Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Live from the Birthplace of Stoicism (PT. 2) | Ryan Holiday and Donald Robertson (in Greece) About this episode In today’s Part 2 episode, Ryan visits the birthplace of Stoicism in Athens and sits down for lunch with writer and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist Donald Robertson. They explore the rich history of Stoicism in Greece, share their must-see ancient philosophy spots, and catch up on what they’ve been reading and writing. Donald is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy.📚 Grab copies of Donald’s books, How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World, Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor and How To Think Like A Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius from The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎥 Watch Donald Robertson’s episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axnl-E1zc5U&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tDSubstackX: @donjrobertsonIG: @donaldjrobertson📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,
0:46 Ryan Holiday? and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.
0:54 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am recording beneath the Acropolis. It is 10:30 PM. It is beautiful. I'm very lucky to be where I am. And I just left somewhere that's, I felt even luckier to be at. You might be able to hear it in the background, but I just took my family last minute. Didn't know it was going to be here. While we were here, walked by. That's why I like to go on long runs on vacation is that you spot things. You go, oh, that would be cool to do. So Michael Kiwanuka was performing at a theater under, at the foot of the Acropolis. If you know anything about Athens, you might be familiar with this theater
1:38 Ryan Holiday? or you might be familiar with its patron. Herodes of Atticus is Marcus Aurelius's rhetoric teacher. And in honor of his wife, who died under somewhat suspicious circumstances, he dedicates this theater to him. He pays to put up this music venue.
2:06 Ryan Holiday? Which still stands to this day. And I just watched a concert in it. Two thousand years this theater has been there and it's hosted some amazing bands from Melton John and Coldplay Theater. I think Antigone is playing tomorrow. We're not going to be here, so I can't see that. But I'm sitting there with my kids. It's nine o'clock. The sun has just set. And I go, boys, you know, Marcus Aurelius could have sat in those seats there at the bottom. Certainly, he wouldn't have known about this theater. And here we are, you know, how the centuries collapse, or you read Meditations and all these centuries and the distance collapses.
2:47 Ryan Holiday? Watching a rock concert in this venue, obviously, they weren't playing rock music there 20 odd centuries ago, but the way the audience was clapping, the way that the band was interacting with the audience, just the awe that everyone had for this surreal, almost holy place. That's very old. That's very timeless. And it's actually something I talked about in today's episode. I brought you the first half of this earlier in the week. I'm here in Athens, as I said, and that's how all this stuff is happening. And I had lunch with Donald Robertson. And he told me quite a bit about that theater. One of the things he points out, as we talk
3:29 Ryan Holiday? about in the episode, is the conspicuous absence of Atticus in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, right? At the beginning of Meditations, he thanks all of his teachers, or many of his teachers, but he doesn't thank this one. Is it because he's the kind of person who potentially is involved in his wife's death, tied to the Michael Kibunuka concert, right? If you don't know his music, you probably have heard it because it's the theme, the opening, the beautiful big sur sequence of Big Little Lies, which is all about murder and secrets and marital complications. I thought that was interesting. Anyways, it was a great lunch with Donald. As I said, I didn't bring my recording equipment with
4:13 Ryan Holiday? me. I'm recording this intro on the voice memo on my phone and I just, I put the phone on a glass on the table and recorded. So if you've ever wanted to know what having a meal with me is like. This is a glimpse. I had a Greek salad. I think you'll actually hear my order in part one, but I had a Greek salad, just to catch you up. I had a Greek salad and gyro. I didn't eat the pita, just nibbled on French fries a little bit. And by a little bit, I mean, I'm probably ate 80% of them. I drank quite a bit of sparkling water. It was nice. Actually, if you want to have a meal with me, we're doing a philosopher's dinner where we talk about philosophy for people who preorder Wisdom Takes Work. If you preorder a certain number of copies, you can get signed page from the manuscript. If you preorder
4:58 Ryan Holiday? a lot of copies, like you're going to give them away at your company or whatever, we'll have dinner together. We usually do it at Storehouse, which is a place across from my painted porch. Donald and I were eating across from the actual painted porch here in Athens, the painted porch, my bookstore in Bastrop, Texas, across from a lovely farm-to-table restaurant that I eat at many, many times a month called Storehouse. Sonia, the amazing chef there, always treats us quite well. We're going to do dinner there for a handful of the folks that do that. So if you want to have dinner with me, you can preorder Wisdom Takes Work, which comes out in the fall. We will run out of slots and signed manuscript pages, so you can grab all that at dailystoic.com/preorder. Of course, order Donald's books. His biography of Marcus Aurelius is incredible. It's got facts like we were just talking
5:42 Ryan Holiday? about. His book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, is largely about the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. Incredible. His book about Socrates, also great. How to Think Like Socrates. Just one of my favorite people. He's been on the podcast a bunch of times. I'll link to those other episodes. And then we will just get into it. He has been a great supporter of my work. I try to be a supporter of his work. I think it's important. I think it's great work. And I was excited to see him. And then I texted him this morning as I was walking down, well, running, starting my run, I saw a fox running up the path of the Acropolis. How cool is that? And he said he'd never seen one in all his time living here. So that was pretty cool. Anyways, let's get into the episode. Here's me and Donald
6:22 Ryan Holiday? Robertson talking. And goodbye, Athens. Thank you for indulging this somewhat untraditional episode of the podcast. And I'm going to enjoy this with you for a couple more minutes and then go put my kids to bed. Bye.
6:37 Speaker 01 I think the other interesting thing about Stoicism in terms of the kind of demographics and the reach is that a lot of the people I speak to, like Stoicism is their only exposure to CBT and therapy. Like, if you work in therapy, you kind of assume that everybody is a self-help junkie, because all your clients tend to be, right? And psychotherapists have to be reminded, and people that are in the self-help field usually have to be reminded, that there's like a large percentage of people, particularly quite a large percentage of men, that never read any self-help stuff. Like, you know, they're completely beyond the reach of self-help, they just aren't interested in it. But if they read books about Stoicism because they're into
7:18 Speaker 01 Roman history or whatever, they find out about CBT self-help stuff, and they often think it's really interesting. The only exposure they get to. So sometimes I think, well, these ideas are good. Some of these ideas are going to be familiar to people that have read other stuff.
7:32 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
7:32 Speaker 01 But a lot of the people that read books like that think the Roman Empire, oh, it's up here, but it's like, no, this is the only self-help stuff I've ever read.
7:38 Ryan Holiday? I think about that with the historical stories I tell. Everyone knows this story.
7:42 Speaker 01 Everyone knows this story.
7:43 Ryan Holiday? I mean, who's trying to tell the story? You know, just like also when you do academic stuff, you're like, everyone knows about this study. And then you realize, no, people are living their lives. They have no idea about this. And if they're hearing it for the first time, it's new. It's new to them. I wrote about Queen Elizabeth a lot in this point of destiny, and people, I had no idea. It's like, this is one of the most famous people in the world. You just realize, well, first up, you can always take something that people do know about and present it in a new way. And it's kind of new. But yeah, most people are busy and they don't know about it. It's funny, though. I think we're switching. So you're going to write more topic-based stuff.
8:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:21 Ryan Holiday? I'm doing a biography of Stockill.
8:24 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
8:24 Ryan Holiday? Uh huh.
8:25 Speaker 01 That'd be cool.
8:25 Ryan Holiday? It should be interesting.
8:26 Speaker 01 That's a great idea.
8:27 Ryan Holiday? I was just working on it in my, in our R B B. His grandmother, like, we think of him as this 20th and 21st century figure, this modern guy, right? Because he flies a fighter jet. Obviously, he runs for president. He dies in 2008.
8:43 Ryan Holiday? His grandmother Mabel goes as an eight-year-old.
8:46 Speaker 01 Right.
8:47 Ryan Holiday? To see Lincoln speak during the campaign. So you're like, oh, this is a, this is almost a 19th century picture. Right? Like, and so in that, in a way, he's closer to the sort of Victorian Stoics. Certainly, that's the tradition he's, he's raised in. But he's born in 1923. It's like, you think of the guys in Vietnam being young.
9:11 Speaker 01 Right.
9:11 Ryan Holiday? But he's almost 40 when he's shot down. He's a throwback figure. So anyways, I'm, I'm really interested in that. Well, that's what I'm doing.
9:18 Speaker 01 No, that's a really good idea.
9:20 Ryan Holiday? I got a picture from his sons of his copy of Epictetus that he's introduced to when he's at Stanford. He gets a copy of the Higginson translation. Higginson being a Civil War general. You know what I mean? He, he doesn't go to a bookstore and get like some new edition, right? It's a throwback era into the philosophy for him. And in a way, he's kind of part of that military Stoicism tradition.
9:42 Speaker 01 Right.
9:43 Ryan Holiday? Higgins and being, you know, the first leader of black troops in the revolution and the.
9:46 Speaker 01 That's definitely like a whole niche even today. But yeah, there's, there's a lot of these dudes in the military. It's a little bit disjointed though. I kind of always felt it would be good if somehow they kind of talk to each other. We had a military Stoicism virtual conference a few years back.
10:01 Ryan Holiday? I remember that.
10:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was kind of, I think it was kind of an attempt to just, just to know each other. It's like you guys, like I keep coming across you guys and keep reaching out to me, but none of them know each other.
10:11 Ryan Holiday? Right, right. I think it's because it's one of the last places where character development is part of the role of the institution.
10:18 Speaker 01 Right.
10:19 Ryan Holiday? Because basically universities and public schools, that's not part of it. Right? Or it is, but it's, it has to be so watered down because it can't be religious. It can't be judgmental. It can't be, so sort of like real values-based moral teachings. It's one of the last places that that's a part of it.
10:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's interesting, like in therapy, therapy's always, pretty much always been, at least as long as I can remember. The code of ethics at different organisations has always emphasised that you have to be value neutral. It's gotta be non-direct, value neutral and all that kind of stuff. And I always felt that was structurally impossible and the therapist's values invariably come through and shape what's going on indirectly. There's a famous study of Carl Rogers, and really it was one, the guy that pushed this idea, he invented counselling. So, in the heyday of psychoanalysis, when everybody was interpreting everything, Rogers kind of abandoned all of that.
11:19 Speaker 01 And said we should just paraphrase back what the client is saying and empathise with them and reflect their own words back. And not impose any interpretation at all. So he really laid on thick this idea of a kind of hands-off approach.
11:33 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
11:33 Speaker 01 Then some behavioural psychologists studied a load of videos of him working with clients. And they said, but clearly, when his clients mention sex, he frowns and leans back and looks disinterested. And then when they talk about self-actualisation, he always leans forward and kind of asks them to say more. Like, so he's implicitly shaping the course of the public. And they said, you can quantify this and prove, like, none of his clients ever talk about sex, because he always looks bored whenever they do it.
12:05 Ryan Holiday? Right.
12:05 Speaker 01 And even though he thinks I'm being totally non-direct, they're like, no, he's like profoundly shaping, like, the things that they're discussing in sessions. He just doesn't realise that he is.
12:14 Ryan Holiday? That's so interesting.
12:15 Speaker 01 He's in denial of the fact that he is.
12:17 Ryan Holiday? Oh, by the way, why are there tortoises up there?
12:20 Speaker 01 Well, like actual tortoises walking around.
12:22 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, you didn't know that? Along of that thing, there's a huge thing of like giant tortoises.
12:27 Speaker 01 Sometimes you see them and sometimes you don't. There's like always a few in there and then the karamikis, there's a bunch.
12:33 Ryan Holiday? I didn't know if they were somehow like deities or gods, it's just, they're just like a peacock walking around, is that what you, it's not like a, they're not like, they're as a...
12:42 Speaker 01 What do you mean statues or tortoises?
12:43 Ryan Holiday? They're the real tortoises.
12:45 Speaker 01 No, they all, they just live here. Like, they like, um, they run wild in Athens. Like, if you go to even the public parks and stuff, like in academia. I don't think there's any in academia, but there's actually been some of the other public parks. You'll, you'll just see them wandering around. Like, often they're kind of in the bushes and stuff, so you don't really see them. You have to be careful at night, like, because they hunt in packs.
13:06 Ryan Holiday? The tortoises, yeah.
13:07 Speaker 01 Like, they're faster than they look. Like.
13:09 Ryan Holiday? And you just, you can, you can trip over them?
13:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. But they, no, they, I saw one down here once, actually, it's kind of come onto the street, like it wandered out the agora.
13:19 Ryan Holiday? So it walked across the bridge? That's so amazing.
13:22 Speaker 01 Somewhere, somewhere around here, like, I mean, there's loads of feral cats around.
13:27 Ryan Holiday? My kids are obsessed. They're just, all they're doing is counting cats.
13:30 Speaker 01 Be careful about stroking them. Like, one of them scratched Casey really badly and there's blood all pouring down her arm. She tries pet it and it just went.
13:38 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, probably thought it was trying to get caught or something.
13:41 Speaker 01 The angriest they get is if you actually feed them, so you give them like a little bit of fish or something like that, they're always hanging around the restaurants. And then they literally will bite the hand that feeds them, right? Because then they get really angry because they want to get more and more from you. If you don't acknowledge them, then they generally leave you alone. But as soon as you start attracting them, they can get a lot of that gassing.
13:59 Ryan Holiday? We walked by our place the other day and there was a feral cat eating a bowl of spaghetti someone had put out. My kids just thought it was the funniest thing they have ever seen in their life.
14:09 Speaker 01 They'd reach by bags of cat food and just throw them on the sidewalk.
14:25 Ryan Holiday? So there, are there any other Stoic sites that you tell people about?
14:29 Speaker 01 Okay, so things that are relevant off the top of my head would be the Theatre of Dionysus on the side of the Acropolis.
14:37 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
14:38 Speaker 01 Where Aristotle's performed the Clouds.
14:40 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:41 Speaker 01 And there's a story that Socrates was sitting in the audience and it was kind of ridiculing him and he stood up and kind of acknowledged it was about him. Like he wasn't ashamed of it. And the agora, we believe that was probably where he was put on trial and imprisoned and executed.
14:56 Ryan Holiday? The Socrates' prison is not.
14:58 Speaker 01 Is non, yeah, I don't even know why they had that sign up. It's super confusing. Uh, there's the Stokylae, there's the Academy, there's the Lyceum, like Chrysakis lectured at the Lyceum.
15:08 Ryan Holiday? That's Aristotle's.
15:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:10 Ryan Holiday? I'm gonna try to run there tomorrow.
15:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's just a small, I mean, the actual archaeological site of the Lyceum is probably not much bigger than that.
15:18 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
15:19 Speaker 01 But it's like, it's a really, it's in a posh part. Relatively posh part of Athens, I'm calling Akki. It's like a really well-kept little garden, you have to buy a ticket to go in it. And it's right beside the Byzantine Christian Museum.
15:32 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
15:33 Speaker 01 Now, the actual Lyceum would have been like ten acres or something like that. So it actually would extend underneath where the Byzantine Museum is.
15:43 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
15:44 Speaker 01 They have this little bit marked in it that they call the Lyceum, which is one tiny little corner of it. But it's worth checking out, it's pretty, it's very pretty.
15:52 Ryan Holiday? So we're gonna go to Delphi?
15:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's amazing.
15:55 Ryan Holiday? I guess that's, that's where it all begins.
15:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it's just like a really stunning place and a really remarkable art. It's got a good museum there. The only thing is, it's like a two and a half hour drive or something.
16:07 Ryan Holiday? We're doing, so we're leaving on Friday, we're doing like a ten day road trip.
16:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:11 Ryan Holiday? My son wants to go to Ithaca, so we're gonna go to Ithaca. Now, at the end of the trip, I'm gonna do the run from Marathon back to Athens.
16:17 Speaker 01 If you had time, the only other place I'd say is like LFC now. But there's like so many, the thing about Greece and the reason why people all come here on holiday and retire and stuff. There are many places in the world, like Montreal maybe, like where you might go once. It's like, oh, this is really cool.
16:34 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
16:34 Speaker 01 And maybe you go twice, but then you think, okay, I've kind of like seen everything there, like.
16:38 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, yeah.
16:39 Speaker 01 With Greece, you come to Athens, you leave, you think, there's still like loads of things in Athens that I haven't seen. You come back to a few times and you think, maybe I'll go to one of the islands.
16:48 Ryan Holiday? Right.
16:48 Speaker 01 There's like two hundred islands, like, and they're all different.
16:51 Ryan Holiday? Right.
16:52 Speaker 01 And then there's loads of other things on the mainland. So you end up thinking, you could just like keep coming back to Greece, like every year and see different things.
16:59 Ryan Holiday? Right. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, because there's just so much, it's not one era of history, there's thousands of years of history. That is something I've been thinking about recently, which is like how old Stoicism would have been to the Stoics. Right, like, you think about how old the Stoic was by the time Marcus Aurelius comes here. Maybe it's ruins, maybe it's not.
17:22 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, Elephcina is kind of a bit relevant to Stoicism because there's a, there's actually a bust of Marcus Aurelius still there.
17:28 Ryan Holiday? Where?
17:29 Speaker 01 Ancient Eleusis.
17:29 Ryan Holiday? Oh.
17:30 Speaker 01 They call it Elephcina today. So I swear that the big, there's a big temple complex there, the Temple of Demeter.
17:36 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
17:37 Speaker 01 And it was raided by the Sarmatians during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and looted. And then when he comes to Athens, he goes there and has it rebuilt. And they build, rebuild the main gate, the proper layer to the temple. And it has a, it had a big bust of Marcus Aurelius over it. And that's still there.
17:54 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
17:54 Speaker 01 So it's one of the few places where there's a bust of Marcus Aurelius in the location where it was originally.
17:59 Ryan Holiday? Right, it's just finding it.
18:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:01 Ryan Holiday? Or even when Dorcas and Adrian and Antoninus, they come here, in some ways for the same reason that we're coming here.
18:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:09 Ryan Holiday? As this historical birthplace. And so just that for 2,000 years, that process has been ongoing. It's fascinating to me that, that the nostalgia is already there for centuries by the time he gets to it.
18:22 Speaker 01 No, there's like a whole thing about, like I always intrigued me, for example, that as far as we know, Seneca never went to Athens. But like, if you teach philosophy, it's kind of to some extent, I mean, you can kind of maybe get away by the Roman period. But generally speaking, it would look a bit lame.
18:39 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
18:39 Speaker 01 If you hadn't been to Athens and you were claiming to be a.
18:43 Ryan Holiday? Oh, that is interesting.
18:44 Speaker 01 But Marcus Aurelius spoke fluent Greek.
18:48 Ryan Holiday? Right.
18:49 Speaker 01 Was completely a master, like really identified with the philosophy. And he didn't go to Athens until towards the end of his life. So for him, even more than people like us, reading about it and stuff. It must have been like a massive, like pilgrimage.
19:02 Ryan Holiday? But also like, you know, today, like there'll be these stories about like, you know, the young men are turning to ancient ideas for modern guidance. That's what he's doing.
19:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:12 Ryan Holiday? You know what, like, that's what the Romans were doing, looking backwards. Hundreds of years for guidance, although it's more of a living tradition that they're still doing the same thing, like just the timelessness of that process of looking backwards for foundational ideas that we've been doing that since basically he's first setting up on this porch. It's kind of an incredible thing.
19:36 Speaker 01 I think they thought about, they probably thought about time a little bit, definitely, but for sure to Marcus, Zeno and the foundations of Stoicism are like, like us looking back to the medieval period.
19:48 Ryan Holiday? Or Shakespeare, yeah.
19:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, like it's a whole different world to him. Like, and I think to some extent just like Greek cult, I mean, he would have been very familiar with Greek culture, but it's also still slightly exotic.
20:01 Ryan Holiday? We just, we just compress that whole period down.
20:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:05 Ryan Holiday? Into, it's all this one thing.
20:07 Speaker 01 Ancient stuff.
20:08 Ryan Holiday? Yes. And it's like, no, the Greeks give way to the Romans and the Romans believe that they're living in the future.
20:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it makes me laugh about like even in TV and documentaries and stuff, you always hear people saying like even professors will sometimes say in ancient times.
20:26 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
20:27 Speaker 01 And you'd be like, what does that mean? Why?
20:29 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
20:30 Speaker 01 You know, what does ancient times mean?
20:31 Ryan Holiday? Totally.
20:32 Speaker 01 Like that could be anything. That's as vague as you could be in the ancient world.
20:36 Ryan Holiday? Yes. And also, I mean, there's obviously all these worlds that they don't even know about.
20:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, our whole civilizations that didn't leave any records behind. And I mean, we don't really know much about the Celts to be honest, like.
20:47 Ryan Holiday? Well, there's a poem, I forget who says it, but like she's reading some ancient author and she's like, what would he, what would he think of me now reading this, you know, all this time that is there on an unrumored continent, you know, like to think like there's all these other things happening in the world that they don't even know that it exists, you know? That's what I think. So like you get to Montaigne and he's now aware of the new world.
21:12 Ryan Holiday? And then there's this sort of different type of civilization for the first time, different kinds of people and then the whole picture of the world has been reduced artificially reduced by fifty percent until about that very moment. Really interesting.
21:24 Speaker 01 One that's important is that, I mean, some educated, like a lot of Romans must have felt like Rome was basically the world.
21:32 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
21:33 Speaker 01 As far as they were concerned, why wouldn't they? But some of them, I think also show this awareness that it's
21:39 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
21:40 Speaker 01 A small corner of the world and there's, I mean, I think probably they were all slightly tortured. They see like, they're kind of bugged by Alexander the Great and the fact that just constantly acts as a reminder to them. Like that there's the whole of Persia and India and stuff beyond that, that's almost entirely unknown to them.
21:59 Ryan Holiday? Yes. Yeah, there was this kind of limit, probably mostly because of the ships. But basically they're like, if it's outside the Mediterranean, we're not interested.
22:08 Speaker 01 Well, I'm glad that you finally made it.
22:10 Ryan Holiday? Yes, it's been good.
22:11 Speaker 01 And you're enjoying it.
22:12 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
22:13 Speaker 01 It's pretty hot, but you're probably used to that.
22:14 Ryan Holiday? I mean, it's cooler than Texas, so. Yeah, last summer we did Australia, which was the exact opposite of this and that. Did totally escape the heat.
22:23 Speaker 01 Right. Have you been up there before, yeah?
22:26 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, yeah, we did that yesterday.
22:27 Speaker 01 You must have done a lot of things yesterday.
22:29 Ryan Holiday? We did a lot of things yesterday and then we're doing it, we're doing it again tonight.
22:31 Speaker 01 Isn't that again?
22:32 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
22:33 Speaker 01 Wow.
22:33 Ryan Holiday? Like, uh, the boys are upset. We wanted to do it night time.
22:36 Speaker 01 Have you been up Mount Lycabettus?
22:38 Ryan Holiday? Is that the tallest peak, that one up there? Yeah, or drive, so we did the improvisation and it was like a drive-in center after, so we took us up there.
22:45 Speaker 01 You took you up also?
22:46 Ryan Holiday? So we got to see that. That was pretty cool. What was that historically? Anything?
22:50 Speaker 01 They don't talk, they mention it in passing, but don't really say all that much about it.
22:54 Ryan Holiday? Right.
22:54 Speaker 01 It's interesting when you're here, yeah, because there are like things, they talk a lot about the Agora and the gymnasium and stuff. But they don't, there's other things that they don't say that much about.
23:05 Ryan Holiday? They're just not that.
23:06 Speaker 01 Lycabettus is like kind of in your face, but they don't really.
23:09 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, they're like, no, we just have the one down.
23:11 Speaker 01 Vaguely and asking.
23:12 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, it's weird. They would so build that out as a temple and then over there, nothing.
23:16 Speaker 01 I don't know if there was anything on it, like, yeah, I think it was kind of with a, and the name is some sounds like it has something to do with Rome. Actually, I'll tell you something, the Lycium. Is at the foot of the cavernous, and I say it basically. And lyceum sounds like it, it's like like us, the word for wolf. Like, so we don't, we have no idea, but it says there's some kind of connection between the name of the hell and the name of the lyceum.
23:46 Ryan Holiday? Oh, look, they're moving it over, closer over here. They're gonna do some digging over here, maybe.
23:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's great, go to watch the bees.
23:53 Ryan Holiday? So these are mostly college students, you think?
23:55 Speaker 01 I think so. It's long, slow process.
23:59 Ryan Holiday? What do you think that is, like, ten, fifteen chi? They'd have to go down to even get to the?
24:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, to even get to that level. And, I mean, it kind of looks like there might be things built above that level. Like, maybe there were other later structures built on top of it, that they excavate first. And then maybe move somewhere in order to get to that, it's crazy.
24:19 Ryan Holiday? The painted porch itself might not be on the ground level. It could be on ruins itself.
24:24 Speaker 01 Well, there's supposedly a shrine to Aphrodite next to the, the stockbroker. I don't know if they've ever uncovered part of that. I think it's, and then also says it was dedicated to the Greek races.
24:36 Ryan Holiday? I do love, there's a bookstore right there.
24:40 Ryan Holiday? Under the green thing, there's a bookstore. But, uh.
24:43 Speaker 01 No, I mean, yeah, there's an Irish bar.
24:45 Ryan Holiday? Yes, of course. But they, they didn't have any of my books or any of your books, so that would have been cool.
24:51 Speaker 01 I think I've seen your book in some of the bookshops in Exarch.
24:54 Ryan Holiday? I was trying to find, I don't know what they look like in Greek, I don't know. Like, cause you know, they send you the different translation. I've never, I don't know if I've ever seen them in Greek, but. And some countries, it's like, like, when you're in the Netherlands, for instance, like, they are translated, but most people just read them in English, you know? What is tipping culture in Greece?
25:10 Speaker 01 They don't expect people to tip. And sometimes it's a little bit of a hassle, cause like in, in Canada, whenever you pay by card, every time it'll always give you the all.
25:20 Ryan Holiday? Try it.
25:20 Speaker 01 Whereas here. Often it doesn't and then sometimes you'll say, sometimes I've been so taken out of the tent, I can't be bothered breaking it up again. It's like annoying.
25:30 Ryan Holiday? Have you sold the anger book yet or no?
25:33 Speaker 01 We're in the process of Mr. Martin's looking at the proposal at the moment. I think they're probably gonna make me an offer on it, but they wanted me to revise the proposal to make it like a little bit less about history. It was about Caesar and Brutus and Octavius and a bit like, and I kinda used those as the case, these are the examples. And they said they thought I'd put too much emphasis in the history and they wanted me to put more emphasis in the side.
25:58 Ryan Holiday? I think that's a good call actually. Usually their notes are wrong, but that's actually a pretty good one. You know St. Martin's also bought a historical novel about Marcus Aurelius? Like have you read Augustus by John Williams?
26:10 Speaker 01 No.
26:11 Ryan Holiday? John Williams who wrote Stoner, uh, the, the, he wrote a very famous historical novel about Augustus.
26:17 Speaker 01 Right.
26:18 Ryan Holiday? That came out in the seventies that sold very well. I know St. Martin's bought a historical novel about Marcus. What's the other thing? A historical novel about it? Oh, Memoirs of a Patriot. Yeah. So I'm excited for that.
26:31 Speaker 01 Great thought.
26:31 Ryan Holiday? It's a good idea. It's a very good idea.
26:34 Speaker 01 Memoirs of a Patriot is weird because it's, the letters are supposed to be written to Marcus Aurelius.
26:38 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
26:38 Speaker 01 But it doesn't include any of his, it's kind of a, like a bit of an odd literary device in a way. Cause it's framed as everything is to Marcus Aurelius and there's nothing about it.
26:48 Ryan Holiday? Yes. Yes. Which is weird because there are letters that's written. Yeah. But it's a very beautiful novel. Have you read Last of a Wine?
26:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:57 Ryan Holiday? I read that in anticipation. That was beautiful. Oh yeah. You probably read it when you're doing Socrates book.
27:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:16 Speaker 01 People like give me a half time about some novels. I do really good novels, but these notes that I've always had to do, read a lot of nonfiction.
27:23 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
27:24 Speaker 01 So I don't like read books about psych therapy or history of my whole day and then it's like, I don't know, I'm gonna kick back and read another book.
27:31 Ryan Holiday? I know. No, it's, that is one of like. Because you become a writer because you love books.
27:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:37 Ryan Holiday? And then you choose what you're gonna write about. And then that assigns you all the things that you have to read. And so suddenly the idea of just reading, there's just not enough hours in the day to read as much as you would like for pleasure because unless unless you're gonna completely neglect your family or your health or anything that's happening in the world, there's just not enough time to read, given how much you have to read to fill up your own writing.
28:05 Speaker 01 And one of the tricky things I find as well is that people will send me manuscripts of books about stoicism, right? Like ninety percent of the time, they're like the least interesting books to read because a lot of them are just like rehashing what other person's.
28:18 Ryan Holiday? Yes, it's rare that you would read a book about stoicism that would tell you something you didn't know. So when you do, it's very exciting.
28:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:25 Ryan Holiday? That's why I've liked I've liked your books.
28:27 Speaker 01 What other ones have I liked? I actually like Walt Farnsworth.
28:31 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, he's good, he's great.
28:32 Speaker 01 Like, I think he's quite a good writer.
28:34 Ryan Holiday? But when you're reading somebody tell you what the people said and you've read what the people said.
28:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:40 Ryan Holiday? It's not always that interesting.
28:42 Speaker 01 Well, that's another reason I don't read that many new books. Because often when I'm doing research for these kind of like historical books, I spend most of my time just like reading the classics.
28:50 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, right.
28:51 Speaker 01 Again and again and going over them like.
28:54 Ryan Holiday? And you're finding something new in there, even though you've read it before.
28:57 Speaker 01 And then you read a modern commentary on it. And sometimes it sheds light on it, but sometimes you're like, I could have just read the original.
29:04 Ryan Holiday? That's totally right.
29:05 Speaker 01 And got that. But I think one thing that's worked out for me is that because there comes the classics from a different background, like there's a lot of stuff in ancient philosophy that just jumps out at you being developed from a psychological perspective. And I think classicists often, what's really interesting is often I'll be talking to professors of philosophy or classics and I'll say, hey, you know this bit in Xenophon where he says such and such? And they'll be like. Oh yeah, I guess he says that. Like, they they just completely ignore that, it doesn't seem important to them.
29:38 Ryan Holiday? Right.
29:39 Speaker 01 But it jumps out to me as being really similar to something that's important in modern psychology.
29:45 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
29:45 Speaker 01 And it's strange how they kind of don't see it. It doesn't seem important.
29:50 Ryan Holiday? If you're only looking at the classics as the classics, what you're not, what you're not having is the things that it can make connections to.
29:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:58 Ryan Holiday? And so you you layer on top of that, that you're living a somewhat cloistered or sheltered academic life. Now you have even fewer things to connect it to because you don't, you have tenure. You have like, so maybe you can see, oh, there's this thing in Zenith that connects to this office politics thing. But you're not actually living in the world of most people, you're not experiencing most people, even the the people you are experiencing, most of them are children. You're you're not in the position to make the connection from one thing to another. And so you end up just focusing again and again on the main thing.
30:33 Speaker 01 And you get sucked into academic debates about what other people have written articles about.
30:37 Ryan Holiday? Yes, yeah, these sort of distinctions without a difference. Or, yeah, or you're primarily right. I think the other thing is you get very used to writing to people who have the same basis of knowledge as you do. So you take, you have all these assumptions that you're making as opposed to being like, what I think. Like, what's wonderful about being a popularizer is you find something you're like, I love this, this is amazing. I want to go tell more people about it that don't know about it. I just come to think that, like, there's there's sort of two types of translation. There's the translation of one language to another, which is obviously a very difficult task and requires an understanding of language.
31:17 Ryan Holiday? And then there's this new form of translation, which is translating from one context to another or one demographic to another. And I think that's kind of what I do in my books. I think you do this in your books too, which is like, you're taking a thing. Whatever language you're interacting with is not important, but you're making it relevant to people who didn't or wouldn't have thought it was relevant to them.
31:39 Speaker 01 I think that in a way that's kind of central to what psychotherapists are supposed to be for a living, because they're meant to read all the psychological research. And the clients, most of them aren't going to understand any of that, or see the relevance of it. So a CBT practitioner in particular, as many spend a lot of the time looking at the current research and then figuring out how to translate into terms, you know, a 13-year-old kid,
32:05 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
32:06 Speaker 01 or a elderly Jewish matriarch, or a guy who drives a bus.
32:09 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, it's actually interesting, you know, they've been finding, like, it's supposed to kind of, oh, that connects to this thing, and maybe you go read more about it, or, oh, somebody, like, a cancer doctor's like, oh, you know, I did hear about this type of study they're doing on a person with a very similar disease as you, you know? And that, yeah, that process of one making connection from one group to another.
32:32 Speaker 01 Actually, I'm interested, like, Albert Ellis, I think stumbled across the fact that that quote from Epictetus was just something that his clients related to.
32:43 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
32:43 Speaker 01 But he latched on to it because he's, like, he's getting that idea from research that was going on, like, in psychology at the time, and research on the cognitive appraisal model of emotion. And then he's like, how am I going to explain that to all his clients?
32:57 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
32:57 Speaker 01 And he's like, well, there's this quote from Epictetus that says something about like that, and they're all like, that makes total sense. So now he's like, oh, I'm going to say that to everybody. We all seem to get that.
33:06 Ryan Holiday? And when is he doing this, in the 70s, 60s?
33:08 Speaker 01 60s.
33:09 Ryan Holiday? Just like, think about what percentage of people who don't have a classical education would be familiar with a quote from Epictetus that, you know, they didn't have the internet in a way that could spread these things. And so, yeah, what an important task it is to be like, hey, this connects to this.
33:27 Speaker 01 And he was just, he was an unusual guy, like, maybe he was an odd guy. He was probably a lot of that new voice, I think, he was like a workaholic. He quite possibly saw more clients than any other psychotherapist I've ever had.
33:39 Ryan Holiday? So he got his hours in.
33:40 Speaker 01 He was kind of obsessive. And he was super, like, nerdy about the history of psychotherapy. He'd read all this stuff that most psychotherapists probably wouldn't have read. So you're right, it's kind of unusual that he would have even read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
33:52 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
33:53 Speaker 01 But he did, because he was like a massive nerd and,
33:55 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
33:55 Speaker 01 like, read loads of random stuff. Like, and but then that was what he chose to draw on. For the things, he says he read it when he was a teenager and then kind of forgot about it. And then decades later.
34:06 Ryan Holiday? It pops back in your head. Yeah, that's why you need this broad sort of liberal arts education where you're connected to the stuff. And then you go, oh, like, that's what I do. I I'm, hey, you know what? Like, I'm writing a book about courage. And I go, maybe I'll do the three hundred Spartans here. And then I'll go, oh, okay, let me go get Herodotus off the shelf and let me go get this off the shelf. You have to kind of vaguely know where stuff is. And I think that's what's going to be interesting about AI for people is if you haven't built the habits of being vaguely informed about these different things, you're not going to know where to look. So you're actually not going to be able to use these tools very effectively, or you're going to be very easy to manipulate. You you need to have a kind of a broad understanding of where.
34:50 Ryan Holiday? You don't have to have read all the books, but you have to vaguely know what the different books are and what's in them.
34:57 Speaker 01 I do think AI, well, I mean, I'm kind of surprised in a way that AI hasn't had the big of a effect already on publishing.
35:04 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
35:04 Speaker 01 It seems like already you'd be generally up there within a couple of minutes just by putting a prompt and.
35:11 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, well, and if you take that most books aren't very good, they're probably pretty replaceable. But at the same time, it's like the decision to read a book, you are deciding to spend a lot of time with a person. So like, it's not the words that are important so much. It's like, why am I reading this book from this person? I don't know, though. So in the wisdom book I opened, Seneca has this story about this wealthy Roman who, instead of learning things, he hires a bunch of really smart slaves to tell him stuff. And then he thinks he's getting away with it. Yeah, he thinks he thinks he's getting away with it. And then one of his friends comes up to him and he says, you know, have you thought about becoming a wrestler? And he says, why would I become a wrestler? I'm an old man. And and the the friend says, yes, but all your slaves are still young. Why don't they just do it for you?
35:56 Ryan Holiday? And to me, that that is, there's something about AI there where it's like, you think you can get something to do it for you, but the whole point is to do it yourself.
36:04 Speaker 01 You know, in Plato's Fivers, there's this like famous section where Softy says that he thinks writing.
36:12 Ryan Holiday? Yes, is going to kill everything.
36:13 Speaker 01 It's going to kill our intellect. People aren't going to think for themselves. But the arguments that he makes against writing sound very similar to the concerns that people have about AI.
36:22 Ryan Holiday? And the problem is, he's actually totally wrong. Like, I think. And I'm probably gonna do a piece on this. I think actually the transition from oral culture to writing culture is actually what makes us smart. Like, I think the reason we're in this mess right now culturally is that people are listening to podcasts to learn about things. With the exception of a scripted podcast, which is written, people just bullshitting is not how you learn about things. Like, there's something about sitting down and thinking. Joan Didion has this line, she says, "Writing is a hostile act." I'm having to take what I think and attack what you think.
36:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, active writing, but what about reading?
37:01 Ryan Holiday? But reading is consuming what someone has spent a lot of time thinking about. So writing, I think, actually sharpens thinking. And when you have read writing, you are consuming sharpened thinking.
37:16 Speaker 01 Let me tell you something that's an unusual observation, but it's well-known in modern psych therapy. So there are a series of research studies, trying recent ones on what's called role-governed behaviour. And they get two groups of participants in a study, right? And they have to solve puzzles, like pressing some buttons in a particular order. And they get, you know, eyes if they're wrong, they get a reward if they're right. And first group are given verbal instructions, written instructions. So they read, "You do this order," and they figure out how to apply that, they do it. And then the other group have to figure out through trial and error, right? So the first group.
37:59 Speaker 01 The second phase of the experiment is that they change the rules that govern the reward and penalty without telling the group. So previously they would press buttons, A, B, C, now that doesn't work, suddenly it stops working. The group that were given written or verbal instructions will consistently carry on trying to use the original strategy for much longer. Whereas the group that figured it out through trial and error will adapt much more quickly.
38:24 Ryan Holiday? Interesting.
38:25 Speaker 01 Now, psychologists are really interested in that, because they think. The, one of the puzzles of mental health is why did people use coping strategies that don't seem to work?
38:36 Ryan Holiday? Right.
38:37 Speaker 01 When they're getting feedback, would you sell them that it's not working?
38:39 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
38:40 Speaker 01 Like, what, what causes rigidity?
38:41 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
38:42 Speaker 01 What causes coping rigidity?
38:43 Ryan Holiday? I heard this once. Yeah, they're, they're saying like, I heard this and then I, I didn't take on any new information.
38:50 Speaker 01 So one, one idea is that they're like, when they've heard it or read it, they apply, in terms of applying in a more rigid.
38:57 Ryan Holiday? Interesting.
38:57 Speaker 01 Professional way.
38:58 Ryan Holiday? I, I would agree with that.
39:00 Speaker 01 Now, funnily enough then, if that's true, and that kind of applies to thinking, Socrates would absolutely be this kind of iconic example of somebody who does the opposite and exhibits cognitive flexibility.
39:12 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
39:13 Speaker 01 By figuring everything out from scratch and questioning everything. Whereas Socrates would teach people to rote learn lectures and maxims. And I think he's aware that this causes a problem with.
39:26 Ryan Holiday? That's interesting.
39:27 Speaker 01 Like learning a formula and then applying it in too rigid a way.
39:30 Ryan Holiday? Right.
39:31 Speaker 01 So he's always trying to get people to think about the exceptions to a rule.
39:34 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
39:34 Speaker 01 Or the exceptions to a definition. And we do that, like in therapy, we say, well, this might be a good coping strategy in some situations, but maybe it's backfiring when you tried to do it in a meeting. So maybe when you were in the military.
39:45 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
39:45 Speaker 01 Talking to people that way worked really well. But now.
39:48 Ryan Holiday? It's a different context.
39:49 Speaker 01 With your kids.
39:50 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
39:50 Speaker 01 Like, it's not working out so well in your marriage.
39:54 Ryan Holiday? Totally. The, the final law in the forty laws of power is assume formlessness.
39:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:59 Ryan Holiday? And I think like, there's, there's something about, you have to learn all the rules and all the, all the ideas and then you have to, you have to toss it out. And actually, Sutcliffe talks about that, right? He's like, the whole point is that at some point, you have to put your own spin on it.
40:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:14 Ryan Holiday? It's not this so and so said this and so and so said this. You have to sort of put your own version on it and if you're not, you're not doing it right.
40:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:22 Ryan Holiday? Let me see where I'm meeting the, uh, they went to the, they went to the park.
40:25 Speaker 01 The National Gardens?
40:27 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, they went to the National Gardens because they, uh, they wanted to see some turtles again, even though we have turtles literally in our backyard. What I do is we agree on all the places we're gonna go as a family. And then anywhere I wanna go, I do, no, no, I do on my, my run.
40:40 Speaker 01 Are you doing your run?
40:41 Ryan Holiday? I do my run, so I go and look at the faraway things or the things that are all...
40:45 Speaker 01 They haven't run up, I've seen people running up with the bases.
40:47 Ryan Holiday? I, I saw that when I was driving yesterday and I was like, this would be good.
40:50 Speaker 01 That's where we're going to be small.
40:51 Ryan Holiday? Yes, that seemed maybe more, although the little, the hill next to the necropolis where that big rock is, that's where like the prison is and stuff, I'm gonna run up there, I think, yeah.
41:04 Speaker 01 That's Philopapas, so...
41:05 Ryan Holiday? Yes, okay.
41:06 Speaker 01 It's beside the Pyneics, which is where they had the liquor assembly and stuff.
41:12 Speaker 01 There's a big, you can see right at the top of that hill, there's a monument.
41:15 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, yeah.
41:15 Speaker 01 From the time of Hapian.
41:17 Ryan Holiday? Ah.
41:18 Speaker 01 Called the Philopapas Monument.
41:19 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
41:20 Speaker 01 Like, it's actually one of the main viewpoints, yeah. One of the things that you could do is maybe you could go up there or walk up to the peak where the Philopapas Monument is. You get a nice view of the necropolis.
41:29 Ryan Holiday? That's, that's what I think I'm gonna do.
41:30 Speaker 01 So how much longer are you in Athens for?
41:33 Ryan Holiday? Till Friday.
41:34 Speaker 01 Till Friday? Just a few days.
41:36 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
41:36 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, I mean, if you want to meet up again, I'll do it.
41:38 Ryan Holiday? Okay, yeah, yeah, I'll shoot you a text, but, but I'll let you know about the beach, too.
41:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're gonna be not far from you.
41:44 Ryan Holiday? That sounds amazing.
41:45 Speaker 01 And if you've got any questions about anything else, you know, you've got my number, just text me.
41:49 Ryan Holiday? This is awesome. Well, I'm excited about the new book. That's a great idea.
41:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'd be happy.
41:56 Ryan Holiday? Steve's the best, isn't he? I keep telling myself that, too.
41:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, Steve's really good. He's been up, he's been a good challenge.
42:02 Ryan Holiday? So you think that, but like, we're, we're doing a 10-year anniversary of Daily Stoic. And then it's a 10-year anniversary of, uh, Ego after that. So you think, you think you're winding down, but actually I bet your things are just start... Because of the culture we live in now, also, it just takes so much longer for people to get around to books. So you don't think about it, but every year, new people are coming to the stuff, right?
42:25 Speaker 01 People email me and they say, I read your book and I'm like.
42:28 Ryan Holiday? Which one?
42:29 Speaker 01 Like, oh, that was one that I wrote years ago. Yeah, I think Roman Emperor was like five or six years ago. I wonder what it was now and I've written a bunch since then.
42:36 Ryan Holiday? Totally.
42:36 Speaker 01 Like.
42:37 Ryan Holiday? Well, you can do an updated one.
42:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then they ask about it and you're like, I'm not totally sure I remember everything that I wrote in it.
42:42 Ryan Holiday? That, well, I just interviewed Ron Chernow and he said something, he put it well. He was saying that every new book pushes out the stuff from the old book.
42:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:52 Ryan Holiday? And so, yeah, you're living in a different world than the reader.
42:55 Speaker 01 So I will see.
42:56 Ryan Holiday? No, this was amazing. All right. Yeah. I'll text you when I figure out where we're going. All right. See you. Bye.
43:07 Ryan Holiday? Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.
Previous This Doesn’t Make You Weak | Ask Daily Stoic Next 100 (Stoic) Lessons From Marcus Aurelius Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
