Ep. 201: Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism with Ryan Holiday (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 201 is again something like what is wisdom? And we read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, written in the years leading up to his death in 180 AD as well as parts of the daily Stoic 366 meditations on wisdom, Perseverance and the Art of living from 2016 by our guest, Ryan Holiday. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer applying rules of discernment to my present representation so that nothing non objective may infiltrate its way in. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Wes: Wow, beat that, Seth.

0:39 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan thinking of myself as dead in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:47 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey being the smelly goat in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Ryan: This is Ryan Holiday also in Austin, Texas. Although I don't have a clever descriptor to go by.

0:57 Mark: You are the obstacle and the way.

0:59 Ryan: All right, I'll take that.

1:03 Mark: Ryan, how's it going? Thanks for coming on.

1:05 Ryan: Yeah, it's going well. I'm somewhat intimidated to be here, but I'm excited.

1:09 Dylan: You're the guy with two actual books.

1:11 Seth: Yeah. What are you intimidated by?

1:13 Ryan: Well, I'm probably the only one without a degree of any kind. I'm always intimidated talking to more trained students of philosophy than myself because I don't know how to pronounce any of the names. And I look at this from I think a much more practical standpoint. So I'm always a little bit self conscious of that.

1:33 Mark: So yes, if folks don't know that Ryan wrote the Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. And then the one that we read this time, the Daily Stoic, which was a co write with Stephen Hanselman. So what was his. Did he had the scholarly mojo or what? I your method of writing books, of having note cards of quotes? I heard you on another interview that that's the main way you do research was all over this thing like even the explanations of the quotes were offered with other quotes. It's chock full of quotes.

1:56 Ryan: Yeah. So it's probably a somewhat unprecedented collaboration in that I wrote a book with my literary agent, which is not typical. My agent, Steve Hanselman was previously a publisher and then before that he's a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. And so he did a book when he was a publisher, HarperCollins I think called the Daily Drucker, which had done really well, as sort of a collection of all of Peter Drucker's greatest hit in a sort of calendar daily read format. And he had this idea of doing the Daily Stoic. He said, you know, you do original translations and then you'd have a sort of a meditation about each passage.

And I said, that sounds like a great idea, but I don't know Greek or Latin, so I wouldn't be able to translate it. And he said, well, I would do it. And so our collaboration was we sort of picked a lot of favorite quotes from the Stoics. I picked all of my favorites, he picked all of his favorites, then he retranslated them from the original sources and then collaborated on the interpretation. And then I went through, basically, I used all the stories that I've researched over the last 10 years, stories and quotes. And then that's how the book came together.

And as far as I know, it's the only sort of selected anthology of all the Stoics. And the idea was a lot of people are interested in Stoic philosophy, but it's very hard to know where to start. And who you start with can have a huge impact on whether you get the philosophy or not. So if you pick up Marcus Aurelius and you're more of a literary person, you might find it depressing. If you pick up Epictetus and you're more of a spiritual person, you might find it's a little bit too blunt and sort of self helpy. And so the idea was, can we put all these people in one place, sort of a greatest hits, and then you would be able to go into the original source material from there.

3:36 Mark: So, yes, I was approaching this week, this being our third foray into Stoicism, folks can go back and listen to our Epictetus episode. Marcus Aurelius, read heavily from Epictetus, often quotes Epictetus verbatim. He doesn't even pretend, since these are notes, that he wrote to himself as a way of basically doing what you're doing in the daily, you know, what the readers of the Daily Stoic would be, or using your Daily Stoic journal. So it's him writing, often very repetitively, writing the maxims that he learned. But he had such good literary training that even though these were not intended for publication, we're not sure if what we're seeing is the order that he wrote them in.

We're not exactly sure when he wrote them, under what circumstances. A lot of them, a couple of them, are labeled with some geographical mark, but for the most part we're just getting a series of disconnected aphorisms. But he was so well trained as a young man. And part of the modus operandi here was not just, you know, to write some scrawled little quick thing to himself, but to really think about it and write it in the best prose that he could come up with. So that's what makes it actually readable to us. But I was thinking a lot about this practice that Marcus is already building on a several hundred year tradition, most directly from Epictetus.

But you know, it's going back to Chrysippus and Zeno, know these people who we don't even have their writings. There have been a lot of Stoics. It was not a terribly uncommon philosophy at the time. So what he was working with is not entirely unlike what a modern Stoic is working with now. So he's like Stoics now, kind of taking the parts that seem to work best for him. He's saying the things to himself at the times that he needs it very much like a modern Stoic, as Massimo in our Seneca episode described. You know, if something seems to make no sense, just put that aside.

Use the things that work for you. So I was thinking a lot about what practical philosophy actually amounts to, which made it a very different experience than the way we read Epictetus, which was just to kind of look for the historical, the anachronisms, the try to get at how foreign. I mean, so there's a little of that going in my mind here. But especially going through the Daily Stoic, where you're combining all these folks. It was good to kind of see Stoicism as a whole school of thought is not so easy to criticize because it's not like one person's argument in one thing.

It's a whole body of work. And if you say like Nietzsche does, oh, Stoicism is a self tyranny, then you can probably respond as you do when interpreting these sayings of the Daily Stoic. Well, you're not doing it right. If that's your experience in how you're taking it, then think again, reinterpret this. And I do want to, though, draw out how different. I think even though Marcus is doing the same kind of thing Stoics do now, I really think that he actually is committed to a fairly specific metaphysics, et cetera. What he's doing is really quite different in some ways to what we'd be doing now.

6:20 Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. It is interesting to think that Marcus Aurelius may have been. You know, what we have of Epictetus survives to us from Arrian. We have Arrian's lecture notes, but Marcus may have actually been working on original lecture notes from his philosophy tutor who attended the lectures of Epictetus. I think that's a good example of sort of the literary tradition of Stoicism, which is some smart guy making a lot of observations about life, often about very individual or specific scenarios, and then that sort of being passed down in this sort of aphoristic, almost cliche format.

And that the philosophy is, on the one hand, it's using it in real life, but the sort of academic side of the philosophy is as simple as sort of sitting down and just writing these notations out or tweaking them or riffing on them. From a music standpoint, you could almost think of them as like scales or sort of riffs that have entered into the common domain. And then the philosophers are just sort of using them, almost like some sort of early Chinese philosophy. You could say it contradicts itself, because in one scenario the philosopher is saying, do X, and then in almost the identical scenario, he's saying do Y.

But the difference is that the student has changed. And then so the specific prescription from the philosopher, whether it's Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, is changing. So Marcus Aurelius is saying, don't be intimidated by thinking of life as a whole. And then Seneca is saying, every part of the human condition should be in your mind at all times. They're not contradicting themselves directly. What they're saying is sort of, sometimes you need to zoom way in and sometimes you need to zoom way out. And I think from a common sense perspective, this is pretty obvious.

We intuitively know that sometimes that works and sometimes the other one works. And so in a way, I think this all makes Stoicism much less intimidating and probably much less appealing from an academic perspective, that it's really just this sort of collection of wise observations about the world that have been riffed on and recycled and reused for thousands of years by people in all these different positions, and that any normal person can engage in that tradition if they so choose.

8:38 Dylan: That tension that you're talking about, Ryan, is a feature of Stoicism and didn't seem as much a contradiction. I liked what you said about a zooming in, zooming out. There's this piece of Stoicism that feels more Stoic, which is being the rock and not being affected. But there's the other piece of Stoicism which, when I was talking with friends about this, it's not so much in the popular consciousness, but as soon as you read them, you realize that there is also a lot of flow in Stoicism, a lot of. Rather than being a rock, being a river kind of thing. And those two aspects sometimes feel like they're contradictory to one another.

9:18 Ryan: Yeah. I mean, Marcus's favorite sort of poet or writer is Heraclitus. And Heraclitus is almost Eastern in the way that he talks. He uses the metaphor of the river. And, yeah, there is this. It's like sometimes you have to hold firm, and then other times you have to let go. And I think where this gets solved in Stoicism is what Epictetus said was sort of the primary task of the philosopher, which was to discern what is in our control and what is outside of our control. And so I think that same discernment applies to when you're supposed to be the rock and when you're supposed to be the river and you're supposed to be the rock. When being a rock makes a difference and you're supposed to be a river. When being a rock doesn't make a difference, I think is probably how you think about it.

10:03 Seth: I'm coming in as somebody who questions the value, who sees a certain amount of limited utility in the Stoic approach, but who questions the universality and perhaps the extended utility, I guess, of Stoic philosophy. That, on the one hand, there's a challenge in trying to understand how the focus on the individual and the individual's response to society, external stimuli, their own emotions and so forth, can be somehow broadened to articulate political or social philosophy. The other question to me is this. It's the same thing that came up when we did Epictetus.

And I was not on the Seneca episode, but on the Epictetus episode, which is. It feels very much to me like a slave morality in some sense, that it's a reaction to a sense of describing experience and generally human life as pain and suffering. So it's a coping mechanism. I'm anxious to see how we can. I can expand outside of that perception of it.

11:12 Mark: So, Seth, you found that with Marcus, too, even though he's known as the actual philosopher king, that he's.

11:17 Ryan: He's the opposite of a slave.

11:19 Seth: Yeah, he's the opposite of the slave. But if you didn't know who he was, would you get that from this book? Is there anything in this book where he's like. Let me tell you what it's like. To have to deal with courtiers and making decisions about laws and so forth.

11:36 Wes: I think I want to back that up a little bit, just in the sense that reading this, it's like, right, it's a diary, a fragmented diary, and it's someone giving himself all these self exhortations. You get the sense from reading it that he is actually in the grip of a lot of self doubt and a lot of worry and he's struggling with all these different impulses and he's trying to. Yeah, anger. And we're looking at someone trying to soothe themselves and trying to do stoicism in a way, trying to say the sorts of things to himself that will help him calm himself down and will help him focus on what's really important and all of that stuff.

So far from it being sort of a. Obviously it's not an explication of the Stoic philosophy where we get to look at stoicism in practice, but that also means that we get some glimpse into its effectiveness in the sense that it's not as if Marcus Aurelius comes across as this sage or something like that. He comes across like the rest of us, as this struggling human being really suffering from all these different feelings and desires and the rest of it and trying to cope with that.

12:53 Ryan: I think Seth raises an interesting point, which is, if you didn't see the name on it, could you identify the position of the person writing it? I think on the one hand it's probably high praise, right? The idea that you would be reading the diary of a president and they would come off as an ordinary person, not as a person who has been corrupted or changed by their position of power. Influence, I think, is interesting. But in a more literal reading, if you were to control f and search through the text, there are a number of clues. I mean, in the beginning, the person who Marcus sort of thanks and holds up as his model more than just about anyone is Antoninus.

And he brings up a number of very specific compliments. He even talks about how Antoninus is so disciplined as a leader that when he would sit and listen to court cases, he would manage his bathroom breaks so as to serve more people than he would be if he just sort of went whenever he wanted. But I think one of the more powerful observations from Marcus, there's two that come to mind. He talks about in the Gregory Hayes translation, which is my favorite. I think it's the most lyrical and beautiful. It's done for the Modern Library, he talks about escaping the stain of imperialization.

Basically he's talking about the idea of absolute power corrupting absolutely. He wants that not to happen to him. And I think that's sort of an interesting oblique reference to the idea of not being changed by his position. In another passage, he talks about how you can live a good life anywhere and you can be a philosopher anywhere. And then he says that includes at court. And actually there's a number of references in the Hays translation to Marcus not allowing himself to be seen complaining at court. It's interesting that he's kind of this guy who has this job that you'd think he would like, but in fact doesn't like.

And I recently read Ernest Renan's biography of Marcus. It's in, I think, the fourth volume of his history of Christianity. He talks about how the emperor is really the least free person in all of Rome. So I think it's interesting that Seth brought up that it feels like it's read by a slave. I wonder if Marcus would have agreed that he kind of was a slave. He didn't choose to be emperor. He probably wouldn't have liked to be emperor. When he ascends to the emperorship, the first thing he does is anoint his brother as co emperor. I think he was someone who very much felt that power was a burden.

It wasn't an office that he sought. And his idea of duty and obligation meant that he didn't have a ton of choice. He couldn't abdicate, he couldn't move to an island like Tiberius. He felt like he was given this responsibility by God or whomever. And it was an immense burden that he struggled under. And I think the Meditations is a reflection of that. Particularly if you think about when Meditations was written. It wasn't written at the palace, it wasn't written at one of the emperor's retreats. It was written during the last years of his reign, which were primarily spent on the frontier waging wars against what they then called the barbarians.

So again, Renan made the interesting observation that I hadn't thought about before, that Marcus was away from the kind of people that he wanted to spend time with. He wasn't around philosophers or wise people or entertainers or his family even. He was surrounded by soldiers. And so the writing that we see has, I think, got to be taken into account the context and the experience of the person writing it as they were writing it.

16:28 Mark: I can detect, I know you mentioned Ryan somewhere in your book, that sometimes you could read Marcus as if he sounds tired, as opposed to Seneca, who sounds very bubbly. And what Wes Was just saying that I could definitely read this as if he's kind of depressed, you know, has anger problems. But more. I see, and I wonder if this is sort of a problem with stoicism, is that it's very demanding in a way that I'm not sure is psychologically healthy. So like 2.5, he says, concentrate every minute like a Roman, like a man, on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice, and on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

Yes, you can. If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life. And stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you. Stop being hypocritical, self centered, irritable. The idea of you need to be every minute monitoring yourself. So, I mean, there's a way to take that. Like, look, if you want to keep to a diet or not explode in anger, you have to keep a handle on that every minute. Like, you can't just. This is the way I think of it. Like, I'm very good about my diet for at least half the day and then I'm eating a lot.

And if you only lose your shit anger wise and explode at people a couple times a day, that's still too much. So in that sense, yeah, you have to keep a lid on it every. But that's quite different than concentrate every minute. There's just riddled throughout this and throughout Epictetus, these every minute don't have any irrelevant thoughts. Stop being aimless. It's just. It's really. This is what I think Nietzsche is talking about of self tyranny.

17:59 Dylan: I see what you're saying, Mark. I find that I don't know if it's leavened or if I take it as an exhortation and in this context as a trying to point himself towards it in a sort of even a hyperbolic sense. Especially when I read the other sections that amount to understand that you have faults that are basically more compassionate to oneself as well as to other people. That combination makes me think that it's. I just don't read it as hard nosed as that. Maybe I'm not taking it literally enough.

18:30 Ryan: No, no, Dylan, I think you raise a good point because almost every one of those very intense observations is in a subsequent passage balanced out by Marcus Aurelius talking about, okay, when you mess up, come back to the rhythm as best as you can. Don't let yourself get too jarred by it. He says, pick yourself up when you fail he talks about how you're a human being, how to not feel guilty. And then obviously, we have the Stoics talking over and over again about how to not worry about the mistakes of the past or the potential failures of the future, but of the present moment.

And so I think what you've got to realize, too, is that there is a, maybe we could call it a publication bias in Stoicism, given that Stoicism was supposed to be a sort of series of exercises to strengthen you where you are weak. Marcus doesn't, by definition, then spend a lot of time talking about the areas that he's doing well. So I think if you read that passage in the context in which it was probably written, that's probably a day in which he was very distracted, when he was not thinking about the tasks at hand, when he was not concentrating like a Roman.

So when I see a passage about him meditating on his death, or when I see a passage about him talking about being serious or losing their temper, I'm not thinking that he's saying that's the most important thing in all of Stoicism. He's saying between the lines that he fell short there in some way. And Seneca talks about this as well. He says, look, you don't need my advice about how to lay contentedly in a bed of roses. He says, you need my help to stand watch and not fall asleep. You need my help being brave and courageous is what he was saying.

And so I think if we can remember too, that the Stoics are writing to themselves about where they feel like they need help, we realize that a lot is going to be omitted, and the things that are omitted, are probably going to be the more positive, the more joyful, the more sort of common and mundane things that might, if we were to see them, make this whole thing feel a bit more balanced.

20:32 Dylan: So the thing that Aurelius more than. I mean, this was true in Epictetus as well, but reminds me most of, is just the notion of training, training of all sorts, where you have a discipline, and part of the discipline is you have an aim in that discipline of doing something, you know, even, let's just say, exercising. So, on the one hand, one of the most important things about exercising is being consistent. And then on the other hand, there's another important part of exercising and training that you have to rest and both of those things. There's a way in which they can feel contradictory, but they're actually not contradictory.

That's the thing that is, in terms of practice, seems most like running through on the Stoics and on Aurelius in particular. But even if we just step back for a second away from the practice itself, there are these underlying unifying themes that he even brings up. I happen to note this one based upon the date that you had it in your daily stoic on the 20th, about just the simple. And these pillars of wisdom, self control, justice and courage, those come up a lot. And those, I think, point in Stoicism to something like a metaphysical, epistemological, teleological background that they all have.

Marcus talks about nature and nature is good. And when you are training yourself, you are cultivating yourself to be more natural. So there's this implicit metaphysics and teleology that's going on through the whole thing.

22:05 Ryan: Yeah, I mean, there are the four Stoic virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and moderation, or temperance. And so, yeah, you're going to see those themes pop up just over and over and over again. And to me, what's endlessly fascinating about Stoicism is that those sort of four basic ideas could have so much nuance, could be so simple and yet complex at the same time. Because life is complex and people are complex. And it's really simple to say be courageous. But as Aristotle talks about, where's the difference between courage and recklessness, courage and cowardice, justice?

Is this about you? Is it about the common good? Whereas this self discipline is important. But when does self discipline become self tyranny? To go to the criticism that you guys brought up, I think Stoicism is very simple, and Marcus Aurelius is very simple, and yet he's infinitely complex. And I think it takes a very long time to wrap one's head around it. And it's something, certainly for me, every time I read it, I feel like I discover or learn something new.

23:08 Mark: Do you feel, Seth, like every time you read it, you learn something new? I just want to provoke something.

23:12 Seth: No, no, no. So I guess my. All right, I'm trying to.

23:17 Ryan: I'm curious, is there a passage or what seems to have rubbed you so much the wrong way? I'm not. I don't mean to project that. But what didn't you like this sense

23:26 Seth: in which the Stoic attitude is to. They can destroy your body, they can hurt you, but you're only hurt, you only experience pain, you only suffer. If you believe that you do that, there's a sense in which you can completely divorce your conscious perception of your own experience from what is imposed upon you from the outside or externally. I believe that There's. It's fundamentally not possible to disconnect your body from your experience in that way. And even if it were possible, it's too much to ask of the majority of people that they do that.

That's part of the challenge for me. The second part of the challenge, and Dylan kind of alluded to this, is there is a teleology. I'll give Marcus Aurelius this. His approach has much more of a universality and a teleology that provides some kind of ethical foundation that doesn't seem to me to exist in at least Epictetus. I'm not sure about Seneca, but this idea that there is a the logos which orders nature and human beings. And if you align yourself to the logos and you find yourself in harmony with the logos for your own experience, you'll be much less disturbed, much more satisfied.

But it also will align you with other human beings or other logos, connected individuals, and you'll find that it's in your best interest to be generous and kind. And all these virtues will fall out of alignment with the logos. But the way you access the logos is through reason. And I have the same problem with this that I have with all predominantly reason motivated philosophy, which is, what is the emotional component? What's the thing that actually makes you want to do this? Like, what is it that makes you want to pursue this reasonable path and to connect with this?

Reason has no motive power. It allows you to sort through. It's the intellectual part, but it's not that soul or that spiritual part that he talks about. Body, spirit and intellect. There's a missing component of the emotions and the passions that actually make you want to do the things that he's describing, because it's not something that will come purely out of your reasoned approach to things.

25:57 Ryan: Maybe I'll respond to the first part and someone else can feel the latter if they like. But I don't think like when Marcus says choose not to feel harmed and you haven't been. I'm not sure he's referring to that in the Buddhist sense of the master or the sage can light themselves on fire and through the power of meditation, sort of transcend that pain, it can push it away and not feel it. I actually think that he's referring to it in a much more practical sense. I was actually just writing about this this morning for an email that we do for the Daily Stoic.

I came across this quote from George Ball, who was an advisor to JFK and to Lyndon Johnson. He was, I think, eventually the ambassador to the U.N. he was saying. And LBJ was. Lyndon Johnson was famously sort of very insecure about his education. His parents had been poor, so he goes to Southwestern Teachers College, which is now, I think Texas State, but at the time was not a good college. And so to go to Washington and be surrounded, particularly in Kennedy's Cabinet by all these Ivy Leaguers, he was very insecure about it, very paranoid. And Ball said, I actually never saw Johnson suffer for his lack of education, he says, but he certainly suffered for his sense of lacking an education.

What he means is that Johnson was actually totally fine and could completely hold his own. And no one judged him for not having gone to Harvard or Yale. The problem was he carried this chip on his shoulder. He felt like he'd been deprived and that it actually created pain and deprivation and problems in his life. I think fundamentally what the stoics are saying, and they say this over and over again because it's so obvious, but it's so hard to remember, is the idea that it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about those things that upset us.

And I think that's what Marcus is saying. I don't think he's saying, look, if you have a broken arm and you just think about it really hard and you can rationalize the pain away. I think he's saying it's, if you decide that you've been humiliated, then you have been humiliated. What happened was objective, that hey, you ripped your pants in front of someone or you said something that was incorrect and people laughed at you. But it's that we add on top of that the feelings of unfairness or persecutions or stupidity or worthlessness or unrecoverability.

I think that's the kind of harm that he's referring to, that sort of self inflicted emotional pain that we add on top of things. I think the stoic position is life is really hard and there's a lot of suffering and pain in it. So don't add to it with your interpretations of that. I think that's the kind of pain that rationally we can get over if we think about it and we can work on. I'm not sure it's referring necessarily to our ability to psychologically override deeper traumas or pain in that sense.

28:47 Mark: One of the theories of emotions we've talked about before, I think of it as Bob Solomon's, I know is kind of related to Spinoza's. We traced out that connection before. But it's the idea that a full on emotion as opposed to A feeling like nausea is a feeling, but a full on emotion involves a judgment. So to feel jealous involves a cognitive component that the belief that your significant other was messing around with someone else, that that is bad. And so that I think provides some of the answer to the way to figure out like Seth's question, where are the emotions in all of this? There are judgment components.

29:24 Ryan: And I.

29:24 Mark: One of the things that is pointed out about, I don't know if it was in the Marcus or in the book about Marcus, the Pierre Hadot, the inner citadel that Ryan had recommended. I was looking at that for as a secondary source, but Marcus makes that separation. It's not a matter of the assessment. The assessment, what I was just referring to the judgment involved in anger, this person is sleeping with my wife or whatever, that is still part of the judgment, part of the fact of the matter. And the part that you add, the part that you want to avoid is merely the value judgment part of it.

And I think that maybe we could make something that there's actually more involved in this distinction between feeling and emotion that's not just the hooking on of the value judgment of it. Because maybe this is one of the problems that we're running into is that when you label something as a fact like that almost always has some sort of connotation to it, that there's always some normative component, or at least very often there's a normative component built into. So even just the word like, yes, I'm jealous because I believe my spouse is cheating on me.

Well, the word cheating obviously has a normative component. You can't just say, well, there's the cheating, that's a fact. But then I get to decide whether that's a good or bad thing. So I think the fact that we have those linguistic conventions makes it difficult to label exactly where the value judgment part that we want to cut off according to Stoics comes in.

30:46 Ryan: No, I think that's fair. And look again, the weirdness of the literary form that Marcus is doing. He doesn't need to explain the basic assumptions that he's working off to himself. Whereas Seneca, who's writing letters, is often more clear. Seneca talks about in one of his letters how, look, if you throw cold water on someone, they're going to shiver. That's an involuntary response, feeling, emotion, whatever you want to call it. But grieving for five years over the loss of a loved one, now that's crossed over a line from involuntariness to some level of complicity in what's happening, I think.

And so I don't think there's a hard and fast line, but I do think stoicism is about the line. It's sort of attributed to Viktor Frankl. We don't know if he actually said it or not. He sort of talked about there being a stimulus and there's response, and then between those things, there's a space. I think stoicism is about exploiting that space. Although this does get real in that there were strong rumors that Marcus Aurelius wife was repeatedly unfaithful. I don't think the Stoic is saying, okay, my wife is cheating on me. I'm going to decide that's not a bad thing, and then I'm just going to be okay with it.

But I think it's. I'm not going to make myself miserable over something that really doesn't have anything to do with me. Now, what's the best decision that I can make in the most sort of objective, rational. Look at this situation? Because Marcus talks a lot about, you know, you're in the ring with someone and they're cheating. You know, he's talking about like a boxer who's cheating. You adjust your strategy accordingly. I don't think he would say, look, you just go, you get cheated on over and over again. I think there's still a common sense ness to it.

32:28 Wes: I do think, though, that strictly speaking, for a Stoic, being cheated on is not a bad thing. And I think that's something we ought to take seriously. And Marcus Aurelius says things to that effect. So, for instance, book two, number 11, towards the end you will say, but death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful, and hence neither good nor bad. And this, of course, he's just communicating something that really is essential to Stoicism and the sort of thing that we also see in Epictetus and Seneca and I think is part of the theory from the very beginning, which is that there is this hard and fast distinction between what is inside of us, what is outside of us, what we can control, what we can't.

And Stoicism here is an extension of virtue ethics, Aristotelian virtue ethics, where our happiness depends primarily on our virtues and our actions in accordance with virtues. So things like courage we've mentioned before, and that's the sort of thing that can be good and bad. I can be virtuous or vicious, but nothing outside of me can be good and Bad properly, in that sense, of course, then there's a problem with what the stoic person is doing when they make life decisions about whether they're going to be wealthy or poor, things like that. And you get into this terrain historically, of what they call the indifference and the preferable versus the non preferable.

And this is something Massimo emphasizes, right? The preferred indifference. I'm not saying whether it's doable or not, but it's an important. It's a high bar to meet for most of us to reach that point where we can actually see the terrible things that might happen to us or the things that we really, really want in life or don't want to happen to us, to see those things as either preferred indifference or non preferred indifference, as opposed to good and bad things. I think it's a real accomplishment to be able to get to that point psychologically where you would be in that mode, because it would dramatically.

Your reaction to your wife cheating, for instance, or your spouse cheating.

34:38 Dylan: I think you could go even a little bit further and say that the context and circumstances of your body and your existence matter. I think this is one of the things we're struggling with or talking about here, is the stoicism seems to say that, well, in the end, it really ought not matter. You can wim hof your way through the whole thing. And I take that to be sort of part of Seth's criticism. In the context, context of your emotions and one's reaction to the world and one's connectedness, that there's something about it that takes you far enough that you can learn to deal with it better. But that goal of kind of being as unaffected as possible by it might even make the criticism that it denies something deeply human about us.

35:26 Ryan: I think that's fair. I mean, I guess the question is, in the passage that you mentioned from Marcus Aurelius, what I think he's really saying there. He said something to the effect of as long as you still have your character, character, that's really what matters. So someone does something to you, someone betrays you, or you're deprived of something, or a thief breaks in and steals all your prized possessions, or Epictetus lamp is stolen, or whatever example you want to use. The comment that Marcus Aurelius is talking about is mostly your sort of emotional reaction to that thing.

So it's sort of not feeling shame, not feeling upset, not feeling like you've been ruined or wrecked. I think it's about sort of curbing that emotional hyperbole that a lot of Us have. That's sort of my read on it. Your wife is cheating on you, you find out. I think the exercises in stoicism are about looking at your immediate sort of emotional reaction to that. I'm not sure they say one way or another, right? Should you endure that forever? Should you not take a positive step towards a preferred indifference to not be lied to or deceived? I'm not sure.

Marcus situation is interesting because we don't know how it was actually happening. But I think the idea would be if it's in your control to do something about it, you would do it. And then if it's not, you would find a way to come to terms with it. But in either way, what you would not want to add to that would be emotional turbulence and disturbance. I think that the stoic is trying to be as unperturbed as possible. Even though they are going to be taking active steps towards a preferred indifference of wealth over poverty, good looks over bad looks, respect over infamy, they're going to be taking those steps, but then also realizing to a certain extent that they don't control the outcome.

37:13 Mark: I think the way Massimo in our Seneca episode was talking about pursuing the preferred indifferent was there are things that are natural for us to prefer. That is part of what our nature is, part of what the grand plan is, insofar as our individual nature is part of this nature of the cosmos. So part of our acceptance of our fate is not actually just accepting what happens to us and sitting passively by, but to accept our place as active participants in the grand plan. And so, no, we don't want to be lied to. We don't want to be cheated. And those are natural things for us to try to avoid that.

It's not purely turning off your preferences. It's a matter of turning off the negative emotions so that they don't distract you from pursuing your goals. And this is part of what I really noticed, and especially looking at in Ryan's earlier books, especially in the obstacles, the way it's using stoicism, not in an Epictetus, I admire the cynics and their simplicity of life, but like, as a completely driven CEO, I know you described yourself as a workaholic. You know, I might have moved in terms of. For Marcus, it's kind of what has your role been assigned?

For the modern stoic, it's like. Like think about what you really want to do, what life you really want to live, and then do not waste a second of your energy with the bullshit out there. Pursue that relentlessly, not so that you burn yourself out, so you destroy your body. And you have to reflect down again on whether this goal is a worthy goal. You know, don't let the ends justify the means. There are all sorts of qualifiers as to how you would pursue these goals. You know, the kind of thing that a CEO would want ultimately is there's too much sacrifice involved in that that, you know, this would fall under what Seneca would dismiss as riches that are not worth it.

Attaining this goal is not worth the cost. So devoting yourself so singularly to something is maybe inadvisable, but it certainly doesn't seem like stoicism. The way you see it, Ryan, is incompatible with being extremely driven.

39:15 Ryan: I don't. I mean, one of the interesting themes I sort of picked up on from what you were just saying is the idea of agency. And there was less agency in Marcus Aurelius life and in Roman times than there would be today. Even if we just look at the modern equivalent of his job. I won't speak the name of our current executive, but Obama chose to run for president. Marcus Aurelius was chosen to be emperor. And really, we see from his writings that he did not have the ability to say no. And so you can choose to be driven. That's something that's in your control.

The idea of agency, I think, was less prevalent both in terms of the government and the economic system at the time. Even the idea of being like an entrepreneur was considerably less accessible then as it was now. So if I am adding anything to stoicism, I am trying to adapt it to a more modern context where our notion of what humans have control over and where we have agency is more. But I do think that the ancient wisdom certainly applies. It's like, look, look, when I write a book, if I spend a year of my life writing a book, it doesn't strike me as unnatural or insane that I would want as many people as possible to read it, right?

I would want that book to be successful. One, because I believe in it, and I think it can help people. Two, because I have a direct financial incentive for it to do well. However, I think what stoicism teaches you in that scenario is that the outcome that you would like, let's say selling lots of copies or hitting a best seller list or getting a good review, that's only partially in your control. And in some cases it's more in your control. In other cases it's less. Take ego as the enemy. I really wanted it to be successful, obviously, so I did Lots of marketing.

I did podcasts, I wrote articles, I hired a publicist. I did all these things. Obviously, none of those things could work, but they did work. And the book sold. I think it sold 11,000 copies in its first week, which was enough for it to be. Mathematically, it should have debuted at number one on the Wall Street Journal business bestseller list. But life isn't fair and life is not objective, and lists don't work. We get the list, it shows up, my agent sends it to me, and not only am I not number one, I'm not even on the fucking list. What's going on?

It turned out that my editor had made a unilateral decision without consulting anyone, to change its category. She thought she was doing this for the good of the book. She was not. And so the thing that I wanted, I was deprived of. Long story short, somewhat salvaging. I think it ended up debuting at number four after some backroom wrangling. But the point is, these things are partly in our control and partly out of our control. And so obviously, I wanted something. I think it was a good aim to go for. But then I also have to put myself in a position of, okay, how am I going to react when the outcome, Outcome that I don't have complete agency over, does not go my way?

What is my response going to be? And then again, I think this is where the philosophy. This is where the rubber meets the road, where it gets real. How do you talk to yourself about that? You can feel betrayed, you can feel upset, you can feel screwed over. You could feel like all the work you just put in was totally worthless and not worth doing, or you can have a different conversation with yourself. And that's what I would try to do in that scenario. I think that's where this philosophy meets driven or a public life. You have some agency, you run the best political campaign you want, but the votes don't always go your way.

And then life is asking you, now what? And that's where I think stoicism comes in most handily.

42:52 Dylan: Sounds like we should talk to Al Gore, right?

42:54 Ryan: I mean, can you just imagine being in that scenario? And how do you respond? You were cheated, you go sailing, you grow a beard. And actually he turned that into a positive right. Agree with his standard or not, he found causes that he would dedicate himself to. He focused on what was in his control, and I think that's all we can do.

43:14 Mark: So this idea of telling yourself things, I mean, this kind of gets at the heart of. Does stoicism vastly Oversimplify the psychology. And you acknowledge in your book, Ryan, look, you gotta not just look at what choices you make, your rational agency, but like, what goes into making the choices. In other words, Marcus had a very definite picture, a metaphysical picture of an entirely deterministic universe. But your rational choice is the island of freedom in the middle of that. That's at least the way Haddo describes that. But if you buy into a more thoroughgoing determinism, you'd want to look at, you know, just like in our Robert Wright episode talking about evolutionary psychology.

So even the idea of stoic life hacks, some of that is kind of in Aristotle, in that you have to train yourself for virtue. The tradition of virtue ethics is a matter of inculcating habits. That's certainly something that all these stoics were very much aware of. But the idea now that simply by telling yourself something you can change, that seems to fly in the face of quite a bit of psychology. And I was especially interested in hearing Wes had some positive things. Wes is our psychologist of the group studying psychotherapy and things. And you seem to have some positive thoughts.

At the end of our Epictetus episode, when I was listening to that about how stoicism could dovetail, you know, we talked about cognitive behavioral therapy like comes actually straight out of stoicism. Just telling yourself stuff can be part of the mechanism. But it seems just as likely to me that you could be self deceiving, that like most self help things, why they don't work or they seem to work for just a day or two and then, well, you could abandon it and say, I guess it was bullshit, it only helped me. Or you could just keep telling yourself, oh, I guess I just have to do this meditation every morning and I will never give give up faith, even though it doesn't seem to cure my depression.

It seems like we have a lot more seriously psychologically that could be wrong with us. That could not be cured merely by telling yourself things, repeating sayings.

45:12 Ryan: Yeah, Wes, yeah.

45:14 Wes: I mean, obviously cognitive behavioral therapy is widely used and its techniques are very similar to the sorts of things that are being talked about here in stoicism. So, for instance, not catastrophizing or Marcus Aurelius himself talks about looking at things for what they are. I think about this not just in terms of cognitive behavioral therapy, but psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts, for instance, or any psychotherapist who draws on that tradition, they think a lot about something called splitting. It's sort of a cognitive mode in which people tend to look at the world in very black and white terms, and especially look at people in very black and white terms as either good or evil.

People who have this cognitive mode in the extreme might have trouble, for instance, recognizing that people are a combination of good and bad. They can be frustrating, they can be gratifying. But they are not just either monsters or some sort of ideal. We have to reconcile ourselves to that. And that's really a part of the process of maturation, that ability to get to the point where we can see people in that way and also events in our lives. It's not merely absolute good and evil, but something, something else. Maybe we could use the words preferable and non preferable.

I think that lines up in a way with some of what I read. It strikes me they're talking about what it means to be mature in some sense. Maturity for psychoanalysts is closely tied to mourning one's ability to actually accept loss. And I see stoicism in a way as sort of like a pre mourning, a way to already have, within one's approach to the world, integrated the concept of loss before you have to confront it. But I also think that's another word for maturity.

47:03 Ryan: I think your phrase of pre-mourning is actually not only quite beautiful, but I think it sort of nails exactly what the stoic is doing. I mean, I just put my son to sleep and I think one of the more haunting exercises from Epictetus, which Marcus, I think repeats two different times in the meditations, is he talks about when you put your child to bed, thinking, if only for a half second, about how they might not wake up in the morning. So on the one hand, it's pre morning quite literally to go to what you're saying. The idea that things happen, they're outside of our control, life takes things from us and basically all we can do is accept them.

But I think the benefit of the pre-mourning is the explanations that we come up with. Things after the fact don't change what happened. They might change how we feel about them, but they don't change what happened. But the pre-mourning exercise allows you to change the present moment. So how I'm going to put my son to bed, how present I'm going to be, what I'm going to be thinking about, what I'm going to say, how I'm going to breathe in or absorb this moment and experience it and fully be there, is changed by this sort of quick perspective flip and this quick reminder.

And I think you see that in stoicism a lot. Again, to Go to my example about the book sort of being mysteriously not on the bestseller list. Not only did I, before the launch, go, look, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make this a success, but I'm also going to have to sit there with myself and know that things are going to happen, that I don't control that final outcome. And then I need to work on that and think on that and be open to it and prepared for that. And then also still, I think this is the humility of stoicism. So you're deprived of the thing.

You wake up and your child has passed, or your spouse has passed, or you wake up and the stock market has crashed and your retirement savings are gone. Being able to say to yourself, oh, that was outside of my control. You thought about this in advance. Don't worry about it. I don't think any stoic would realistically think that a person is going to be capable of that. It's in many ways just about making sure that a month later, two months later, a year later, you're not still stuck in that sort of helpless thought pattern. I think it's about to pull this full circle.

Perhaps the pre-mourning exercise is really about shortening the mourning process and allowing us to move on and to do whatever we're going to do next in our lives.

49:34 Seth: Yeah.

49:34 Wes: And the reason why I put it that way is because I think the obvious criticism and, and you've talked about it a bit tonight of stoicism. One other way to reformulate that is to say, well, stoics are people who just want to be in denial of loss. They just want to have a stiff upper lip and they want to fail to recognize the things that hurt them. I'm actually, again, more sympathetic. And so I cast it in precisely the opposite way, which is to say, one might see it not as the denial of loss, but something that actually integrates that concept. And I think that's right.

But I think the other part of this discussion is for therapists of a psychoanalytic bent, that process of becoming mature or trying to develop aspects of one's personality which didn't make it to maturity, let's say, or are stuck, are fixated. Psychoanalysts might use that term. How do you repair that? How do you improve one's character, one's life, one's ability to deal with impulses, all of that stuff, there's a whole therapeutic method around that. Right. And there's a kind of a therapeutic method for Buddhism. There's a therapeutic method for A lot of different practices, but there's a very specific one for psychoanalysis, and it involves developing a certain kind of relationship with a therapeutic mentor.

And it involves resolving specific areas of conflict and areas in which loss has been denied, let's say. And it involves, I think, most importantly, learning to look at the subtext of one's own life and one's own actions, able to essentially interpret oneself and one's own behaviors in such a way that you can make sense of them and alter them. So in other words, I'm trying to draw the contrast here between the way a cognitive behavioral therapist might approach treating someone, or a philosopher or a stoic, and the way a psychoanalyst might approach that.

In the former case, it might seem to be the case that one can make use of reason. And this is just in virtue ethics, right, and philosophical tradition more generally, but. But use reason to figure out how to lead a good life and to make oneself happy. In the latter case, I think there's some skepticism about that use of reason, that ability just to step into the gap between stimulus and response and say certain things to oneself. I think the idea might be that we are far more irrational than that and we have to somehow get deep into the machine and tinker in order to alter ourselves.

We really have to get. Get deep in there, into all the rational stuff and make changes at that level.

52:10 Dylan: What's interesting about the way you describe that process, Wes, and I guess you would probably say it's a cursory cut through it, but is in some aspect you end up bringing that irrational stuff around so that it can be dealt with rationally in a first order sense, that is, by regulating yourself in a conscious way or thinking it through. And so in some ways, I guess I'm interpreting that you're making choices in one way or another. You're making some kind of rational action on your irrational understandings.

52:46 Wes: I mean, the question ultimately, right, is how do we change? Our emotional responses to the world are the big problem. How do we change those? It's a complicated question, and I think there's a lot of virtue to this stoic idea, this idea that good and bad can only be within oneself and one's character in a way that the world out there is not essentially good and the bad in the sense that it's more of a set of shades of gray. And it's not good and bad in that absolute splitting sense of absolute good and absolute evil. And part of that is we project onto the world this, when bad things happen to us I mean, as Ryan mentioned, we amplify our pain by associating things with our ego.

There's the question of pride that comes in, and that is something that we can make. A certain separation where when something bad happens to us, it's just the pain of the bad thing that happened. It's not also the pain of incredible humiliation that's predicated on my attachment to my pride. So that's one area. But the other thing is it's just a matter of the significance of things. If the significance of my job isn't just having an income and the pleasure of some prestige and the pleasure of the work and the social relationships involved, but if it is also my identity and my right, and if it has something to do with something I can't live without, because it has these meanings that go beyond what it really is, a job with a certain function in my life.

That's the problem. And for the stoic, as for the psychoanalyst, I think the task is to. Especially for the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst would want to show you this thing doesn't have the significance that you think it does. You've foisted some other significance onto it.

54:33 Unknown speaker: It.

54:34 Wes: And you have to be able to separate those two things.

54:37 Ryan: Look, I would imagine that Marcus and Seneca and Epictetus, given the way that they tended to crib from and rely on science or theories of their day, I have to imagine if they were writing today or if they'd been writing 500 years later, the philosophy would have evolved and been somewhat different. Based on these things, I would be surprised to find that they were somehow like a fundamentalist who was not taking advantage of the advances or breakthroughs we've had in psychology and biology and evolutionary psychology and pharmacology and all these things.

So this could be my projection. But I've always read them as being very reasonable and very open minded to insights and changes. I mean, look, Seneca's favorite philosopher sounds like it's Epicurus. When you read Seneca, I mean, he doesn't quote anyone more than Epicurus, so. So he was willing to take from and learn from anyone who he felt had a point.

55:32 Mark: I want to give one bit of errata. I think probably the funniest moment in our Epictetus episode was Alex Fasella. Our guest conveyed a variation on the story that Ryan just told about. I just put my son to bed and I'm going to tell myself he could be dead in the morning. Is he said, and you should whisper into your son's ear you could be dead in the morning. Recently, somebody asked us on the board. Like, I can't actually confirm that that's in Epictetus anyway. Are you sure that's really an Epictetus? I have not been able to confirm that either. Ryan's version of it is quoted in the Marcus here, so I think it's.

56:09 Ryan: You're saying it to yourself. I'm not sure it's helpful to the child. I don't think it's going to help them go to bed. At the very least. Yeah.

56:16 Wes: Let me read you a bedtime story. It's called tonight, you might die.

56:20 Ryan: Yeah.

56:20 Dylan: They're gonna go visit Wes later.

56:22 Seth: Yeah. In what way is it helpful to anybody?

56:25 Ryan: What do you mean?

56:26 Dylan: To think about being dead?

56:27 Seth: Yeah. To think I'm gonna tuck my child to sleep. But I have to remind myself every night that they might just die in their sleep. And I just better be prepared as I go to bed tonight. I should be prepared that I might wake up to a dead child. In what way is that productive and helpful?