The Perspective Shift I Had in Australia (A Stoic Lesson)

Why does everything feel so much worse when it’s happening close to you? In this episode, Ryan shares a simple shift he noticed while traveling in Australia that changed how he sees the news, stress, and everything happening around us. He also sits down with Brigid Delaney, author of Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times, to talk about what happens when you actually try to live like a Stoic in real life. Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🇺🇸 USA dates:Portland, Oregon - June 8 San Francisco, California - June 11Minneapolis, Minnesota - August 18 Chicago, Illinois - August 19 Detroit, Michigan - August 20 🇳🇿 NEW ZEALAND:Auckland, New Zealand - October 13 🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA dates:Sydney, Australia - October 16 Melbourne, Australia - October 18 Brisbane, Australia - October 20Perth, Australia - October 21 📚 Book Mentioned: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson🎥 VIDEO EPISODE| Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGij35sCHw✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Okay, so a funny thing happened. Some people from Australia came out to the bookstore over the weekend and they were shopping and then all of a sudden the people at the bookstore started to close up. They said, hey, we're going to close temporarily. And people said, no, no, no, sorry. We came all the way from, from thousands of miles away. Do we have to close? And they said, yes, sorry, there's, there's a protest down the street in Ryan speaking. We want to come watch him speak. My employees wanted to see me speak at No King's Day, but why don't you just come with us? You can actually see Ryan talk. And they were like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. So I got to meet these two guys who'd come all the way from Australia. They saw me talk. It's like a delightful little

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  small town thing, but the politics aside, it's like you're on a historic main street and then you walk over to the county courthouse and there's a, a political rally going on. I'm speaking under this gazebo that's been there for 100 plus years. It's like small town democracy, small D democracy at its best. And so anyways, I was talking to these guys and I said, hey, just so you know, I'm going to be in your neck of the woods in October. I'm doing Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Perth. So they were like, oh my gosh, we're totally going to go. From that encounter, I sort of thought I'd put down an Australia themed episode of the podcast. You can come see me. By the way, you just got to grab

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  tickets at dailystoiclive.com. But I was in Australia back in July of 2024 and I did their version of the Today Show. Here's what I said.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  We're very excited to have our next guest here with more than 3 million books sold worldwide. Ryan Holiday is a leader when it comes to teaching self-control.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Well, now he's here down under on a speaking tour and we are thrilled to say he joins us live in studio. Ryan, good morning.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Hey, Ryan.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Great to have you here. You've got a lot of Australian fans. A lot of your work, of course, focuses on Stoic philosophy. For the uninitiated, explain what that is and how you became so involved in it.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, when you start to talk about an ancient philosophy from Greece or Rome, people's eyes glaze over. I sort of say Stoicism is this idea, we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, which is what human beings have always struggled with in the ancient world and the modern world. And the Stoics have a lot to teach us about, you know, how to manage a frustrating, confusing, overwhelming world.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  So you've got a new book out as well, your third book, I believe, called There Is a Right Thing Right Now. Tell us about the virtues in this one and what the focus is.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the four virtues of Stoicism. The idea was that everything was an opportunity to practice courage, self-discipline, justice, or wisdom, or all of the above, right? That's what life presents us, always the opportunities to do that. And so I've been writing about, in this most recent one, the virtue of justice, which when people think justice, they think the legal system as opposed to like, what standards do I hold myself to? What's my sense of right and wrong? What am I obligated to do in each and every situation? Not what's legally allowed, but what am I okay with? What do I think the right thing to do is?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  I think Stoicism has had some misconceptions around it for a long time in terms of being detached from emotions, being strong and not vulnerable.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  How does emotion, how does vulnerability play into Stoicism?

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  We have to make a distinction between like lowercase Stoicism, right? The word Stoic in English, which means like has no emotions, invulnerable. And I think the philosophy that we're talking about, which is about courage and justice and discipline and wisdom, discipline is part of it, but just stuffing things down and pretending they don't exist, that's not dealing with them. They're going to come bubbling out at some point. So I think about Stoicism more as processing one's emotions, thinking about them. Figuring out what they mean, figuring out the response that's best in a situation, as opposed to just being ruled by them. So feeling angry is different than doing something while you are angry. And I think that, to me, that distinction is where the Stoicism comes in.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  All right, let's take this a little bit more wider here for people to understand at home. Because I think that sometimes we get bogged down in the guys and togas. But there was one thing that you talked about recently was about Stoicism. The Stoics knew about knowing when was enough for you in your life, not desiring other things. Tell us a little bit more about that, because I think those sort of things really resonate.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the Stoics say the greatest empire is command of oneself. So people always want more and more and more. And really, wealth, self-control is understanding like, what's enough for me? What am I good with? What do I actually need? And so it's so fascinating. On the one hand, you have a Stoic like Marcus Aurelius, who's the most powerful man in the world. Then you have this other Stoic named Epictetus, who Marcus Aurelius admires. Epictetus is a slave. And who is actually most in command of themselves? Who's in command of their desires, their emotions, their fears? So it doesn't matter how much you have or how little you have. Stoicism is this sense of, here's what I need, here's who I am, here's what's important to me.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I'm following the Joneses.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly. And a world of social media where you're constantly bombarded with what everyone else is doing, you lose track of what you're trying to do, what's important to you, what's possible for you.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Know your own needs.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  So you're taking this to the stage to your Aussie audiences. Tell us what everyone will take away from these nights.

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we tend to think of philosophy as this abstract, theoretical thing, as opposed to something that really helps us with our real-world, modern problems. What's so great about Stoicism is that it's timeless. That's why it's endured for all these centuries. So I want to help people see philosophy as something that can help them with their actual life, just as it helped the most powerful people in the world and some of the most powerless people in the world. Stoicism has always been this thing that's helped us not just survive the ups and downs in life, but thrive whatever circumstances we happen to find ourselves.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  I think what you're teaching is really useful, and I really appreciate you being here today.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things I found while we were in Australia, you know, this was a chaotic time. This is the run up to the 2024 election. I think Biden dropped out while we were there. Stuff was going crazy in America. But every morning we would get up and we'd go to this coffee shop. When we were staying in the Rocks in Sydney, we'd go to this one coffee shop. And then when we were in Bondi, we'd go to a different coffee shop. But we just had this morning routine. It was like we were living there. And I would see the news while I was there. And I'd sort of see America through the lens of Australia, but I'd also see Australian politics through the lens of the Australians. And it helped me not go crazy. And that actually inspired a little email I wrote for the Daily Stoic email from a book that I'd read on the plane. This is Bill Bryson's In Sunburned Country,

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  one of the great classic Australian travel logs. I wrote actually a couple of emails inspired, but this is the point that it inspired. This will help calm you down. If you read the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. Political incompetence, political corruption, rise in crime, depressing economic news. The future looks dark. People seem awful. And worse, it's happening near you. Are you in danger? Should you be scared? Is there really nothing you can do about it? In the hilarious book In a Sunburned Country, and you can grab a copy at The Painted Porch, it's wonderful. Bill Bryson speaks about the joy of reading the news in Australia, a country many thousands of miles from his own.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  "It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with the local paper," he writes. "I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee, than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith." What he was experiencing, of course, was the wonder of perspective. He was taking Plato's view, the 10,000-foot view, the one that Marcus Aurelius talks

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  about in Meditations. Two armies battling each other is horrible thing up close. From the top of a mountain, it looks like ants going after a piece of food. News near us is alarming, frustrating, disappointing. News from far away is funny, absurd, and riveting. The turmoil of ancient Rome provides us moral lessons. The turmoil of our own time simply makes us queasy. Bryson, who no doubt had problems with politicians at home, noted the hilarity of two feuding Australian ministers who were literally named Abbott and Costello. The point is, how we look at things matters. And sometimes by noticing how we might look at something while we're on vacation, or through

• 9:04Ryan Holiday?

  the lens of a foreign language or a culture, can give us a better insight into how we might better look at things at home. And so while we were in Australia, between those two shows, I only did two while I was there, we got to see huge chunks of Australia, went to the Blue Mountains, spent a couple weeks in Bondi. I got the whole Sydney experience. Now I'm excited to do other parts of Australia. I jetted down to Melbourne, but the family didn't come with me. But one of the things I was able to do while I was there was I interviewed Brigid Delaney, who wrote this wonderful book called Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times. She'd actually been super skeptical of Stoicism for a long time.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  She also has a great Netflix show that's sort of a spoof of the wellness industry. She's a great writer, and she decided she would let Marcus Aurelius guide her decisions for a year of her life, sort of a gonzo journalism take into Stoicism. And I thought that was great. So here's a chunk of she and I talking. So how did you come to the Stoics?

• 10:05Brigid Delaney?

  So I was a columnist at The Guardian, and I have a weekly column. One week I just listened to Joe Rogan nonstop, and I wrote about that. Another week I'd, you know, wake up at four AM and, you know, act like a CEO. So it was a lot of gonzo stuff and Stoic Week was happening in the UK. And a friend of mine who's an editor, sent me the press release and said, live like a Stoic for a week. And I was like, oh, I'm more an epicurean. And so I did it. I did Stoic Week. I was hungover. I was think, you know, I missed a few of the lessons. I didn't really like it. And I wrote essentially a piss take saying, oh, Stoics, you know, they're so po-faced and boring.

• 10:50Brigid Delaney?

  And, you know, this is, I was too hungover to take this seriously. And I got a lot of pushback from people within Stoic Week, but also Stoics who said, it's a real shame because it's a great philosophy and you, you could have actually got something out of it. And I took that on board and the following year I did Stoic Week privately. I did it with some friends. We formed a WhatsApp group. I didn't write about it. I just showed up, did it and really, really liked it. Like the second time round, I got it. And I was telling one friend in particular about Stoicism. It just chimed with him and we decided to sort of undertake a project where we would do some reading

• 11:33Brigid Delaney?

  and then meet and talk about Stoicism. And we did it each week. So we had a kind of, almost a dialogue, a Stoic dialogue. And I'd go and see him and say, I've had, I've had this terrible week. I got turned down for a pay rise. And I'd be really frustrated and he'd say, well, was that within your control too? Yeah. And so we started applying the Stoicism like it was the medicine to each other's lives. And we were out one night talking about it at the pub. And there was a publisher sitting, a publisher that I, I was acquainted with who was sitting behind us. And she said to me later on, you should do a book about this. Oh. I said, I can't, you know, I can't write about Stoicism.

• 12:15Brigid Delaney?

  I, I did one year of a philosophy degree at university and dropped out because it was all mathematics. And we dropped out also. Yeah. And didn't feel like I had the permission to enter the space. But my friend and I kept going with our stoic journey. And then the pandemic happened and I started writing. It just clicked in and it came out like Australia had some very severe lockdowns. And so people felt like they didn't have a lot of control.

• 12:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Brigid Delaney?

  And the book came out after all of that. But people were kind of in a space where they thought if this happens again, I need to have some sort of framework that's going to help me understand or help me accept a reality that I don't like very much. And so my book did really well in Australia. It's sold in like more than 20 different countries. So it's been, and now I'm doing another one, which is more of a fable. And it's a dialogue between a seeker and a sage. So, so that's really cool. And I found myself practicing it. So the books were a way, the books and the reading are a way of reinforcing stoicism in my own life.

• 13:26Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's really important, right? Like stoicism isn't this thing that you read one time. It's not a thing that you get a degree or a certification in.

• 13:33Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  It is a thing you are doing. It's a verb, right?

• 13:36Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 13:36Ryan Holiday?

  And, and the writing about the stoic, you can't write and talk and think and read about this stuff and not have it seep into you in some way. And that the longer you do that, the more you do that, the more able you are to draw on it in moments, big and small in your life. So if you see stoicism as this thing that you are studying, as opposed to a thing that you studied, you're a bit closer to what it's supposed to be. And by the way, that's what Marcus realist is doing. That's what Seneca is doing with his friend Lucilius. Is this kind of ongoing dialogue, practice, process.

• 14:15Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Ryan Holiday?

  That's helping them get a little bit better every day at the thing.

• 14:21Brigid Delaney?

  Absolutely. And you have to keep doing it.

• 14:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:23Brigid Delaney?

  Cause you, you drop it. It's like going to the gym. You, you stop going. My big thing that I'm struggling with at the moment is if people are rude to me or if someone's, if I'm having to deal with someone that's obnoxious, I get reactive back and I get shitty with them.

• 14:42Brigid Delaney?

  And I ruminate.

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Brigid Delaney?

  And Stoicism has been, you know, you go back to this, what does Stoicism say? Oh, you can't control them. Oh, of course, you know, I have to control my reactions. And it's never wrong. You know, I don't always like Stoicism. I don't necessarily like the fact that it's a bit unforgiving.

• 15:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Brigid Delaney?

  But it hits real, you know, and.

• 15:08Ryan Holiday?

  You know what's funny? It's very forgiving to other people. It's not forgiving to you. Right? Like.

• 15:12Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Ryan Holiday?

  The passage that I have helped popularize this one for Marcus Realist about how the obstacle is the way.

• 15:18Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  You know, what he's specifically talking about is difficult people. He's talking, he's saying that they are the opportunity for you to practice the Stoic ideas. You know, it's so, so you could be trying to have a wonderful, loving, friendly conversation with someone. And then they can make that impossible, but they can't take away from you the opportunity to practice some other kind of virtue patience, forgiveness, empathy. And, and I try to, I try to remind myself that that's when the Stoics say the obstacle is the way. They're not talking so much about pandemics or car crashes or injuries or bankruptcies.

• 15:59Ryan Holiday?

  They're mostly talking about day to day interactions with annoying, obnoxious, frustrating, evil, stupid people.

• 16:08Brigid Delaney?

  And Marcus actually put it very plainly in his book, you know, each day you will wake up and there'll be annoying people. It's like, oh, of course. And I love the quote by Seneca. We are bad men living amongst bad men and only one thing will calm us. And that is we must go easy on each other.

• 16:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:24Brigid Delaney?

  To me, that's, you know, that's the great calming quote because I think if I was to diagnose one of society's biggest problems right now, it's anger. Anger seems to me, you know, there's a huge sort of increase in reporting of domestic violence in Australia. I'm sure the statistics are.

• 16:43Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 16:43Brigid Delaney?

  Across, across the board. Road rage has gone up. Assaults. Also, every shop you go into, little signs saying, don't abuse the staff. It's insane. So it's like, okay, we have an anger problem. Stoicism is so explicit in deal in how you handle anger and how you, you know, stop yourself from becoming reactive. And I think if there's one thing I want the world to take from Stoicism at the moment, it's just dealing with anger.

• 17:11Ryan Holiday?

  There's a wonderful woman named Ashley who does the customer service for Daily Stoic.

• 17:15Brigid Delaney?

  All right.

• 17:15Ryan Holiday?

  And you should see some of the emails that she gets from people who ostensibly know and understand and follow Stoicism, people who just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we don't control the post office.

• 17:30Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Ryan Holiday?

  We're not the reason your package is delayed. That was the storm that you just experienced. That was the ocean that it had to cross. That was the person who stole it off your porch. It wasn't us. And yelling at this poor lady doesn't do, doesn't magically make it go away. And it's been illustrated for me because like, I get to the airport and then the people tell you that the, the plane is delayed and that, you know, like, I feel that. And I've certainly acted in ways in the past that I'm not proud of, but, but just this process of, yeah, hey, is this what in my control? Is this who I want to be? What is, what opportunity is this presenting me? I think that passage from Archriles that you mentioned, the famous one about how today

• 18:13Ryan Holiday?

  the people you will meet, and he lists all the shitty things that people are going to be and do. But I think it's so easy, we forget the second half of that, which is he goes, and why are they like this? You know, he says, because they don't know any better. And he says, he says, what they can't do is implicate you in their ugliness. Like you, that's the choice that you make, that part's on you. And he says, by the way, we're meant to work together. We're meant to be together.

• 18:38Brigid Delaney?

  We're two rows of teeth in the same mouth.

• 18:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's beautiful. I mean, it's great writing and such a profound insight that the quote can work on this superficial level to the, to the frustrated person who's just pissed off at humanity. And then also the second level, the wiser or philosophical level of like,

• 18:59Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, I've calmed down a little bit. Here's how I should think about this.

• 19:03Brigid Delaney?

  I think also just thinking about anger is that not being angry may not necessarily, you might not get on the plane earlier or whatever, but I think you're creating a situation where if you bring the temperature down in your own interactions, it does have a knock on effect. One of my, I had breakfast with a friend yesterday who works as a volunteer counselor for Lifeline, which is the

• 19:25Ryan Holiday?

  Suicide hotline.

• 19:26Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah, suicide hotline. And I always like asking him when I see him, what's the main kind of thing that people are calling up about at the moment? Like, what's the, what's the big issue? Previously, it's been addictions. During the pandemic, it was like drinking too much. And now he's saying he's seeing a big rise in loneliness.

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  Hmm.

• 19:49Brigid Delaney?

  And that people feel like they don't have anyone

• 19:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 19:53Brigid Delaney?

  close to them. And they also don't have any interactions necessarily that have got warmth in their minds. So I think part of being a stoic is not just to not be reactive, but also to be aware that if someone's angry at you or they're in a bad mood, what's behind that, you know?

• 20:14Ryan Holiday?

  I think about those videos, they're very popular in the US because we're awful to each other, but it's, you know, it's some lady or some man freaking out at someone at the store. They're basically screaming, berating.

• 20:25Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes they brandish a weapon, whatever. But when I would first see them, I would be like, fuck this person. And then I've gotten better at going, what is that person's life like?

• 20:34Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  Why are, why did they break?

• 20:37Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Ryan Holiday?

  In line at the supermarket? What happened? Why did somebody cutting them off in line? Why did this thing not being on sale? What is happening? Their life must be a pressure cooker of stress and dysfunction because this is not how they want to be acting.

• 20:54Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 20:55Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Ryan Holiday?

  This isn't normal.

• 20:57Brigid Delaney?

  I think underneath a lot of anger is a lot of suffering. So, you know, there's no compassion in stoicism. That's, you know, something that I grapple with, you know, it's not a stoic virtue.

• 21:08Ryan Holiday?

  You don't think it's in the virtue of justice?

• 21:10Brigid Delaney?

  So my read on compassion is that compassion is wanting something better for someone else, and that's outside your control. So if you are, if you have strong emotions of compassion. You are actually wishing for something that you can't change.

• 21:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. I don't know. The golden rule seems to me to be the definition of justice and is rooted in the sense that how do people deserve to be treated?

• 21:33Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Ryan Holiday?

  And there is a sense, to me, that seems rooted in compassion in some way.

• 21:37Brigid Delaney?

  Okay, well, maybe I can incorporate that into my interpretations. I think for me, the gold in Stoicism has not just been controlling my own sort of worst impulses, but it's being able to see the suffering in other people and try and show some sort of kindness to others. I think that's where Stoicism stops being this thing, which is, which people accuse it of, which is being just all about you and your responses and being actually, look, it's probably a bit more, almost more Christian than, you know, most interpretations of Stoicism is, but I think it does, and it should have that element.

• 22:17Ryan Holiday?

  Have you seen the circles of concern, the idea from Heracles?

• 22:21Brigid Delaney?

  Yes.

• 22:22Ryan Holiday?

  I think to me, that's about compassion. Why, why would you be expanding the circle? If you didn't care?

• 22:27Brigid Delaney?

  Yes.

• 22:27Ryan Holiday?

  So for people who don't know, that basically the Stoics say like, look, we're born selfish. We have self-interest, but we start to care about the people who raised us, the people we're related to, the people who live near us. And then they say, you could imagine the world being this series of concentric circles. And he says that the purpose of philosophy, but I think namely the virtue of justice is about pulling those outer circles inwards. And he said, this is a beautiful madness to care about someone that you've never met. It's not like you, that you're not related to. To me, that's rooted in compassion. So I think it's there. It's just not, it's not what attracts us to Stoicism. It's not, it's, it's not its most salient feature, but I think it's, it's there. Marcus Aurelius could

• 23:11Ryan Holiday?

  have been so much worse.

• 23:13Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Ryan Holiday?

  You know, what, what's, what's the governor on that? It certainly wasn't the guardrails of the Roman system. It was some sense to him of other people's inherent value and worth.

• 23:23Brigid Delaney?

  And also our own nature. I think it feels good to do good.

• 23:27Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 23:27Brigid Delaney?

  And it feels bad to do bad. And that's the That's the kind of interesting thing about how we are in the world.

• 23:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Brigid Delaney?

  You know, we have these. I did a chapter in the book on, on how to be good. What does it mean to be good? The writing in it was quite, you know, wasn't fantastic because the only thing I could come up with was we want to be good because it feels good. You know, it's a, yes, it's a duty, but also, you know, I get a bit of a buzz when I've done something for someone else, you know, it's nature. It's something working within us that it doesn't really have a lot of language around it.

• 24:01Ryan Holiday?

  I definitely get the sense that Seneca saw really shitty people up close. Epictetus saw awful people up close. Marx really saw awful people do awful things. And I think they get the sense, and I'm sure you've met people like this, where you go, oh, wait, they're not getting away with anything. It's awful to be them also.

• 24:20Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like that it's not just that being good feels good, but that being a selfish, merciless, you know, evil, vindictive, angry, you know, insert your adjectives there person is a real hellish way to live.

• 24:36Brigid Delaney?

  I agree with you, but I also think a lot of people would see that in this world, in, in current times, you're not necessarily punished for being bad and you're not necessarily rewarded for being good. And.

• 24:50Ryan Holiday?

  But I think they're saying when you're at home with yourself at night. That's the, that, they're not saying society, karma exists and that society rewards good people and punishes bad people. I mean, there's a great line in meditation, the Marx really says, to be a good king is to earn a bad reputation by good deeds.

• 25:08Brigid Delaney?

  Yes.

• 25:08Ryan Holiday?

  So he saw like, hey, I could be, I'm doing my best here and I'm taking all this heat for it. I don't think they meant it in that sense. I, I think there's this famous passage, one of the middle Stoics, he's, he's at the deathbed of this Roman general named Marius. And that's the one that Seneca says, Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius.

• 25:29Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Ryan Holiday?

  And, and the Stoic basically sees the most powerful man in Rome in his last moments. And he realizes he's sort of in and out of it and he's kind of commanding these troops that no longer exist. He, he just goes, oh, all of it was hollow and empty and you're a sad, dying, vulnerable man.

• 25:49Brigid Delaney?

  Do you think everyone has that on their deathbed? Like, do you think there is a, a moment where people are conscious of? Of their actions throughout life? Or do you think some people never have that reckoning?

• 26:00Ryan Holiday?

  I definitely, I don't, I don't think, you know, you eventually get what's coming to you.

• 26:07Ryan Holiday?

  Let's go back to anger for a second because my wife sent me this tweet the other day that I thought I'd get your opinion on because I think I've been struggling with it. She says, it's from this guy, Tim Greer Son, he said, being angry all the time is exhausting and corrosive. Not being angry feels morally irresponsible.

• 26:24Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 26:25Ryan Holiday?

  How do you balance that?

• 26:27Brigid Delaney?

  So that's a tough one. One of the things I struggled with most with Stoicism was the approach to social justice.

• 26:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:34Brigid Delaney?

  And my friend and I, when we were having our Stoic sessions, you know, we'd always come back to this, particularly the climate. And we'd be, we'd wrestle with it, you know, like really wrestle. My thinking still hasn't, I still grapple with it.

• 26:49Ryan Holiday?

  Me too.

• 26:50Brigid Delaney?

  There's tension in Stoicism, you know, there is tension throughout the whole philosophy. And I think this is one of the main areas of tension. And also I would put desire in this camp as well, you know, where it's, there's Stoic teachings and okay, it, it makes sense, but it also isn't necessarily human nature.

• 27:09Brigid Delaney?

  But let's just stick with anger for the moment. The tension is that Stoicism walks is that you can't control, like I can't control what happens in the Middle East.

• 27:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Brigid Delaney?

  So therefore would me going on a protest or me doing some, some action or me getting angry, would that change anything? A, a pure Stoic would say, no.

• 27:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. But if everyone felt that way.

• 27:34Brigid Delaney?

  If everyone felt that way. So same with the climate crisis. One of the reasons I was attracted to work in politics is that you're actually working, you know, it is a system where things happen, you know, it's the government. So I think there's ways of directing your impulses to make change.

• 27:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Brigid Delaney?

  One of them is working within a system, but people who think the system's broken would say, no, get angry, stay outside the system. Anger can give you energy to.

• 28:05Brigid Delaney?

  Fight, but it can also burn you up and mean that you you're not effective as an activist.

• 28:12Ryan Holiday?

  I think about it in sports. It's like, what is the single best thing you can do to weaken your opponent? It's to make them angry. It's to get in their head.

• 28:21Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Ryan Holiday?

  And needle them and frustrate them and either make them give up or make them overreact or distract them. And so I it's like, I've come to think about it. It's like, okay, either the person that you're angry with, like your political opponent or whatever, is either a good person who is misinformed and thus redeemable and informable. And so anger is probably not going to help.

• 28:50Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Ryan Holiday?

  Or they are genuinely evil and awful, in which case you need all your wits about you to be able to beat them. And that and that anger, the Stoics would say is sort of the most irrational and the most that most difficult to contain of all the emotions. It's precisely what you don't need in either situation.

• 29:13Brigid Delaney?

  And I think it's William Irving that talked or Irvine that talked about fake anger, you know? So you use it when you're teaching, say, small children who might be, you know, mischievous. So you pretend to get angry. So you don't have, so you scare.

• 29:28Ryan Holiday?

  Do this in sports too. The coach gets upset to rally the players, but they're actually still in command of themselves.

• 29:34Brigid Delaney?

  They're acting. So the main thing's ataraxia, like how is your equilibrium? That's very important to me at this point in my life. I if I feel myself getting angry, I can actually feel the chemicals, you know, leaving my brain circulating around my blood. It's not good. It's very unhealthy. But the impulse of anger comes from a feeling of injustice.

• 29:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:57Brigid Delaney?

  So, you know, it's catching, it's getting that initial impulse, closing it down, which is what Chrysippus or I'm not sure how you pronounce him. You know, it's like before the the cart rolls down the. The hill with the dog attached to it, you know, you stop it before it

• 30:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Brigid Delaney?

  It takes off. So you recognize the impulse, you feel, oh, this is unjust. Stop before you blow up. And then you think, well, what's in my power?

• 30:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Brigid Delaney?

  But I am increasingly becoming more of a mainstream, like traditional Stoic with anger, which is there's no place.

• 30:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Brigid Delaney?

  You know, I recently read De Ira, the Seneca book. You know, he is so unequivocal about how bad anger is. And I tend to agree with him. And it's just working out that tension between justice and control, the control test, that I think every Stoic has to kind of deal with.

• 30:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, look, I mean, the almost to a person, the Stoics are involved in politics.

• 30:58Brigid Delaney?

  Absolutely.

• 30:58Ryan Holiday?

  So this idea that they didn't think things could change or were worth trying, or that there wasn't a responsibility or an obligation. Sometimes people get mad and do, so I'll talk about something that's happening politically. What would the Stoics think? And be like, they probably think I'm not talking about politics enough, quite frankly.

• 31:15Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:16Ryan Holiday?

  The idea that Stoicism is this self-improvement strategy divorced from the world that you live in is nonsense. It's a way to let yourself off the hook to not have to face these things that are happening around you in the world that you have some ability to affect. You know, yeah, you don't control what happens in the Middle East, but you control who you vote for. And most people don't even fucking do that.

• 31:40Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Ryan Holiday?

  You know, so you have, you have little ways to have influence. And then you have to content yourself with, have I at least done all that I can do?

• 31:51Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 31:52Ryan Holiday?

  And, and Marcus really says in meditations, he says, look, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. And, and that's the, most of us are guilty of those injustices of just, we could do more. We just make up excuses for not doing it.

• 32:07Brigid Delaney?

  It's definitely nowhere near nihilism as a philosophy. You don't know. Nihilism is all about, and I've had readers who've approached me after book events and said, You know, I like the sound of Stoicism, but it really, it's not what we need in this day and age because we, it's such an urgent time in history. And I said, well, when hasn't history been urgent? You know, all through the 20th century, look at how many people were killed.

• 32:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Brigid Delaney?

  History is one urgent moment after the next.

• 32:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Brigid Delaney?

  How do we respond to that moment? When that tweet says the only way to respond is with anger. It's like, well, what does that look like if everyone's angry?

• 32:41Ryan Holiday?

  Is it actually true that we need more angry people? That's not what I would diagnose as what's happening. I mean, I think there's things that people are not as engaged with as they should, but I'm not sure anger is the way through them.

• 32:54Brigid Delaney?

  One of the great things about Stoicism is that it wasn't defensive. You, you know, this Seneca said, this philosophy is open for people to change it depending on the new discoveries.

• 33:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 33:05Brigid Delaney?

  I don't know the exact quote, but I've read it in your books. And it's some, you know, if someone comes along and says Stoicism isn't working for these times for these reasons, I'll listen and, and really, you know, think about it.

• 33:18Ryan Holiday?

  There's some fundamental things that we don't control as human beings, right? We don't control other people. We don't control the weather. We don't control this or that and the other. But like, we thankfully live in a society of much more dynamism and agency than the one where Epictetus is a slave, right? Or where Marcus Aurelius is an emperor, right? So if you live in ancient Rome, you don't get to choose who the emperor is.

• 33:42Brigid Delaney?

  Hmm.

• 33:43Ryan Holiday?

  We live in a society where we get to elect our leaders, right? So, so I think it's important to, to think as society has evolved and invented things, we have more influence over things that 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were having to steel themselves.

• 34:00Brigid Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Ryan Holiday?

  To accept and be resigned to. And so, you know, slavery was a perpetual institution which no one could do anything about until one day, some people did something about it. And now it doesn't exist, at least at the same, in the same way, the same prevalence. And so, yeah, I think seeing Stoicism, Stoicism as a way of thinking about things, that there's some things that Are in our control and some things that are not in our control. That is timeless and always will be true. What was in our control and not in our control was different in Zeno's time than it was in Seneca's time than it was in Marcus Aurelius's time.

• 34:42Ryan Holiday?

  More like society empowered, things changed, things were invented, mechanisms were created, new breakthroughs happened. And so we should feel empowered to update and adjust Stoicism for a world where we have, thankfully, mechanisms to do things that were unthinkably out of everyone's control. Anyways, I can't wait to go back to Australia. I want to swim in the rock pools. I might try to drag my in-laws with us. The kids are very excited and I hope to see you while I'm there. You can grab tickets at Daily Stoic Live. As I said, it'll be Auckland on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th and Perth on the 21st.

• 35:26Ryan Holiday?

  I haven't been to Perth in, when did I go? 2013? Wow. So I haven't been in quite some time. So I'm very excited to go back to Perth as well. I hope to see you there. I might bring you some other chunks from the trip over the next couple of weeks. But anyways, hope to see you in Australia.