Stoic Practices for Getting Rid of Mental Junk, Your Morning Routine, and Talking to the Dead | Ryan Holiday

28:01And so most of the people that you admire that you think are winging it and in fact have some sort of system like this. So I don't think it just works for writers. Yes, it's a wonderful excuse for all of us. But if you're the CEO of a company, if you are trying to teach something to your 16-year-old, it's better that you don't have to go, you know, I think I read somewhere one time there was this idea about X, Y, or Z, or I heard once from somebody, I don't remember the exact wording of it. You're going to want to draw on these things. And at some point in your life, you're going to want to draw on this store of wisdom or knowledge.

28:41And if you haven't done the work before you know that you're going to need it, it's not going to be there for you to draw on. Another thing you recommend is to find a teacher. This is actually a question I get a lot because this is going to reveal me to be the type of schmuck who reads his comments. But I read a comment recently somewhere that was complaining about this podcast and the fact that many of the people I bring on are Buddhist teachers who are friends of mine and are legitimately my teachers too. And this person was saying, I think with some justification, you're kind of a dick for that because it's kind of flaunting to us that you have all of these teachers that we don't have access to.

29:24So I'm curious to hear what you say. When you recommend to people find your teacher, what does that look like? Well, I want to let you off the hook first because I think you could say that what you're doing is actually an act of service and even generosity. Instead of just pursuing this stuff on your own, you're choosing to interview and talk to these people in a way that makes it public. And by the way, free, you've put out hundreds and hundreds of hours of these discussions that to otherwise access these teachers' wisdoms would either be expensive or impossible because they don't just take on random students.

30:01And so we talked about cheating earlier, part of the cheat code that you and I have figured out is that, hey, we can have access to people that we otherwise wouldn't have access to because we're going to share that knowledge with a wider audience and it allows it to scale. I think you've figured something out there and I think it's very much of use. But I told you that story about Zeno. So Zeno ends up in the Agora, he hears the reading of Socrates, he's having this conversation with the dead, but he isn't content just to talk to the dead. Actually, his first question to that bookseller is, where can I find a man like that?

30:38Meaning Socrates. Where can I find someone like Socrates? Because Socrates is dead. And although it's wonderful to read his dialogues, it would be ideal to have a dialogue with someone as wise or approaching the wisdom of Socrates. And as it happens, a cynic philosopher named Crates is walking by at this very moment. The bookseller simply raises his hand and points at him. And Zeno becomes a student of Cretes and his wife, just to give credit to the female philosophers of the ancient world. His wife has a very difficult to pronounce name, so I won't embarrass myself, but she was not a nameless individual.

31:14But the point is this sort of philosophical team of Cretes and his wife are the foremost philosophical influences of Zeno's life. And Krati's nickname in Athens was the door opener, which I think is such a great way of expressing what the best teachers do. They not only open doors, they open doors to rooms we didn't even know existed. And so, yeah, who is your teacher on your journey? I talk in the book both about teachers and mentors. Can you draw a clear line between one or the other. I don't know where one begins and the other ends exactly. But who are you learning from? At whose feet are you studying at?

31:57Obviously, there are some people who are totally self-taught, who find they learn by experience and books exclusively. That is more the exception than the rule. You've got to find the people who you can ask a million questions to, to go back to what we were talking about, that patient teacher who is willing to direct and orient you towards the things that you need and want to know. Feels to me like there are many options here, many sort of levels to this. There's the parasocial teaching relationship you can have with people you believe to be wise out in the world who are dead or alive, like the dead people that we talked about earlier or live people who are podcasters or authors giving speeches that you can attend.

32:41So there's that. And you can do your best to get close to them if that's within your realm of possibility. But then there are also like people in your life who are never going to be on mic on a podcast. Yes. But are just naturally wise to experience your grandmother. Yes. Some teacher you had in high school that you reconnect with, et cetera. It's a boss or at the office who or even a colleague at the office who just seems to have some aspect of wisdom that you can. They don't have to be a perfect teacher, but they can be good enough and you can accumulate enough of them to triangulate your way toward progress.

33:16There's a lot of things that you can learn from people telling you. That's a talk you would attend or a book you would read or a video you would watch or a podcast you might listen to. And then there's some things that I think you kind of need to be shown. And that's probably where your teacher comes in. And there's some things that need to be tailored exactly to you. I talk a lot in the book about Montaigne, the French thinker. he talks about while he was at school, he has this teacher that understands, he doesn't name the teacher, we can sort of triangulate and guess who it was, but this teacher understands that even the curriculum in class and the assigned reading is not going to be everything that Montaigne needs.

34:02And so they work out this agreement that he gives him access, you know, books being rarer in these days, the printing press being a relatively recent invention, that he's allowed to raid his teacher's bookshelf. And we can imagine the teacher also picking out some specific titles and going, hey, I need you to read this one. I'm writing right now about Admiral James Stockdale, who's one of the few sort of modern proponents of stoicism. And I'm just getting to the point right now where he's at Stanford, he's getting a graduate degree, and everything he learns in all of his classes is great. but then he has this sort of side relationship with a professor named Philip Rhinelander who begins to sort of do a series of extracurricular assignments for him, books that he has to read.

34:49And then Stockdale comes and they schedule one hour a week for discussion where they just talk about these books. I think most of us, and if not, then I think we should all count ourselves as incredibly fortunate to have this, have one of those kind of intellectual relationships in our life, someone further ahead than us, someone we admire, someone who possesses some amount of wisdom, who sort of charts out a course of study or experiences for us. And we either listen to them or we don't. But when we look back, we go, I wouldn't have gotten where I am without that kind of one-on-one instruction.

35:28Okay. I'm going to reset for the listener. We're talking about Ryan's new book, Wisdom Takes Work. The book is divided into three parts. We're never going to cover everything in the book. You should go buy it and read it. We've just spent some time talking about a few of the aspects of part one of the book, which is the training ground for wisdom. The second part of the book is about the shit you should avoid, the sirens, the perilous rocks of which you must beware. Before I get into the specific sirens, why dedicate a whole section of the book to the stuff you must avoid on the path toward wisdom?

36:08If we think that wisdom is simply the acquisition of knowledge and experience and teachings and advice, we're obviously missing something because you can learn a whole lot. But if you don't remove certain tendencies, if you don't avoid certain pitfalls, you can end up being something that I think appears in most of the different philosophical and spiritual traditions, which is the intelligent fool. right you can have all the knowledge in the world but be stupid at some level and so i came to understand that wisdom is both all these things that you're learning and then it's also all this foolishness that you're trying to avoid or excise right like there's the learning and then there's i don't know about you the first time you you sort of are informed about all these different cognitive biases that humans are susceptible to so on the one hand you're learning something And then what you're actually learning is how to beware or avoid these sort of timeless traps or blind spots that all of us have.

37:12And so I wanted to spend a lot of time on that because I think that's probably what causes most of the suffering and the evil in the world is not ignorance per se. It's something different. Okay, so under sirens, in this section where we're talking not so much about commission, but omission, one of the entries is called empty the cup. What does that mean? Well, this is the famous Zen story of the teacher and the student sitting down for tea. The teacher goes to fill the cup and it overflows. And he says, you know, our mind is like this cup. If it's not empty, I can't take any knowledge in. I wanted to talk about a couple things there.

37:58One, ego being a thing that often fills our cup and prevents us from learning. And then also the biases and the prejudices or the habits or the preconceived notions, whatever you want to call them, that while perhaps they don't fill the cup exactly, what they tend to do is poison or taint whatever you put in the cup. And so the idea of sort of clearing the mind, understanding what we're bringing to things and trying to empty that out as much as possible to me seems like an essential part of this sort of wisdom journey. What are your modalities for doing that? Yeah, it's a good question. To me, journaling is a big one.

38:42I tend to, like Stoic philosophy is this idea of sort of pausing and reflecting. So I try to go, okay, I have this opinion. I have this view. this is my first impression of the matter and not allowing myself to go with that, but to stop and go, okay, what's acting on my opinion here? What is informing my impression here? The Stoics talk about taking all of our emotions, our judgments, our views of things and putting them to the test. So this kind of process of not going with your first instinct or reacting immediately in the moment is I think one of the more essential parts of it. And ego is one of the ones that I'm always trying to check for.

39:22My view is sort of ego is the root of most of the big failures and conflicts of the world. And whenever we can ask ourselves, hey, am I acting out of ego here? Where's my ego distorting what I'm seeing and feeling and experiencing? And how can I remove that from the equation, the better we're going to do. And by ego, and I know you wrote a whole book about the ego, so I'm going to be annoying and ask for another definitional question. Do you mean just like an inflated sense of the self? Yeah, not the Freudian ego exactly, but that sort of colloquial ego, Donald Trump being the embodiment of that ego probably, right?

40:01The sort of narcissism and inflated sense of worth, as you said, maybe another less triggering way to think about is like your identity as a person, right? I am this, I am that, I don't want to be this, I don't want to be that. That thing getting in the way of what is actually a little bit of feedback or what's actually a totally innocent remark or something that has absolutely nothing to do with you. That's where ego gets in the way. In recovery, they sometimes talk about ego as being a conscious separation from. I think that's an interesting definition. It's something that's getting in between you and whatever's happening.

40:41Actually, the acronym they sometimes use, and I don't even think this necessarily has to be religious, but they said ego stands for edging God out. You know, it's just something that's like pushing away this because it threatens the identity or your sense of self. Yeah, that's actually quite profound. I have not spent a lot of time in the recovery world, but every time somebody talks about it, I'm like, yeah, they're really onto something there. And that sense of separation, I mean, that goes really deep. Like we have this sense of ourselves as encased in some sort of armor separate from a dangerous universe, when in fact, I mean, that's all an illusion.

41:24You are created entirely from non-Ryan stuff. Yeah. And yet you feel very much like Ryan. And so how can you not let that sense of Ryan, which is true on some level, if you look in the mirror, you'll see Ryan. But on some deep level is actually an illusion. How can you not let that separation fuck up your decisions? Well, and here's where I experience it quite practically, right? Like the stereotype of like the egotistical artist or the egotistical politician or the egotistical CEO. The problem with that ego is that what each of those people is doing is fundamentally about someone else, right?

42:08Like you're making art that's supposed to sure speak to your experience, but it has to resonate with other people. The CEO is making something of value that other people will willingly exchange time and money for. The politician has to be the representative of the people, has to like the people, has to understand what they're experiencing and what their needs are and what their emotions are. And so the problem with ego is that it makes everything about you. And most of what we're doing in life, professionally and personally, is by definition not about us. And so that's where ego really gets in the way of what you're trying to do or really what you need to do to be successful at that thing.

42:54So along those lines, there's another entry in this part of the book around, the sirens, the dangerous stuff on the path to wisdom. There's another little chapter here called Don't Be a Know-It-All. Yeah. Epictetus's line was, remember it is impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And I think that gets right to it, right? Because there's something self-fulfilling about being a know-it-all. It's not that you know everything, but you know all that it's possible for you to know, right? Because you don't think there's anything else for you to learn. And so the irony of humility is that it actually makes you smarter.

43:35We've been talking about the Oracle of Delphi. At some point, Athens dispatches someone to the Oracle. And it actually wasn't until I was in Greece this summer that I truly understood how far the Oracle is from Athens. It was a several hour drive, right? And then I'm like, oh, how did they get here in the ancient world? It occurred to me that part of the function of the oracle must have been as a cooling off mechanism. It's going to take them a week or two by boat or a month or two by foot to get there. It must have functioned as the founders supposedly said the Senate was supposed to, as the saucer that cools the cup.

44:15But at some point, Athens dispatches a messenger to the oracle to ask, is there anyone wiser than Socrates? And the answer comes back, no, no one is wiser than Socrates. And this is all quite baffling to Socrates because he doesn't feel that he's wise. And it's only as he takes his quiet time to focus and reflect that he realizes that perhaps this is what the oracle meant, that his lack of certainty about his wisdom, his intellectual humility, his interest in asking questions instead of providing answers that is in fact the source of whatever wisdom he does possess. And so if we can understand that the more we focus on what we don't know, the more we will come to know, and the less we sort of reflect in glory in all that we have learned, the better we're going to be.

45:10Didn't stop Socrates from getting himself killed. It's true. Maybe that was him being a little proud of himself. This is a total digression, but I just read this novel set in the ancient world, set in Syracuse, called Glorious Exploits. Have you read it? Who's it by? It's by a first-time Irish novelist whose name is evading me now, but I will put it in the show notes. My friend Zev recommended this book. It's very funny. and to me, what's coming to mind right now is it gave me this feeling that listening to you gives me too, which is just a scintilla of a taste of what it must have been like to live at that time.

45:53The reason I ask is like the best book that I read this year, by the way, talking about speaking to the dead, often my favorite book of the year is like never published in that year that I'm reading it. It's often like some book that was incredibly popular 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 500 years ago, and I'm just hearing about it for the first time. But I read this book, The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault, which is a novel about basically Periclean Athens. Socrates is one of the main characters. And it was hugely popular many, many years ago. It's so easy to think about these historical figures as like, you think of Socrates walking around Athens in his toga, oh, it was so wonderful.

46:34And they're just kicking around ideas. I mean, Socrates lives through a great power conflict between Athens and Sparta, a series of wars, one of which he fights in, which his country loses, by the way. And then he lives through a time called the 30 tyrants. And then later he's put to death. He lived in this incredibly fitful, uncertain, chaotic, stressful time. And we just totally misremember what the past was actually like. The past was exactly like things are right now, which is to say a complete mess. It feels like the world is ending all the time. It feels like everyone is uniquely awful and stupid and cruel, and we're going to fuck it all up.

47:19And it's like, that's what they felt like. Montaigne lived through the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. His whole period of retreating to his study to think about things, that wasn't a voluntary choice. He was worried about being burned at the stake, and that's why he retires from public life. So just to pick up on that, what you said about Socrates and the Athenians losing wars, This book, Glorious Exploits, is set in, I said, Syracuse. And I didn't know until I read the book that Syracuse was on Sicily. And the Athenians had invaded at the point where this book takes place and had lost.

48:01And they were keeping a bunch of the POWs, the prisoners of war, in the bottom of a quarry. Yes. And some locals got this madcap idea to put on an Athenian play using the Athenian prisoners. Hilarity ensues. So two things related to that, right, about how interconnected all this stuff was. That failed, flawed invasion is led by Alciobides, who's Socrates' student slash protege, who's your classic example of a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic fool. and those prisoners, because the Athenians get absolutely decimated, just went through. They were basically worked to death in these horrible camps and they almost all died.

48:58It was brutal. But I didn't know about this novel and now I'm very excited to read it. Listeners should know that Ryan is the proprietor of a bookstore. If you find yourself in Austin, Texas or the environs, you should go check out his bookstore, which is called? The Painted Porch, just to make it all full circle, that's where Zeno sets up in the Agora. It's the Stoa Pokile, or the Painted Porch, is where he begins to host his philosophical discussions. So that's where the name comes from. Let's keep going with some of the sirens. Yeah. This is more of a commission than omission, but it's, I think, worth talking about.

49:37Seek criticism. Yeah. The problem with success is that the stakes become ever higher and your access to accurate information, feedback, and criticism is less and less. I've thought about this practically on this very book. I sent in the first draft of it and my publisher was like, sounds good. I have a decent track record. We've worked together a long time. And they basically were just like, okay, this is good to go. And I had to go, no, no, no, no, no. It's definitely not. There is no way that it was. Right. And so it's funny earlier in my career, both out of ego and then also, you know, as you're sort of fighting to do what you're trying to do.

50:28My problem was too much feedback, too much criticism, people trying to tell me what I could and couldn't do. And you have this kind of antagonistic relationship with feedback. And then the irony is once you succeed at some level, that goes away. And that's actually not a privilege. It's a kind of a curse. You know, I ended up having to do quite a bit of work to get the feedback and criticism that I needed to get the book where I think it needed to end up. Obviously, this is a minor example, but you can imagine the president doesn't get many people telling him they're not doing a good job. There's a story that Gerald Ford, speaking of presidents, Gerald Ford was fond of this story about Abraham Lincoln when he was inspecting the defenses around the Union lines.

51:14He's obviously so tall that a Confederate sharpshooter takes a shot at Lincoln and just barely misses. And a Union soldier, you know, petrified. He goes, get down, you fool. And he said, that may have been the only and the last time that anyone called an American president a fool to their face. That is, let's say, less a risk in a democracy where you have freedom of speech. But you can imagine not many people are able to tell Vladimir Putin that he's fucking up this Ukraine thing and that he made a colossal mistake and needs to back out, right? Dictators, presidents, celebrities, CEOs, et cetera, don't get the feedback or criticism that they need to improve and get better.

51:59And so if you don't cultivate a practice in your life, as well as a network, later in the book, I talk about cultivating a board of advisors. If you don't cultivate that, you're not just going to stop getting better. You're going to start getting worse. You can see it in Kim Jong-un's fashion choices. Yeah, and this is why you read the comments on your videos, right? Thank you for putting my dumb behavior into the most positive light. I will say just one thing, what feedback to let in and not let in is really the question. Is it feedback from random people on the internet? Probably not, right?

52:35And so that is the art of it. It's not what everyone thinks, but how do you get it from the right people in the right way? coming up ryan talks about how to seek out criticism embrace complexity and how to learn how to die keep it here we talked about the first two parts of the book the training ground and then the sirens the stuff you should avoid on route hopefully to wisdom part three of the book is called the apotheosis or the touching of the divine. What does that mean? And what's the relationship to wisdom? Yeah. So what I ended up kind of doing in each of the four books in this series is kind of like, there's like your beginner level, there's your intermediate level, and then there's your sort of advanced level.

53:27There's some kind of transcendent level of each of these virtues. There's a sort of ordinary courage of a person who gets up and speaks their mind, And then there's the courage of the person who's willing to go to jail for an idea or willing to be executed for said idea, right? And I think with wisdom, there's obviously the sort of educational process we all have to undergo. There's the sort of foolishness and error that we try to avoid. And then there is some level of kind of transcendent wisdom. Gandhi's education is fascinating to me, right? He has some ordinary schooling in India. Then he goes to London for law school, which is where he really becomes a critical thinker and engages with a bunch of the intellectual ideas that shape him for the rest of his life.

54:15But we don't call him the Mahatma because he got a degree in London in the law, right? There's some other level of education and learning and insight and understanding that he learns first in South Africa, both as a practicing lawyer and then as a fledgling activist, and then later when he goes back to India. So my point in the third part of the book is just the ideal, the highest level of wisdom. And I talk a lot about Lincoln because Lincoln's fascinating in this regard. He sort of mirrors all these different levels. His self-education as a young man was obviously essential, but it's actually later in life, kind of the last 15 or so years of his life that he becomes the sort of Abraham Lincoln, the great man of history.

55:03And that education and that transformation is what I'm sort of not just most interested in, but I think we all ought to aspire to at some level. So let's talk about the how of that. You have a lot of recommendations, but let me throw a couple of them at you and get you to hold forth. One of them, you've got a chapter here under this third part of the book called Embrace the Mystery. What do you mean by that? Before you know stuff, you think the world is very simple. And then you study and you learn, and it becomes a little bit more complex. And then you study it more and more, and it becomes simple again.

55:44And then you study more and more, and it becomes complex again. I guess what I'm talking about, and I talk about this a lot in part three of the book, is the complexity and contradiction, the ineffability of things, like even the idea of wisdom. I think I've gotten better at going like, I actually don't know how to define wisdom exactly. I don't think, and perhaps the definition of it is actually not the important thing. So I just wanted to spend some time in the book talking about that ineffability, that contradiction, that complexity. I think this is why often some of the wisest people love fiction and poetry and the arts.

56:24In a way, almost a poem comes better to encapsulating the truth of something than a textbook can, even though it's attacking the problem from a very different angle. Speaking of truth, there's also a chapter here called Suffer Into Truth. Yeah. It's very hard to achieve any kind of real or lasting wisdom without paying for it. The ancient said, we suffer into truth. That was Aeschylus, which by the way, Robert F. Kennedy, the first one, famously quotes this line to a raucous crowd in Indianapolis the night that they all simultaneously learned that Martin Luther King Jr. has been killed. He was speaking of his own painful lessons from his brother's death, that you want to be angry, you want to rage, and then he just sort of where does violence in this way take you?

57:22He was just talking about these lessons that we have learned painfully over our experience as a human race and then also individually in our own lives. And so, you know, when we talk about learning by trial and error, some of those errors are going to be embarrassing and humiliating and costly and expensive. And the redeeming quality that comes out of them has to be the insight and the understanding. You can suffer and screw up and not take wisdom out of it too, I guess. So that's the choice that you have. I shudder to think how many times I've made the wrong choice in this regard. But moving along, there's another chapter here I want to hear you talk about, which is called Grasp the Essence.

58:08The story I tell in that chapter is about Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address, which is word for word, pound for pound, one of the greatest things ever written in the English language and then also most impactful things ever written in the English language. I talked about his sort of deep dive into slavery and the history of America there. That speech is the distillation of all of that study, of all of those talks, of all of that suffering that he had experienced personally and then witnessed as he toured these battlefields and read the casualty counts. What Lincoln is doing there is articulating fundamentally what America is, should be, and could be.

58:58And the fact that he does it in, what, like 260 some odd words is all the more remarkable when you learn, and I didn't learn this in school, that he was not the main speaker of the day. Edward Everett was widely considered America's greatest orator at that time. He spoke for two hours before Lincoln. The Gettysburg Address was shorter than the invocation, the prayer that kicked off the events there at Gettysburg. But Everett tells Lincoln either that evening or the next day that he came closer to expressing the essence of what needed to be expressed in two minutes than Everett had done in two hours.

59:42That was not a magic trick. That was the culmination of an intellectual and spiritual journey that had gone back to Lincoln's earliest days. I can't remember if the words I'm about to utter come from the Gettysburg Address or the second inaugural, but the idea of malice toward none and charity toward all, that just seems to me to be desperately lacking in our culture right now. You're totally right. It is in the second inaugural. But to go to our point about expressing the essence, the idea, if you've been to the Lincoln Memorial, that his two greatest pieces of writing, and Lincoln was a writer.

1:00:22There's actually a great book called Lincoln Biography of a Writer that I recommend to a lot of people. We think of him as a politician giving speeches, but these were meticulously crafted documents that oftentimes he just read. He fished a scrap of paper out of his pocket and read the Gettysburg Address. But the fact that those two speeches could fit on, I think, three tablets, you know, in the Lincoln Memorial is just a magnificent statement of brevity and distillation. I think the second inaugural address is like one of the shortest inaugural addresses, and yet it is the best. Someone pointed out to me once, and I don't know if it's true and I don't want to look it up because I just like thinking about it, that every sentence and phrase in the second inaugural has become a book title.

1:01:10And you go, yeah, probably because every phrase in it is perfect. A couple more questions for you before I let you go. There's a chapter here right at the end called Pass the Final Test. Yeah. Wow. Cicero said that to philosophize is to learn how to die, that the whole point of philosophy was to prepare us for the one thing that we're all going to do. So of all the things that I'm writing about in the book, this is obviously the one I have the least experience in, and I have no idea whether I'm right or not. But if the dead can teach us anything, I'm just trying to sort of channel what they have spoken to us about.

1:01:50The idea being that all philosophy is aimed at both living well and then ultimately dying well. I wanted to talk about sort of some of the lessons that death teaches us and then sort of how we orient ourselves. I opened the book with Montaigne and I end it with Montaigne, and he loved that line from Cicero, but he had written that he hopes death will find him planting cabbages. And what he meant was that he hoped death would find him in the course of an ordinary, regular moment of life that he was living well. And I think there's something kind of zen about that. It's kind of the perfect expression.

1:02:27But, you know, death is ever-present. The Stoics want us to remember that death isn't a thing that happens at the end, that in fact, death is happening now. So Seneca would say that actually I do have some familiarity with death because I've already died nearly 40 years, that if we think about death as this thing that is a part of our existence and a part of our life, not just that the people we love and know are dying all around us all the time, but that we ourselves are dying with the passage of time. I think we are grasping a fundamental piece of wisdom that can be life-changing. There's a final phrase I want to ask you about.

1:03:06Thou mayest. Ooh, yes. This is Steinbeck. Have you read East of Eden? A long time ago. It is worth rereading because it is an incredible book. I reread it early in the pandemic, a beautiful, magnificent kind of epic novel, which, by the way, has a lot of stoicism in it. The Chinese servant to the main family is this philosopher who's always quoting Marcus Aurelius to the two boys. In any case, Steinbeck writes this book about writing East of Eden, and it's called Letters from a Novel, I think. Anyways, he's talking to his editor, and he says basically the fundamental premise of the book, and he thinks this is his insight into the ancient traditions too, is that the commandments are not thou shall not, as in like you absolutely are not allowed to do these things, but that thou mayest, that you have the choice not to, and that who we are is ultimately about making this choice, that free will is the essential part of the Christian tradition, part of the virtue tradition, which is that no one is making you do or not do these things, and that perhaps hell or heaven is the wrong way to think about it too, because then it's like you've got a gun to your head, that there's a punishment for doing or not doing the right thing.

1:04:32He's saying that it's a choice and that this choice is the thing that matters, that says who we are. And so I begin and end the series calling back to that story about the choice of Hercules, which was so informative for Socrates and then later for Zeno, the choice of Hercules being this very idea that Hercules comes to the crossroads, the choice between virtue and vice, and the path of vice, he is told, will be easy and straightforward and wonderful and pleasurable and all of these things, and that the path to virtue will be hard and difficult and may not pay off, and which one is he going to choose?

1:05:16That that's the choice of Hercules, and that's the choice that we have to make as individuals. And by the way, just like a little crazy thing, I was surprised to learn. John Adams thought that the choice of Hercules should be what's on the seal of the United States, not the eagle. He thought the choice of Hercules was fundamentally what a country built around liberty was saying, that the government can't tell you to do or not do these things, but you as the individual, given the choice, may or may not do these things. And what you choose is who you are. It's always great to talk to you. I'm going to ask the two questions I always ask at the end of the show habitually.

1:06:00The first is, is there anything you were hoping that we would get to that we didn't get to? No, this is amazing. I always love talking with you. The second question is just, can you remind everybody of the books you've written and any other stuff that they should know about from you, the Daily Stoic, et cetera, et cetera. Please just step into the plug zone. Oh, yeah. Well, ego wise, this one's much easier for me. So the Stoic Virtue series, Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, Right Thing Right Now, and Wisdom Takes Work. That's what I just finished. Those are available anywhere. And then I'm probably best known for my book, The Daily Stoic, and then dailystoic.com, which is a Stoic-inspired email every day, and then podcast and YouTube stuff.

1:06:46So that you can find at Daily Stoic pretty much everywhere you would go. Right. Thanks again for making time for this. Awesome to talk to you always. No, this is amazing. All right. Hope to see you soon.

1:07:03Thanks again to Ryan Holiday. As I said at the top, love having that guy on the show. So before I leave you, just want to remind you to sign up for my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris, my new meditation app. You can sign up over at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Lots of amazing stuff going on over there. I'm really proud of my team for all the work they're doing over there. And finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

1:07:38Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.