It Begs To Linger | Ryan Holiday Visited The BEST Swimming Pools All Over The World (Here's What He Learned)

Once you let anger into your life, once you let it motivate or animate you, it’s very hard to get rid of. It’s hard to find a substitute that measures up. It’s hard to let it go. 🪙 Carry The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/anger-medallion as a reminder to pause. A pause creates space. A pause creates clarity. A pause can change everything. | Grab The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/anger-medallion at dailystoic.com/pause http://dailystoic.com/pause Get $20 off when you purchase the Pause & Reflect Medallion and Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Course for Controlling Anger https://store.dailystoic.com/cart | Get this discount here https://store.dailystoic.com/cart 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content coming soon: dailystoic.com/premium http://dailystoic.com/premium 🎟️ Come seeRyan Holiday LIVE in Austin, Texas https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ on September 17! | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 📖 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/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: 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 https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  It begs to linger. It's fuel for you. It's a powerful force you tap into. It's a shield you use to protect yourself. Many of us use anger in our lives. Productively, we tell ourselves. It's what's driven our career. It's what's behind our activism. It's what allows us to put ourselves out there, that desire to prove someone wrong, to punish some wrongdoer, to feel alive. But the problem with anger, as the song we quoted recently puts it, is that it begs to stick around. As a fuel, anger is both explosive and addictive. Has anyone ever actually felt like they finally did stick it to those doubters

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  and can now rest securely in their accomplishments? Of course not. Anger finds the next target, the next slight to obsess over, the next molehill to turn into a mountain. It doesn't burn itself out, but it does eventually burn everything around it. The Stoics knew that anger was very dangerous. This is why they warned against revenge. This is why Marcus quoted that line from the now-lost Euripides play to remind himself of the impotence of rage. "Why should we feel anger at the world?" he asks, "as if the world would notice." Once you let anger into your life, once you let it motivate and animate you, it's very hard to get rid of.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  It's very hard to find a substitute that measures up. It's hard to let it go. But imagine a life without anger's presence. Imagine if you had control of your temper. How much better would you be? How much purer would you be? How much lighter would you be? And we actually have two really great reminders, I think. So one is the Daily Stoic Pause and Reflect coin, which I've been carrying as my daily carry lately. It's just a reminder. It's got a mirror on the front. Like, what do you think you look like here? But Seneca's line about how delay is the best remedy is the reminder I want with me. And then for many years, we've had our Tame Your Temper course. It's an 11-day Stoic deep dive into what they can teach us about anger. It's not that you have an anger problem, or maybe you do.

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  I'm just saying that anger causes problems for all of us. And the Stoics have a lot to teach us about that. And you can get the coin and the course as a bundle right now and save 20 bucks. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not saying that the Stoics were swimmers. Almost certainly, most of them were not. But there is something very Stoic about swimming. Sometimes the water's really cold and you don't want to get in. Sometimes there's big waves and it's scary. Sometimes you're nervous about what lurks beneath. Swimming gets you alone with your own thoughts. Swimming challenges you physically. It challenges you. Mentally, but if you do it right, if you achieve what the Stoics call the smooth flow of life, if you learn to work with the water, not to fight it too hard, there's a tranquility and a mastery and a confidence and a peace and a stillness that comes from it. And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. I've been swimming since I was a little kid. I was on a swim team. I try to get in the water every single week,

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  not just in my pool at home or in Barton Springs, which is one of my favorite places on earth, but when I travel also. And I'm so often thinking about Stoic philosophy while I'm in the water. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius writes a good chunk of Meditations, looking at the Danube River. He talks about washing off the dust of earthly life in the Roman baths. Seneca takes a cold plunge every New Year's Day. The Stoics knew that water was soothing and calm, but also invigorating and challenging. But also, I found swimming to be the most meditative thing that I do in my life, where I've had most of my biggest breakthroughs as a human being, trying to apply Stoicism in my life. I think there's a reason that every Zen garden has a fountain. There's something about the running of water. There's also something cleansing about water. Whether you grew up around water, whether you know how to swim, whether you don't, you've got to figure out some way to build, I think, a Stoic practice

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  around water. Of course, it's also a life force for us. If you're not drinking water, eventually you die, right? I think there's a reason that the theme of water runs through the Stoics. What is the role that water has in your life? How is it replenishing and recharging, but also challenging and invigorating?

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite passages in all of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about being the rock that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around. There's something really special about water. I just went for this swim in Lake Michigan, but I'm just standing here by the water, listening to the waves, trying to sort of slow myself down. I have a talk I have to give later today. I have to travel later today. I have a bunch of stuff I have to do, but I want to, I want to get in that place of stillness, euphemia, as Seneca talks about, tranquility. I wanted to get to a place of peace. Even though everything is crazy, it's slowing down around me and I'm going to be able to do what I have to do for the day.

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  The reason not to let it get to you, Marcus Rilis reminds us, is that it doesn't last. He says, "Time and events, they flow past us like a river at an incredible rate. Everything is changing," he says, "nothing is stable and very little actually lasts." He says, "It would take an idiot to feel self-important, to be irritated, to take any of this as permanent, because it isn't. It's always changing, it's always moving, and you don't know what's coming next."

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  In one of my favorite passages in meditations, Marcus Rilis talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. And we know that he visited these ancient springs in a quincum, the Roman camp, in what is now Budapest. And so, we wanted to come here. This is Balmore, the biggest spring, natural spring pool in the world. It's kind of like Barton Springs. And we wanted to jump in. I swam, let's see, about a half mile. And then, I went on the high dive a couple times. My wife Samantha didn't want to do the high dive yesterday, but she convinced herself to do it this morning, which is fitting, being that this is the trip for the courage book. So she worked up the courage to do it, jumped off. I'm not sure she was actually that pleased, but at least she's pleased with herself for doing it. Kids got in the pool, we saw some turtles and some fish.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  Even when you love the water, even when you swim all the time, even though you know it at some level, you almost never like getting in. Getting in is hard. Getting in takes some getting used to, but you're almost always glad that you did get in. It reminds me of this thing from Musonius Rufus where he says, "When you do something difficult, the labor passes quickly, but the good remains." And he says, "When you do something easy or you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures." And I think about, it's like, I didn't want to get in, it was cold, it was uncomfortable, I didn't like getting splashed, I didn't know how it would feel. But afterwards, you're always glad you did it.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Look, maybe there's some health benefits to cold plunges. People say it's better for their circulation, it's better for your immune system, it helps you recover. Honestly, I don't know, it could all be complete and total bullshit. In fact, there's a part of me that thinks that it probably is. But to me, the benefit of a cold plunge is the mental benefit. Seneca said, "We treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind." The point of the cold plunge is that you are doing something hard. You are doing it for an amount of time that you committed to, even though every part of you is screaming to stop, to get out, you do it anyway. That's the muscle that you're building, that's the muscle that you're providing benefits to. The part of your body that wants to quit, but the part of your mind that says, "No, I decide. I am in charge." When you crank the handle on the shower, when you jump in a snowmelt river,

• 8:58Speaker 01

  when you jump in the ocean, when you get in a cold plunge, that's what you're doing. You're saying, "I am in charge, I can do hard things." You don't like it while you're doing it, but you like how you feel after.

• 9:16Ryan Holiday?

  I've been to some pretty incredible places in my life, but it is almost unbelievable to me that you can still bathe in the hot springs that the Spartans bathed in before they faced Xerxes and a million Persian men at the final stand of Thermopylae. And it's just pouring from the earth, it's still 104 degrees Fahrenheit, it smells terribly like sulfur, but it is just absolutely surreal. And it's free, there's not even like an entrance fee or a security guard. You just walk in and bathe in a stream that 2,600 or so years ago, the bravest warriors who ever lived, who gave everything to protect all of Western civilization to come.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  You can just get in it and wash away the dirt of earthly life, as Marcus Aurelius said.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And that whole thing with Michael was interesting because it started quite benignly. Yeah. He was 12. I started working with him because we had limited pool space, like every club in America, right? The group that he was in practiced one time per day and then they practiced on Sundays. That was the best attended practice. Everybody would come. Yeah. Saturday, Sunday morning. Everybody thinks, oh my God, that's terrible. And there were people in the group who would, you know, Wednesdays was the day off for them when he started. And then he got good and I was like, well, yeah, Michael needs to be challenged. So he'd come on Wednesdays and he was just going seven days. Yeah. But it was like an hour and a half. It wasn't some big deal. Yeah. And he would go play lacrosse and all this stuff. And then he moved into my group and we were still going seven days. And we did that till he was 12, 13, 14, because

• 10:49Speaker 02

  he was only training one time per day. He wasn't training like, you know, a lot. Then we started doing a little bit more. We put in two doubles a week and stayed on the Sundays because we were just doing it. And we went on a national team trip, one of his very first ones. One of the older guys were on their bus and I don't even know how we got into this. They're like, hey Phelps, I bet you even, you train every day? Do you train every day? He's like, yeah. Like, he didn't know any different. Yeah. I was just like, he's like, do you train on Christmas? And he was like, yeah. And on Christmas, literally, they came in and swam for 30 minutes and we played water polo. It wasn't like a big deal, but it was just enough to kind of keep it going. And the guys were like, gave him this look that I knew that that was a huge psychological advantage. Yeah. And Michael's like, we're going to keep doing this. They were then terrified of

• 11:34Speaker 02

  him at that point. And then he just kept going. And, you know, you can make the case that those 52 days a year that other people aren't training, you do that for six years? Sure. Picked up six months.

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  I would think you would want to know. I think you would want to know what you're capable of, what your limits are, the difficult, challenging things you can do, you can endure. Actually, Socrates said this. Of course, we think of him as a wise philosopher, but he was a tough guy. He served in the military. He challenged himself. He tested himself physically. He said, "It is a shame to grow old and not know what your body is capable of." He actually said that no citizen was exempt from keeping themselves in peak physical condition. He said, "Because you might have to serve your country one day." I just think the point is, we don't just want to explore our limits intellectually. We don't just want to expand our brains. We gotta work on our bodies, too. We gotta push ourselves physically. We gotta do hard things. We gotta train ourselves. This miraculous physical specimen, this machine we are inside.

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  We, we wanna see what we can do with it. We wanna see what we can make of it. We wanna see where it can take us.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  You don't have to be an elite athlete. You don't have to be like a strong man, strong woman. You don't have to be that in order to take advantage of what your body is and what your muscles can do for you.

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  You know, and it was like that for why we swim, too. Like, I wanted that book to be for people who didn't. Obviously, it's for swimmers.

• 12:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Who identify as I'm a swimmer, but for people who, even if they are afraid of the water, that we all have some relationship with water.

• 13:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  And in this case, we all have a relationship with our bodies. We all have a relationship with like moving through the world, which is what our muscles do.

• 13:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  And it's like, it's about capability. It's about action. And so like that philosophy of muscle is kinda cool to me. Like, that's what I took away from the process of writing it.

• 13:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a Roman expression, I have it in the book that I'm doing now, where they were saying like, a good education should teach a child like about books and how to swim.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

• 13:31Ryan Holiday?

  Just like if you don't know those two things.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  That was like a moral failing if you didn't know how to swim.

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but then you just read about like, pretty much like right after that, just nobody learned how to swim. Like Benjamin Franklin was considered a fucking weirdo because he knew how to swim and he would swim. Like sailors didn't know how to swim.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yes, fishermen don't know how to swim.

• 13:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's just like, I think that's kinda the point that Socrates was making. It's like, you have this thing and you're just remarkably uncurious about. Imagine you make your living on the ocean and you're like, but I don't go in there.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:03Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that just seems strange.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  It does seem strange.

• 14:09Ryan Holiday?

  It's pretty surreal. It's actually warmer in the water than it is outside right now. It's like 70, a little more than 70 in the water and it's like 40 out. It's pretty freezing. I just had a million gallon swimming pool filled with endangered fish and soft shell turtles, totally to myself. It was like five bucks to get in here. The best things in life truly are very cheap things, things a lot of people take for granted. And they usually involve getting out and getting active.

• 14:48Ryan Holiday?

  I'm in Lake Boeotia in Greece and one of the crazy parts of this insanely beautiful place is that there are these little fish in the water and they're eating the skin off of your feet. They're eating your dead skin. And it makes me think of that line from Seneca where he says, "Death isn't a thing that happens at the end." He says, "We're wrong to think of death as something we're moving towards." He says, "Death is happening right now." His point is that we're dying every minute. We're dying every day. And there's something about this sensation of them eating the skin off of your body, the dead skin off of your body, that makes you realize that you are covered in death, that getting older, that falling apart, that decay. Death, it's not a thing that happens at the end. It's happening now. We're dying every minute. We're dying every second. We're

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  falling apart every minute, every second. Entropy is working on us. Old age is working on us. Death is coming for us in little tiny pieces, in the form of fish, in the form of your hair going gray, in the form of your hair falling out, in the form of your muscles and bones getting weak. Even though we can't always perceive it, we are always aging, we are always dying. And that's the Stoic lesson of memento mori. Not just that you could go at any moment, but that you are in fact going at every moment. And that's why we have to be so conscious of how we spend our time. Because the way we spend our time is how we are spending our lives. And quite literally, we are spending our life, our most precious resource, on everything that we do. And to waste it is

• 16:12Ryan Holiday?

  to waste the most essential thing that there is.

• 16:17Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.