Ryan and Stephen Hanselman Talk About Their Newest Book, Lives of the Stoics

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks with co-author Stephen Hanselman about their latest book, Lives of the Stoics, and what their experience has been writing it for the past year. This is the first part of the interview that Ryan recorded as a bonus gift for pre-ordering Lives of the Stoics; to hear the rest, just visit DailyStoic.com/Lives. Stephen Hanselman is a longtime collaborator of Ryan’s, having worked with him on their previous books, The Daily Stoic and The Daily Stoic Journal. Stephen has worked in the publishing business in various roles for over three decades. He is also a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. Get Lives of the Stoics now: http://DailyStoic.com/lives***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Stephen Hanselman: Homepage: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveHanselmanInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevehanselman/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephenhanselmanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's crazy for me to wrap my head around the fact that four years ago exactly, we were just launching the Daily Stoic website and we were slipping The Daily Stoic, the book, out into the universe. I had just put out Ego is the Enemy in the Summer, and the book was sort of an experiment. We weren't sure how it was going to work, if people would like it. Stoicism as a trend was not nearly what it is now. And of course, we were just coming up on the election, and no one knew what was going to happen. My wife

• 1:07Ryan Holiday?

  was very, very pregnant. And so, of all the books I've put out, that one had the least fanfare. We just put it out into the world and wanted to see what happened. And it's been this incredible journey in the four years that have happened since I now have two kids. I've written other books. I've seen and experienced all sorts of things that, just as you have, four years seems like an eternity. And here we are in 2020, and by the time you are listening to this, although when I'm recording it, it's not yet happened, Lives of the Stoics will be out in the world, sort of a sequel to Daily

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  Stoic, but another collaboration with Steve Hanselman and myself. As we've talked about before, the premise of the book is, okay, The Daily Stoic is one thought from the Stoics every day. Well, let's actually look at who these people were. How did they live up to the philosophy? How did Stoicism actually help them day to day? And what can we learn from their lives? It's not just biography, but what can we learn from the moments, the critical moments of their lives where they made good decisions or bad decisions, whether they lived up to the philosophy or didn't live up to the philosophy? And how can that inspire and teach us?

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  But what I thought I'd kick around a little bit this morning is maybe document it because it's a weird moment. Like, you know, the book is done. There's nothing else I can do. And this is how all creative projects are. At a certain point, like, the ship has sailed. They've already been printed. They've gone out to stores. The marketing campaign is done. The release date is set. And then it's just sort of like out of your hands. And it's a really weird feeling. It's an exercise in that sort of powerlessness that the Stoics talk about, where you have to sort of let go and let God, as the expression goes. You realize you control the effort. I've controlled everything I've put in up to this point. Then whether people like it, whether it sells well, whether it gets the media attention,

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  you know, it's not up to you. And this is a really, this is a thing you have to remind yourself of constantly. If the fact that Daily Stoic came out and has sold, you know, a million plus copies, it's translated in all these languages, that we're having this conversation right now, the fact that that's happened doesn't change the part of that process that was really meaningful, which is the time that I spent at my desk on the page doing the work. So the Stoics try to practice what, that idea of indifference. Like, Marx really says, you know, you gain nothing by coming up and you lose nothing by coming down. It's who you are. It's what you've done that counts. The external rewards or the validation,

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  it has to be secondary. I'm not saying it doesn't mean anything, because it does mean something. And certainly, when you care about something as much as I care about this philosophy, you want it to reach people, but you have to detach a little bit from those results, or it'll just break your heart. I mean, two years ago or so, I put out Conspiracy, which is, you know, a book I'm proud of, one of the, as far as writing goes, probably the book I'm proudest of. It was the most interesting challenge. It was the most interesting story. It's just a different book. And it sold well, but not nearly on the scale of Daily Stoic, let's say, or The Obstacle is the Way. Does that mean that it was a failure? I don't think that it was. And I don't think you define, I don't think you can define yourself

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  as a success or a failure based on external results. I even talk about this in Ego is the Enemy, the idea of an internal scorecard. You want to judge your success based on what you did, what's firmly up to us, as Epictetus would say, and then you have to tune out the other things. Now, this is easy to say, of course, and then it's always hard to do. As I'm recording this, we're less than a week out from pub. And you know, there's news trickling in so far. The preorder numbers have been really great. Thank you to everyone who preordered. You know, maybe it's in bestseller territory, maybe it's not. A lot of the media has happened, but then also media that we hoped for or expected hasn't happened because, you know,

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  the election has just sort of consumed the world. And hey, there's a pandemic going on. And you can't, I think in earlier parts of my career, that would have been very nervous, would have been, have taken it very personally. I would have, you know, been desperate, trying to do anything, trying to salvage it. I think the more you do this, the more you do anything, whether it's, you know, play professional baseball, or put out books, or work in a store on Black Friday, you've seen it before. So you can get a little bit more zen about it. So I'd like to think I'm in a much more zen place about this book. I hope it does well. But, you know, my identity is not riding on it doing well. And I think if it does

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  do well, and right now, the numbers are looking like it will do quite well, like, you know, numbers that authors, myself included, would be, would kill to have had at earlier points in our career. That's not going to puff me up. It's not going to make me feel extra special just because I did do it. If it makes it on this bestseller list, or that bestseller list, if it wins some award, if it sells out the first printing, I'm already back to work on the next thing. I know the luck and the randomness that goes into it at this point. And I've also been flattered and slighted enough times that, you know, you toughen up to it. So that's just sort of the thought process that goes through my mind when I'm

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  putting out something. And I know Steve, my agent, Steve Hanselman, my agent and collaborator on this book as well, is on The Daily Stoic. He feels the same way. This is only the second book he's done as a writer, but You know, as a publisher and as a, as an editor and, and as an agent for many, many years, he's been through this cycle a lot, many, many times. So I think he's at this same zen place. And so for today's episode, I wanted to interview Steve, one of the smartest guys about Stoicism on the planet. It's very fortuitous that we happen to, I happen to find him as my agent. I can imagine having, you know, signed with someone different 10

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  or so years ago and, and we wouldn't be talking right now because maybe they would have nurtured a different side of my, my writing career, a different, you know, vein of my interests. But Steve and I have been longtime partners and collaborators. He was the genesis behind the idea for The Daily Stoic. And then for this book, he did the yeoman's work of, of the research and, and digging into these obscure, you know, some of the, the more obscure lives. And, and then also is, is the translator, because I don't speak Latin or Greek, and I can't read either, but Steve can. So Steve is someone who doesn't get enough credit around here. He's a great guy, one of my favorite people. And so we talked through

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism, we talked through the creation of Lives of the Stoics. But really, what we're, what we're digging in on is the, the central lesson of the book, which I don't think can be stressed enough, just how do you turn the words into works? How do you apply Stoicism to whatever it is that you're doing? And in my case today, as I'm talking to you, I'm trying to apply Stoicism to those nerves, to the uncertainty, to the stress of a launch. And I hope that some of the insights from today's episode can help you do the same thing to whatever you're going through. So please check out the book and enjoy this episode. Well, Steve, we, we did it. I, I just finished the audiobook. The book is done.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  And to the printers, we, we saw, we just saw the, the final, final, final pass of the audio file. It's crazy to think that when we started this book, I guess it was almost two years ago now. The idea that we would be finishing the book in a global pandemic, our publisher remote, you and I remote, I mean, there's just no way we could have predicted that this is where the world would be. And yet, it sort of strikes me as a kind of an oddly stoic turn of events.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's, um, the times we're living in have so many parallels to many of the moments we write about in the book. And of course, the last chapter on Marcus, and he was dealing with a pandemic for 15 of the 19 years of his reign.

• 9:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, a pandemic that originates in the East, that slowly spreads, it, nobody thinks it's going to be what it's going to be. It overwhelms the institutions, it creates a financial crisis, a leadership crisis. I mean, I guess that is kind of the stoic idea too, that, that history is like the same thing happening over and over and over again.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Marcus often reflected that way in his meditations. He would think back on the times of Trajan and Vespasian and how, you know, really, everything they dealt with, famines, wars, disease, was the same in his era and in every era.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and I think the other part of it too is like, you know, you think, hey, I'm going to do this thing. I'm important. I'm excited. Obviously, you know, like there's that Emerson quote, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door or something. You think like, because something's important to you, obviously, it's going to be clear sailing. And, you know, I think the other sort of stoic idea is like, hey, actually, Murphy's Law, the reality of the universe, the logos is in control, you know, just because you're working on something and you're planning on putting out a book, does not mean that the universe is going to cooperate. In fact, you have

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  to figure out how to cooperate and adapt and be flexible to whatever happens.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  It's very true. I think one of the things that I appreciated most about this book, you know, we've, I think the writing, as you said, has been going on for about 18 months. We sort of kicked it off formally about two years, but really it's about three and a half years of research and writing before that and just sort of being immersed that whole time, you know, and in this very moment now, when everything we planned and worked for for so long is on the line, I think it's less the pub window and the marketing plans and all the other things that, you know, are usually part of a launch. What really

• 11:59Speaker 01

  strikes me now is the benefit that's in what we've been able to pull together here for people, real help for people who struggled and suffered, just as we're struggling and suffering right now.

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's right. And, and you know, there's this quote from Marcus that I have been thinking a lot about lately. He says, and who knows, he might have, he almost certainly wrote this during the Antonine Plague, but he says, you know, no, it's, he says, it's unfortunate that this happened. And then he kind of corrects himself and he goes, no, it is fortunate that this happened. It's fortunate that it happened to me and that I've remained unharmed by it. And he says, you know, not everyone would be so lucky. And then I think it's the same quote, I might be mashing two together in my mind, but he says, you know, flexibility is being able to look at adversity or difficulty or, as you said, events being canceled, media being consumed with an election cycle with

• 12:59Ryan Holiday?

  a pandemic, whatever, and going, as Marcus said, this is just what I was looking for. To me, that sums up Stoicism completely. It's not, you know, people think it's this kind of resignation, like a, okay, whatever, you know, like Eeyore kind of a thing. It's, no, it's, it's actually this sort of optimism that can't be broken. It's like, all right, bring it on. Like, we're going to make the most of this.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I, you know, people think of the Stoics as, you know, trying to rid all emotion, to, you know, uproot it and to deny all emotion. But, you know, the Stoics held there were a number of good emotions that we actually ought to seek out and ought to cultivate. And sometimes people talk about Stoic joy, kara was their word for it. I mean, you cannot appreciate or understand Stoicism unless you realize that this is a bedrock of the philosophy. From the time of Cleanthes On, who was the second leader of the school, you know, he believed that we were all born with everything we needed

• 14:06Speaker 01

  to live a good life, to have happiness. And, you know, being a poet, the way he put it is, you know, we're in bad environments, there's a lot of bad things that happen. But if we focus on the work at hand, our lives are a poem that we can, we're born like half-formed verses. And if we work with the resources that we have, our lives can become a beautiful poem. And I think that, that sort of view of no matter the circumstances, there's a deeper work that we can be doing that can bring us joy. That's what Stoicism is about.

• 14:45Ryan Holiday?

  And was it Cleanthes? I know we talk about this in the book. Was it Cleanthes who was also talking about, might have been Chrysippus, but to further this, this poem metaphor, that also it's the constraints of the medium of poetry, you know, that it has to rhyme or, you know, or whatever, that that's what creates the beauty?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  That's Cleanthes all the way. And, you know, being a trumpet player, I love his metaphor, because he said the constraints of poetry are like a trumpet focusing the breath into a brilliant sound. And this idea of sort of working with whatever the constraints are, whether it's your language or, you know, your situation in lockdown, you can work with those constraints and produce a beautiful sound.

• 15:36Ryan Holiday?

  And, and look, I, I've actually found this, writing the Daily Stoic and now doing the daily email, like as a writer, you know, you're, you're used to having unlimited space. What was so tricky about the Daily Stoic, for instance, is that it's actually really hard to write a book of 366, 300-word meditations, because sometimes, writing in longer form is actually easier than writing in shorter form, because you don't have those constraints. But the constraints actually become something quite powerful, and it by, by being forced to follow these rules, it, it, it forces you to go to a place creatively that ordinarily, you just never would have gotten.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think, you know, this is, um, this is another facet of Stoicism, the view of the care of the self as a practice, as a spiritual formation, as this, you know, work that we're doing. And we all have limitations. We all have these resources. But the time that we put in, and the way that we use the circumstances to focus and redirect, that's where progress comes. You know, perfection, not something any of us are ever going to achieve. But progress, something we can every day in, in everything we do.

• 17:00Ryan Holiday?

  To, to go back to the Daily Stoic for a second, I, I thought, one of the things I, I wanted to do in this talk is I wanted to give some credit where credit is due. For people who don't know, Steve is also my literary agent. So all my other books, Steve has represented, and I, you've been a wonderful literary agent over the years. Not many writers write books with their literary agent. But I remember when you were the one who came up with the idea of doing the Daily Stoic. And I, you know, when you first said it to me, I wasn't like, oh, that's exactly what I want to do. That's where I thought my next book would be. And, and I remember you saying something, this wasn't the reason I did it. But when you said it, you, you said something like, this will be

• 17:45Ryan Holiday?

  your bestselling book. And I thought, that seems crazy. How could that possibly be? And it's not quite there, but it has sold extremely well. I mean, I, I was looking at the numbers, uh, the other day, where over a million copies, we're in 20 languages, you know. Weeks and weeks on the various bestseller lists in the four years that it's come out. Why did you think that the format would work? And talk to me a little bit about your background with that format? Because I think it'd be interesting for people.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I've spent most of my life in publishing and as a bookseller early on through college and graduate school. And then had a chain of bookstores and a direct mail catalog. And after that, I went to work for Harper Collins for 13 years. And, you know, over the course of that experience there, I actually witnessed one of the, you know, stoicism is one of these topics that sort of comes in waves. It never goes out of vogue, but within American culture, it definitely seems to have these waves. And of course, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, Stockdale was getting a lot of attention about the same time.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And we decided to publish at Harper San Francisco Sharon LaBelle's The Art of Living.

• 19:08Ryan Holiday?

  A great book.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, you know, basically her free form reinterpretation. Very sensitive and beautiful reading of Epictetus. And she, she did such a wonderful job with that book and it changed so many lives. I remember, you know, she always talks about the letters that she gets from people, just, you know, people who've been saved from suicide or, you know, who were able to turn their lives around and, you know, tattooed lines from her book, you know, on their body. You know, and the book sold, you know, it's been a while since I've been there, but I think, you know, hundreds of thousands of copies and, you know, Sharon's still quite active.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  So, you know, when I first met you, I think it was at a Tim Ferriss event in 2011. You know, the insight I had about you, especially after reading, Trust Me, I'm Lying. Was that you had this gift for understanding the usefulness, the practical application of philosophy. And I think when I took the book on, we, of course, were very enthusiastic about it. But I told you, I want to see you publishing popular philosophy, because I think that's your gift. And certainly, in both The Daily Stoic

• 20:30Speaker 01

  and now in this book, that insight has just proven to be very true. And I'm very humbled and have very much enjoyed working with you.

• 20:46Ryan Holiday?

  You've published another daily book, though, right? That would sort of inspired you a little bit?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the format issue in particular. We at Harper San Francisco, for years, we did a lot of books with Hazleton and the Recovery Movement. And they perfected that page a day format. And we did a number of books at Harper San Francisco that used it, many that sold tremendously well, like Anne Wilson Schaeff's Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, which was done in that format, sold millions and millions of copies, helped countless women turn their lives around. Very important book. And when I went on after Harper San Francisco to run Harper Business, I saw that Peter Drucker's

• 21:36Speaker 01

  writings really weren't reaching the audience that they should. And I thought, he is really deep philosophical wisdom for the business crowd. He should be put into this format. And so I commissioned The Daily Drucker, and we put that book out there. And it was a tremendous success and brought a whole new generation of Drucker fans into the readership. We republished all of his books following that. And there was an insight that the business community in particular... Was bereft of this kind of wisdom, this kind of anchoring ethical guidance.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  The last decades of business life in America has not been something to be proud of.

• 22:29Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think we're, you know, there are a lot of things going on in the culture right now, but I think people are waking up. They're waking up to the need for pursuing excellence, not in the profits and balance sheets sense alone, but in terms of the values and the ethics that we govern our lives by.

• 22:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, it's funny. I had bought that Daily Drucker book long before you and I had met for precisely, I think, the reason that the Daily Stoic worked, which is I'd heard things about Peter Drucker. And then it inevitably brings up this question of where do you start? And no, very rarely, unless someone is recommending an author to solve a specific problem, like if someone is like, oh, you're dealing with an obstacle and they recommend my book, The Obstacle is the Way, or if someone's dealing with, you know, a power dynamic at work and somebody says, you should read Robert Greene's The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, you know,

• 23:32Ryan Holiday?

  if you just hear, oh, someone is a fan of so and so, or, you know, someone's a fan of so and so, and you want to check that out, it's really hard to know where to start. And, and to me, that's always been the tricky part with Stoicism. Like, I feel, not only do I feel like it was fated that I bought the Daily Drucker, and that's why when you had the idea, it did resonate with me, but when I was introduced to Stoicism for the first time, as I, people listening might have heard, if they hadn't, I was at this conference when I was like 19 or 20 years old and, and Robert, sorry, I met Dr. Drew Pinsky, and I just asked him for a book recommendation. He actually recommended Epictetus to me, but I ended up buying, because I didn't see The Art of Living on Amazon, ended up buying work, because really I'd seen the movie Gladiator.

• 24:17Ryan Holiday?

  I lucked into the Gregory Hayes translation, which is such a beautiful lyrical translation of Marcus Aurelius. If I had gotten one of the free translations, or one of the antiquated translations, or even one of the newer ones that just wasn't meant for me, you know, my whole life might have turned out differently. And I think it's been really hard for people to find out where to start with the Stoics. And I think what we did well with the Daily Stoic, what I try to do even with the emails, is go, how could this serve as an entry point into philosophy for someone? Because I think that's the hardest thing. You know, if you started with, you know, one of Epictetus's, you know,

• 24:57Ryan Holiday?

  particularly challenging books, you know, in Coridion, I think you're not going to connect with it the way that if you start with Seneca's On the Shortness of Life, or something, right? I think, I think what we, what's the hardest thing to do about Stoicism and philosophy in general? Dip your toe in. And, and I think that's why the format works.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think the format, basically, you know, not only do we have, you know, some of the most pithy and powerful passages from all of, you know, Stoic literature, but, you know, what you've done to sort of unpack it and put it into a situation, or a context, or tell a story, or relate it to a historical figure. And this just brings it to life for people. And it's that whole sense of philosophy being about, you know, what you do, not what you think or believe.

• 25:55Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I want to talk about sort of this, that way of teaching philosophy in a second. But I think the other thing that, again, giving credit where credit is due, and I think an interesting part, you know, the idea, not many writers write books with their agents, unless the writer is dead and the, the agent is carrying on, as has happened a few times for some literary estates. I think this is most of Kafka's books, for instance. But the other sort of Stoic parallel that I, I look at fondly, and I hope people don't think this is an egotistical comparison, but like, I think the most remarkable action in Stoic philosophy is Marcus Aurelius

• 26:36Ryan Holiday?

  becomes king and the first thing he does with absolute power is share it. And to me, that's a, that's, that's a lesson about, you know, absolute power doesn't have to corrupt absolutely, but to me, it's also a statement about collaboration that like, hey, actually, the way to do this really hard thing is to share and that, you know, the sum is greater than its parts. Now, there was, I'm not comparing either one of us to Lucius Verus because he wasn't the greatest, but the, the, the point being, it wasn't easy to collaborate on the Daily Stoic, although that one was a little bit simpler because we could sort of so clearly delineate the roles. You did the translations, I wrote the sections, we chose the, the passages together.

• 27:18Ryan Holiday?

  This one was trickier because it's, it's a full book of prose, but I thought maybe we could kick around how we managed to collaborate and not kill each other.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, when you're covering 500 years of history, it's, um, it's no small task.

• 27:38Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  So, um, you know, just to, it's not just about, I mean, first we started with a list, right? I think, I think we had, what, 20 figures originally? And, you know, we're pretty sure they were the right ones, but, you know, then we started reading and working and we discovered, wow, a couple of these, you really, there's not much that can be known about them from the historical record. You really can't bring them to life in the flesh and blood and what they did and who they interact with and what happened. So you toss a few and then we gained a bunch more. We have 26 total in the book, but like, if you look at the index of the book, there are more than 50 Stoics that, you know, we treat in the book.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And obviously the book's not exhaustive because there are many, many more that we could have talked about, but didn't. So I think the first challenge for me in terms of the research was, you know, Do I understand the social, political climate that each of these figures were working in? What was going on? What were the politics? You know, what was the geopolitical situation? You know, if they were in a school, how much interaction were they have having, you know, outside the school? And just to get your arms around that, first thing I had to do was to kind of create a timeline, just so we could know where everything was gonna hang. And of course, that's become quite refined now by the end of the process

• 29:04Speaker 01

  and is a neat little addendum to the back of the book. You know, I think the main thing, Ryan, through the drafts that I produced was just to cover all the sources, if there was something that could be known, to make sure that we were reflecting it in the book and where it came from. And of course, that meant a lot of names and dates and, you know, a thicket of material. You know, on my own, that would not have been prose that more than a small handful of people would have read.

• 29:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, I think, I think, yeah, as a note, just for people on how this collaboration actually happened, it's basically Steve would would gather, reading dozens and dozens of books, would essentially present kind of a dossier on each one of the Stoics with like every mention that has ever happened, like every obscure ancient text, every conflict. And a lot of the times, the things even conflicted, it would be, you know, Diogenes Laertus said this, but Seneca said this, and then Cicero said this. And, and, and I think, I think you had to go so far off in the weeds, that I think if you then had to write the

• 30:18Ryan Holiday?

  book, it would have, it would have broken your heart to have to leave so much material on the cutting room floor. And on the other hand, if I had to go research that stuff, I never would have been able to have the forward momentum or the time, quite frankly, to write the book. So I feel like it wasn't as clean of a delineation as the lives or as Daily Stoic, because that was like much more formulaic. But, but in a weird, in a weird way, the, the splitting of the roles worked out quite nicely.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really, I really think so. And, you know, it's There were, there were a number of sort of insights and aha moments, you know, that we each had as we interacted with the material. But I think the main thing that you did is you just, you weeded out so much of the background. You took what was important about the context and the situation and you spotlighted it. But you really zeroed in on the characters and on the lives and on each characteristic, each kind of unique moral situation that the figures were in. And you really brought it to life.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And I must say, I know when you, when you said it to me, you were nervous, but when I read it, I was just delighted. And yeah, you know, ego aside, I did see enough of, you know, the things I had turned up in my aha moments to be happy about that, too.

• 31:53Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's, it's funny. I found this quote from Plutarch, I actually found it, I think, two weeks ago. So after the book was done, who knows? You may have presented it to me and it may have gotten caught. There was so much material. But I think this quote sort of captures what I was trying to do perfectly. And I think it captures the medium, which I think we should talk about a little bit, too. This is Plutarch, he writes, "For neither is it histories we are writing but lives, nor is there by any means display of merit or vice in the most outstanding actions, but often a trivial matter as well as a remark and some joke have offered a better illustration of character than clashes with countless casualties and the biggest battalions and sieges of cities."

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I love that. I love it. And you know, one of the other things that rejoined her to that is that, you know, the Stoics were the same way, you know, like Epictetus telling his stories, you know?

• 32:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  About other Stoics, like Agrippina, you know?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  And, you know, just seeing how they paid tribute to those little off-color stories and insights, you know, in their own writing and teaching, how they delighted in it, you know?

• 33:13Ryan Holiday?

  No, and to me, it's such a departure from the sort of modern sort of biographical impulse, which is to, like, for instance, I love Ron Chernow's biography of Grant. And I love it because of the little anecdotes in it. What I don't love is the sort of postmodern understanding of alcoholism projected backwards onto Grant. What I love, I love, why was Grant doing what he was doing? And what does it tell us about him as a human being? And how can we learn a moral lesson from that? And to me, that's the essence of what, what a biography is supposed to be.

• 33:55Ryan Holiday?

  And that, I think that's what Plutarch is saying, saying, it's not history, but lies. And, and it's, it's often in a joke or a quip. You know, it's like, what, what Seneca wrote in a highly polished letter is beautiful, but you have to be somewhat suspicious of it because there's obviously the intention of performing for the audience. To me, what's more powerful is what he said as Nero's goons were demanding his life. Or, or, you know, less powerful, more cautionary, what he did when tempted by Nero's millions, right? And so I think this idea that philosophy is not what someone says, it's what someone

• 34:38Ryan Holiday?

  does, to me, is the essence of what obviously Stoicism is about, but it's also what I think this book is about. And frankly, what kind of biography people should read. And that's why I think Plutarch is one of the greatest to ever do it. He's not trying to give you the facts and figures of Cato's life. He's trying to give you the essence of who Cato was as a totally unique, magnificent figure.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's very well put. And you know, Plutarch, of course, isn't just the model for the kind of chapters we've tried to put together here. But, you know, he was a, he was a critic and an admirer of the Stoics and, you know, chronicled quite a bit about them. So.

• 35:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and how nuts is it? And I didn't really, this didn't quite hit me till the end of the book, which is, is, I guess, a knock against me. But anyways, the idea that Plutarch's grandson or nephew, we're not sure, ends up being a philosopher that Marcus Aurelius calls out specifically as one of the guiding influences of his life in the opening of Meditations. It's like, it just blows your mind how small a world this was.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is. That's, it's, it's true.

• 35:59Ryan Holiday?

  And he tells a great story. I was, I was reading about it. I wrote a daily Stoic meditation about it, but it wasn't time for the book. But apparently, the story is Marcus had been gone from Rome for, for many years. He comes back, someone goes to his house and he finds Marcus leaving. And the guy says, where are you going? And, and Marcus says, I am going to visit Sextus's house to learn what I, I do not yet know. And he was saying that as an old man, as the most powerful man in the world, Marcus was going, was, he wasn't, I mean, rare enough that, that a powerful person would seek out the advice of an expert, you know, call them to the White House or, or call them to 10

• 36:41Ryan Holiday?

  Downing Street. No, Marcus was, was walking over to visit, to pay his respects to the philosopher and to learn what he does not yet know, to me is just incredible. And again, a great example of a philosopher in life. You know, Marcus could talk in meditations all he wanted about the importance of learning and, you know, not getting conceited and, you know, focusing on what you don't know, you know, or, or the example of Socrates. But what matters is what did he do? And there he was caught doing it. To me, that's the best.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, really amazing.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And you know, it was right about that time he was reestablishing the four chairs of philosophy in Athens. So not only ever the student, but also trying to make sure that the schools would endure.

• 37:33Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm curious too. So let's talk a little bit about the book. So, you know, we set out with about 20 names. We ended up, I think with about 26, although we mentioned some others here or there, as you said, as we did this, like, I think some of the ones I added, like I added Diotymus, and I wanted to do Rutilius Rufus. I was tending to focus more on the ones who were less influential in the thought of Stoicism, but happened to live through particularly controversial or illustrative moments in the history. Was there anyone that we didn't include that you wanted to include, or anyone you thought we were going to include and then didn't?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, there were a number that we could have included, like the original list had Archidemus and Hierocles. You know, Archidemus is quite fascinating because, you know, he, about the same time that you have Panatius running around with Scipio, he took off and founded a school with the Parthians out in Babylon. So it's like this interesting time when the Stoics had two ambassadors, one out, you know, gallivanting with the Romans, and one out with the Parthians. You know, they were

• 38:58Speaker 01

  hedging their bets on the future. So there were a lot of little interesting side bits like that that didn't make it in, just because, you know, other than some doctrinal stuff about Archidemus, what he taught, what he believed, we really don't know anything about him at all. In the case of Hierocles, he's a quite famous figure in Stoicism because of his circles. And to my mind, Hierocles' circles, he was writing about the time Marcus Aurelius was born, and his circles are his picture of what Stoic ethics look like. And it's a series

• 39:38Speaker 01

  of concentric circles. And in the beginning, the middle is you, the next circle out is your family, the next circle out your friends, the next circle out your community, et cetera. And his teaching was that every day, in everything we do, we should be trying to reach out further into these circles. Treat your family as you would treat yourself. Treat a friend as you would your family. Treat a neighbor as you would a friend, et cetera, all the way out to the edge of the circle where you're dealing with foreigners, people completely

• 40:17Speaker 01

  alien to you. And his view was that even those people, their concerns, their interests are no different than mine, and I should try to bring them closer to myself. He was really sort of teaching the golden rule, the Stoic golden rule.

• 40:38Ryan Holiday?

  Awesome. Well, we'll talk soon. And for people who are listening, if this is your first book, obviously, go check out The Daily Stoic, The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes, The Enemy is Stillness is the Key, The Daily Stoic Journal, those are the other Stoic books in the sort of the catalog. And then if you want to keep this journey going, obviously, we do a meditation for Daily Stoic every single day. You can sign up for that at dailystoic.com/email, or you can get the podcast version of it. If you like audio, anywhere you listen to podcasts, Daily Stoic Podcast. Thanks for listening. Thanks for checking out this book. Steve, we'll talk soon.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ryan.

• 41:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. I just wanted to say, Lies of the Stoics is now out. You can check it out. It's awesome to bring you this book. I'm so proud of it. It's 26 biographies of the most interesting, most intriguing, most inspirational of the Stoic figures from ancient history. It begins with Zeno, it ends with Marcus Aurelius, and it's a deep dive, not into what the philosophers said, although it's important, but what did they do? How did they live up to what they said? As Epictetus said, "We can't just talk about our philosophy, we have to embody it." And that's what this book is all about. Lies of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is available everywhere books are sold.