stomping on his carpets like to be like, you don't need this.

• 27:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  And, um, and he says, I am stomping on Plato's vanity and Plato goes, but how vain you are in acting like you're better than me.

• 27:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  You know, and so it's like, they were not just friends, but also kind of like frenemies. And, and just to, just to survive 25, just to have one person have ideas survive too long and then they're just like, two people that had dinner together is fucking crazy. And so it was, it was a very small world, like Greece is both bigger than you think it is and the empire contained way more people and way more stuff happening than you think and at the same time was much smaller than you think.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Wasn't it also though too, I mean, doesn't the Stoic, these Stoic ideas get to something a little bit more fundamental at this point too, because you're saying they're sitting around and they're thinking, sitting under trees like the Buddhists and the Stoics and whatever, they're actually not though, it's actually a very, very practical philosophy that comes out of this, you know, and a shipwreck and, and, you know, adversity and all of this. So was it just that they got to the more fundamental aspects of this quicker because, because they were actually like not just sitting under a tree?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  I do think what, what the Stoics do somewhat of a reaction against the cynics who were sort of like closer to the Buddhists or they were more monkish in their approach of like, hey, uh, like. Uh, dropout man, you know, like there's something to like that with the cynics. And I think Zeno coming from like, had a job, ran a company, seems to understand. And, and it gets very quickly to, uh, the world where, where philosophy isn't this thing you do by itself as an end to itself, but as part of the toolkit for whatever it is you're doing. And so there is, I think Zeno is close, Zeno being immediately descended from the cynics

• 29:30Speaker 01

  is still part of that kind of early Socratic, uh, cynic school where the, the philosopher's this kind of weird guy that you would go to for advice and, and, and actually Kriti's wife, whose name is escaping me, is also a famous cynic philosopher. So it's not just dudes, I think that's worth pointing out, but, um, it very quickly, the, the philosophers cease to be these kind of figures outside society. And the stoics pretty quickly become leaders of society who happen to subscribe to this school of thinking and living. And I think that's why it has to be practical because like they have day jobs and they need help with the job.

• 30:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I do want to comment very quickly before we move on. One of the things that I liked, I appreciated about Zeno's framework, cause like I, I've read quite a bit of Plato's work. I've read the Nicomachean Ethics and on this podcast, uh, we, Aristotle generally comes up as being the guy who was right about everything.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 30:36Mark Manson?

  I really appreciated how like the elegance of the framework, cause like I, reading Plato and Aristotle, there's a lot of brilliant ideas, but it like, they never seem to have like kind of this cohesive worldview that fit and makes sense with everything. Whereas, um, you know, this, this three-part framework, it's kind of like the physics is the, the rational order, the predictable, predictable order of all existence. Logic is your faculty to understand that predictable order. And then virtue is your adherence to living out through the reason and logic that you're able to perceive. And like, that's just. I don't know. There's a part of me that just loves brevity and simplicity and elegance.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  In Lives of the Stoics, I have the metaphor they have, which is escaping me, but it's like, there's the fence around the field, and then there's like the crops in the field. It's like, the idea of them being these kind of interlocking ideas, I think, is, and then there's one where it's like, ethics is the yolk, and then there's the egg, and then the shell. And so they did kind of think about them as these kind of interlocking, interdependent things. So you couldn't just be a philosopher. You also had to have some understanding of the scientific basis, and you had to have, obviously, like this sort of strong, logical mind that could help you understand how things work. So yeah, it was kind of this framework, which, again,

• 32:03Speaker 01

  because of what survives to us from the Stoics, we don't have the same, like, if you think about the famous Stoic works, and obviously we'll get into this later, but it's worth pointing out, like, we don't have, like, here's Zeno's explanation of the universe. We have a couple quotes, and then we have Meditations, which is like, a handful of aphorisms, and then we have Seneca's letters. Like, we just have these smattering of texts. So we kind of only get people telling us how the Stoics thought about things, as opposed to like, the definitive Stoic texts that goes like, this is what we think, this is how it works, this is what we teach people who are interested in Stoicism. None of that really survives to us.

• 32:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's also worth noting, too, probably should have done this at the top of the show, but like, everything we're talking about here is like, early Stoicism, right? This is 200, 300 years B.C. A lot of this is undocumented. A lot of what we know of Stoicism today, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, like, that's 300, 400, 500 years after this.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yes. Before you, the names you've heard of are coming centuries after these people.

• 33:12Mark Manson?

  Yes. And those are much more well documented. A lot of the ideas are more refined by then. They've been battle-tested, in many cases, literally. That's kind of like the later Stoic period, which we will get to.

• 33:29Mark Manson?

  So Cleanthes was the successor to Zeno.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:32Mark Manson?

  Correct?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Well, so in the Wisdom book, I tell this story. Zeno has basically two promising students. He has one named Aristote and one named Cleanthes. And Aristote is the smart one, the brilliant one, the flashy one, the one everyone thinks will inherit the school, but is also much more interested in all the different schools. And, you know, he studies at the Lyceum, he studies this, but he was sort of notoriously brash and egotistical, and he and Zeno clash many times. He is probably the recipient of Zeno's favorite, famous line about how we have two ears and one mouth for a reason.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  He is talking more than he is listening. And then Cleanthes, who, again, sort of coming to philosophy from an interesting perspective, is a manual laborer. He waters the gardens of the wealthiest Athenians, and then he's a boxer. And he comes to the school probably later in life, and I think Zeno sees something in him. His nickname was like the ath of Chethos or something like that, like the donkey of the town he's from. And he says, "Yeah, I am like an ass in that I am strong enough to carry the load." And so he's, it's kind, there's, there's an interesting parallel here. You know, it's like sort of your classic tortoise and the hare thing. And ultimately, it's Cleanthes who takes the school.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  And how official this transition process, we don't really know. Probably, probably not so much, but, you know, it's not like a university endowment that you're, you're taking over or something. But, but yeah, there's this kind of split in the school. And I think it goes much more to the everyday, to the practical, to the accessible when it gets handed to, to Cleanthes.

• 35:26Mark Manson?

  So it's with Cleanthes and his, I guess, kind of salt of the earth personality that you, you do see a lot of this celebration of voluntary hardship emerge in Stoicism. This, this ethos of doing hard things and not complaining about it seems to kind of emerge from him. And Cleanthes, despite not really being an intellectual, he did do some writing.

• 35:52Mark Manson?

  But he's definitely not the person that we associate with a lot of the principles or concepts of Stoicism today. He stood out to me as just an interesting, like in all my knowledge about like philosophical history, I can't think of another, I don't want to say anti-intellectual, but non-intellectual person.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:14Mark Manson?

  Like, obviously unintellectual person who is, who has taken the reins of a major philosophical school or movement. And so I just see it as like, it's such a fascinating decision on Zeno's part to pick the unassuming guy who's like literally carrying jugs of water every day and has like no vanity, no money to his name.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  He's your classic disciple, right? Zeno is the prophet and he is the apostle. He's, he is like, this smart guy, smarter than me, said X, Y, and Z, and I'm gonna do a good job explaining and evangelizing and keeping that flame alive. And he does write some interesting things, but, but he is, yeah, he is not sort of slashing and cutting and, you know, breaking new ground as a philosopher, which is maybe exactly what it needed to remain a viable school.

• 37:12Mark Manson?

  Well, after him, we get Chrysippus.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:15Mark Manson?

  Who wrote over 700 books.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:19Mark Manson?

  Systematizing Stoic doctrine. And this is the, really the first time that we get, or at least of everything that we, we still have, like clear documentation of, you know, what are, what are the, the belief sets, what are, you know, what did, what are we believing, what are we following, you know, is this true, is that true? Here's the argument for this side versus that side. Tell us a little bit about Chrysippus.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he's the guy that comes in and cleans stuff up, right? The founder is sort of messy, he passes it to his sort of, you know, his chosen disciple. And then, you know, now in the third generation, it needs someone to go like, okay, is this a real thing or not? And what do we believe and what's important? And I think when people hear 700 books, again, they that probably seems like impossible. And maybe there's an exaggeration in there. I assume this is mostly like essays and little treatises on things. But again, none of the 700 survive.

• 38:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  So we don't really know. We just know that he's incredibly prolific. He's a fighter. Ironically, Cleandis is actually the boxer, but he's the fighter. Chrysippus, though, also practical, is a runner. And he competes in this Olympic event called like the Dilekos or something. I'm always terrible at the pronunciation. But like, I thought this is remarkable, too. Like, the Greeks didn't run in a circle. They the Olympic running track is like about 200 meters long, and they would run back and forth, back and forth. So he did this. He competed in this race that is about three miles of wind sprints.

• 39:00Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  So again, I think there's something like his one of his famous analogies. He's like, life is like a race. You want to beat the other people, but you don't want to beat the other people by cheating. And like, you're like, oh, he's using a sports metaphor from a sport that he competed in, not, you know, a person who occasionally watches it on TV or something. So again, there's this kind of practicality to the Greeks, too, that it's not this sort of distinction between, you know, mind and body. Yeah, is an interesting kind of combative guy who seemed rather difficult to get along with.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Insufferable, I would say, from what I read of him. Constantly arguing. He was like, he would be an internet troll, for sure.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And then and then famously dies of laughter on his front porch.

• 39:51Mark Manson?

  I read that he was laughing about a joke of a donkey drinking your his own urine.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  No. So as I understand it, and this is what Diogenes Laertus says, he's sitting on his front porch, and a donkey breaks loose, wanders up to the front porch, and begins eating figs out of the garden. And Chrysippus says,

• 40:12Speaker 01

  When the owner rushes up, he says, "You should get that donkey some wine to wash down those figs." And then he begins laughing at his own joke so hard that he dies. And I've asked many comedians, like on the Daily Stoic Podcast over the years, if they have any idea what this joke means, and no one, no one can even begin to crack it. But I do think it's, it's not, because there is some, some sense of the Stoics as being humorless. And I think when you read about Chrysippus's life, you go like, this guy must have been insufferable. And then you go, oh, but he obviously also had a sense of humor. Yeah. And so I think, you know, this idea of the Stoics as having no emotion, we can only take little anecdotes here or there, but to me, that's always been kind of something that undermines that stereotype. And then I think it says something that it was his

• 40:56Speaker 01

  own joke that he was laughing at. He was on the list of unusual deaths on Wikipedia, which is quite an accomplishment.

• 41:03Mark Manson?

  That is, yeah. You gotta work hard to get up there. I'll also add that, I mean, he, he really did seem to be a bit of an intellectual giant.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:13Mark Manson?

  He essentially invented propositional logic. A lot of early Stoicism involved a study of paradoxes, which is super interesting. I didn't, I actually didn't realize that before this episode. I always associated that with like a Zen thing. But he very much like, was very focused on creating a technical philosophical framework. And also, he offered one of the first solutions on the free will problem, in terms of answering, like, the issue of determinism. Like, if the whole universe is predetermined, how can you argue that you have free will, or that your free will matters? And apparently, he was one of the first people to attempt to answer this.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Interesting. And that is a theme for the Stoics throughout, right? Because they did believe that we're sort of not in control, and that the kind of the universe is in control. And so, does that mean that everything is predetermined? Does that mean that it doesn't matter what you do? And I, maybe it comes all the way from Zeno, but there is this sort of metaphor in the Stoics about that, that we're like a dog tied to a cart. Did you find this when you were reading? So, that basically, the Stoic view is that we're like a dog tied to a cart. And the cart's going where it's going.

• 42:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  And the dog has two choices. The dog can trot cheerfully alongside, or it can lay down and be dragged. And so, The idea there is, I think, it comes back to this even, you know, Zeno reacting to the shipwreck, which is like, it happened, your life blew up, you lost everything. No amount of being angry about this, no amount of pointing out whose fault it was, or how preventable, nothing changes that it happens. Really, all you control is your attitude about that thing, right? Are you gonna cheerfully keep going, or are you gonna lay down and be like, this is it for me? Now, obviously, there is a certain amount of agency and choice, and then he decides

• 43:11Speaker 01

  to become a philosopher, like, he rebuilds his life in another direction after, but I don't think we have that free will about, we certainly don't have free will over what has happened, right? Because it did happen, it's done.

• 43:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  And I think that's, that is kind of the perennial debate in Stoic philosophy, is like, how much agency do we actually have? And there is, I think, a reasonable knock against the Stoics, that like, there is, acceptance very quickly becomes resignation, and do you want to live in a world where everyone is resigned? And then how do you explain the fact that most of the changes that happened came from people who chose not to resign themselves to the status quo?

• 43:56Mark Manson?

  I will add that this, this is a paradox and a philosophical issue that is, infects almost every school of philosophy, not just Stoicism. And we're actually gonna return to this later, especially with the Roman Stoics, because it becomes actually extremely relevant in terms of a lot of their decisions that they chose to make. I feel like this would be a good place to go through the Four Virtues, talk through each of them briefly, just get an understanding of like, what are the kind of core recommendations of Stoic philosophy? And then from there, we'll move into kind of the later Stoic age.

• 44:38Mark Manson?

  So, the Four Virtues, courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Which ones do you want to start with?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  This has been my life for the last six years. As I've been working on this series on the virtues. And, oh, and then you got the.

• 44:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we got it. So I should, I should add that you, yeah, you have written a full book on all four of these virtues. With the, the fourth and final one coming out next week.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:04Mark Manson?

  Wisdom takes work. So, so yeah, you're probably.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Well, but like, when you're like, no, no, you're like, which one do you want to start with? It's like, it was in, like, as you're, I'm writing this series, which one do you start with?

• 45:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And which one do you end with?

• 45:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  And then, uh, Zeno, who lays these four virtues down, you know, points out that the virtues are independent, yet inseparable from each other, which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about it. So, um, the challenge on the series, and then the challenge on even defining the virtues is like, where does one begin and end? And where does the other begin and end? Because, you know, uh, courage, well, obviously you have to bring discipline to the courage. And then what is the courage in pursuit of? And then how do you know what to be courageous about?

• 45:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  So they're all, all of them are, are related. But I think courage is the simplest, not simplest, because it is very complex. But it, it tend, I'll say it's the one that they start with. Like when, when everyone lists the virtues, courage tends to be the one that they start with. And then I think it's also worth pointing out, these are also known as the cardinal virtues in Christianity. Not, uh, because cardinal has any religious context, but it just means pivotal or, or it's, uh, cardos means hinge. Like C.S. Lewis writes an incredible essay on the cardinal virtues. And Aquinas has written about the cardinal virtues. You've probably seen it in a Catholic church, if you've ever been to Europe or something.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  It, it is, it, it's this sort of core, uh, framework for understanding the universe and what is obligated of a person. And then obviously underneath each of these virtues is a number of sub virtues. So maybe you start with courage.

• 46:56Mark Manson?

  What, how would you describe the cardinal virtue of courage? Like, how is it, is it different than what we think of as just kind of everyday courage?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Well, when, when we say there's sub virtues, right? I think we all understand there's moral courage and physical courage. So, physical courage is running into a burning building. It's exploring, you know, distant land. It's running onto the battlefield. And then moral courage is, you know, speaking truth to power. And yet, why is, does it require courage? It's because, sure, saying something unpopular is difficult because you don't want to be looked at. But if you said something unpopular to a tyrant in ancient Rome or ancient Greece, you would all, you were also risking your life. So again, they're all, it's, it's very difficult to say where one begins and ends.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  But courage was, you know, the decision to be yourself, to think for yourself, to act alone if necessary. You know, the, many of the Stoics serve and fight in various wars. And also, I would think you would just say, like, just being alive in the ancient world required a certain amount of courage. This is a much more dangerous place, right? But to me, courage is, like, if you're deducing it, it's like, it's putting your ass on the line. Right? Like, what are you willing to put on the line? And there is almost certainly no good or honorable life in which you don't do that.

• 48:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I guess the alternative to courage, I mean,

• 48:33Mark Manson?

  typically, we would think of it as cowardice. But like, from a more philosophical point of view, it is, it's actually just kind of a lack of living in general, right? Like, you're just-

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Implacancy too, yeah.

• 48:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like, you- The alternative is, is nothing. It's indecision. It's.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Well, the, the interesting thing about how interrelated the virtues are is Aristotle uses, when he's talking about the virtue of temperance, uses courage as the metaphor. So he, obviously you're familiar with the Golden Mean, but he's like, look, the opposite of courage is not cowardice. The opposite of courage is recklessness.

• 49:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  And so the, the, the virtue is in the middle, right? There's too much courage, not enough courage. The virtue is in the middle. But yeah, the, the idea of, like, there's a famous story about a Roman Stoic named Agrippinus who lives in the time of Nero. And, uh, you know, he, he's just decide, he thinks Nero is a clown. He thinks he's illegitimate. He doesn't want anything to do with them. And so he just, he's like, I'm not gonna kiss the ring, right? And he doesn't. And so someone comes up to him and says, you know, hey, you know, why don't you just kind of go along with these things? Like, what are you doing? And, and he says, look, that's fine for everyone else. But he's like, I prefer to be the red thread in the garment that makes the garment beautiful. And he was just making, I think,

• 49:54Speaker 01

  a very Stoic, but I think we can trace this back to the cynic school of like, to be independent and to be yourself. Like the courage to just be you instead of being like everyone else. I think we see this in, in most of the great Stoics is that they weren't followers.

• 50:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  They were just independent people in a, in a world that didn't always appreciate that.

• 50:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  So, so courage is all those things.

• 50:22Mark Manson?

  There's an interesting crossover as well. You know, there, there's kind of this idea of voluntary hardship.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:29Mark Manson?

  Like intentionally putting yourself in difficult situations.

• 50:34Mark Manson?

  And it's almost like, that's like a, a training ground for courage, right? Like it's, it's if you can do difficult, small transgressions in your day to day life.

• 50:44Mark Manson?

  Then you will be prepared, both mentally and physically, to do it when it really matters.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Well, one of the stories we have about Zeno when he's studying under Kritis is that he was, he's supposedly kind of socially awkward and very self-conscious. And so, one of the tasks that Kritis gives him is he tells him to carry this pot of lentils through the agora, which he is. And then, you know, he's doing this thing, he doesn't know why his teachers make him do it, and then all of a sudden, Kritis jumps out from, you know, behind a building, and he smacks him with his staff, and he spills the lentils all over himself. And Zeno, as any sort of self-conscious or embarrassed person would be, is kind of mortified. And he says, "I need you to understand that nothing bad has happened to you."

• 51:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Like, "This isn't anything you have to think about or take seriously." So, there is this kind of active training in the indifference to a thing we don't control, which is other people's opinions about us.

• 51:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And so, you know, is this in courage? Is this in wisdom? Is this in discipline? You could probably put it in a little bit in each of the buckets, but I just think the ability to be yourself unapologetically is obviously a key philosophical value and virtue, going back at least to Socrates. And, and I don't think it's something you're necessarily born with. Or, if you are born with it, then it's not a virtue for you.

• 52:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Right? It's, it's a thing you have to train and develop.

• 52:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Where, where does, where's the line, though, with recklessness? And you talked about the golden mean there. Where's that line?

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Well, the line is probably Diogenes, who's like an antisocial wacko, you know? Like, he's masturbating in public, and, and, you know, he lives in a barrel and, and doesn't have a job. Like, even, you know, maybe even the line is Socrates, right? Like, Socrates is so obnoxious that they kill him. And someone with a slightly more social acuity could have probably escaped that death sentence.

• 52:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  I don't know about you, but like, I didn't become a writer because I wanted to like, be in front of a camera a lot, or give talks to people. That's like the opposite of why you become a writer.

• 52:48Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And then you realize, oh- First off, it could be lucrative if you do these things. But second, like if you care about your message, you have to figure this thing out. And so courage isn't always, you know, charging a machine gun nest.

• 53:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  It's just, can you do a thing that is uncomfortable and scary to you? Because most of the, most of the things you want in life are on the other side of those reservations that you have.

• 53:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, let's move on to temperance.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  A very attractive word in the English language, for sure.

• 53:20Mark Manson?

  It's funny, yeah. You renamed it discipline in your book, or to the title of your book. Yeah, when I hear temperance, I just hear like, stop drinking.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the temperance movement. It is interesting internationally, it doesn't have the same context.

• 53:35Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Because it just, it didn't work, it didn't happen in other countries.

• 53:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  But yeah, and then it's funny, I call it discipline, but we're really talking about self-discipline of all, it's a big bucket virtue, right? It's, it's self-control, self-command, it is restraint, it's moderation, it's the ability to push yourself, the ability to do uncomfortable things. It's the kind of willpower that you bring to the other virtues.

• 54:06Mark Manson?

  Do you see a golden mean aspect here as well? Because it's especially this day and age, right? Like, discipline, there's kind of two meanings of discipline. One is just like, get off the couch and fucking do something. But then there's also like, the hardcore hustle culture, grindset, grind mentality of, you know, you should be working 12 hours, you should be hitting the gym at 5:00 in the morning, you should be, you know, taking 50 grams of creatine every day, you know, like whatever the new thing on Twitter is these days. Do you see that as a golden mean thing?

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 54:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  I think it was Confucius, you know, he tells this one student, he needs to hurry up and do the thing he needs to do. And then he tells the student's brother that he needs to slow down and take his time. And then the third student says, but these contradict each other. And he says, yeah, well, he needs to speed up and he needs to slow down. And I think, I think some people need the discipline.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Period.

• 55:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Or the, you know, and then other people very clearly need more of the restraint.

• 55:08Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  And in different, and I think we're all on that spectrum.

• 55:13Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  In the sense that in some areas, we need more discipline and in other areas, we need more restraint. Epictetus, uh, somebody, one of the ancients sums up all of Epictetus's teachings in two words. He says, persist and resist.

• 55:28Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And I think that weirdly captures the, the, the tension in the idea of discipline. Like there's some things you need to just do and do and do. And then there's other things you need to stop doing and stop doing and stop doing. Like for me, discipline was the easiest of the books to write because I think it's one of the virtues I'm, I'm.

• 55:48Mark Manson?

  You're very good at it. You're one of the most productive people I know.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  But when I think about where I need to be more disciplined, it's usually in the areas of restraint.

• 55:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Or pausing or recovering or slowing down.

• 56:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And yeah, so it's like, if you're a professional athlete, discipline is probably not like, how do you squeeze more workouts in? Um, it's like, how do you, how do you slow down and pace yourself and work more sustainably? And then, yeah, if you're sitting on your couch, it's probably, you've got to get off the couch and do your thing.

• 56:19Mark Manson?

  There's a life balance aspect to it as well, right? Like it's, you can be extremely optimized, say in your professional life, but, uh, if you're ignoring your, your wife and never seeing your parents and.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 56:34Mark Manson?

  You know, ditching all your friends, then that's, that's in temperance in a certain capacity.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 56:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  And it's just a more socially accepted, um, or adaptive form of, uh, ill-discipline, but it doesn't mean that it's not.

• 56:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Like the, the, the image on the front of Discipline is Destiny, which was a metaphor they used. It was, um, is a chariot racer.

• 57:00Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  And it's this idea of like, look, sometimes you're prodding the horses to go faster, but a lot of the times you're reining them in.

• 57:07Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And especially when you're going around a sharp turn or, you know, um. You're navigating some sort of narrow path, right? It's about knowing how to control and command. And I do think it's also worth pointing out, just like encouraged with discipline, there is physical discipline and sort of mental or spiritual discipline, which I ended up spending a lot more time thinking about. And I think is weirdly more relevant today than ever and not talked about enough.

• 57:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  We live in a world where often people who are very temperate or very disciplined professionally are just like, ah, all over the place with like social media or their emotions. And so just the idea of like, I have opinions and I don't express them, you know?

• 57:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Or like, I'm not going to hit send on this email until tomorrow.

• 58:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  And I'm going to, I'm going to think about what I have to say, or I'm going to come back to this later, or you know what? This is enough for today. I'm going to, those all take a certain amount of self-command that I think we don't celebrate enough in society.

• 58:16Mark Manson?

  I would argue too, in like the, you know, the 21st century, the, the importance of physical discipline. I mean, physically speaking, life's pretty easy these days.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:28Mark Manson?

  Like it's, it's pretty low stakes.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:30Mark Manson?

  Uh, you know, you're, you're not being chased by a lion and there's no, uh, people aren't going to bayonet you.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:36Mark Manson?

  I would say the mental discipline, there are a lot, the stakes are probably higher than they've ever been before because everything lives permanently online, because, you know, one awful text message.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:47Mark Manson?

  Will sit on that person's phone forever.

• 58:51Mark Manson?

  Because things can be shared so easily and come back to bite you so easily. Like it does seem like, and because of how many, how much addictive stimulation we're exposed to on a daily basis. Like it makes sense to me that like mental discipline, the stakes are probably higher than they've ever been.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  There's a really good clip where Tina Fey was on Bowen Yang's podcast. And this is right after he had like, he had been talking shit on the podcast about, I don't know, Jennifer Lopez or something or someone. And then she was like coming on SNL. And, and so it was like this whole controversy and she Tina Fey came on the podcast and she was like, you're too famous to be saying your real opinions off, you know, like off the cuff. She's like, what are you doing? Like, you can't say this movie sucks. Yeah. You might want to work with that director three movies from now and you are not think, she's, she's not saying like, don't be yourself. She's just saying like you, there's more at stake here and more that needs to be considered than your knee jerk reaction to a thing that you have not studied fully. Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Right? And that's something that you find out as you become more successful or more connected is you go, hey, like as a regular person, I can just like, do whatever, but, but now these things are more interconnected than I would have thought. And there's more going on than I knew about and you have to take the time and have the restraint to be able to go like, is this really my opinion? Do I really feel strongly about this? Is this actually constructive or helpful in any way? How does it help me with what I'm trying to do? Yeah. And that's, that to me is like, as the Stoics cease to be these fringe figures and start to become mayors and advisors and then ultimately senators and generals and emperors,

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  the game is changing and they don't get to be Diogenes stomping on Plato's carpets, right? They, their, their words mean too much and the effect is too great to be that person.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  One of the things too with discipline, where you're talking about the balance you're striking between persist, resist.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  One of the things that's helped me kind of navigate that though, is thinking about the definition of, uh, discipline as correction, right? So if you discipline a child, you're correcting a child or self-discipline is you're correcting yourself.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  So it's an active, it's an active process.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  No, no, that's, I like that a lot. And, and I think that's what sometimes people miss when they talk about discipline is they think about discipline in the sense of like a Marine Corps general screaming in your face. That's discipline. Self-discipline is when no one is watching and when you can do whatever you want. What do you do?

• 1:01:26Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  And so, when you think about the Stoics, like, we'll talk about them later, but you think about a Marcus Trilis, no one can tell Marcus Trilis what to do. He is the most powerful person in the world. So this is where the virtue of self-discipline becomes so important. You can, but you shouldn't. And I would argue, in today's world, this is something we very much missed in a lot of our political discussions. It's a lot about like, whether something is legal or not, or allowed or not, or what the Constitution says. It's like, yes, the First Amendment allows you to say more or less whatever you want. But there's a whole bunch of things you shouldn't say, or you're a shitty person.

• 1:02:04Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  And again, should someone who does say them go to jail? No, that's a very, that is a legal and sort of social contract discussion. But should you be the kind of person that says mean things at people for the sake of hurting their feelings? No, right? This is where restraint comes in. And so, self-discipline is something you apply to yourself. And then, the tension there is, it is very hard as a self-disciplined person to accept and

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  come to terms with the fact that other people have different definitions of self-discipline. And that it's not your place, one, to enforce it on them, and then also, do you have the self-command to be like, "I'm not even gonna judge them for doing it differently."

• 1:02:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  This is, I think, a thing that, I mean, certainly I struggle with it, but I think all disciplined people struggle with.

• 1:03:00Mark Manson?

  It's interesting, so we just, we just recorded our episode on resilience.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Mark Manson?

  Last week, and at the end of all of our episodes, we do, we do a section of trade-offs. Of like, okay, if you, if you, if you develop a lot of resilience in your life, what are actually like the hidden costs of that? What are the downsides of that? And we listed that as one of them, which is that, the more, the stronger and more resilient you become as a person, you can say this about discipline too, the more disciplined you are as a person, the more you're able to manage your thoughts and feelings and behaviors. The less empathetic you're gonna be for people who don't.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:36Mark Manson?

  Or can't. And I've definitely run into that quite a bit in my own life. And it's like, it is a hard trap to not fall into.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  You tend to see this in like, the first woman to do X, or the first man to do X. Like, when someone's like a minority and then they break through, you would think they would be very sympathetic to the people who didn't break through. But actually, they tend to more identify with the group that was just trying to exclude them and make their life harder. They have a, they have a, it's called the adversity paradox or something like that, where you tend to go, if I did it, everyone can do it.

• 1:04:13Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  And to some extent, that's inspiring and true. And that's what people who break glass ceilings and barriers do. But then also, it's hard for them to go like, well, maybe I broke through for flukish reasons. Or maybe I, maybe it shouldn't, it didn't need to be this hard and all this. And yeah, you can tend to be very unsympathetic to other people. And to me, that's, that's a failure of both discipline, but then this leads us to the next virtue, which is justice. Which, again, people think is the legal system. But no, it's your ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and go, no, they're just having a hard time. And I'm, I'm in judging them, only making that harder.

• 1:04:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Like, what are the stoic precepts of justice? And I, I ask this totally understanding that any sort of ethical philosophical conversation is messy as fuck and gets, gets very convoluted quickly. But I'm curious, if you were to like summarize, what is the stoic position on justice? How would you describe it?

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Well, I do think it's, justice is a tricky, again, how we render these words can sort of preclude people from being interested in them. Like, so it was very obvious to me that justice should not be in the title of the book on the virtue of justice. Because when people hear it, they think.

• 1:05:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Law, they think the legal system, they think politics, they think social justice warriors. Which, again, it says something about our society that that's like a bad thing to be as a warrior.

• 1:05:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, when you can't put justice on the cover of your book.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  You can say it's an indictment of our society.

• 1:05:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  The virtue of justice is really. The ethics that we were talking about earlier at the core of the sort of Stoic big three is this idea of ethics. So what are the ethics? Look, it would be nice if some Ten Commandments from Zeno had been passed down to us, but they didn't. And again, we see the Stoics over, you know, almost a 500-year period, even the norms of what's okay and not okay is changing over the course of this. So it's hard to be like, well, the Stoics say this is really important. You can see this from their actions. And then it's like, they also own slaves, right?

• 1:06:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah, once we get into the Roman period, it's gonna, this is gonna get very messy.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  It's complicated, but there was this middle Stoic named Hierocles, and he, he talked about this idea of, of the concentric circles. So he said, at the beginning is us, we're born as a baby, all we care about is surviving, and all we care about is ourselves. And then we attach to mom and dad, and we care a lot about them. Then we have siblings, then we have an extended family, and these are rings, right? Then we have, you know, our neighbors, we have the citizens of our city-state, then maybe we belong to an empire, then it's all of humanity. And then, and then you could probably add some rings that they didn't explicitly talk about, but I think are obviously logical extensions here, which is like animals. And then you could put like, people you've never met.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  You could put like, people who've never been born, right? But the idea Hierocles said was, was that philosophically, how do you pull these outer rings inward? And that he said, there's a beautiful madness in doing this. And I think this is so important because it is very clearly a counterbalance to those first two Stoic virtues. And so much of the Stoic thinking, which is primarily about the individual orienting himself in opposition to a world that is indifferent to them. So to then have this other virtue that's saying, well, like, other people may not give a shit about you, but you have to give a shit about other people, I think was kind of radically transgressive and really, really interesting.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  So I think fundamentally, there is this idea that we were in Stoicism, that we were made for other people, that we were made to treat them well, that we were made to, and that we degrade and...

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Harm ourselves when we act with dishonesty, when we act with cruelty, when we write people off. And so I do think there is something pretty similar to the sort of Christian ethic in the love thy neighbor, be of service, be a person of honor and integrity. That to me is like what we would categorize under this virtue of justice.

• 1:08:34Mark Manson?

  We're going to come back to justice a lot when we talk about the Romans.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yes, they've got some interesting ideas about it.

• 1:08:41Mark Manson?

  Well, and there's a lot of interesting decisions that are made as well in consequences of decisions. All right, let's finish up with wisdom, which is the new book. It's coming out next week. It's funny because I didn't say anything because I would have just interrupted you like six times, but like as you were describing the context and the situations in which the other virtues are applicable or make sense, almost all of your explanations, I was like, oh yeah, that's wisdom.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, totally. Well, the line I've been saying is that no one is born with wisdom, but all the virtues are born from it. So like wisdom is the work to understand history, to understand human nature, to understand the world, to understand other people, right? It's this sort of getting all this shit in your brain and then that's how you know what to be courageous about. That's how you know what the right amount of something is. That's how you know, you know, what the right cause is. The thing about wisdom is there's a lot of definitions. It's many things. Again, I think we can say, we know for certain it's not something you get for free, right? Like you, you, you earn it. But it's really this

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  idea of discernment, like what is what, you know, like, do you know how things work, why they work, what works, you know, the, it's, it's this kind of. This, and this is why I think it's so often associated with old age, is that it's in large part something you accumulate slowly over time, not just from experiences, but from, you know, exposure, both in in learning and in fact, and then the interplay between these things. And that is a slow and steady accumulative process.

• 1:10:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  You, you can be born smarter than other people, and you can get off to a pretty good start, but I think wisdom is something that's much more of a slow burn.

• 1:10:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  But it informs all the other virtues.

• 1:10:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I also feel like wisdom kind of unlocks or properly explains the Stoic concept of indifference, because like the simplistic view of indifference is is being robotic.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Mark Manson?

  Is just being not giving, not giving a fuck about anything, right?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  I was waiting for it. I was waiting for it.

• 1:11:00Mark Manson?

  We had, we had to go there. But it's like the example with with the lentils in Zeno. It's, you know, wisdom is that ability to differentiate between, do I control this?

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Mark Manson?

  Or do I not control it? Does this matter? Does it not matter? Is it worth getting upset about? Is it worth investing myself into? Or is it not? And, and I really think that that Stoic practice of indifference is that ability to understand where your attention and effort, where that boundary should be.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:36Mark Manson?

  Right? Of like, understanding like, okay, that that is something that I have absolutely no control over and doesn't affect me. So I'm just not going to worry about it.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of Marx's realist's lines, he says, to be indifferent to the things that make no difference.

• 1:11:50Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  And you're like, oh, that's the key. It's not indifference generally, or universally.

• 1:11:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  That's, that's to totally miss the point. But you're being indifferent to the things that are outside of your control, or that don't matter.

• 1:12:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  And, and that's where wisdom comes in to to really know that. And You the things you cared about when you were younger. Some of them you you continue to care about because they're really, really important. And then other things you're like, why did I make such a big deal about that?

• 1:12:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  And and it's it's both like, how do you know the difference? It's like, some of it's experience, some of it's like studying the experiences of others. Some of it's like having great teachers like Crates who are like forcing you in that process. And then you kind of figure it out as you go.

• 1:12:37Mark Manson?

  Where where do you feel like you've developed the most wisdom? I mean, you've been writing about Stoicism for 15 years now. So like, in what areas of your life do you feel like you've developed the most wisdom over the last decade plus?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I I do think your point about like, uh, discipline, like, what are you? What are you doing? Why are you doing it? And then to go like, hey, I'm gonna pull this back. I I think I think a lot of it for me has been dialing. It's like, where do the dials go on these things? And I think I've I've gotten better at kind of finding those different dials over the years. I think I I understand people in history and the world better. And like, I'm I'm reading this book right now about this sort of mid 20th century kind of political figure. And then I'm like, oh, like, I understand what's happening right now, like so much better.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Because this person who I knew existed and I thought was one thing was actually this other thing. And now it's unlocking all this stuff that I understand about now. And so I think I think just as I've slowly read more and then experienced more, it's the interplay between those things that you you go, OK, I I just kind of, I I know what's happening.

• 1:13:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  You know, that's to me what wisdom is, is like, the ability to, well, Epictetus says, uh, wisdom is like, how many arguments are you getting in? Like, the sign of progress is you just don't get in as many arguments. But I think that's part of it, too.

• 1:14:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  You're just like, oh, no, no, I I understand what's going on here.

• 1:14:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And I understand what I actually should do in response to it.

• 1:14:16Mark Manson?

  I I'm thinking of it, I'm probably thinking about this just because I've been thinking about AI a lot lately. But, um, you know, when you're when you're prompting an AI, the more context you give it. The better the result is, and I feel like wisdom is that like what you're describing, right? Like, reading books, having life experiences, getting in fights with people, seeing what's stupid, seeing what's not stupid, seeing what matters a year later, seeing what doesn't matter a year later. That's all context building.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:14:44Mark Manson?

  And, uh, yeah, it's funny. I just made that connection of like relating like wisdom is just, it's having context.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  No, wisdom is having, what context are you bringing to this situation? And, and I've been thinking a lot about how if you don't have a lot of context, if you don't have a lot of experience, you don't have a lot of wisdom, it's going to eat you alive because it's wrong so often, or it's incomplete so often. And so, like, I just, I was just using AI to, I needed some fact for this thing I was writing and I asked it this question. And it started to solve, like, it's, the solution was, the, the logic was sound, but it was starting from a faulty assumption at the beginning.

• 1:15:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Which I spotted immediately, but it didn't. And I said, no, this is wrong for this reason. It says, oh, I'm sorry. It's like an approximation. And I was like, okay, but, but the approximation, again, flows from a flawed premise, you know? And, and I guess the point is, um, to me, a big part of, of wisdom is not always knowing the answer, but knowing what's bullshit.

• 1:15:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Like, I, I don't know, like, I see this even in my business where it'd be like, I'll ask someone something and they'll be like, I'll be like, how big is that segment? And they'll be like, it's a thousand. And I go, it's not a thousand. And they go, well, how big is it? I go, I don't know how big it is.

• 1:16:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  I just know that that number is wrong.

• 1:16:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And that's context, because I have, I can't tell you the exact thing, but I can tell you what it's not. And so the ability to spot bullshit, to spot misinformation, to spot flawed thinking, or whatever, that to me is a lot of what wisdom is. And it comes from experience and knowledge and understanding, where you're just like, I can see this. And so I think people that don't have that are gonna get, how do you know when it's giving you a totally? Flawed answer.

• 1:16:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  I think that's going to be really hard for people.

• 1:16:34Mark Manson?

  It's, there's an irony in which that like AI has all the knowledge and very little wisdom, or its wisdom is dependent on the wisdom or the context you give it.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:44Mark Manson?

  I'll actually give you a really funny example from this morning. So I was doing some last minute prep and I, I went to Claude and I wrote in, I said, I'm doing a podcast. I need, give me some example questions with Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. And then it generated podcast questions as if I was interviewing Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. It was like, so you've been an emperor now for 12 years. Like, what do you think about? And I was just like, what the fuck, man?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:11Mark Manson?

  This is, you know, no human would ever make this mistake, but it's a.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Well, there's a funny thing about how like knowledge is that tomato is a fruit.

• 1:17:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  And wisdom or, or, yeah, wisdom is knowing that it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

• 1:17:26Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  I could very easily see ChatGPT giving me a tomato based fruit salad.

• 1:17:31Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Thing because it doesn't actually understand. It's just grabbing different things and throwing them together. There's not this extra filter. And this is timeless. There's a story I tell in the intro of the wisdom book about Seneca and this wealthy Roman, who just hires these slaves to give him the answers to all the questions that come up at dinner parties. And, and so one of his friends comes up to him after, to this, this Roman and he says, you know, this is a great party. He says, have you thought about becoming a wrestler? He goes, why would I become a wrestler? I'm an old man. And he goes, but your slaves are still young. And, and the point is that you can't have anyone do this stuff for you.

• 1:18:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  If you have, if you have your own knowledge and context and understanding, you can have people help you, who give you information that you then filter, synthesize and make decisions on. But you're never fully going to be able to outsource this stuff to any one other. Than you. Yeah. And that's wisdom is the ability to do that.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  We're, there's a lot of pressure to not be wise right now, right? There's, it's a lot of pressure to hop on the bandwagon of things that maybe you can't control. Right?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  So Mark and I, we talk a lot about how we, we think a lot of people are under indexed on the local and over indexed on the global.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  So just global events you can't control, but everybody's like, and I talk to people about this and I tell them this and then I immediately get a lot of pushback. Well, well, you're super privileged because you don't have to think about that. Right? And I'm like, no, you can focus on your local communities and environments and make more impact there and not be just beside yourself and out of your mind. Half of the other time. What do you say to that? I guess when.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  No, I get that a lot. People will comment, they'll go, this is easy for you to say.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  You just think we should do nothing.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  And like what I've come to, this person was already doing nothing.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  It's not like this person was running this major activist organization that's desperately trying to recruit people and, and like by telling them to focus on equanimity and poison restraint, you're, you're depriving them of, you know, like valuable team members. Yeah. It, it's this classic thing of conflating emoting about a problem and thinking about a problem with making a difference about that problem. And so there is a stereotype that the Stoics are not active or engaged. But when you look at the lives of the Stoics, which I have done, every single one of them was active and engaged, like more so than your average person. And so, so what do they mean then? When they say like, you don't have to have an opinion about everything.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Focus on what you control. They just mean exactly what you mean when you say that, that not giving a fuck is a subtle art. There's a bunch of things that you don't give a fuck about, that you don't think about so that you can allocate those resources and energy towards the things that you should give a fuck about, that you can make a difference on. And, and yeah, this distinction between global and local is obviously a very big one. Like even, yeah, you look at what's happening in the Middle East. I, I think it's, uh, everything people are saying it is.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Is that, but, but me saying that or thinking it, is that changing it? No, but.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Right now, a person of that personality type that's doing that horrible thing overseas is running in a local election in your town. And you're not voting.

• 1:20:56Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  And so, obviously, that's a simplified example. But you get my point, which is that like, we are, it's not just that we're over-indexed on, on the global and the national. It's that we're actively neglecting the things that we have. Like, how many people have a hard, have an opinion on like, what the minimum wage should be? And then, when they decide to hire someone, are like, well, what's the minimum wage? You know what I mean? Like, like, that's the great thing about being an entrepreneur, being a person, is that you get to make your own decisions. And you can do whatever you want. You know? Yes, we should also band together and try to solve these problems and codify them in law. But you could also be a good person in your local sphere.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  And, and that's those concentric circles again.

• 1:21:44Mark Manson?

  Where do you think you've gained the most wisdom, Drew? Over your adult life?

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  Where have I gained the most wisdom? Um, I guess we might get into this a little bit more later, but just like, the, the acceptance and the indifference part, I think, as I get older, the more, I'm like, yes, this discern, the discernment that comes with that.

• 1:22:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  I, I think it's, you, you, you go through enough iterations of that, you go through enough relationships, you go through enough, um, enough people in your life, and you're just, this does and does not matter. And you're right, it's an experience thing. It's, it's, it's one of those things. You can be born smart, you can be smart about a lot of things. Gaining that wisdom, yeah.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Just having less opinions is like...

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Yes. Very much so.

• 1:22:24Mark Manson?

  By itself is...

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  I used to be very, very opinionated, and now I'm just like, God, I don't know anything. Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Like, have you heard that idea of not yucking someone's yum?

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, hey, that's a great fucking expression.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Don't yuck on my yum.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, why do I give a shit? It's like, like, you're right in that you like that.

• 1:22:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  You know? And like, but, but the inexperience says like, no, no, this is a statement about whether something is objectively good or not.

• 1:22:47Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  And that my inability, and then the irony is my inability to let you like something you like is actually making me unhappy. Like, just the idea of being able to be like, I don't, you do you, man.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  You do you. Yeah. What about you, Mark? Were you fishing for us to ask you that question, too?

• 1:23:04Mark Manson?

  No, I'm just thinking about this. Um, I, I think, I think Ryan and I are very similar in that we're both... I consider us both like all gas, no brakes, guys.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Mark Manson?

  But in very different ways. Like, you're, you're very regimented and like incredibly consistent, productive. I think mine is-

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Impulsive might be a word.

• 1:23:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Mark Manson?

  Wow, you've come a long way.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Sorry, I was so, yes.

• 1:23:33Mark Manson?

  There is some wisdom there. I think on my side, it was more, how do I call it? Like, a little bit more like chaos, you know? Like, I, I was always, I wanted to try everything. I wanted to experience everything. I wanted to go everywhere. I wanted to do everything. And I think that served me very well when I was younger, but it, it led to a very chaotic life. And so I've really had to learn how to calm down, but I think in a different way than you.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Mark Manson?

  I've had to learn how to, like, calm my desires and my, my impulses.

• 1:24:17Mark Manson?

  You know, just like, I have a lot of shiny object syndrome.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Mark Manson?

  I think I, I've never heard about a trip that didn't sound cool.

• 1:24:27Mark Manson?

  So it's, it's, it's taken a lot of time and work to like, get me to step back and just be like, you know, it's okay to chill out and just, you know, do the same thing every day for a few weeks. Like, that's not gonna kill you. Actually, it might be really good for you.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. My, uh, my eight-year-old, one time I was like trying, I was like, "Come on, dude, this take forever. Let's like go." And he's like, "We got nothing to do and nowhere to be."

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Whoa, alright. You've been watching The Big Lebowski? I was like, but it's like, it's a Saturday.

• 1:25:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  There's literally nothing we have to do. Not only do we not have to do it on Saturday, but also like, we're good. Like, I don't have a boss. I don't have to think about money. Like, I can do whatever I want.

• 1:25:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  And here I am going like, "We need to get there 30 seconds faster."

• 1:25:14Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  And I think was the wisdom of just like- Again, understanding what's important, what's like, what's real and not, like, what's actually serious and what isn't is a big part of it.

• 1:25:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and I think it's interesting that all three of our examples were various forms of temperance.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:30Mark Manson?

  Right, it's like, the temperance is the correction, I like that definition of like, it's correction, and then obviously, to know what to correct, you need to have an understanding of justice, and, so yeah, it's, it does all tie together quite nicely. As we move from this early Stoic period into the later Stoic period, there's kind of two major historical shifts or transitions that I want to talk through. The first one is the Roman conquest of ancient Greece, which happens in 146 B.C.

• 1:26:11Mark Manson?

  There's a political fallout from this, and there's a, and this didn't just happen with the Stoics, but it's all of the major Greek schools of thought, like, suddenly now there are Roman patrons to impress, to entice, to, I guess, ingratiate yourself with, so I want to cover that, and then the second major historical transition I want to talk about is the kind of civil war period of the Roman Empire, or the Roman Republic, which emerges with the Roman Empire, because there's a lot of interesting Stoic intrigue that happens during that period as well, but let's start with the Roman conquest of Greece, and the influence that it starts exerting on a lot of the Stoic thinkers of the time.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Well, Rome conquers Greece militarily, but Greece conquers Rome culturally, and there's a famous diplomatic mission where Greece sends like, three of its greatest philosophers to Rome to basically plead with their new overlords. They were used to being the deciders, it's like, it's Britain sending Churchill to America to meet with FDR during the early days of World War II, because the balance of power has shifted. They send Diogenes, different guy, same name.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Carnetides and somebody else I'm forgetting. But basically, it doesn't go over well at first. Rome is like instinctively averse to philosophy and they particularly take issue with the way that one of the Stoics, one of the philosophers who's more of a sophist argues one position one day in a, in a presentation and then argues the other way the next day. In the way that, you know, in a university context or a debate environment, we respect, but for the Romans who are sort of much more literal, this was repulsive. And actually, Cato the Elder is this famous Roman, wants to ban the philosophers altogether from Rome. He, he would have hated the fact that his great, great grandson, Cato the Younger, becomes

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  maybe the most famous Stoic of the age. But, but, but it's this sort of slow acculturation where the ideas from ancient Greece, in the same way that we look to them and admire them and are blown away by them, and we look at these buildings and we go, how do they do this? The Romans had the same reaction. And so culturally, they, the Romans raid the Greeks of all their ideas and they renamed some of the gods, they picked some of the philosophers, reject some of the others. But Greek remains like the philosophical language. Marcus Rilis, again, hundreds of years later is writing Meditations. He is writing in Greek and not in Latin.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  And almost all of the Roman emperors visit the Greek schools and Hadrian famously listens to Epictetus, but, but all the, all the Greek emperors and thinkers and lovers of philosophy make their pilgrimages to Greece in the same way that we would today because it's where it happened.

• 1:29:16Mark Manson?

  It's interesting because I think, when I think about kind of the early Stoic period, it's very cerebral. Like it's, it's a bunch of dudes on a porch debating the nature of existence and like, what is virtue and what is the right thing to do in this situation? And I feel like the, the later stage of Stoicism is you get a lot more of the practicality and, and the implementation. And I feel like- There seems to be a little bit of a shift, or at least like it's it there's more of a focus that it goes gets a little bit away from the metaphysics and like resolving paradoxes and trying

• 1:29:56Mark Manson?

  to understand the nature of the universe. Whereas like when you read kind of the Roman era Stoics, it's much more about, you know, what's the most effective thing to do in this moment? Or how to act in each situation?

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  The word here I would use is engaged. The Romans are engaged in the business of running the world and the empire and the levers of power in a way that the Greek philosophers were not so much. And so the philosophy becomes about these questions of like, what do you do? How do you do this? What is what are the skills and attributes and virtues of a public man?

• 1:30:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  Right? A person who is ruling a province, or leading troops in battle, or is serving in the senate, or is a wealthy businessman? Like, what are the tools you need? And so they're engaged in life in it in a very sort of vital, essential way that that the again, this, I think the earlier Stoics were a bit more on the periphery. So so you see it. It's not that it's a softening, but it is sort of like an assimilation into the real world from the theoretical world that just wasn't as much a part of it before.

• 1:31:09Mark Manson?

  Is there a clear through line of how so many of the Roman elite became interested in this philosophy? Because it's like, once we get, you know, to the civil war and Augustus and everything, like, there are senators, there are like, very prominent Romans who are avowed Stoics.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Mark Manson?

  So like, what does that bridge look like?

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, and to go to this point about being engaged, like, I think it's interesting, like, Greece is trying to solve this political geopolitical issue, right? And they're like, who should we send to Rome? They're not like, let's send our strongest guy. Let's send our richest guy. Let's send our, you know, most illustrious. But they're like, let's send our philosophers. So there is this kind of entry into the global affairs that philosophy has, which I think is interesting. One of the big things, there's this group called the Cypionic Circle. So Cipio Emiliinus, he's this famous Roman general, who he becomes interested in Stoic philosophy, and he sort of cultivates this scene of thinkers and doers.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Some are in generals, some are politicians, some are historians, but they kind of just cultivate this club that talks about philosophy, and then they all kind of go back to their thing. And I think that's kind of in the way that we might look at sort of like the lost generation in Europe post-World War I, where Samuel Johnson's the club in Enlightenment England. It's just this like scene that is kind of, it's like the PayPal mafia of Stoic philosophy. Like, all these people go on to do these things, then each, under them, have their own coaching tree.

• 1:32:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  And Cicero is particularly enamored with this idea of a Cypionic circle, and he's who we hear about it from a lot.

• 1:32:51Mark Manson?

  So, from this period, once we get into, I guess, first century B.C., we get into the civil war era of the Roman Empire, and all the turbulence with Julius Caesar and what eventually emerges as the empire itself. I guess we can start with Cato the Younger, since he is the most prominent story, although there are other examples as well. Tell us about Cato the Younger, tell us his story, and then we'll kind of dig into the significance of it.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  So, Cato has a, probably, you know, his great-grandfather's rolling over in his grave, but has a tutor who teaches him Stoic philosophy. So, he learns it at this early age. Again, we think of this as a stable, solid period, and it wasn't. There's a great book by Mike Duncan called The Storm Before the Storm, that's about the 100 years leading up to Julius Caesar. He doesn't come out of nowhere. The Roman Republic is struggling and sort of creaking under its own weight. Again, kind of like we feel today, where it's like, they can't pass laws, you're watching, you know, political violence and political dysfunction, and the continual breakdown of norms. So, Cato comes out of this kind of a throwback figure.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Like, he takes to Stoic philosophy with a kind of monkish devotion, and he doesn't write anything about it. We know him as a Stoic philosopher because of how he lived. Scrupulously honest. There was a saying in ancient Rome, like, a politician, when they were asked to do something, would be like, "We can't all be Catos." You know, he was like, he's, he's... He's like an old school, like conservative in the lower C sense. So as the system sort of creaks and groans under its own weight, and then you have the introduction introduction of Caesar, the two are kind of these mortal enemies. One representing not just change, but an attempt to overthrow the old order and what

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  the Romans would call the mass maiorum, or the old ways. Cicero, Caesar, etc., these are like new men in the sense that they're a legion to a new order. And Cato is the thorn in their side. He's the break. And it sets up this clash, ultimately, leading to the civil war, which Caesar dies in, or sorry, Cato dies in and then famously commits suicide in protest, rather than submit to Caesar.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  He goes to his room, he pulls out a copy of Socrates or Plato's recounting of Socrates' Last Days, reads it, and then stabs himself in the chest. And then as the doctor rushes in, they hear him fall and the clatter of the sword, they sew him back up. And then when he wakes up and realizes he hasn't died, he rips the wound open and like disembowels himself.

• 1:35:46Mark Manson?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  But it's this powerful example of sort of Stoic opposition to tyranny and power and change that sort of stands as the example that inspires like subsequent generations of Stoics. But, but long story short, Cato is a philosopher not for his writing, but for his way of life. He lives the Stoic ideas.

• 1:36:08Mark Manson?

  He's literally a Stoic martyr.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And he's the first of many.

• 1:36:14Mark Manson?

  Because it's, it's interesting over the following period, and it's probably worth noting too, you know, once we get into the Roman Empire. Each emperor kind of had a different disposition towards

• 1:36:28Mark Manson?

  being challenged. Stoic philosophers, I mean, there was one under Domitian. Is it Domitian?

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  I said Domitian.

• 1:36:36Mark Manson?

  Domitian. Under Domitian, even writing a biography, even writing about Stoics

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:41Mark Manson?

  was illegal.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. He blanket bans all philosophers from Rome.

• 1:36:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Just because it feels weird to think, we don't think of philosophers as being transgressive today, but that that word was inherently revolutionary at this period in Rome.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Just one sort of Stoic after another is a thorn in the emperor's side. But it doesn't, there's a brief period where that's not the case. The first emperor, Augustus or Octavian, is taught by two Stoic philosophers, Athenodorus and Ariestidimus. So there's, there is this interesting debate even amongst the Stoics of like, are we Catos or do we accommodate and adapt?

• 1:37:23Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  And, and so I imagine there's a split. Like you can persuasively argue it either way. But these two teachers, not from Athens, are the, the two main teachers of the emperor. And they, they have some interesting stuff. You know, they're, they're suddenly now, now the power is vested in one person. And it's really just the individual dilemma writ large. And so they're talking to him about, you know, what do you do when you get angry? You know, can the emperor afford to lose it? The emperor can lose his temper and do whatever he wants. But can the emperor afford to lose his temper? And what, how, how can this person who now possesses all this power

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  learn the ideas of restraint and these virtues that we're talking about? So they're, they're just, I think, if you're sort of looking at the montage of this period, you're just noticing the Stoics moving closer and closer to the levers of power and, and then moving, taking a resistance role when they lose the levers of power.

• 1:38:30Mark Manson?

  Well, and it is interesting because there are examples of Stoics on both sides of that equation, right? There are some Stoics who Quietly and try to subvert the power and resist.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:44Mark Manson?

  Maybe not in a not so obvious way. And then there are like people like Cato who just overtly challenge.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:50Mark Manson?

  Authority repeatedly. And it's, I don't know, like, it does raise an interesting question, especially in times like these, like, what is the most responsible thing to do?

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Totally. So Seneca is a senator, right? He's taught Stoic philosophy as a young man. He becomes a senator, so he gets to basically the peak of Roman life. And then, based on these rumors that he's having an affair with the emperor's sister, which are probably not true, he is banished by the Emperor Claudius, who was not a good emperor. And so he's banished to this rock in the middle of the ocean. And he spends like a good chunk of a decade there. And at some point, he is given an opportunity to come by Nero's mother. And Nero is then just a young man who's being groomed to be emperor. And so Seneca obviously doesn't

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  know who he's going to become. But, you know, for a guy who worships Cato, this is like an interesting question. You know, do you serve the emperor? Are you an oppositional resistance figure? And he decides, you know, like, it's better to be in the room where it's happening than in exile. So he comes back and he tutors Nero. And Nero, when he takes power, actually, people are pretty optimistic. And he has, there's a period they call it the Quinianum Neronium. And it's the first five years, the golden years of Nero. And he mostly listens to Nero and his military advisor Burrus. And then at some point, you know, they say power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. And power begins to reveal that Nero is deranged.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  And at one point Nero, Seneca has to remind Nero that it's impossible to kill all of your successors. The joke being that eventually somebody does it, right? And, and, you know, he writes a speech after Nero tries to kill his own mother. Seneca almost certainly is telling himself he is the adult in the room. He is containing the madness. And on the outside, the other Stoics, and there's a number of resistance Stoics like Thrasse, who are senators, who are like, no, no, no, you're enabling, you are complicit. And Seneca becomes enormously rich, working for Nero. And so it is this, it's a fascinating and eminently modern, modern debate.

• 1:41:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Is it better to be on the, be on the outside or be on the inside?

• 1:41:20Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  And Seneca chooses the inside, a number of other Stoics in the same period choose the outside. And kind of depending on which, what side of the bed I'm on when I wake up, I can argue it either way. But Seneca is very, very fascinating in this regard. Because he is, he is forced in a number of incredibly morally compromising positions.

• 1:41:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's, there's, he's full of contradictions.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:45Mark Manson?

  Much more so than probably any Stoic thinker.

• 1:41:50Mark Manson?

  It's, you mentioned briefly the wealth thing. Like it's, that's another aspect of him that is.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  He's the second richest man in Rome, you know?

• 1:41:58Mark Manson?

  Which is mind boggling.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Yes, as a philosopher. And, and you know, he has this, he, and he can never, he can't talk about any of this, right? So he does write a number of like really dark, really fucking dark plays. That where he talks about depravity and paranoia and stuff. And it's, he's obviously subtweeting Nero as he's doing this. But yeah, he becomes incredibly wealthy. And, and so he understood this was a charge against him even at this time. And one of his essays are, is this an essay or a letter? I forget, but he goes, you know, can a, can a philosopher be rich? And he says, yes, a philosopher can absolutely be rich. He says, provided that their money is not stained in another man's blood. And which is like an interesting, a very vivid.

• 1:42:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  An interesting point, which doesn't give us any clarity as to his specific case, right? Like, like, like, because that's exactly why it's so complex, you know? Seneca is fascinating. He writes probably most beautifully of all the Stoics about Stoicism.

• 1:42:59Mark Manson?

  I agree with that.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  And then also seems to be the most fun.

• 1:43:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  And modern of them, and almost certainly the.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  He and Cicero are both better writers than practicing Stoics.

• 1:43:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, he's definitely my favorite of the Stoics to read. And it was interesting, I mentioned earlier that I did a bit of a deep dive on, I think it was eight common Stoic practices and just digging up where they came from. And I mentioned earlier that almost all of them came from Plato, Aristotle, or the Cynics, with the exception of one philosopher, and it was him.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:35Mark Manson?

  So he is where negative visualization originates from, daily gratitude practices.

• 1:43:44Mark Manson?

  And then, obviously, he probably wasn't the first person to journal, but he was the first one who explicitly said that you should write down your thoughts every single day so that you can reflect upon them and think about them impartially. So for listeners who aren't familiar with what negative visualization is, basically, you know, when you're stressed about something, or worried about something, or afraid that something bad is going to happen, the conventional wisdom is visualize what success looks like. Visualize everything working out. Well, what Seneca actually said is to do the opposite. Visualize the worst-case scenario. Visualize what it would mean if everything went wrong. And the point that he made, which is extremely profound, is that if you actually sit and visualize and think through the worst-case scenario,

• 1:44:27Mark Manson?

  you realize it's often not that bad. Like, when you run through the mental examples of like all the horrible things that could potentially happen to you, you start to realize like, wait a second, I actually think I'd be okay. And so, paradoxically, it makes you more confident to do the thing. And even if it doesn't, it at least gets you in the mental practice of preparing for the worst. It's, he's such an interesting character because he is twisted up and tied up with all these, like even the money thing, you could even make the same argument that... By being the second richest man in Rome, you have more opportunity to influence good.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:45:08Mark Manson?

  Than if you were, you know, like Diogenes the Seneca, right?

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:45:12Mark Manson?

  Living in a barrel, whatever. So.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Well, here, to go back to the period we're talking about first, right? So Cato is the mortal enemy of Caesar. And then his daughter, Portia Cato, is married to Brutus, who assassinate Caesar, right? And Brutus is Stoic-ish. Shakespeare makes him more explicitly Stoic than he was. But like, the Romans have a very real counter example to why you don't get rid of the emperor. Like, so they assassinate Caesar, and then a civil war breaks out that ravages the country. Like, and then they end up with another emperor. It doesn't do anything.

• 1:45:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  And so I do think humility is the wrong word. There was a reticence for the later Stoics to go, hey, we would rather be a republic, but we don't know how to get from here to there. And we don't exactly have a playbook here. And the revolutionary attempts previously have been disastrous. So I think Stoicism as a, like, what do you do about a flawed status quo? Is a Stoic dilemma. And it wasn't a theoretical dilemma to these people. It was, hey, last time, what happened? And there was, I think, a fear of that.

• 1:46:36Mark Manson?

  Well, and I think this is a perfect example of kind of that transition between early Stoicism, which was still very intellectual, cerebral, still worried about like the free will problem and determinism. And this later period, which is like, okay, you can either, you have an emperor who's fucking crazy and murdering everybody, but he listens to you.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Mark Manson?

  So should you try to talk to him?

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:02Mark Manson?

  Right?

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  And we can imagine Seneca being like. Dude, you don't understand, I nixed nine out of the 10 bad ideas, and then you're saying I'm complicit because one of the bad ideas happened. The Senecas of the world would say, "You don't understand how much worse it would be without me."

• 1:47:19Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  And then the outsiders, your Thrasias and Helvidiases and Agrippinuses, the Stoics who are in this same period but on the outside, are saying, "Well, actually, you're coward, you know, you're complicit and you're enabling, and we need to do something about this." And it's, um, these are no longer these kind of black and white philosophical issues, they are pragmatic policy choices between evil issues.

• 1:47:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  Well, isn't there just, too, the Stoic idea that you play the hand you're dealt?

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  Right? Like, this is what it is.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  Right? And so that is kind of the two sides of the warring camps there.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it, but it's still, like, is this the hand that you're dealt? Like, is this out of your...

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  I think that's what's interesting, right? Like, we say that, and then, obviously, if we said that all the time, nothing would ever change.

• 1:48:13Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  And, um, that is the, that is the trickiness of it.

• 1:48:18Mark Manson?

  It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote, the, it's the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world who inevitably do, right?

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:48:28Mark Manson?

  Seneca's letters are fantastic.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:30Mark Manson?

  Like, I, I, that, between that and meditations, like, to me, those are like the two entry points in the Stoicism.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:48:39Mark Manson?

  And I don't know if you would agree with that, but for anybody listening, um...

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Seneca's essays are also very good. You know, he has a, he has an essay called "On the Shortness of Life," which is incredible. He has one called "On Anger," which is incredible. He has one on tranquility, which is incredible. And then he has a few on grief that I always recommend to people, uh, you know, who, I just lost my father and my mother.

• 1:49:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Um, he's, he's, um, he's not just a political philosopher, he's also writing these deeply moving essays and letters about just kind of practical human problems.

• 1:49:12Mark Manson?

  And I would argue... Better than almost any philosopher in human history, which is what makes his story all that more compelling. So he was also, he also died by forced suicide.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, Seneca and Jesus are born in the same year, different provinces of the Roman Empire, both become enormously famous philosophers and then both die at the hands of the Roman state gruesomely. I've always been fascinated by that parallel. But yeah, at some point, he tries to, he does what everyone says he should do, which is he walks away from Nero. And you could say it's too late, but he walks away from Nero, he tries to give all the money back, and Nero goes, that's not how this works, you know? He's like, I'll let you live in exile, but I decide, you know, what happens next. And we're told Nero tries to kill him a couple of different times, and then finally, the sort of goons come. And in those days, they would give you, as a courtesy, they would allow you

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  to commit suicide. And so, yeah, they allow Seneca to commit suicide, and he tries to slit his wrists, it doesn't work, he tries to take hemlock, it doesn't work. It's this kind of gruesome thing where, where if he was the hypocrite and the charlatan that everyone wanted to make him out to be, I don't think he could have handled the scariest thing that happened to him in his life, the way that he did. And he supposedly handles it with this sort of, like, almost good humor. And in the end, he's, he's suffocated to death in a steam room. And, and, and, yeah, he's, he's killed by his, his prized pupil,

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  right? And in one of his plays, in Thiestes, Seneca has a line that crimes return upon their teachers. And there's some poetic justice, I think, in being killed by the monster you helped create.

• 1:51:06Mark Manson?

  Honestly, his life story could be a Greek tragedy.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  It is, yes, totally.

• 1:51:10Mark Manson?

  It's one of those, if you didn't tell me this actually happened, I would think it was made up.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Well, and it, they thought it was made up for many years. Like, first off, what we thought Seneca looked like, we only found out he looked totally different, like, 10 years ago.

• 1:51:23Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  Like, the famous, sort of haggard picture of Seneca, is now known as pseudo-Seneca, because it's not a bust of Seneca, and we found Seneca was much... Plumper.

• 1:51:36Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  And epicurean looking.

• 1:51:38Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  But, uh, but like Seneca, the philosopher and Seneca, the political power broker. Then there's Seneca, the playwright, and it was, you know, all the Romans had like the same names.

• 1:51:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  For most of the last 2,000 years, people just, most historians assumed that was at least two, if not three, different people.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  And only more recently have they, did they really confirm that, no, he also wrote these plays. So it's like, I don't know, it just like, think of the most powerful unelected political official, also your most famous self-help thinker, and then also writing blockbuster movies. Or like, there's a line from one of Seneca's plays on the wall in Pompeii. Like, so he was famous that people knew his stuff.

• 1:52:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  And he's just doing that on the side. So he's a genius.

• 1:52:32Mark Manson?

  Did he do the plays before or after he got elected?

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  During.

• 1:52:36Mark Manson?

  Oh, during.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  So, so it, what, what they take it to mean is that this is where he is processing the moral injury and the trauma, because all his plays are fucking dark.

• 1:52:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  And like incredibly dark, like he, he was taking the Greek tragedies and adding a brutality and a viciousness to them that wasn't, it's not a stretch to be like, oh, this, this is this guy processing what he saw his boss do.

• 1:53:00Mark Manson?

  Right, right. What are the, the biggest lessons that you take from Seneca that you think are the best takeaways?

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  Well, Seneca writes a lot on mortality, and one of the ones I think about all the time, he says, you know, it's wrong to think that death is something that we are moving towards, that it happens at the end. His point was that we're actually dying every day, because the time that passes belongs to death. And so Seneca writes a lot about, as I said, he has an essay called On the Shortness of Life, but he thinks about how time is our most precious resource, but it's the thing we're worst at managing.

• 1:53:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  And he writes beautifully about what an active practice of meditating on our mortality gives us as far as perspective on how to manage our time.

• 1:53:45Mark Manson?

  Nice.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  Um, and then, yeah, he writes a lot about tranquility. He writes a lot about controlling your temper. His, his essay on anger is very interesting, again, when you go, oh, this guy's the Nero's. Like Nero's advisor, he's like, yeah, you can't just kill everyone you get mad at. But he's talking about, you know, how you manage the passions, which a leader has to figure out. You do not need a degree in the classics to read Seneca. It is incredibly readable and accessible, and that's why he's so.

• 1:54:14Mark Manson?

  And very applicable still. Like, anybody can pick it up and relate to it. So really quick, there are a couple of other concepts that are associated with Stoicism. Both of them are in Latin. One is memento mori, which is, literally means, remember your death. And basically, the Stoics argued that the more you think about your own death and your own mortality, the more you appreciate what's in front of you, the more you take advantage of the opportunities in front of you, and the more perspective you have on what actually matters in your life, on what to actually put your effort towards. And the other concept is amor fati, which literally means, loving your fate. And this goes all the way back to Zeno and Chrysippus and the early Stoics.

• 1:54:59Mark Manson?

  Amor fati basically says, love whatever happens to you. Find a way to appreciate and take advantage of any circumstance that comes your way. Basically, don't resist the things that happen to you. Don't try to fight the nature of the universe. Don't try to change the natural order of things. Instead, find something to be grateful for, find some sort of opportunity in the hardship, and look at your struggle in a way that you can love it. Like, find a way to love the hard things that you're going through. Which is a very counterintuitive concept on the surface, and I think it's, people's natural reaction is to kind of recoil to it.

• 1:55:41Mark Manson?

  But if you can find a way to do it, it is incredibly powerful and profound. All right, let's move on to Epictetus.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:51Mark Manson?

  Tell us about Epictetus.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  So if Seneca is the privileged man in Nero's court, Epictetus is also in Nero's court, but on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. He's a Greek slave. Literally, his name just means acquired one. And he is owned by one of Nero's top.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Aides, secretaries, you know, sort of administrators. So Epictetus is there watching these same people, but from a very different vantage point. And I think Epictetus's main observation is contrasting his lack of freedom, which is legal, with the lack of freedom that these supposedly free and powerless people have. Like, one of his most brilliant and I think vivid observations is he's, he talks about seeing this man sucking up to Nero's cobbler.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Like, this guy is trying to get in good, be in the good graces of the guy that makes Nero's shoes, because he's both afraid of Nero and wants something from Nero. And I think what Epictetus sees when he sees like these millionaires begging for favors, or these people who are afraid to tell the emperor that he's wrong, I think he just kind of goes like, "Oh, I might be freer than they are, because I know what's good and bad, I focus on what's up to me, and I'm not hoping or wanting for anything." And so he achieves this kind of freedom inside captivity that I think is a really important

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  layer on top of Stoicism, that is, the resilience layer that obviously Zeno begins, coming out of a shipwreck, but, but is the most, has a large degree to do with why Stoicism is still popular to this day.

• 1:57:51Mark Manson?

  And he is the, he's the originator of the idea of focusing only on what you control.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he says that most clearly. There's stuff that's up to you, there's stuff that's not up to you, anything that's not up to you, don't think about. And, you know, he goes, he eventually goes on to be a philosophy teacher, then he's banished, when all the philosophers are banished. And then, you know, it's funny how the tables turn, towards the end of his life, one day, you know, the Emperor Hadrian, who loves Greek thought, is just there in Nacopolis, listening to Epictetus's lectures. And to me, I love the, again, the full circle-ness of like- Well, doesn't that make him the most powerful man in the world? If the emperor is coming to listen to you because you have so conquered yourself

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  and found plenty in the midst of scarcity and all this, like, aren't you actually more impressive? And then it is the lectures of Epictetus, he doesn't write anything down, recorded by this guy named Arian, who's one of Hadrian's administrators, that makes its way to Marcus Aurelius. So that's the most, now you have the most powerful man in the world being directly influenced. Like, the Epictetus is the philosophical bible of Marcus Aurelius.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Would I be overstating it too, thinking that Epictetus, that represents a huge shift in the morality of Western thought, wouldn't you say?

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  How so?

• 1:59:18Speaker 02

  Well, because he's saying it's not about, like, the power that you have, it's about the virtue, right? That morality, or goodness, or whatever you want to call it, isn't derived from power. It's not derived from, you know, whatever it is, success, power.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  That all these emperors had, or whatever. It's more about who you are as a person. So you have this slave, I think it's almost like a precursor to what Nietzsche ended up calling the slave morality, right? Is, am I overstating how much Epictetus had, like, an influence in that?

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Well, Epictetus remarking on the idea back then that only the free were allowed to be educated, makes this point that he's like, no, no, no, only the wise are free. And I think his point is that, you know, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you come from, like, it matters what you know and what you do with what you know. And so there is something kind of individualistic in a kind of corrupt, broken world that he's kind of turning around. And, yeah, I think, I think that's what's so, there's a reason he is so striking, not just to, Epictetus becomes, obviously, deeply influential in powerful people like Marcus Aurelius,

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  but then also like other people who are later political prisoners, or experience, you know, incredible adversity or deprivation. There's just something about Epictetus where you're like, this dude not only fucking said it right, but he gets it because he lived through it. Like, he has the least privilege of all the Stoics, right? And then, so you're like, okay, if he is saying this, like... It's been battle tested.

• 2:00:59Mark Manson?

  One thing I heard is that he would often use shocking language and harsh statements as a pedagogical tool.

• 2:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Mark Manson?

  I don't know what kind of fucking idiot would do that.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, he's a little bit more like, he's, he's a little bit of a throwback to the cynics.

• 2:01:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  In that he's like, you know, like even that story about the cobbler, he's like, he's making fun of people and

• 2:01:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  breaking them down and kinda, he's questioning your most basic bedrock assumptions, which is what great teachers do.

• 2:01:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  You, you think this, and then he shows you why you don't have any idea.

• 2:01:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  What the fuck are you talking about?

• 2:01:36Mark Manson?

  What are the biggest or most important lessons you've taken from Epictetus?

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously the dichotomy of control is like the core of Stoicism. I like his thing where he says, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. That's like, that's the definition of Stoicism right there. Like the thing is.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  All throughout Western thought.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  Since then, it's like.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  The thing is objective. The news, the news is, and then we say, it's a bear market, it's a bull market. You know, we're saying it's good or bad, fair, unfair. Epictetus talks a lot about virtues and good and evil. So he's not saying there's no such thing as right and wrong. He's just saying there really is no such thing as positive or negative. It just is. Um, and then his other one that I really like is, um, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know.

• 2:02:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  And so he, he is, uh, as a teacher, in the same way that we get some good insights from Zeno on this, I think very much about breaking you down first and disabusing you of your notions and your faulty assumptions. So then you can be remade in this sort of stoic mold. And that's why the most powerful Romans sent their kids to him to be educated.

• 2:02:50Mark Manson?

  It's mind boggling that. Yeah, that the most powerful Romans would send their family to a slave.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Mark Manson?

  To learn how to live.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  But also, you know, to go to the idea of justice, right? I think it's really interesting that his teacher, Musonius Rufus, not only teaches Epictetus, so he's teaching this former slave, or maybe he still was a slave, but he also writes this fascinating essay on, which survives to us, on, you know, whether women should be taught philosophy. And he has another one about how whether virtue is the same in a man or a woman. And there is something really progressive about these people, you know, again, almost 2,000 years ago, going like, oh yeah, virtue is virtue. It doesn't have a genderedness. And obviously, there's a lot of misogynistic things in all their writings, but they are starting to question some of the earlier ideas.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  And we're seeing, you know, threads that get picked up by other people later.

• 2:03:46Mark Manson?

  So how does Epictetus's work reach Marcus Aurelius?

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Meditations, at the beginning of it, he thanks his philosophy teacher, Risticus. He says, "For loaning me his copy, the discourses of Epictetus, from his own library." And so I just love that, you know, again, 20 centuries ago, like, hey, you might like this book.

• 2:04:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  And then it changes the course of Western civilization. Like, and I think everyone's had a book like that, that someone was like, hey, this worked for me, it might work for you. And so you have this young man, probably in his early twenties, gets this thing. You know, he's not born to be the emperor. There's a series of Roman emperors who have to choose their heir. And Marcus is chosen by Hadrian, but he has to choose someone in between them. So he chooses Antoninus, who in turn has to choose Marcus. At some point in there, Marcus reads Epictetus. And then that's what sets in motion one of the only instances of a philosopher-king in human history. And I think it's remarkable that you have in Marcus Aurelius, a guy who could do whatever

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  he wants. And so the voice in his head, saying, ah, it's not a good idea, that's not right, I don't think you should do that, is the voice of this slave.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  And how powerful that is.

• 2:05:06Mark Manson?

  It's notable, the two things that kind of stand out to me. Within meditations is obviously the Memento Mori aspect of it. But also his idea of the view from above, right? Zooming out, zooming out across history and time and space and everything. And it makes sense considering where he's coming from, right? As you said, like, he's the most powerful person in the world. There's literally not a single soul that can tell him no.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:35Mark Manson?

  So the only thing that can potentially give him perspective or challenge his perspective is history and time itself.

• 2:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:43Mark Manson?

  And so he has to regularly develop, he has to develop a practice of regularly like zooming out and making himself feel insignificant.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:52Mark Manson?

  To keep his head on straight.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  Imagine how even just like logistically, that's actually pretty groundbreaking. Like, we so take it for granted, it's like you get in an airplane and you look down. Or you drive a car up to the top of a mountain and you look down. Or you have a picture that they sent you from outer fucking space.

• 2:06:12Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  Of this tiny blue marble that we look, like, they didn't know any of this. So when he's, he's talking about taking the bird's eye view, this is like, actually an imaginative exercise.

• 2:06:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  And I was just at the Acropolis and I was thinking, it's like, no, he came here and he stood there and he looked down on this. And this would have been, he would have been looking down at the, the sum total of the ancient, you know, world that he so admired. And it's like, he wouldn't get that view very often. But you do, when, I was just talking to this astronaut and he was saying, he's like, it's just, it's just incredible because the borders go away.

• 2:06:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  And time goes away and race goes away and all you're left with is like, this sense of like, everyone's in this together.

• 2:07:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:02Speaker 01

  And that's not a perspective that people who find themselves the most powerful person in the world are often naturally inclined to or get.

• 2:07:12Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:07:14Mark Manson?

  Right. So, meditations was written.

• 2:07:18Mark Manson?

  This is a personal journal.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:19Mark Manson?

  It wasn't ever meant to be published or seen by the world. You read it in college, I believe.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07:24Mark Manson?

  And it had a profound impact on you.

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:28Mark Manson?

  Tell us about that. What was that?

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Well, just like somebody gives Marx's Realist Epictetus, someone was like, hey, you should read this book, Meditations, which I didn't know existed and I didn't know anything about it other than that's the old guy from the movie Gladiator. You know? There's nothing like it in any language, in any philosophical tradition. Like, almost every book, and I think you and I as authors appreciate this. There's something inherently performative about a book. You are writing it to be read by someone else. And so, that's not to say you're not being honest and you're not pushing yourself, but there is, um, you're performing.

• 2:08:01Mark Manson?

  You're putting on your best outfit.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:02Mark Manson?

  You know, you're trying to make a good impression.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, the idea that this guy, who has a pretty busy day job.

• 2:08:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Is writing these notes to himself. And he's doing it in his second language. And he's doing it, never intending it to be published. And it's so good that we're still reading it 2,000 years later, is incredible. But there's a, he says you. And when he goes like, you know, when you wake up in the morning and you want to stay in bed, you know, he's not thinking of you. He's thinking of him. Like, he is struggling to do that. But from the specificity came this timeless universality. And it's, it's him talking about controlling his temper. It's him talking about his fear of death. It's him talking about fear of losing his children, which he did.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  You know, it's fear, uh, it's, it's him wondering about legacy and will he be remembered? It's him, you know, getting worked up about stuff. It's, it's like, just this very human book. But it's, it's a human trying to...

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  Not transcend their humanness, but but trying to get from the lower self to the higher self.

• 2:09:14Mark Manson?

  I it does seem what is so remarkable about it is that you would, I don't know, I think this is just like a natural human bias. We do it all the time with celebrities and world leaders and historical figures, but we assume that there must be something different about them.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:30Mark Manson?

  Like, oh, clearly, clearly, you know, Steve Jobs didn't have the same amount of hours in the day or didn't worry about the same things I worry about. So it is wild to peer into the mind of a Roman emperor, not just any emperor, but like at the peak of the Roman Empire and its power. And yeah, see passages about not wanting to get out of bed and.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  And also, though, like, it's it's easy to read like, I don't know, a Buddhist monk being like, power doesn't matter, fame doesn't matter, money doesn't matter. And it's like, that's easy for you to say. You've never had those things and you didn't have a shot at having those things. There's something unique about someone who's actually done it. This is why I think Ecclesiastes is the most interesting book in the Bible, too. This is someone clearly talking from experience, not cynically tossing them aside preemptively, but going like, no, no, no, I've been to the top of the mountain and it's not what you think. There's something very powerful and profound about, like when Marcus goes like,

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  you know, he's saying something about Alexander the Great. It's like their peers.

• 2:10:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:39Speaker 01

  You know, like, he's not just some some historian being like, here's the fatal flaw of Alexander the Great. He's up there with them. And I think that's that's what makes it such a remarkable book.

• 2:10:51Mark Manson?

  So if Aurelius is kind of the anti Nero.

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:10:56Mark Manson?

  Is that reflected in their policies? I'm I'm curious, like, how would you, as a Stoic?

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would love to see him have been the greatest emperor of all time.

• 2:11:06Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Right? Like, some George Washington figure that lays down power, which, by the way, when Washington resigns his commission first from the army and then resigns the presidency, he's he's thinking of Cato and he's thinking of Cincinnatus, right? He's like, he is steeped in these classical ideas, but.

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would want, you would want Marcus Aurelius to be the Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of Gladiator.

• 2:11:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Where he's like, Rome will be a republic again. He doesn't do anything like that.

• 2:11:36Mark Manson?

  No, he doesn't.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  And part of the reason he doesn't do anything like that, although there's a couple, like, he, he, he doesn't, he ceases to let the gladiators use real swords. And he, he does-

• 2:11:47Mark Manson?

  It's something, it's something.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  And he does some, like, little things like that, you know? But, um, but the tragedy of Marcus Aurelius, and maybe it's also fitting, is that basically, the day he takes over, just one fucking thing after another happens. So 20 years of peace and prosperity, Antoninus is his predecessor and his beloved stepfather. Then there's this plague, which is known as the Antonine Plague. And then, like, the plague, uh, is put on, like, there's a flood, then a famine, then a plague, then there's wars, then there's a coup, then he has health, it's like, it's one fucking thing after another. And so he's not, there's a Jimmy Carter-ness to Marcus Aurelius.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  If, if, if, bear with me for a second, when you go like, this might be the most fundamentally decent, good person to ever get in this position of power. And then both events and the nature of the office conspire to make those things less of an asset than you would have predicted.

• 2:12:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  Right? And the most obvious example of this is, five emperors in a row don't have a son. Marcus Aurelius has several sons, they all die, except for Commodus. And so now, again, you talk about, like, these aren't theoretical things. Sure, it's better to pick your successor than your son, but what do you do about your son?

• 2:13:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  And so he turns it over to Commodus, who is probably a sociopath or a psychopath, or, you know, deeply unstable, plus, power corrupts. And, uh, almost immediately, the era of Pax Romana ends.

• 2:13:38Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  And you have to lay that on Marcus Aurelius's feet.

• 2:13:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It is.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  But what's he supposed to do? You know what I mean?

• 2:13:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  What's he supposed to do?

• 2:13:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it is such a, the Jimmy Carter reference is actually, I think, very appropriate. I mean, it's, I think it's a hard pill to swallow, just to get off into a little tangent. But it's like, we have this idea that being a great person should make you a great leader or executive or ruler. And I think history bears out that that's not always the case.

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:14:17Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, the smartest person isn't always the best in charge. The most virtuous person isn't always the most effective leader. Shit gets complicated. You know, it's funny, like, the thing I took from Meditations when I read it, and it still kind of sticks with me, it's just, there are stretches of it that feel repetitive in a way. And it's interesting, again, thinking about the context in which it was written, it, I think it really drives home the fact that it's one thing, philosophy in the abstract, you know, you can like, solve a problem and, okay, good, we figured out virtue or whatever. But when it comes to daily life, you have to solve the problem again every single day.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:02Mark Manson?

  It's never permanently solved. You're gonna have to face it over and over and over again. And there's no station in life that prevents you from being subjected to that.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think this is the interesting thing about psychedelics, right? Is people like, tell you this like, thing that they learn, which is, by the way, in every philosophy book ever.

• 2:15:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not the information that's important. It's the data, it's solving the problem again and again and again. Like, Marx, Lewis, obviously knows that he's gonna die, and then when you die, you're done, right? But like, that doesn't change the fact that... You wake up today and you're like, don't want that to be true.

• 2:15:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:15:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  And so, so yeah, he's wrestling with these same perennial problems over and over and over again. Meditations is a book for the writer, not for the reader. So sometimes the criticism of it, I'm like, you're missing the point.

• 2:15:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  Like, he needed this.

• 2:15:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  It, some of it is incidentally beneficial to us. Um, but yeah, I think it's important to understand that Stoicism is not a thing that you have read. You shouldn't have read the Stoics, you should be reading the Stoics. It, just like, uh, oh yeah, I meditated. It's like, not a past tense thing. It's like, did you do it today?

• 2:16:20Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  Because it's always beginning anew.

• 2:16:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah. What do you think he would think of his private journals, still being read 2,000 years later?

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  Probably mortified at some level, right? Like, I think, I think probably didn't want them, I think they would be different if he wanted them to be published.

• 2:16:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  At the same time, uh, I just read this book, um, some of Joan Didion's notes survive. She wrote these notes as her daughter was dying of alcoholism. She was going to therapy every day and she would write these notes about the sessions to give to her husband. And it's like, obviously on the one hand, the most private thing you could possibly imagine. And clearly, like, not in the form of a book. On the other hand, you're reading it and you're like, oh, she can't turn it off.

• 2:17:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  She, like, this is still Joan Di- Joan Didion writing notes from a therapy session is gonna read like an epistolary novel. Because she's fucking one of the goats.

• 2:17:17Mark Manson?

  She's Joan Get- yeah.

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think there's something about Marcus where it, on the one hand, he doesn't want it to be published. And on the other, probably understood. Like, Seneca's letters are more, much more so like a performative medium.

• 2:17:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  But they're designed to read like a letter that was not meant to be read. I think Meditations was not designed to be read, but like, wink, wink.

• 2:17:44Mark Manson?

  Hey, if you want to do something with those scrolls over there when I'm gone, you know.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, check the left-hand drawer in my desk. There might be something, you know.

• 2:17:53Mark Manson?

  Oh, please don't go in that drawer.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  I know it has a title on it, and it's been edited and, you know.

• 2:18:01Speaker 02

  Is there any connection there with why he wrote in Greek instead of Latin?

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Greek was just the language of philosophy. So, like, as a lover of Hellenistic thought, like, Latin is not elegant enough to render the philosophy.

• 2:18:15Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. I find that fascinating, too, because so few people were literate.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  And here he is, you know, navigating between two languages like that.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this guy's got the greatest philosophy teacher, the greatest rhetoric teacher, the greatest Latin teacher. Yeah.

• 2:18:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Last question for this section. What did you personally take from Meditations? I know you've read it like 100 times.

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's designed to be read over and over again, and I feel like I take new stuff out of it every time. But the idea that here you have this guy struggling, he has a line in there, he says, "Fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you." And I think that's what Meditations is, and that's what we're supposed to take from it, too. It's like, we know what we're capable of being. We know this higher self, and then it's really on us. No one's gonna make us do that. We have to do that work. I think that's one of the most beautiful ones. Here he has this famous passage, he opens Book Two. So, Book One is just a list of all of his debts and lessons, all the things he learned from people. It's very beautiful. And if that was the only thing that survived,

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  it would be an amazing thing. But he opens Book Two with this, like, list of how fucking annoying and obnoxious the people he's gonna meet today are. It's a very famous, sort of captures the cynicism of the Stoic. They're gonna be obnoxious and annoying and dishonest and stupid and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes, "But you can't let them get to you, and you can't let them make you like them." He's like, "You know better than them. You know you were meant to get work together, so, like, suck it up and figure it out." And I think that, it's like, people think Stoicism is the first part, and it's actually... The second part.

• 2:20:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  The first part's obvious. That's the cynic part. The second part is where Stoicism evolved to.

• 2:20:09Mark Manson?

  So don't just put up with them. Find a way to live with them and work with them.

• 2:20:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:20:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:18Mark Manson?

  So coming out of the ancient world, Stoicism persists throughout history. It's a philosophy and a school of thought that seems to sit with the elites throughout Western culture.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  It's like a secret weapon.

• 2:20:33Mark Manson?

  Yes. And it's, first of all, if you look at the Enlightenment philosophers, a few of them talk about it explicitly. I know Nietzsche wrote very fondly of the Stoics, but you actually find out if you read their biographies that they were very much into Stoicism. And it was very inspiring for them. And it's similar with a lot of world leaders, a lot of very famous figures throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. So like, talk to me just about the legacy and influence through Western culture. Like, why did this, of all the philosophies and all the schools of thought, like, why did Stoicism persist, especially among kind of the upper echelon of?

• 2:21:14Speaker 01

  I wonder if a lot of it is like exactly why Risticus gives it to Marcus Aurelius in his early twenties. It's like, if you have like a promising, talented person you're grooming for success, greatness, power,

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  you know they have a lot of the things they need, but they need this as like a governor. And so I wonder how much of it is like, it's like this kind of like open secret. Like, okay, but have you read this?

• 2:21:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  And that, like, the Stoics are not the thing that anyone is specializing in. It's not the sexy, or the exciting, or the groundbreaking field. And a lot of it is kind of intuitively obvious. But there's something inspiring and beautiful and like affirmative about it. And it's just always been there as this like person to person passing this along kind of a thing.

• 2:22:05Mark Manson?

  It's almost like history's self-help.

• 2:22:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 2:22:08Mark Manson?

  Like, it's the sort of thing, like, the same way people don't, or at least when we were growing up, right? Like, nobody broadcasts that they were reading Tony Robbins. But like, if you got one-on-one in a quiet room, they'd be like, hey, man, you gotta check out this Tony Robbins guy. Like, it was completely life-changing. It seems like Stoicism was that. You know, for centuries.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  And Seneca was more familiar than the other Stoics for a long time because his epigrams were often how you learned Latin. So you learn Cicero and Seneca as you were learning languages. And obviously, that sort of fell away. But you tend to see Stoicism resurgent in turbulent times. So Enlightenment thinkers, the, you know, the founding fathers, there's a segment of it in the American Civil War. You know, it's, it's, I think it says, it's fitting that it's popular now, too. It's like, when the world feels like it's out of control, people are like, oh, I gotta get better at controlling myself.

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Well, what's the smartest stuff ever written on that topic? It's from Greece and Rome.

• 2:23:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:21Speaker 02

  It also survived because it got co-opted into so many other philosophers, like Christianity being the prominent one. I was kind of teasing earlier when I brought up Epictetus and his kind of upending the moral order. Christianity did that in a big way.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:37Speaker 02

  And I didn't really realize the influence that Stoicism had on those, like Thomas Aquinas, for example. So how did it, I guess, those early Christian years where Christianity was starting to take off, the Roman Empire is falling.

• 2:23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:51Speaker 02

  What happens there?

• 2:23:52Speaker 01

  So Paul studies Stoicism in Tarsus, as Saul of Tarsus. And then famously, when he goes to Athens, he stops at the stoep of Hocile, meets with the philosophers there, and they walk him up through the agora to the hill next to the acropolis where he gives one of his most famous lectures. And so this was all kind of swirling about. I mean, Seneca's brother is in the Bible. He's a judge who lets Paul go. There's a series of fake letters between Seneca and St. Peter. So even in the early days, they were like engaging and interacting with each other, less contentiously than we might imagine. And then I think, obviously, a lot of the ideas from

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  The ancient world make their way through the Bible, then obviously we have the dark ages where we turn away from classical wisdom. But the Renaissance is kind of the rediscovery of these ideas. And I think with the printing press, suddenly you didn't, still elite-ish, but like, regular people are getting some of these books in their native languages for the first time. And that's also the reemergence of this idea.

• 2:25:01Speaker 02

  You see it all throughout, though. I mean, you've mentioned Shakespeare several times, or did you, in Hamlet?

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:07Speaker 02

  Right? The most famous line, "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it."

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  You've mentioned some of the founding fathers of the United States. The play Cato was played before Valley Forge.

• 2:25:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  Right? The Battle of Valley Forge. George Washington was a Stoic.

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. This play, Cato, is like, I've said this joke so many times, but I think it's true. It was the Hamilton of this day.

• 2:25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  It's like, it's the play that everyone knows, and it's like, in the way that a 15-year-old might not have actually paid attention in, you know, US history, but they got the gist of what happened in the revolution from the play. They might not have read the Stoics, but they knew Stoic wisdom from this play. The famous line in the play, Cato, says that "we have to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophy." And this is one of Washington's favorite lines that he says like, over and over again in letters.

• 2:26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the play was written in the 1700s, too. It wasn't like a throwback or anything like that.

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  No, no, it's new.

• 2:26:08Speaker 02

  During this Renaissance period, yeah, that it was brought on, yeah. But I mean, you go all the way through, like, I just found all these like little examples of where Stoicism just pops up, but it rarely gets acknowledged. And I don't know if it was like what you were talking about, people were just like, "Well, that's just what it was." It seems to just be like, just this foundation of Western thought.

• 2:26:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26:27Speaker 02

  That has persisted and just, it gets absorbed into everything, like Christianity, like a lot of, like the founding fathers, the Serenity Prayer. We get to that, that's very, very Stoic.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  What I love about this Serenity Prayer is like, if you just gave it to someone, you're like, "What year was this written?" You know, they'd be like, I don't know, the 1300s?

• 2:26:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:51Speaker 01

  Or like, is that, did Jesus say that? And you're like, no, no, no, some guy wrote it on a train in the 50s. But it's obviously the, the synthesis of the accumulation of all this wisdom distilled down into its, its Stoicism, Christianity and Buddhism, like all mixed into one.

• 2:27:11Speaker 02

  What was then the, you know, even go into the, that book by James Stockdale?

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:27:16Speaker 02

  The Vietnam?

• 2:27:18Speaker 01

  So Stockdale, he, the Navy sends him to Stanford to get a graduate degree.

• 2:27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  And he is introduced to Stoic philosophy. The professor gives him a copy of Epictetus. So he reads it and he kind of goes down this Stoic rabbit hole. And then he's shot down like, I don't know, two years later. But his copy of Epictetus is on, is like with his stuff. Like it gets mailed back to his family because it was on the aircraft carrier that he took off from. And supposedly as he's parachuting down into what he knows is going to be imprisonment, possibly death, you know, he says, I am, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. It's like, oh, these ideas that were theoretical, like now they're, it's about to get real. And you know, Epictetus is tortured by his slave, his master.

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  He's like, he breaks his leg and he never fully regains the use of it. The same thing happens to Stockdale in this prison. So it's, it's one of the, when we talk about like the resilience layer of Stoicism, that's Epictetus. And then it's Stockdale who was like, oh, no, no, this wasn't just true 2,000 years ago. It's now.

• 2:28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:28:29Speaker 02

  I mean, it even comes, you want to get into the psychology part of it too?

• 2:28:32Mark Manson?

  Sure. I mean, you really see it show up. You know, it was highly influential on Aaron Beck. It's interesting, like Epictetus has this, this three-part little framework. I believe it's a desire, action and ascent.

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47Mark Manson?

  And they all work in. Cohorts and it's you, you could almost copy and paste that in the CBT as the, you know, thoughts, behaviors and emotions and how each one is an entry point to the other two. So if you want to, you can't, you can't single out any single one and only master that. You have to continually adapt to all three and work with all three simultaneously. And so it's, there's also a lot of stuff. I mean, they used to call it narrative therapy, which you actually, I forget the name of the, the journaling process that they studied, but it's like you literally, I mean, it could have come straight out of Seneca. It's

• 2:29:28Mark Manson?

  basically you, you write down your worst thoughts and experiences and then you go back and reread it and do a reappraisal of the meaning of it. And it's like, there's all sorts of positive therapeutic outcomes that come from that. So it is, I mean, if, whether intentional or not, like whether the psychologist kind of came across the same truths independently, or if they were reading tons of Epictetus and Seneca in college. It's probably both. There's a, there's a shocking amount of overlap.

• 2:30:02Speaker 02

  They do credit them, like Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, who did REBT, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. They do credit the Stoics with a lot of that. It was kind of after the fact.

• 2:30:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Speaker 02

  One of the interesting things I, I think Beck and Ellis both came up with their frameworks, which are very similar around the same time, the 50s and 60s. And it was during, so you had behaviorism, which was, you know, proving to be a little bit difficult in a lot of areas, you know, that could everything just be boiled down to incentives. And then you had psychoanalysis, kind of the other side, everything's unconscious. What Beck and, and Ellis realized was that these people were not, it wasn't, they were psychoanalysis analysts, they were psychoanalysts. So the unconscious played a big role. What they realized was these people weren't unconscious of their motives and desires. They were very conscious of it. They just didn't know what to do with the interpretations that they were giving it to, which was very, very stoic, which is what they realized. So it was.

• 2:30:56Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know how much of it was after the fact. They, they write later about, yes, it was, this was very much, these aren't new ideas. They're very stoic. But it was just interesting how that kept popping back up again. When you had to have, when there was a kind of rubber hits the road moment. Like this shit has to work. And then the stoicism comes back in to save the day.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  I think there's something about psychology and therapy that's akin to the role that philosophy played in the ancient world.

• 2:31:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  Today, we think it's like, people go like, oh, I studied philosophy, or I was a philosophy major, as if it's this like one time thing. And then, then you just go about your normal life. You're like, good, you got it. In the same way that like, I learned my multiplication tables.

• 2:31:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  And, and that's not what it was supposed to be. And when you hear about like the Socratic circle, or these dinners that Cato would have, it was like, philosophy was this thing you were engaged in constantly. Like, people would go and see Socrates and talk to him about their problems and, you know, shoot, shoot things, shoot the shit and get ideas and whatever. Philosophy was this ongoing thing. In more similar to what a therapist's role is in someone's life.

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:32:03Speaker 01

  In that you're like, I call this person, or I go to this person's office once a week, or once every other week.

• 2:32:08Speaker 02

  Or a support group, right?

• 2:32:09Speaker 01

  Yes. I think 12-step groups are very similar to the Stoic process of like, hey, are you sure that that assumption is true? Because like, what about this, this, and this? And like, here's some aphorisms or ideas that you can maybe try to replace that thought pattern with. And then here's a network of like-minded people who are all engaged in the same, like, they're porch guys.

• 2:32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. And we're, and we're gonna meet twice a week.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:38Speaker 02

  To, to remind ourselves to do this stuff.

• 2:32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:32:45Speaker 02

  As I sit here thinking about it, I, I feel like you could probably, if you took the Stoics, Aristotle,

• 2:32:54Mark Manson?

  Say Buddhism. That probably covers eighty or ninety percent of psychology of like, of like shit that actually works.

• 2:33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. You even look at like a post-traumatic growth theory. It's very much, Tadashin and Calhoun, they very much credit the Stoics with it. But then nobody acknowledges it after that.

• 2:33:12Speaker 01

  The only thing that's missing is like the mental illness side of things.

• 2:33:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:16Speaker 01

  Like, it's hopeful but a bit naive in the Stoics of just like, you control your mind, get to rationality, but and it's like, okay, but what if you were horribly abused? Or, you know, like, how do you, what if you, you know, something happened? You got a head injury. But like, there's something missing there. Like, I think the part, the ten, the ten to fifteen percent you're missing is for like, the edge cases that are just like where, yeah, but it, it works up until a point.

• 2:33:45Mark Manson?

  I personally feel that Stoicism is best when it is kind of, in psychology, it's called cognitive reappraisal, where it's basically like, you take the narratives and the shit that your brain, your mind is saying to you, and then you like take a step back and you reevaluate it. You say like, what if that wasn't true? What if it was this way? What if we invert that? What if we pretend I'm the other person? I feel like Stoicism is, is like the GOAT at that.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:34:13Mark Manson?

  Where I, where I feel, where I feel it lacking at times is on the, more of the emotional side. It's, I, I don't, I don't subscribe to the common criticism that it's, you know, Stoicism is just telling you to be feelingless, emotionless, robotic. And to be fair, I don't think anything in the ancient world really addresses this super well. When you are consumed frequently by anger, or when you are so sad you can't get out of bed, like, how do you work with that? Right? Like, how do you, what is the process or procedure? And I really don't think we, we got anything like consistently replicable that could like address that probably until modern times.

• 2:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would also say there.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  If, if your primary concern is like not being exiled, not being murdered, how do you deal with your, you know, infant mortality is 30%?

• 2:35:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:11Speaker 01

  You know, uh.

• 2:35:13Mark Manson?

  There's a war every other year.

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you're, you're primarily going to be thinking about like freeing yourself from anxiety and worry and anger and dread and what, you're not like, okay, well, where do I find meaning? Where do I find purpose? Where do I find happiness? Um, and, and sure, I think they do, they, they do have a definition of happiness and it's not, you know, I make a lot of money and I'm, I look great or whatever, but, but like, that's why I think it's so striking. You read Marx's realist and you read Seneca and you're like, which one would you rather be?

• 2:35:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  You know, Marx's realist is more impressive as a figure, but it doesn't seem like he's having a great time.

• 2:35:53Mark Manson?

  No, he seems miserable. I mean, to be fair, Seneca.

• 2:35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:57Mark Manson?

  You know, it, it's not exactly a, a rosy picture either, but yeah, it's, it's.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  I think we've made, like, we've made a lot of advancements.

• 2:36:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:07Speaker 01

  In just our assumptions, like, uh, there's just different, I just think about like how interesting it is that's like not until Gandhi that we were like, oh, you don't have to like kill and murder someone that you disagree with. There's like other ways of producing political change. You know, like, like nonviolence is literally an, not passive, nonviolent resistance is an invention.

• 2:36:31Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:36:32Speaker 01

  That happens in the 19th century.

• 2:36:34Mark Manson?

  Well, to be fair, Jesus invented it, but we immediately killed him.

• 2:36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Mark Manson?

  And we had to relearn it.

• 2:36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:42Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 2:36:43Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 2:36:43Mark Manson?

  1900 years later.

• 2:36:45Speaker 01

  But, but it's also, Jesus isn't proposing it as a political strategy.

• 2:36:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:50Speaker 01

  He's proposing it as a, a mode of personal behavior.

• 2:36:53Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:36:53Speaker 01

  Right? And, and so it's just like the idea of what a good life is, was circumscribed. You know, like, like it never occurs to Marx to realize that he doesn't have to be the emperor.

• 2:37:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:06Speaker 01

  You know, like, like he hates it.

• 2:37:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:08Speaker 01

  And it's not conceivable to him that he would do anything other than this thing he was chosen for. Right? And like, I think we've made some developments as a society about like. What your obligations are.

• 2:37:20Mark Manson?

  To come back to the parallel between him and Washington.

• 2:37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:23Mark Manson?

  Washington fucking hated being president.

• 2:37:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:25Mark Manson?

  He was miserable. He spent the entire time wanting to go back to Mount Burton. And so, to his credit.

• 2:37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:31Mark Manson?

  He stepped down.

• 2:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:33Mark Manson?

  You know, and it's, it says something about his character.

• 2:37:36Speaker 01

  It's ironic that a philosophy that was popular with elites kind of becomes like to every man.

• 2:37:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:41Speaker 01

  For modern day elites to properly mythologize and institutionalize. So yeah, you have like these college kids reading Plato, when really they should be reading Marcus Aurelius. And then the grad students should be reading Plato, you know, like.

• 2:37:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:58Speaker 01

  Like, which one is actually going to help you in your life? Like, I think, I think it's so interesting, like, to go back to the founders. We spend a lot of time thinking about, like, who inspired them from, like, a legal basis.

• 2:38:09Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:38:10Speaker 01

  Which is like, interesting, but again, if you're 17, what do you do with this information? There's much more of these classical ideas and these myths and these, like, I didn't know who Cincinnatus was until I was probably in my mid twenties. I mean, I'd obviously heard of Cincinnati.

• 2:38:26Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:38:27Speaker 01

  But I never heard, like, but that's a story that for hundreds of years, thousands of years, everyone heard when they were growing up. Like, here's this guy, he's named dictator, and then he defeats Rome's enemies, and then he retires to his farm. That's such a beautiful, inspiring story, and it's what, it's foundational to America, but like, we don't learn about that. And, and maybe you learn about Washington resigning his commission. You do learn about resigning after two terms. You don't learn the classical basis for it. So, we've just been skipping that this was kind of the, it's like the Stoics, you know, that expression, like, your favorite rapper's favorite rapper?

• 2:39:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:03Speaker 01

  The Stoics were your favorite person's favorite philosophy.

• 2:39:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  But like, you kind of don't get back that far. And so, people have been missing that this is the piece. And like, I think that's, if there's any reason my works and my writing has succeeded, I think it's because it kind of broke the floodgates of that a little bit.

• 2:39:20Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  And it kind of took this thing that people of all different types have already known about or been using, and then they're like, oh yeah, this is, this is the, an entry point into this thing. It's actually, because it is hard, you go, well, what is the best entry point into the Stoics? Is it Marcus Aurelius? Is it Epictetus? Is it Seneca? The answer is like, kind of all the above.

• 2:39:42Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:39:42Speaker 01

  Much credit to my book agent who suggested an idea of The Daily Stoic. He was like, you know, there's not actually like one book that is the greatest hits of the Stoics.

• 2:39:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  And I was like, is that true? And he's like, yeah, it's true. And so that's where The Daily Stoic came from.

• 2:39:56Speaker 02

  I was just saying, could it be all of that and?

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  That the Stoics uncovered something so fundamental to human nature that we kind of ended up taking it for granted and just kept rediscovering it?

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:09Speaker 02

  Like, you take, for example, REBT with Albert Ellis, and he's got this ABC model. You have this, the A is sometimes called adversity. It's an action event, then the behavior, then the consequence. And he says, you know, like, the, the human free will exists between the action and the behavior, right? Very Stoic idea.

• 2:40:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:40:26Speaker 02

  Also incredibly obvious when you think about it, right?

• 2:40:28Speaker 01

  There, there's something about it that's like, oh, yeah, I think my grandma told me that.

• 2:40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:31Speaker 01

  Right? And, and so what I like about it is you're like, no, no, no, no. This actually isn't some cliche that you saw written on the wall of a gym. Like, this, somebody made this up for the first time, and we know who it was. Like, I, I was giving a talk to the Pittsburgh Pirates at spring training a couple of years ago, and they had on the wall, it's not events that upset us, it's our opinion about events. And I'm like, you don't even realize that, like, that's from the Stoics. Like, you think I'm here to talk about Stoicism, but you already know it.

• 2:41:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:02Speaker 01

  You know, and that, that's like, that's Stoicism all day.

• 2:41:08Mark Manson?

  So let's, let's back up. Let's talk about, earlier in your career, you used to write about marketing.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Mark Manson?

  And, and at the time, it's one of these funny things that you look back on. At the time, you decided to take a huge risk, exhibit some courage.

• 2:41:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:41:22Mark Manson?

  Uh, and write about this, I guess what you thought at the time was an obscure philosophy, by writing Obstacles the Way in 2013. And then it, it did kind of blow up. So I'm, I'm curious, why do you think it's taken off the way it has in, in the social media age? Like, what is it about this era that suddenly has everybody?

• 2:41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:42Mark Manson?

  Calling themselves a Stoic, following Stoics, reading about Stoics?

• 2:41:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, it probably says something about how dysfunctional and weird things are. I think it says something about the tools that allow, you know, the repopularization of something in a way that can appeal to, like...

• 2:42:00Speaker 01

  Like, my books have sold really well, but I've reached many, many, many millions more people on social media and the email and the podcasts and whatever, right? Because way more people consume those things than books. So, yeah, I think it did allow this idea to break outside of just sort of people who read books about philosophy, right? Or even just people who read self-help books. So that was a big part of it. But I think, you know, I was mentored and taught by Robert Greene. And what Robert Greene is so great at is taking ancient ideas and then illustrating them with sometimes ancient stories, sometimes modern stories, sometimes literature, sometimes words.

• 2:42:42Speaker 01

  But he's like, let me, instead of let me just tell you this idea, let me show you this idea, what it looks like. It may be a story that you are familiar with, or a person you're familiar with, but you didn't actually fully understand what this would look like. And I think what I have been able to do is take the ideas from the Stoics and illustrate them in a way that people go, oh, I get it now. And then I can give this to my 16-year-old son, or I can give this to this person who's struggling at work, or a person who just found out they have cancer, like. And then I think also, what I've tried to do is I'm not writing about Stoicism generally. I'm always writing about a very specific thing that Stoicism can help you with. The Obstacle is the Way is about dealing with problems.

• 2:43:27Speaker 01

  Ego is the Enemy is about, like, you know, obviously dealing with ego. And then Stillness is like, how do you find peace in a noisy world? I'm not, I'm taking all the things the Stoics said, plus a lot of other people, and aiming it at a thing that there is a latent and perennial interest in getting better at.

• 2:43:47Mark Manson?

  And how do you feel, it's been interesting...

• 2:43:53Mark Manson?

  Watching this philosophy blow up over the last 10 years and I feel like we're now in an age where it's become so popularized and there's so many, there's now, we were talking over lunch, there's so many social media accounts now that are these faceless channels that are knockoffs and in many cases like posting absolutely terrible advice and calling it stoic advice. It's funny, there's like almost, there's a term I've seen thrown around a little bit of broics.

• 2:44:23Speaker 01

  Broicism?

• 2:44:24Mark Manson?

  Broicism, like it's stoicism, it's almost been co-opted by some internet sub-communities that are...

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  It's been co-opted and that's a problem. I mean, look, I also get it. Like, why at 19, reading Meditations? What lit me up? Was it the fact that he talks about doing good for the common good like 80 times, you know? Was it like his meditations on mortality and wrestling with our fear of death? Like, no, that's not like, I'm like, wake up early, work harder, push yourself, don't be a bitch, you know, like, you know, like, so, like, I understand that that's the, that's if you're a young dude, or if you're any person in a sort of competitive environment of any kind, there's a lot of, that the Stoics teach

• 2:45:15Speaker 01

  you. And I'm like, if that's what brings you in the door, welcome. You know, I don't, I think there's also been kind of an elitism backlash to it that I don't like either. Like, I'd rather you be in the ballpark of Stoicism than go in the opposite direction. At the same time, I think if your interpretation of Stoicism is that it'll help you be a better sociopath, you're getting it totally wrong. You know, it's, that's, that's certainly not what the Four Virtues are about. And that's certainly not what virtue is about. So, you know, you take the good with the bad. In the early days of something, you're just desperate for anyone to hear about it and take it seriously. And then you're fortunate

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  enough to get in a position where it's like bigger than you thought, or there's a backlash to what you... I said this at this conference about Stoicism like almost 10 years ago now and people still like throw it in my face, but I think it's more or less correct. Like... If you took every person in the world who knew about Stoicism, and then you stacked them against the people that are familiar with the ideas in Buddhism, or even just, let's just say, Eastern thought generally, you're talking about meditation and such, it's like, not even close. Like, Stoicism is a fraction of how big it could be. And I don't mean that from like, a business standpoint. I just mean that like, it can be really easy to be like, everyone's talking about this, it's popular.

• 2:46:41Speaker 01

  And it's like, the vast majority of people think the word stoic means has no emotions, and be a robot, and they'll, they've taken it no further than that. And they, if they know the name Marcus Aurelius, it is from the movie Gladiator and nothing else. You know, and, and so I'm, I'm much more of the minds of like, we should bring as many people in as possible. Cause even if you get only a few of the teachings, that's better than nothing.

• 2:47:10Mark Manson?

  And even if there's a temporary backlash, or some bad actors or whatever, like, this stuff is clearly timeless.

• 2:47:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:47:17Mark Manson?

  It's been around for over 2,000 years. It will likely outlast all of us.

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, the Stoics were arguing about what Stoicism was.

• 2:47:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:26Speaker 01

  Right? Uh, like, you had Seneca and Thrasia, and there are different definitions of it. So I think that's fine, too. But yeah, like, if you ask AI what Stoicism is, it's like this shredded Greek statue, you know, like, decapitating his enemy with a sword or something.

• 2:47:42Mark Manson?

  And feeling nothing about it.

• 2:47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I, I just, that's, that's to me, what I, what I think about being that person who is attracted to this sort of muscular, masculine, uh, productivity Stoicism at 19. And then because I stayed with it, it, it works on you as you're working with it. And I think it's, it's, it's hard to actually read the Stoics at any length and not be like, these were thoughtful, fundamentally decent people. And it's not about whatever these other people are saying about. You know, it's the opposite of Andrew Tate, or whatever.

• 2:48:23Speaker 02

  How would you update anything in Stoicism for, for today's?

• 2:48:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I would love to hear them talk. First off, I would love to know what they would have said about the breakthroughs that we've had medically.

• 2:48:39Speaker 02

  Neuroscience too.

• 2:48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, what would they say about this? And I, it's only a dead philosophy because they're dead. You know, like, it's not like it's this and nothing else. It's not the word of God. You can add to it. And, you know, Seneca quotes a lot from Epicurus because he read widely. So I don't think it's a problem to update it. I would love to know, yeah, this line between acceptance and agency. And where is it? Because like, it's true, there's some things that are up to us and some things that are not. And then there's a lot in the middle.

• 2:49:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:09Speaker 01

  You know, like, you know, this as a writer, like, you put out, like, obviously, you control the book, and you don't control whether people like it or not. But you kind of control the marketing.

• 2:49:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  You know, like, like, so there's a lot of gray area between. And like, I think most people need the black and white thing first. Then, once you've grasped the black and white thing, like, what do you do in the middle?

• 2:49:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. Which Stoic philosopher would have the most Instagram followers?

• 2:49:38Speaker 01

  Ooh, well, you know,

• 2:49:39Mark Manson?

  Let's get, let's get into the hard hitting questions.

• 2:49:42Speaker 01

  Marcus Aurelius is, is the most famous and powerful. So, you know, maybe he's, he's got the official Roman Empire account.

• 2:49:49Mark Manson?

  I wonder what,

• 2:49:50Speaker 02

  I bet he actually does.

• 2:49:52Mark Manson?

  I wonder, I wonder what color checkmark that would be.

• 2:49:56Speaker 01

  But Seneca's the better writer.

• 2:49:58Mark Manson?

  He is the better writer.

• 2:49:58Speaker 01

  Would, you know, have been very popular with his other works.

• 2:50:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:05Mark Manson?

  All right, I'm glad we got to the bottom of that.

• 2:50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:10Mark Manson?

  Any parting thoughts? For, for people listening who, this is, this podcast is their first exposure to Stoicism, what, what would you recommend?

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we usually do an 80/20. So maybe give us like the 80/20, if that's even a thing.

• 2:50:23Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah, we should do an 80/20 of Stoicism. Like, what, yeah, what's the 20% of Stoicism that, that will?

• 2:50:28Speaker 02

  You don't know to it. You don't control what happens. You control how you respond

• 2:50:32Speaker 01

  to what happens. So, right? So the Stoics believe that everything that happens, including obstacles, including adversity, is this opportunity. It's this opportunity for you to practice virtue. Right? There, there isn't a situation that you can think of that doesn't allow you to respond with courage. Self-command, justice, or wisdom. And in fact, it's like, the worse the situation, the more...

• 2:51:00Mark Manson?

  The more opportunity.

• 2:51:00Speaker 01

  The more opportunity, the virtue. So, like, when I wrote "The Obstacles Away," I think a lot of people... And I think I was... That's where I was when I was 24, 25. Is like, hey, how does this help you professionally? Right? Like, how... And it's true. There's a chance to do that, right? That's what great entrepreneurs and creatives do. But what they're really saying is that, like, this is a chance for you as a person to get better or worse. What is it going to be? Because it's unfair to be like, well, you know, Amor Fati, you have cancer. You know? That's not what... But they're saying, "It fucking sucks that you have cancer. It fucking sucks that someone just stole all your money. It fucking sucks that you lost an election." Whatever it is.

• 2:51:40Speaker 01

  And now, what are you going to make of this with whatever is feasible or possible next? Which could be 24 or more hours on this planet? Or it could be 50 years of exile? What are you gonna do with it? Uh, that's what Stoicism is. The more trying the situation, the more impressive the virtue can be.

• 2:52:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:03Speaker 01

  Um, but if you're asking me, like, where I would go next? I mean, I would pick up meditations. Like, I would pick up Seneca. Uh, I'd probably start with those two. I'd do Epictetus last. And I would make them your companions. Again, it's not a thing, "Oh, I flipped through it, I got it." It's like, no, no. It's a thing you come to. And you come back to. And my relationship with Stoicism has changed. The words are the same, but what I take out of it and who I am bringing to it, that's what's changing.

• 2:52:34Mark Manson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:52:35Speaker 01

  And that's, that's the... That's what great texts do, is they bring you something new every time.

• 2:52:42Mark Manson?

  Nice. Ryan Holiday. Thank you so much, dude.

• 2:52:45Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:52:46Mark Manson?

  Uh, we made it. We made it to the end.

• 2:52:48Speaker 01

  We did, yeah. This was awesome.

• 2:52:52Mark Manson?

  Cut.

• 2:52:52Speaker 01

  Cut!