Agnes Callard on Socrates and Wisdom

On today’s episode Ryan speaks to professor and author Agnes Callard about the philosophical model that Socrates passed down, the ancient problem of fundamentally flawed people, how to re envision success and ambition, pulling rather than pushing your children towards philosophy, and more. Agnes Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago (ancient philosophy and ethics). She wrote Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming and wrote the lead essay in On Anger, one of the New Yorker’s top books of 2020. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. This episode is also brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Everything from coffee to toilet paper & shampoo to pet food. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout. This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. This episode is also brought to you by Box of Awesome from Bespoke Post. They have a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. To get started, you just take a quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers help them pick the right Box of Awesome for you. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code STOIC at checkout.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Agnes Callard:Twitter: https://twitter.com/agnescallard See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is someone I first heard about several years ago on Tyler Cowen's podcast, Conversations with Tyler, one of my favorite podcasts, free shout out right there. And I've read many of her articles. She's written some great stuff on parenting, some great stuff on ancient philosophers. But it was actually my dear friend and former research assistant, Christo, who recommended that I have her on. And I reached out and I was very excited that she said yes, because Agnes Callard

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  is a fascinating, modern philosopher, but most of all, she's, I think, one of the most public proponents and popularizers, as if he needed help, but he does, of the one and only Socrates, the godfather of the Stoics, if you will. She's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics. She's written everywhere you could possibly imagine, including The New York Times. She wrote a book called On Anger. As it happens, Seneca also wrote a book with the same title, so you can imagine that this deals quite a bit with Seneca and his thinking. She also wrote Aspirations, The Agency of Becoming, about that idea of ambition and drive, another

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Important topic. Agnes has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and just an all around fascinating person. You can tell she thinks differently, but she has such a deep relationship with these philosophers, particularly Socrates and his dialogues, which we nerd out about in depth in this episode, that she just brings them to life and but brings them to life in a way that I try to do with my work on the Stoics, which is bring them to life in a way that can help people in their actual lives. So I think towards the end, we talk about how to teach your kids philosophy, which is something I'm thinking about, obviously, more than ever now as a parent and something I tried to do in my newest book, The Boy Who Would

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  Be King. But but it's a great episode with Agnes. Please check it out. She's a fascinating thinker, and I so enjoy this conversation, and I think you will as well.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  I was I thought maybe we would start with a favorite of yours and a favorite of the Stoics, the one and only Socrates. Tell me how Socrates comes into your life.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  He comes into my life in a lot of ways. I guess the main one

• 3:30Speaker 01

  is that he's kind of my role model. So I think that Socrates like is instantiates philosophy. He like he symbolizes philosophy in my mind. When I think of like what it is to be philosophical, I think of Socrates. That's the simplest answer. I can say more, but.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, that please, please do say more. How does he come into your life? Do you remember when you encountered him for the first time?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yes. So I read The Republic in high school, but it actually I didn't like it that much and didn't make a huge impression on me. The.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  The time that I, I think I really first encountered Socrates was as a first year undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I took a kind of general humanities sequence and we read Plato. We, we read just like some dialogues. I can't remember which actually at that point. And then, I know we read The Apology, but I don't know what else we read besides The Apology. And I, it wasn't like that, a transformative moment or something when I first read The Apology or anything like that. It was like, it took a long time for me to see what was going on, that what was happening in the dialogues were actual conversations. So they seem stylized.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  They seem like, like the euthyphro, okay? It's a dialogue in which there's like a guy who is about to prosecute his own father for the murder of a slave and a servant. The servant himself was the killer of a slave. And then, and then he's talking to Socrates, right? And Socrates is about to be prosecuted for impiety, or not exactly be prosecuted. He's about to hear the charges against him, right? And they're standing outside the courtroom. They're like, they're like about to go in, right? And they're standing outside and they're having this conversation about piety. And like, the first, I don't know how many times I read that, I didn't realize like, how, how high the stakes are. Like, for both of them,

• 5:36Speaker 01

  right? This is like, both, for both of them, in some sense, the, the very essence of their lives are on the line in this conversation. Like, do I know what piety is? Can I defend myself from people who attack me on this charge? And can I defend myself from the claim that I'm violating it by prosecuting my own father in this extremely heterodox way, right? So that kind of, the, the directness, I guess. The Socratic dialogues are extremely direct. They're like, Socrates finds, when he, he meets someone, he finds like, what is the, what is the sore spot in this person's ethical makeup?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  In their ethical theoretical makeup and he attacks there. And it's like their whole life is on the line in every conversation. And I that that didn't strike me immediately when I read the dialogues. I think it's not exactly that I thought Socrates was being ironic or joking or whatever. But so many of the people around me thought that that it took me a long time to just be like, no, this is just an actual conversation about like whether or not my life is a disaster or not.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's surreal because you tend to read him as this sort of provocateur or this guy that asked annoying questions or just even just now, what, what, you know, if you asked a high schooler what they think a philosopher was, they wouldn't, they wouldn't describe Socrates as he really was, which was a soldier and a husband and a father and, you know, a real person with hobbies and interests. And then ultimately, who, you know, sort of gives their life, you know, in accordance with their philosophical beliefs. We don't, we don't stereotype the philosopher as like a real flesh and blood human being.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there's quite, so the thing Socrates was doing was very threatening to people. That's immediately obvious in the dialogues. And then, of course, he gets put to death for it, right? But I think the thing we don't often realize is how threatening it is to readers. So, you know, I think that the ironic detached provocateur reading is partly an artifact of the reader's desire to protect themselves from what's in the text.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right, if you read him as a court gesture, a court gesture, you don't have to change anything about your life.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, and in Shakespeare, for instance, he'll often give like the wisest and most incisive points to the fool because the fool is sort of protected from being taken seriously.

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, there's a, there's a line, I think it's from Epictetus, and he's quoting Socrates. He says, you know, "Just as some, you know, delight in improving their farm, I delight in improving myself day to day." We also don't really see Socrates as like a person trying to get better. We kind of see him as this sort of superior person off to the side, like poking fun at other people. But I make up that he was asking these questions, not because he believed he had attained wisdom, but because he was trying to get to wisdom to be better in his own life.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, I mean, he's really clear. So this is a point on which I think readers are just persistent in resisting the text because he's really clear that he thinks he's not in any kind of good shape. The, the, the Lakeys, I think he ends with a line that's something like, "There's one thing that's clear, which is that we should not remain as we are." So I think that, you know, part of it is like, suppose Socrates discovered these, these huge gaps in people's ability to defend the most basic points about like the groundwork for how they're living their lives. And like, at least you could take

• 9:44Speaker 01

  comfort in the thought that Socrates had it all worked out, right? And thereby identify with Socrates in the conversations and be like, "I'm not like one of the messed up people. I'm like one of the Socrates kind of people who has it all worked out." But that's, you know, an obvious misreading in a certain way. Because Socrates is very clear that he doesn't have knowledge and he's knowledgeable about his own ignorance. I think the way people get around that is they think, "Well, yeah, but like, as long as you're knowledgeable about your ignorance, it's fine," right?

• 10:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right. No, he's not, that is, and obviously it gets projected on later. He doesn't really talk about, you know, knowing of his own ignorance too much. I think it's Diogenes Laertes that says it, you know, many centuries after his death. But if we take it to be true that Socrates is wise because he's aware of his own ignorance, it's also true that he is, he does not accept this. He actively seeks to remedy the ignorance. And that's the, that's-

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  Also, why he's so annoying is that he's, uh, he's asking all these questions, uh, and, and poking at all these pretenses, trying to get at the truth.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes I think of it like, imagine, uh, if you were, um, I don't know, you're on the way to the grocery store to get an ingredient for a food that you're gonna make, right? And, and you're walking with someone and they're like, no, no, this isn't actually the way to the grocery store, you know, you gotta go this way. Okay, fine, I'll go the other way. And then they're like, actually, that, that ingredient isn't like, you shouldn't use that ingredient for the food that you're gonna make. You're like, okay, okay, I'll, I'll get something else when I get to the grocery store. And then they're like, well, actually, you, you shouldn't make that thing. Like, that's not a good dish. And, and just imagine it keeps on going, like,

• 11:34Speaker 01

  all the way to everything about your life. That's what Socrates is like, like, that is, there is something that you're doing in the living of your life, right? Like, something that you're doing right now, like, even, you know, Euthyphro, like, right now, he is, uh, operationalizing his own knowledge of piety, right? In being about to defend, being about to, um, uh, prosecute his own father. He's operationalizing it. And in that very moment, Socrates is like, wait, I don't think you know what you're talking about. Um, and that wasn't knowledge that was sitting idle. It was like being used in the way that you were using your grip on like, what food you wanted to make and what ingredients you needed for

• 12:17Speaker 01

  it and where the store was in like, moving forward.

• 12:22Ryan Holiday?

  Well, in some sense, it's kind of an intellectually unfair position, too. And this is why you'd get so frustrated with your friend. You'd be like, dude, just say what you fucking mean. Stop poke, stop like, killing me by a thousand cuts, questioning everything. You'd be like, do you have some, it's like, do you have something to say? Would you just like to say it? And then Socrates is like, no, I just have a million more questions for you. And I'm, I'm gonna eventually lead you to what I'm not saying. So I think it's fresh, it's frustrating because we expect human beings to come out and take a stand or say what they mean. And Socrates' humility is also, uh, kind of, it's like fighting, it's like not fighting fair.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, except in another way, it really is genuinely fighting as opposed to what you might think of as debating. So I mean, say you have a view, right? You've said your view about what piety is. And say I come along and I'm like, well, here's my view about piety, right? I take a stand. I say what I mean. What do we do next? Right? I mean, I suppose you can keep defending your view and I can keep defending my view. And maybe whoever shouts the loudest or speaks the best or whatever is going to convince a third party, right? And that is, that is the standard Athenian way to think about talking, right? And it shows up in the Gorgias where Gorgias is like, I think most people who are sitting here listening to this conversation, sorry, not Gorgias, Polus says, I think most people sitting here listening to this conversation are going to agree with me, Socrates. And Socrates is like, yeah, this isn't like a contest in that way, right? We're actually

• 13:50Speaker 01

  trying to understand something. And like, if you actually want to understand something with someone, just saying what you mean, once they have said what they mean, isn't actually a very useful thing to do, right? It affords the possibility for something like a debate, but the debate is resolved externally by the judge or the audience or whatever. And suppose two people want to figure something out among themselves. I think two people saying what they mean is one person too many saying what they mean.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's asymmetric, right? It's like why a guerrilla war frustrates a superpower. It's like, we've taken our stand, and our stand is that we want to occupy this territory. And you're not saying that you want to occupy this territory and own all the responsibilities and obligations therein. You're just saying, you're going to undermine my ability to occupy this territory. And so Socrates, you know, never fully comes out and says what he means, but he's definitely going to knock the legs out of whatever you think you mean. And so he does a real service there, but you could see why that would drive someone nuts.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree, though. Socrates himself says that he would prefer to take the opposite role. And he would love to be investigated and refuted. He says that at the end of the Gorgias, because he says that when Somebody is refuted, then it's the one who is refuted that is benefited because they get to learn, right?

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  And Socrates is like, "I would love if people were benefiting me," you know, "instead of the other way around, but people don't seem to be willing to do it." And, you know, in fact, there's a little exercise in The Gorgias where he's like, Polus is like, "Why can't I be the one who asks you the question, Socrates?" And Socrates is like, "That's fine, go, do it, you know, let's switch roles." And Polus is like, "Super bad at it." And Socrates has to keep saying, "Polus, now you have to ask me this. Polus, now you have to ask me this." Because Polus can't like, can't do it. And I think it requires an extraordinary amount of altruism to really be thinking, to forget about what it is that you think about something and to just devote all of your attention to what might be problematic about what someone else has said.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Most people are not capable of it. But I do think, once you become capable of it, it's true, and this is what people are noticing, that that is an advantageous argumentative position. It's easier, once you get what he's doing, it's an easier role than the role of the speaker. And that, Socrates agrees with that, so he's grateful the other person's willing to do this hard thing of trying to define piety. And, and I think it's sort of, for me, one telling manifestation of the fact that the Socratic role is in some way more powerful is that if you try to do both of these things yourself, so if you, if you try to incorporate both interlocutors into yourself, Socrates and the other guy, I think you kind of end up a skeptic, because the Socrates guy keeps

• 16:50Speaker 01

  winning.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  Right, right. Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine a few years ago, we were giving each other some unvarnished feedback, and I said, "You know, you're very Socratic. You always ask these tough questions about other people, about what they're doing and their things." And I was like, "I appreciate it. I would just remind you that everyone hated Socrates and ultimately they killed him for it." You know, it's, it's a, intellectually, it's fascinating, but I think you're, what you're also saying is, it's a dangerous position to occupy because you're questioning, in some cases, the most sacred, either the most sacred things to a society or to a person, or at the very least, you're just befuddling them and frustrating them by forcing them to question things that they'd, they thought they'd already figured out.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, though Socrates didn't think it was dangerous. He said that...

• 17:44Speaker 01

  The worst thing people could do is kill him for it, which is not even harming him, according to himself. So, in fact, what's dangerous is like not taking care of your own soul and not inquiring into the good.

• 18:00Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Ignorance is more dangerous than whatever harm befalls you in searching for the truth.

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  One thing that struck me as I was, so my most recent book is this book Lives of the Stoics, where I wanted to look at the actual human beings who, you know, sort of make up the Stoic tradition. And, and what was fascinating to me is they were, obviously lived much closer to Socrates, you know, so when Zeno is introduced to Socrates' writing, you know, Socrates is only dead a few years at this time. But, but that there were stories and anecdotes, they weren't just like, oh, check out this, this great, you know, singer from Socrates. I think it was Antipater, when he sort of starts to talk about relationships and family life to, as, which he teaches to the Stoics, you know, to him, Socrates was

• 18:50Ryan Holiday?

  this example of like, and I'd be curious about this because it's sort of a cliche and, and sort of shows some sexism of the time. But, but he was really fascinated with Socrates' marriage and that it was, you know, maybe not a, not a happy one. And it just struck me as like, you know, we tend to think of Socrates as this intellectual philosophical figure, but, you know, thousands of years ago, he was a guy and you, you could get practical advice from the choices that he made as a human being.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's super interesting. I didn't know that about Socrates' marriage. I mean, we, you know, what's come down to us from Plato and Xenophon, the only thing that pops into my head is, you know, the thing at the, in the pheda where Socrates says, get her out of the way, like, he gets rid of his wife. So, because she's going to be too emotional and stuff. But we, we don't, we don't have, we don't, we don't know a lot about that marriage.

• 19:52Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  But, you know, I think that It's not an accident that Socrates, first of all, came to be this guy that a lot of people wrote dialogues about, right? I mean, we have Plato and Xenophons, but we know there were at least, like, what, 14 other people, something like that, who wrote dialogues. And then he became the figurehead for just about every ancient school in one way or another, not the Epicureans, but the, you know, the Stoics, the skeptics. Like, he shows up, you know, like, even, he's a kind of, um, he's a kind of symb- he has a kind of, he has a kind of symbolic significance, not just for me, but for a lot of people. And so it makes sense to me that people became interested in his life.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  And of course Plato encouraged that interest, right, by sort of giving him this, this very symbolic death. I mean, you know, many dialogue, many of the dialogues are about Socrates's death and about his response to his death.

• 20:54Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. It seems to be a theme, maybe the Stoics made it up, but there seems to be a number of commentaries from the Stoics about basically Socrates's wife being a nag or sort of a shrew, and that this is kind of a philosophical test for Socrates, and that, you know, he stays in the marriage, and that he's good to his wife. But yeah, that just, what I, I think what I like about it is, you know, whatever the sexist stereotype is there, there's a certain element of like, just like, that's so real,

• 21:35Ryan Holiday?

  and like, that it's not this sort of high-minded Socrates, you know, triumphing over death or going bravely to his death, or even Socrates on the battlefield, it's just like Socrates putting up with a minor annoyance with some level of, of equanimity.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  I see. Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, that, that, I guess in Plato, you see the more heroic sides of it, right? Like him, how he doesn't feel cold, apparently, and he can drink without getting drunk, and then the stuff on the battlefield, so there's a kind of superhuman character to, like, the way that he's presented, like, say, especially in the Symposium, which is kind of a dialogue that's about the cult of Socrates. But yes, the idea that he's, um... Just kind of a like a tolerant emotionally well-balanced person is

• 22:36Speaker 01

  that's not that's not a side of Socrates that Plato emphasizes.

• 22:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. The other one I like is Seneca sort of lists like all these hobbies that that people have and he points out that, you know, Socrates was sort of famous. He would he was like the guy in the neighborhood that if the kids were out playing in the street, he would he would go kick a ball around with them and have fun. And I just it was like, oh, yeah, that's so. He's also this guy like he's a physical human being and that that the philosophical ideas would not have resonated and at the time or historically if they hadn't been backed up to a certain degree by his real world exploits. And again, the battlefield one, I think, is I think Zenith's,

• 23:19Ryan Holiday?

  you know, unshakable admiration for Socrates, I think, is one there in how he comports himself, you know, under under in a stressful situation.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean,

• 23:38Speaker 01

  that it makes sense to me, but it also, you know, if you're dealing with stuff, even that's the next generation after Socrates, it also seems like it's very likely that the sum of it will be like a kind of the accretions of the cult of personality that Plato sort of describes at the beginning of the symposium. In some way, if we want a contemporary, like the best contemporary evidence might be the clouds, right? Because it's like earlier and, you know, Aristophanes is like younger relative to these other people who wrote, right? And and so there it's like there's something quite comic about Socrates, too. Something a bit and now, of

• 24:22Speaker 01

  course, this weird because the clouds is some kind of composite portrait of Socrates and then a bunch of different intellectuals, right? As Socrates complains, but still, it's like Socrates was also like a little bit a guy that people laughed at or that you could laugh at, you know, at least like during his lifetime. I think that's that's a bit of evidence for that, that that's like who he was at the time.

• 24:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, I think what the another thing that fascinates me about Socrates is like, I think people think, you know, sort of Athens, democracy, Socrates, we sort of forget that he was also, you know, sort of navigating what must have been a tumultuous political climate. I mean, you know, the Thirty Tyrants, like, Socrates wasn't this guy living in this sort of, you know, golden age, this sort of fantasy world. He was navigating, you know, sort of real world politics. He's forced to go to war, you know, he it's it's he's also living in the real world.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Right. And I guess, you know, it's it's

• 25:36Speaker 01

  he, in the apology, that's sort of one of his credentials, right, is not giving in when the Thirty want to him to participate in one of these sort of executions without a trial. And

• 25:59Speaker 01

  and so that's supposed to be,

• 26:04Speaker 01

  you know,

• 26:07Speaker 01

  at least Plato, who knows what Socrates actually said, right, but Plato is there presenting Socrates, Socrates's sort of ethical stance and his philosophical activity as something that can guide him in making difficult real world decisions that are potentially life-threatening to him.

• 26:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, you know, you have Socrates, Thirty Tyrants, then you have Aristotle, you know, having to figure out his way, you know, working for with, you know, Alexander, you have Seneca in the time of Nero. There is this sort of tradition of, I mean, the cynical view is there's this tradition of the philosophers being, you know, corrupt hypocrites. The other argument is, you know, sort of Having to make difficult moral navigations in, you know, not Plato's Republic. Like Marcus Aurelius goes, sort of, "Don't go around expecting Plato's Republic," meaning that there's the real world. And they all had to live in that real world and make real choices.

• 27:13Ryan Holiday?

  They didn't get to, you know, sit in a university with tenure apart from everything. They were in the thick of it.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, maybe in some way, like, Socrates was kind of at an extreme of being in the thick of it, I guess. Because, like, whilst, while, in a sense, being fully a philosopher.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, the, there's, I guess, Socrates's life raises this question of like, does the philosopher need to be sheltered, right? And you get, post-Socrates, you get, you know, slowly the emergence of something like philosophical schools or philosophical communities, right?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Where, you know, maybe there's this distinction between kind of intramural and extramural speech. I mean, they didn't have walls yet in the academy, but, but still, like, there's the kind of not fully public philosophical speech. Or even, there's the idea, you know, I guess my feeling with like, the Roman authors is like, there's this idea of philosophy as a little bit something you do in like your spare time, right?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  As your OTM, you know, your, the way that you make use of your leisure, right? And that's a kind of separation too, right? So there's, there's this, I think, never again after Socrates, is there such a sort of complete fusion between philosophy and...

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Uh, just the living of life, that these various kinds of separations start to appear. Of course, they're never going to be perfect or complete, and philosophers are going to be persecuted in one way or another for their views, you know, for a long time. Um, but still, like, even, even at the level of philosophical content, the fact that Socrates does not make a distinction between practical and theoretical philosophy, right, like, you, that's Aristotle. You have to wait, you have to wait for Aristotle to get that distinction. And arguably, maybe the later dialogues of Plato, where it's Plato, right? Um, but you, you, you know, for Socrates, like, there's just one thing. There isn't like going off and thinking about things in a way that doesn't relate to real life.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  And then the thing where it's more like politics, right? That those, you know, that's, that's sort of the way Aristotle thinks about the space of thought. Um, for Socrates, it's all just very integrated.

• 29:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and Socrates doesn't even, it, it's almost like it never even occurs to him that philosophy is something you write down. Like, to him, philosophy seemed to be this sort of series of questions. It's how you lived, it's the legacy you leave. There's really not another philosopher as integrated, as you said, as, uh, Socrates, maybe until someone like Cato, who's sort of widely seen as a philosopher. I'm talking about Cato the Younger, who, who is seen as the sort of penultimate philosopher, but then leaves essentially no written works behind them.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's,

• 30:26Speaker 01

  it's hard to imagine what we would think of Socrates,

• 30:33Speaker 01

  if there hadn't been a Plato, right? Um, or, you know, Aristophanes and Senefon, but still, kind of mainly Plato. Um, so, yeah, it's, it's almost like you need...

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Someone like Socrates can make the kind of mark he did only because of stuff that was sort of out of his control.

• 30:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, so I wanted to ask you, you sort of brought up how Socrates is sort of the head of most of the schools that come after him, the sort of the mascot, if you will.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Ryan Holiday?

  Except for the Epicureans.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:08Ryan Holiday?

  So, so the Stoics take Socrates sort of as their model and the Epicureans don't, which is interesting, this idea of sort of doing versus thinking, because then of the schools, the sort of Epicureans are the most sort of insular, sort of apart from the world. And then the Stoics of all the schools are sort of the most engaged and the most active. Is that the sort of Socratic lineage, you think?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  I think that, I think that, that we have to explain it differently because Socrates is just so popular as a figure, sort of, I mean, for the skeptics too, right? I, I think that it's more like, why didn't the Epicureans, why wasn't Socrates more important for the Epicureans? And the answer has just got to be all the various critiques of pleasure that like keep showing up in the Socratic dialogues, right? From the Protagoras to the Gorgias, the Republic, the Philebus, over and over and over again. Socrates being like, pleasure is not the good. It'd be pretty hard to take that guy, you know, and make him the Epicurean mascot, I think. So, that, that would be my guess, but I, I don't know, actually.

• 32:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it, it is, it is interesting because of all the schools, I guess the cynics are, are sort of not engaged to a certain degree in the, in the skeptics, more so. There's kind of a spectrum, but, but I think the Stoics, you, you sort of mentioned philosophy versus politics. The Stoics seem to kind of think that those things are, are similar. But there is this real undeniable tradition inside the Stoics that like, a philosopher is not someone who talks about philosophy or writes about philosophy. A philosopher to the Stoics is someone engaged in public life in some form or another. And to me, that seems like

• 33:05Ryan Holiday?

  that's got Socrates' fingerprints all over it.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but how do the Stoics reconcile that with the idea of the sage who is in some way withdrawn?

• 33:17Ryan Holiday?

  It's true, but what's interesting about the Stoics is they sometimes say these things and then you kind of look at who their heroes are. And it's like, there are no sages that the Stoics hold up as heroes who were not deeply engaged. I mean, there's Socrates, that's one hero. Then there's Cato, that's the other hero, very engaged. Like, all the Stoics were, you know, day to day. Marx realist talks about the sort of the pen and ink philosophers, and sort of somewhat derisively. All the Stoic heroes were, you know, sort of active participants. And when I did Lives of the Stoics, I did about 20 or so of the major Stoics.

• 34:00Ryan Holiday?

  There was not a single one who you'd probably, you'd primarily define as like an academic philosopher.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Right, but it's just odd that the sage figures sort of quite importantly in the theory, right? So that's always puzzled me.

• 34:21Ryan Holiday?

  No, you're right, you're right.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, there are these moments, right? So like, there's a moment in the, early in the symposium where Socrates doesn't come into the house. He waits outside and he's just standing there like, thinking. And then, and it actually gets, there's a reprisal of that in the story that Alcibiades tells about Socrates, that he, he's like, "Yeah, we are on the battlefield," and he was just like standing outside, thinking for a while. So you have this sort of, almost, you can tell that there's some kind of a desire to create an image of Socrates as being something like...

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Complete unto himself in the way that someone who just stands there thinking is kind of, it's kind of the image of thought, like you don't actually get to see the thought, but that, you know, they look like they're thinking deep thoughts, right? From the outside. And that's sort of how we imagine this age, but then we're actually looking at actual people, we're like, well, I want to see the wisdom manifest somehow.

• 35:22Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this just occurs to me. So, okay, so Socrates' sort of most famous student is Alcibiades. You know, Aristotle's most famous student is Alexander the Great. Seneca's most famous, oh, they say Arius and Athenodorus, their most famous student is Octavian. And then, and then Seneca's most famous student is Nero. Arguably, and I would say inarguably, all these students turned out to be not at all what the philosophy was sort of intended to teach them. Is it, is it that they were bad teachers? Is it that the, the philosophy falls short? Well, where, how does this work?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  I feel like Nero was the worst case scenario there.

• 36:12Ryan Holiday?

  The worst case scenario, of course, would be Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, but I, you know, who, I guess if we add one more bad example to the list of...

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Okay. Right. No, it's a good point. I mean, you know, maybe, maybe we, we find, I mean, like, look, in some sense, right? Plato is a student of Socrates too, so.

• 36:30Ryan Holiday?

  True.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Maybe there's a sense in which, right, we are, we are gravitating towards the example of like the people who became infamous.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  But Socrates, Plato does have an explanation of this in Republic VI. He says that it's the same basic nature that is pulled towards philosophy and tyranny. And that if nurtured... Well, it will go in the direction of philosophy, but if nurtured badly, and in particular, if the outer temptations are such, then it's going to go in the direction of tyranny. And if you sort of put that together with what he says in the Theatetus, that a lot of his students tend to, what Socrates says, a lot of his students will go away from him before it's time, and will not nurture the wisdom babies, that this is the midwife

• 37:18Speaker 01

  passage, you know, there's a failure to properly raise the wisdom babies that were born under the association with Socrates, and that this is like, you know, people get into trouble for this reason, that the idea would be improper, this would just be Plato's theory, improper association with a philosopher has a tendency to lead to the kind of full-blown development into tyranny of somebody who had tyrannical impulses.

• 37:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, if the philosopher is getting the most brilliant students, because that's their parents are sending them to hire the best philosopher, that doesn't make any, there's no selection mechanism that's saying, you're brilliant but a bad person, or you're brilliant but immoral or amoral. So just as, you'd be like, you can look at all the people who went to Harvard who've done good for the world, and then all the people who went to Harvard who did bad for the world, and really what they have in common is that Harvard gets the most brilliant people, and there's no selection method to weed out one from the other.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Right, but you might have hoped that maybe unlike Harvard, philosophers wouldn't just try to select for the moral people, but they would make you moral, right?

• 38:41Ryan Holiday?

  Right, yes.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Like, they would get you to care about morality, like, that's what the Republic is about, right? It's about persuading people to be just. It's about praising justice on its own terms as being good in and of itself. And so, you know, it is a little alarming to think the philosopher is, you know, what, incapable of doing that, incapable of creating enough of a...

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Of making the case for morality.

• 39:08Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And I think that the thing is that that's not quite right. Like, the philosopher can make the case for morality, but the philosopher only does that in the context of also really entertaining very serious doubts about morality, too, in ways that the conventional culture doesn't. And so the question is just whether you kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again before you send the person out in the world, right? So imagine Descartes' meditations. Imagine you stop after meditation number one, where Descartes has decided he's going to doubt the existence of the external world, his own body, all of the knowledge of his senses, even his mathematical knowledge. He's like, what if everything is a lie? And what if an evil demon has deceived me and is controlling my mind? Right?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  That's the end of meditation one. And like, okay, you go on the meditations, and it turns out that's not the case. It turns out, actually, Descartes, you know, is an immaterial thinking substance created by a perfect deity, and his senses are pretty accurate. But if you didn't make it to meditation six, you wouldn't know that. You'd just be stuck at one, and you could easily, in a sense, it could feed into a kind of nihilism and an easy justification for anything you wanted if you sort of like never put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

• 40:25Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I've talked about this. You could argue that's what happens to Ted Kaczynski or something, right? You have this brilliant person, and philosophy sort of breaks their brain. But, you know, there's this way where a philosophy like Stoicism could just make you a better sociopath. And maybe that's what's missing. You know, Socrates says, no man does wrong on purpose. It does seem that the ancient world struggled to wrap their heads around the fact that there were, like, just fundamentally broken people, or people operating on a different logical or ethical conception. To me, that explains a Commodus, that explains a Nero, that explains an Alexander to a certain

• 41:10Ryan Holiday?

  degree. Like, they look and act like a regular person, and they're brilliant, so they understand the philosophy, and they're parroting it right back. Alcibiades is brilliant and smart and wise, but also...

• 41:26Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it feels like a malignant narcissist in other ways, and maybe no amount of interacting with Socrates can undo that in a person.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess it becomes difficult. You know, the thing that this puts to my mind is like Peter Strassen's distinction, like between like the kind of second person versus third person, or how he puts it, perspective on like moral accountability, right? Like if you make them alien enough, if you think of them as really broken, then they're no longer morally responsible. Like if their brains just don't work, or something like that, right? And so, you know, I think the puzzle that's moving Socrates, when he says, "nobody does wrong willingly,"

• 42:24Speaker 01

  is presupposing that this is somebody within our moral space, who we can get like a basic grip of like, understanding why they do what they do. Can we then allow that they are, you know, understanding what is bad and still doing it? And I think his thought is like, no, we can't. And, you know, if the question is like, well, maybe this isn't really like a human being. Maybe it's like wearing a human disguise, but it's not actually a human being. I think Socrates might have said, "Okay, all bets are off then."

• 42:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  And so, so I don't know that it's just the ancients. Like, I think we continue to struggle with this thought that if you vilify someone enough, you actually lose a grip on the categories required to hold them accountable.

• 43:17Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 43:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, and look, that's the, that's the thing I'm sure future generations will have to wrap their heads around with Trump. To what degree is he aware that he's lying? And to what degree is he incapable fundamentally, constitutionally, of telling the truth? And, you know, those characters have existed in the plays of, you know, from the plays of Shakespeare all the way back to Rome. You know, how, how, how much do you hold a person responsible? And obviously, what we, the, it seems like the ancient philosophers seem to be under this sense that everyone's sort of a perfectly rational person. If you just get, get to the rationality, you're good.

• 44:07Ryan Holiday?

  But obviously, science and psychology is, you know, we now understand it's a, it's a tad grayer than nobody does wrong on purpose.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I don't know, I don't know that it's grayer. Like, it, it, it, it seems to me that, um, you know, there's a trade off between saying they did wrong on purpose, or rather, between saying that they understood that it was wrong and that they did it on purpose. And it, at least, it gets harder and harder to call it on purpose if they fully knew that it was wrong. Right?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  And we're like, like, we want to do both things. We want, and that's why we tend to create layers. We're like, on some level, he knew, right? Where the some level has got to not be the same level as the level on which it's on purpose to separate these things that seem to contradict one another. So I think we are just still in that Socratic predicament of, you know, that in some way, the very basic idea of agency is an attempt to do something good. Why would you do anything if you didn't think it was a good thing to do?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  And, uh, uh, you know, you, there are things that could happen to you that wouldn't be good, but if you were going to be in charge of it, you'd make it good, unless you didn't know how to make it good. And then you might unintentionally make it bad. Right? But that basic thought is like, I think continues to be pretty hard to evade, in my view.

• 45:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I, I'm fascinated. There's this statue of Nero and Seneca. I think it's by Eduardo Barone. It's, it's not super old. It's like maybe 200 years old or something like that. And, and then the statue, it's, it's sort of Nero on the throne and Seneca trying to teach him. And it's this fascinating statue because of, I think, the body language that it captures. And to me, it sort of perfectly nails what must have been their relationship. And to me, it captures the sort of, um, the, uh, the logic of that express, or the truth of that expression. Uh, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. You know, Nero has access to the greatest mind of his time, but something

• 46:38Ryan Holiday?

  in him or a part of him prevents himself. You know, Nero gets all the same instruction and has all the same advantages as Marcus Aurelius, but they turn out on opposite ends of the spectrum. Why does that happen? Uh, I, I just find to be endlessly fascinating.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:00Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, Nero could have been the philosopher king. Instead, he was the deranged murderous tyrant.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Right. Right.

• 47:12Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know. It's, uh, it's, that, that's what I think is so interesting about philosophy. Again, is these aren't, these aren't just happening in this small, you know, part of the world, that these sort of philosophical things are played out, you know, in the, in the court of the emperor. And, and that just how few generations pass from, you know, Socrates and Plato and the idea of a philosopher king, to actually getting a philosopher, philosopher king.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm trying to get like, I'm trying to think about like, what's the best way to think about being on the inside of that tension or something. And, you know, maybe just in terms of like, maybe one thing to think about is like Alcibiades's self description of being pulled in two directions, like in his speech at the end of the symposium, right? So because Alcibiades ends up going in the, you know, attempted tyrant direction, he's just not that successful, but he goes and sells himself to a bunch of different groups, right? And trying to be essentially a tyrant. And he's like, yeah, I'm really persuaded by

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Socrates whenever he's around. But then like, the minute he leaves, I'm like, I go back to my old ways. And I can, even when he's not around, I know that like, I know what he would be saying to me if he were around. I know how he would be criticizing me and stuff. But, and I know that I'll be ashamed the next time I run into him. But I, you know, I, I'm still lured by these worldly temptations. And then, and then I go back to Socrates. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to reform my ways. So anyway, the way Alcibiades describes it is as being a kind of, um, living in two worlds, and the pull of the one world eventually sort of winning out.

• 49:03Ryan Holiday?

  Well, maybe this goes to the, the, I think this, one of the central arguments in your other book, which is, you know, the idea of ambition. And so it's like, on the one hand, he has this love of wisdom, this love of truth, and he has this side of him that can be made to be good and all these things. And then on the other hand, he has this ambition. And, you know, he's being pulled in two different directions. And eventually, the ambition wins. And I think that's true in a lot of these sort of very powerful characters. The ambition wins. And very rarely does, does the goodness beat ambition historically.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I guess like what ambition is here, right, is taking your conception of the good or of success kind of prepackaged from your society, right? So it's like you can, without a lot of work, be like, okay, if I could make really a lot of money, that would be success, right? And Socratic success requires you to re-envision what success would be, right? Like, success for Socrates is knowledge. And a lot of the work there is in getting that into view as even being a target that you should have, whereas in the case of ambition, it isn't a lot of work to get into view what

• 50:29Speaker 01

  the target should be, right? That is like, that's handed to you from when you're a young child, that you can pursue honor and power and wealth, right? And you don't need to do work in order to come to value those things.

• 50:44Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, in Meditations, Marcus says, you know, ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say and do. I take this to mean external, external things, right? Power, fame, applause, etc. And he says sanity means tying it to your own actions. So there's a part of Alcibiades, or there's a part of, you know, let's say Alexander, who their ambition says success is conquering, success is power, success is relevance, you know, success is being in, you know, at the center of things, whatever it is. Then there's the other part of them, the part of them that loves wisdom, that maybe

• 51:28Ryan Holiday?

  deep down suspects that that's not enough, that it's too, you know, to just pursue that is insufficient, and so ultimately they chase. Or it's hard to nail down, and how do you know whether you're making progress? And so they chase, they chase wealth or achievement or whatever. Cicero, to me, being a great example of this too. Nobody knows ancient philosophy better than Cicero, and ultimately, nobody's life is sort of more pathetic and less philosophical in the big pivotal moments.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that I really like that that quote about tying your well being to what other people say. What are people saying do you it's like. Um, there's a and and maybe that's also important.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  In like to thinking about like, why didn't these philosophers succeed more? Um, because I do think that's the question that that Plato was putting before himself in terms of defending Socrates. Right. Like the symposium is a kind of defense of Socrates and because Alcibiades is like exhibit A as to why you should kill Socrates. Right. And and I think the thought is like, well, it was up to Alcibiades, right? That's the, you know, like, it's like, don't get mad at Socrates like you, you know, if the thought here is that. Um, um, the problem is people tying their well being to what other people say and do as opposed to what as opposed to what? Well, as opposed to actually figuring it out for themselves, right?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  And actually figuring it out for yourself is not something that any philosopher can do for you if that's the goal. Right. Um, so it can't be the philosopher's fault that you didn't do it because you had to do it. That's the whole point. Like, it could be someone's fault for not, you know, feeding you the ideology, which had you believed it, you would have acted appropriately. But if the whole point is for you not to have an ideology, then um. It's hard to like, the philosopher can help you to the extent that you're willing to be helped. And then there isn't anything more that they can do because you can't someone else can't do your thinking for you.

• 53:46Ryan Holiday?

  Right. No, that's that's what I mean about sort of you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. I think that's fascinating, too, with Marcus Aurelius. Um, you know, so he's chosen to be king, you know, it's not it's not part of his ambition. But at some sometime in his twenties, uh, Rusticus uh, hands him a copy of the lectures of Epictetus. We don't know if it's if it's the notes that Rusticus takes himself or if it's just, you know, the the an early edition of of Arian's transcriptions. But but what I what I've honed in on there is like, so he gives him the book recommendation. And that's what the philosophy teacher's job is to do. But nobody makes Marcus read it.

• 54:28Ryan Holiday?

  And more importantly, nobody forces Marcus Aurelius to actually live by these ideas. And so the philosophy teacher can only kind of open the door, but you, the student has to walk through it and the student has to live there if they, if they choose.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and arguably, you know, Socrates is sort of way, way more hands on than that, right? Like nowadays, I think we do think of philosophical engagement as happening in large part through books, where there's something very hands off and um, kind of, in a way, kind of liberating, right? About engaging with a philosopher through a book, like you can stop anytime you want. You can take what you want from it. Um, the, the interaction is completely governed by the student. By contrast with conversations with Socrates, when people are often kind of like, I don't really want to be doing this anymore. And Socrates is like, come on, let's keep talking.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  So, so like, I mean, there's only so much that uh, even Socrates can do. But like, if you're a philosopher writing a book, there's even less. But it's, it's really up to the reader of the book, not only to read it, to think about it, to internalize some parts of it, to resist some parts of it, and then to like, realize it in some way in their life, right? Like you're, you're figuring only at the very beginning stage of that.

• 55:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that was the last thing I, I wanted to kick around with you. I read your piece on acceptance parenting, which I thought was fascinating. And I've got two young kids, so I, I related to it. How does, your, the sort of question of your piece is sort of like, how do you raise kids to be successful in an uncertain world, which is, I think deliberately an unanswerable question. That's sort of your premise of the piece. But maybe my question to you would be, and maybe you don't have an answer, maybe you do. How does one raise philosophical kids? Like, how does one apply, you know, as you said, the sort of more hands on version of Socrates's philosophical approach? How do you, how do you cultivate that in kids?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  So it's weird because I don't, I don't see myself at all as having set out to do that.

• 56:43Ryan Holiday?

  How old are your kids or your, your kid?

• 56:45Speaker 01

  My kids are seventeen, twelve and seven, but my seven year old recently, it turned out in school, they asked what they wanted to be when they were, when they grew up and he said, not only did he say a philosopher, but he, he said, he didn't put in these words because he basically said he wants to be a philosopher who works on Spinoza.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Because we had talked to him about, he has this view that like God is everything and God is in everything. And we've talked about how this is actually, he's, he's kind of reinventing Spinozaism and stuff. So he's like, okay, I guess that's my thing, you know, I'm going to work on Spinoza. So I definitely think my kids have absorbed a lot of, um, you know, philosophical culture.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  And I think, um, maybe, maybe it's that,

• 57:34Speaker 01

  some people have like multiple hats. Like, you know, they, they speak in multiple different registers or,

• 57:44Speaker 01

  they have like a diff, like several personi, right? Um, so you might, for instance, you might meet them and talk to them in their office and then you might hear them give a lecture and then you might be go to their house and they would seem sort of like three different people.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  And I'm less like that than anyone I know. Like I, I don't have, um, multiple registers. So it's, it's less like a matter of,

• 58:17Ryan Holiday?

  So philosophy isn't a performance for you, it's who you are.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I don't, I don't want to say that it's a performance for those people either. Like they, they, they might just have three authentic selves or something. Do you see what I mean?

• 58:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  It's just that I don't have any other self to fall back on. And so I didn't have any other way to do parenting than to like ask my kids questions and talk to them about things and,

• 58:46Speaker 01

  so, so it, it, it, it was not at all a strategy, but I do think it has ended up making them be quite philosophical and they have told me, like when they go to other kids' houses, they're like, they don't argue at all in the dinner table.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  And, um, uh, you know, it's like, it's unimaginable for us to have a dinner table conversation that doesn't involve some argument about, like, last night, it was, um, what is, my seven-year-old came up with, what would be the best kind of glove you could have? If you could have your dream glove? It's like, what a weird question, right? You know? It was like, okay, so now we're gonna like, try and think about what is the ideal kind of glove? And then there were all kinds of questions about whether, for instance, if there were claws and things coming out of the glove, did that count? Was that like a glove? Or that not even a glove anymore? Right? So the borderline between a glove and non-glove is, has to get adjudicated in this conversation

• 59:46Speaker 01

  about what's the dream glove? Right? That's like a normal dinner conversation for us. And I kind of like, can't imagine what we would talk about if we didn't do that. But I know mostly from my kids that that's like, not the way, what other people do. So I don't, I don't have a good, uh, it wasn't like, I wasn't selecting between options. Let's put it that way.

• 1:00:05Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Did you actively encourage this idea of having sort of debates and discussions over dinner? Or, or again, was that just something that sort of happened because they saw you doing that?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, um, my guess, if I had to guess as to how it would arise, it would be something like this. Um, you know, say with my oldest, right? Like, we'd be sitting at the table, and I would be trying to have a conversation with my husband, that now ex-husband, but at the time husband, while my son was like, you know, eating his food and blabbering and whatever. And eventually, like, my son would figure out that he has to try to participate in the conversation that we're having, if he's gonna like, get our attention. Right? And then with each child, they're in a sense, they have to join the club or something, you know, and they have to find a way to join it. And I do think we make an effort,

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  something we, so I don't think a lot of this is intentional, but the part that is intentional is we make a very big effort to always include everyone in the conversation. We have rules about like, things you're not allowed to talk about at dinner is like, things where other people haven't like, seen the movie or read the book. So the conversation has to be open and accessible. And then there's just a strong incentive, I think, for the kid, the youngest kid, to get up to speed to the point where they can participate in it. So my guess is that that's how it goes. It's not that we tried to bring it about. We did try to be a bit open, but it's that they want to be, they want to participate. And like, this is the price of admission.

• 1:01:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, one of the questions I get from a lot of people, they'll go like, how can I introduce my kids to Stoicism? Or how can I introduce my kids to philosophy? What advice do you have? And this, you know, some, it's funny, like, sometimes they'll be like, you know, my kid is seven, how do I introduce them to philosophy? And then other times, they'll be like, my kid's a 20, you know, 21 year old junior in college, how do I introduce them to philosophy? It's funny to me that the question is still the same. But it also strikes me at how modern that question is, because like, I don't think that's what the Greeks or the Romans were thinking. Like, like, you know, George Washington was considered like, stupid among the founders, because he'd only read philosophy in English as a

• 1:02:36Ryan Holiday?

  child, didn't also know it in, in Greek Latin or French, the way that, say, Jefferson did. So there's this, there's almost this kind of patronizing approach that we have today, where it's like, of course, you know, a kid couldn't understand these ideas, but for thousands of years, kids have understood these ideas.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it's gonna be very hard to introduce your kids to philosophy if you're not interested in it.

• 1:03:03Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  So, and I think if you are, like, you're, um, you're just gonna end up talking to them about it. Like, so, I mean, that is, I think that, like, you have to, in terms of introducing them, like, it, you know, at least for me, the most natural way that it comes up is just that there's like some question that we're, we want to know the answer to. Um, and, um, uh, you know, like, what, what was one, one we really debated for a long time was, um, um, uh, if, if, if there were, um, can, my, this was my seven year old came up with this, if there were conjoined twins, and one of them committed a crime, uh, and you, should you put them both in jail?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Um, so, uh, and, you know, questions about, like, lots of interesting questions arose about, like, like, could the sec, could the innocent twin really have been fully innocent? Like, could he have not known at all if they're conjoined, right? And maybe they could have resisted or something, um, but like, it's more important to not jail the innocent than to jail the guilty, but what if the crime is really bad, right? Uh, it's a lot, lot, this, this question has like tons of interesting stuff about more responsibility, you know, baked into it. And I think, like, if you're interested in the question, then the kids are, are, I think in certain ways, kids are more naturally philosophical than adults. Like, I feel like the question should be from kids, how do I interest my grownups in philosophy?

• 1:04:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, or, or maybe it's, how do I not discourage my kids' interest in philosophy? And maybe first and foremost is not making them think philosophy is this thing, this external sort of ghettoized thing, but we go back more towards the Socrates model, which is that philosophy is asking questions about what you know and don't know, and trying to get to truth in some form or another. It's, it's, philosophy is not philosophizing, philosophy is, is the, the search and the love of wisdom.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Yes, but I also think it's nice to have these sort of figures that are kind of like philosophy heroes.

• 1:05:09Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Where like even, you know, even if, um, I mean, my two older kids have actually read philosophical texts. My younger one hasn't, but like, but like recently he was really, really, really angry about something. I can't remember what it was, but he, and he was trying to think of the worst thing that he could say. And he said something like, I don't like Aristotle. Aristotle was stupid.

• 1:05:34Ryan Holiday?

  He was like. That just stabbed you in the heart?

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so like that indicates, right, that in his mind Aristotle, you know, he's never read any Aristotle, but has a kind of status, right? Um, and so I think that like the idea that people have been thinking about these things for thousands of years and there were these kind of like heroes of thought, um, that we have sort of access to.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that that's kids really, um, uh, they connect with figures, I think, with individuals, people, right? Um, um, so that like for my son, you know, like Spinoza, like that's like that my, my way of life is a, is a person. My, my thinking is, you know, can be, can be sort of condensed into a person. That, um, I think that, yeah, so I would say like, uh, you only need the cartoon version of each of these people or like some interesting points or something that's made by them. I don't, but I think that having some connection to that world, um, uh, makes it in some way makes it real for kids.

• 1:06:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you, it's funny. You said cartoon version, right? If you, if you lived in a Roman villa, your family would have, you know, busts of, of Socrates or Cato or Seneca or, or, you know, you would have the, you would have the likeness of these heroes embodied, uh, in, in, you know, in your library or in your hallway. Um, and this was a tradition that existed. I mean, Until relatively recently, you know, I have this little bust of Marcus Aurelius on my desk that it was made in 1840. And, you know, that was before images could be so easily reproduced. I guess paintings too, but yeah, what paintings were the Renaissance painters doing?

• 1:07:27Ryan Holiday?

  It's the death of Socrates and the death of Seneca. Like, it's also the imagery and creating this sort of lexicon or this familiarity with these figures to, again, make them flesh and blood people that you're trying to either live up to or to be the opposite of. And maybe that's another way to teach kids philosophy, you know, instead of reading them, instead of having a poster of Curious George up on the wall, you know, who are the philosophical heroes you're helping them understand?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Right. And like, they, you know, they have other, they have, my kids have lots of heroes. So, like Curious George too, but, but I think that, like, the idea that it's possible to devote your life to thinking, I guess. Like, I think that it's nice to have that as a, as a possibility, as a possible life that's put before you. I mean, I didn't have it as a kid, but, but, and I, and I, it's not as though I intentionally put it forward to my kids, but that's just, I guess I could, you know, I wouldn't be able to be me and not be always talking about these people that for me figure largely, so.

• 1:08:42Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think it's interesting. Yeah, you mentioned the play that satirizes Socrates. You know, there's not a lot of philosophers that get parodied in hit films or plays these days. So there's, you almost have to compensate by making philosophy relevant at home. So, because certainly pop culture's not doing it the way that it would have done when these figures were essentially rock stars. Like, nobody's bothering to put Socrates to death in 2021 because he's just not much of a threat.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. They talk about Socrates. I used that, I used an image from that for a poster for an event I did on public philosophy. And my son saw it and was like, what is this? Something from the 70s?

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  So that's why, that's when I realized, like, like, many, many people in my audience are not going to know what this is a reference to, sadly.

• 1:09:46Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, when I tell people about Marcus Aurelius, I go, you know, the, the, the, the guy, the old guy at the beginning of Gladiator, that Joaquin Phoenix's character kills. And it was, it was so funny. I was talking to a, because my books have sort of become popular in sports, I was talking to a, let's call it a first round, high level draft pick in the NFL, who had, who'd come to Stoicism through my books. And, and it was, this is the first time I felt really old from, from this, is he, he said, you know, he read about Marcus Aurelius, and he goes, I'm thinking about watching the movie Gladiator. Is it any good? Do I, should I watch it? And it struck me that he was born the year that

• 1:10:28Ryan Holiday?

  the movie Gladiator came out, and is now 20 years old, or 21 years old. And so even that movie is like, probably the most philosophical movie, as far as ancient Rome goes, of the last, you know, few decades, isn't even relevant to him.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, I mean, you're right that that is not, there's not a lot being produced along those lines.

• 1:10:54Ryan Holiday?

  It's, uh, but we'll have, we'll have to resolve that. And hopefully, you know, podcasts are new. And I mean, where else, I, the one thing I, that gets me excited is podcasts are, to me, some, some inching our way slightly back towards the sort of Socratic debates and the, the, the sort of accessible, but also popular discourses about philosophy that I, I think, I think you could take an ancient Roman and plug them into a podcast, and they'd, they'd get what's happening here quite, quite clearly.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true, though I think that, like, there's a kind of, you could, if you do like a spectrum, and you had...

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  I think you could have podcasts at one end and at the other end you would have something like, you know, philosophical dialogues in, written in the dialogue form, but not written by Plato, you know, like, like, I don't know, Augustine or Hume, all these, all these other people who wrote dialogues, right? Not just Plato, it's not the only guy who wrote dialogues, Barclay, right? So, the, like, the, the kind of philosophical dialogues, like, they're, they're sort of, they're not as fun to read as Plato, like, because it, it sort of feels like the interlocutor is just a device.

• 1:12:19Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  On the other hand, they get a lot of argumentative work done. And then the podcast is, I think, very engaging and you sort of, there's a bunch of ideas put out there and it's, it's, it's, it's fun to listen to. I admit, I like, basically don't listen to podcasts. I read them when there's a transcript, but I find it very hard to listen. And, like, the Socratic dialogues are just this amazing middle ground in terms of being both engaging, but also really pursuing a line of thought in a quite extended way, you know? For like, sometimes, like, I mean, the Republic or the Gorgias, that's a lot of pages and it's quite focused, I think. So that's a thing I don't think we've figured out how to do yet with podcasts.

• 1:13:04Ryan Holiday?

  But I, and I think, I think the difference there between those sort of three, those three examples on the spectrum, the thing that makes, that this conversation engaging, but probably not essential, and the, the other dialogues as being, you know, containing wisdom but not being interesting, and what puts Socrates right there in the center, is the urgency and the stakes of what happens. You know, he's talking about, in some cases, matters of life and death, or he's talking about really real questions. What is courage? What is endurance? What is piety? You know, he's talking about the central questions of

• 1:13:41Ryan Holiday?

  our time in the real world at real moments, sometimes of, of real physical peril. And thankfully, you might argue that none of that is at stake in this conversation, but, but it's what makes Socrates sort of the one and only.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point. I think there's a kind of, most people who are on podcasts, both the podcaster and the guest. Are there, there's a kind of leisure that, a kind of lack of urgency. That's, that's, you're right about that.

• 1:14:14Ryan Holiday?

  We're not arguing for our life or for, you know, not really arguing for anything. We're just having a conversation and, which is great. But there's some, some, some element of, of urgency falls away.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, thank you so, so much. This was amazing. I'm a huge fan of your work and we'll, we'll talk when your next book comes out.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks very much for having me.

• 1:14:39Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 1:14:42Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The, the reviews make a difference. And of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So 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.