You Made That Up | Robert Greene's Favorite Stoic Lessons

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You made that up. If you don't answer this call, you could lose your job. If you keep passing on these opportunities, you could get passed over in your career. If you miss this flight, the vacation could be ruined. If you let your employees do that, they'll think you're a pushover. In the course of a day, we make hundreds and thousands of assumptions. We rely on causal links. If this, then that. If not this, then that. That while rarely spelled out explicitly, they cause us worry and concern. The problem is, most of this logic is spurious at best. Most of these assumptions are faulty. We're just making them up, even though they make us miserable. And this is why the use of reason,

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  as well as reflection, was so important to the Stoics. Because in pausing and examining, we find that much of our anxiety, much of our franticness, much of our suffering, is self-inflicted and totally unnecessary. One missed meeting, or a phone call, or an opportunity is not going to determine the future of your life. Sometimes you have travel difficulties. That's just how it goes. Your employees don't think you're a pushover and probably appreciate what you did for them. So what is real in these moments? What are you making up? Stop extrapolating. Stop adding in the lens of anxiety. Stop putting your worries and stress and assumptions on it. And when you remove these self-inflicted and likely incorrect assumptions,

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  you're able to face whatever comes with the right reaction.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  We tend to think of philosophers as people who lived a really long time ago, right? They've got these unpronounceable names and they talk about these big abstract ideas. But in fact, there are brilliant, wise philosophers walking among us right now.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  In fact, no one has taught me more about applying Stoic wisdom to your actual life than the one and only Robert Greene, who I think is one of our great living philosophers and thinkers, whose works will be read hundreds and hundreds of years from now. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written books about Stoic philosophy. I've been able to speak about it to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. But almost every step of my career, I've been following in the footsteps of Robert Greene, who has been my mentor, who I was lucky enough to be a research assistant for. And Robert has, over the years and many conversations, expressed to me the essence of Stoic philosophy. And although Robert's books are controversial and sometimes poorly understood, in fact, no one has taught me more about Stoic

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  philosophy than Robert Greene. Robert himself once showed me his copy of Marcus Aurelius, which had tons of little notes in the corner. So he's been a practitioner of Stoic philosophy for many years. And in today's episode, I want to give you some more Stoic wisdom from the one and only Robert Greene.

• 3:20Robert Greene?

  Realistic outlook on life. Try to forget about all the bullshit, all the things that you learned in university, all the bad ideas that you got from your parents, all the bad ideas that you get from your peers. And you're able to look at the world relatively objectively, and I mean relatively. And it doesn't mean that life becomes this kind of boring, gray world of just, it actually becomes more exciting and fulfilling. And so I learned that the hard way with that kind of realistic attitude, which I was forged through a lot of battles. It's really, really what allowed me to write The Forty Eight Laws of Power. And the second thing was... The power of daily practice. Yes. Of habits. Now, I've been meditating for about 11, exactly 11 years now, every single day.

• 4:05Robert Greene?

  Don't miss a single day. If I miss one day, I make sure the next day I do it two times. And the habit of doing it every day is just very fulfilling. It becomes something I've been forward to, and it's really helped have a profound effect upon me. But habits of work and discipline, where every day you attack something, is where the power of our brain operates maximally.

• 4:30Robert Greene?

  We so intellectualize and verbalize things, but life is a feeling inside your body. It's an energy, it's a force. How could you ever put the words that would describe what it's like?

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  It's ineffable.

• 4:41Robert Greene?

  It's ineffable, but you know it when it's like leaving you, what that feeling is like. So there was another woman who I've, she wrote a great book about her stroke called Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte. She became a neuroscientist. She had a much worse stroke, and she literally felt all of the life draining out of her body, inch by inch by inch, as like, as death was passing through her. I had a little bit of that, and I also felt that this kind of force that is being alive is like being drained out of me. It wasn't as strong as that because my stroke wasn't as bad. But I did connect to the feeling of life and the feeling of death,

• 5:25Robert Greene?

  because I had the feeling of death in my body, as I described earlier, the sense of my bones kind of shriveling and melting and getting soft, and kind of everything that makes you alive, kind of leaving your body. So it makes you aware that there's a physical, a physicality to being alive, to being conscious, and to that you carry your death within you.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  I love this quote, and I read it at the beginning of the pandemic, and it's been helpful to me. I think it kind of connects to what you're talking about in the sublime book, Marx's Realist and Meditations. He says he learns from one of his mentors, that the key to happiness is to be free of passion, but full of love. What does that mean to you?

• 6:12Robert Greene?

  I'm not quite sure. I don't know if I, can you help me a little bit and then I'll riff?

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  I was taking it as meaning like, you're not angry, you're not jealous, you're not frustrated. Like the passions, the sort of negative emotions as the Stoics talk about.

• 6:28Robert Greene?

  So love isn't a passion?

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  But that love is some sort of deeper emotion, some better way to go through the world. That of all the passions, that was the one that was okay.

• 6:40Robert Greene?

  Okay, so love is a passion?

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, it's something that, you know, I believe very much so. And it is, it is kind of touching upon the sublime. But all the other passions are very inward moving, right? They're about you, about your anger, they're about your frustration. Yes, you could be angry because some people are doing some really fucked up things to you at some point, right? So it's not completely you, but the emotion is geared towards how you feel. And you want to get retribution if someone's hurt you, you want revenge, you know? So it's all very kind of self-centered. But love is the one emotion that forces you outside of yourself.

• 7:22Robert Greene?

  True love, because there can be fake love, where you, really it's just a form of narcissism, where you want people to give you the attention and feed the image you have of yourself. But true love, the ability to get outside of yourself and to feel what other people are feeling, which is empathy, and empathy, which is a word I'm afraid it's overused, and I'm getting a little tired of it, I wish we could find a better word. But it's a major theme in the sublime, because the idea is, the highest mental power that we humans have, the source really of our intelligence, is what they call theory of mind, that we are able to place ourselves in the bodies and the minds of other people, what's made us the supreme social animal, right?

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  To be able to think about what someone else is thinking.

• 8:10Robert Greene?

  Yeah. And it's not only just for love, it's also for fighting your opponent, et cetera, and for dealing any kind of social situation. But it's the source of all of our intelligence, right? It's the source of our science. A great scientist like an Einstein is thinking inside the very subjects he's trying to get into, right?

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  And that's where his metaphors and analogies often come from, because he's able to think about it. Oh, this is like this.

• 8:38Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Robert Greene?

  So that's the source of our power. And so, high level empathy, where you're able to think inside of other people, to kind of imagine what they are going through, what their feelings are, is to me, the highest passion of all, which is a form of love, and it is extremely sublime.

• 9:00Robert Greene?

  I'm actually not as secure and certain of myself as people think I am. Whenever I hold a belief or I'm writing a book, I always start with the premise that I'm probably wrong, that I'm actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side, and I examine it, and I try and convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn't, then I change it. But it's very painful, because you want desperately to hold on to those beliefs that you had initially. So, the number one thing about reality is confronting yourself. The fact that you are a limited human being, with unlimited cognitive abilities, you are emotion-based,

• 9:43Robert Greene?

  and so your relationship to the world is usually through thick layers of illusions that come from the media, that come from your childhood, that come from your culture that you live in. And that you have to cut through those layers, but you have to confront yourself and see yourself as the source of them.

• 10:02Robert Greene?

  One of the things in our nature that's extremely powerful is our ability to get inside the perspective of others and get inside their world. But empathy is a really hard thing to write about, because it's not something you can quantify. We're such a culture that loves data and quantifying things. You can't really write a book about empathy in any kind of realistic, practical way, because it's a feeling, it's a visceral emotion. It has to be a feeling. And we have this power because as primates for hundreds of thousands of years, we lived without the ability of language in our earliest ancestors.

• 10:44Robert Greene?

  And we had to understand each other without being able to speak words. We're incredibly attuned to the emotions and moods of people around us. And I know in my life, I practice empathy on a very deep level. So when I go, I'm out in the world and I'm in a store or something, or wherever I'm on the street, and I see someone, I go through this process where I go, what is it like to be that person? What is it like to be them, to feel like them? You know? What is it like to grow up in a house? I imagine a background for them. And I use my imagination to get inside their world. And sometimes I get this sort of shudder, this feeling,

• 11:25Robert Greene?

  like I actually can be them, that I actually can feel what it's like to be in their world. Now, obviously, I'm probably inaccurate, but I get closer to it than if I'm sitting there judging and criticizing them. And so I've been doing this for probably my whole life. Because it's kind of what a writer does. A writer has to get into other people's skin. So you might say, well, Robert, it's easy for you because, you know, that's who you are, you were born that way. But I wasn't born that way. It's a skill you develop, practicing it endlessly, using your imagination to get inside the worlds of other people. It's obviously a little bit harder to cross gender and ethnic lines and socioeconomic lines, but it's certainly not impossible.

• 12:10Robert Greene?

  And I know I've done it on several times, occasions. So it's an incredibly valuable tool that each and every one of you was born with, but that you don't use. It's like a tool in your box that just lies there and just gathers rust. And so I know it's hard to talk about and write about in a practical way, but I did my best to sink into it and explain to you how you can develop this extremely critical tool.

• 12:38Robert Greene?

  If I'm talking about how we have certain qualities that we have to accept and through accepting them, try and move past them. So I'm trying to tell you, you feel envy, accept that, and now find a way to make envy useful. And I explain how you can start, instead of feeling envy, you can start feeling sorry for people who have less than you. You can start using your envy of powerful people to emulate them, etc. Well, death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically, but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death.

• 13:22Robert Greene?

  It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. And so, it's like Montaigne, I end the book with a quote from Montaigne. And he says, "The ability to think about death and overcome the fear of death is the ultimate freedom." You're enslaved by this fear, you're not aware of it, it's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom. I have to end the book on that. But the idea is, most people are gonna say, "Oh, that's not me", as they say in for all of these chapters.

• 13:58Ryan Holiday?

  The other people, they're irrational, not me.

• 14:00Robert Greene?

  Yeah. "Oh, I'm not really afraid of death, I play video games and I'm always killing people, I watch movies, people are always dying, I'm not afraid of it." That's a cartoon version of death. Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical, it's going to happen to you, it's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it. No matter how many video black ops games you play, you are still afraid of your own death.

• 14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:28Robert Greene?

  And that fear creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks.

• 14:43Robert Greene?

  So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book, I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use, is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species, as far as we know, that's aware of its mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean. You don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it, and you turn your back to it. And we humans have the ability to explore things, to conquer our fear.

• 15:25Robert Greene?

  And I want you, instead of turning your back, to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality, and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways.