9 Stoic Lessons From Iron Maiden

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1:20Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

1:59Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Last Saturday, I flew my son. We got up very early. We got a morning flight, and we flew to Sacramento where I'm from, and I took him to his first Iron Maiden show. I actually saw Iron Maiden in Sacramento where I grew up at the Sleep Train Amphitheater in Marysville. I don't know if it's still called that, honestly. This time it was in downtown Sac, like on the river in Discovery Park. It was crazy. There was like 150 ,000 people there. It was totally insane. Rich Roll got me some amazing backstage passes. It was cool. But I saw them in Sacramento 20 years ago, almost exactly.

2:47So to be able to take my son, and he did so good. It was our first sort of solo trip together. I have a Daily Dad episode that is all sort of behind the scenes on it. I'll link to that. You should listen to it. But it was a great show. We saw Judas Priest first and then Iron Maiden. And then my son has been so excited about it. My oldest, he's been so excited about it and bragging about it. Now his younger brother is jealous, who I basically only didn't take because I thought he didn't care. And he was like desperately wants to do something. And it turns out Judas Priest is playing right down the street from where I live in the country that we're not far from the Circuit of America's track.

3:20So actually Thursday, I'm taking them both now to see Judas Priest. So my son will have seen Judas Priest twice in a week, which seems crazy to say in 2024. What does this all have to do with stoicism? As you'll see in today's episode, in some ways, absolutely nothing. And in other ways, I'm going to figure out how to make it work. I think you're really going to like this episode. I wanted to take two of my favorite things, which is Iron Maiden and Stoicism, and find a way to tell a story about them together. And that's what we're going to do in today's episode. Trust me on this. You know, the weave.

3:52I think I weave all these threads together, and eventually it comes to a point that is worth listening to on this Sunday. Enjoy.

4:05So what is Iron Maiden? What do you have to do with stoic philosophy? Absolutely nothing. But this is my channel, and I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about. And in today's video, I'm going to give you some lessons from the greatest heavy metal band of all time and what they can teach us about ancient philosophy.

4:29I actually do think there is one very explicit stoic lesson in Iron Maiden, which is that we focus on what we control. There was a brief moment where heavy metal was sort of mainstream, but that was a long time ago. And even within that, Iron Maiden was never really a huge band. It's pretty remarkable that you would have a band that would sell 100 million albums, be touring stadiums almost 50 years after they started, and to do so without having any enormous hit. They've had some singles that have charted, and their albums have often debuted well on the charts. But Iron Maiden has always been a little bit outside the mainstream.

5:05Part of that, one of my favorite quotes from Bruce Dickinson, who's the lead singer of Iron Maiden, he says, we have our fields and we've got to plow it and that's it. He says, what's going on in the next field is of no concern to us. We can only plow one field at a time. What you have to do is focus on what you control in business, in life, in art. If you are looking to see what the swimmer next to you is doing, you're going to slow down. If you're looking back to see how proud you are, to talk about this in the Bible, not to look behind you as you plow because you veer off to the side, you have to stay focused forward and you have to stay focused on your field.

5:42I try not to get distracted with what other authors are doing in this moment, what's popular or trendy right now on YouTube or in podcasts. I try to focus on what I control and I'm trying to run my own race. That's what Epictetus says. He says, you will always win if you only run in races in which winning is up to you. Iron Maiden isn't trying to be the biggest band in the world. They're trying to be best version of Iron Maiden that they can be. They're trying to do their thing, plow their fields, mine their minds. They're trying to focus on what they control and they're running their own race.

6:16That's what you have to focus on in life, in business, in art, not what other people are doing, not what's going on in the moment. You keep doing your thing.

6:28It's actually kind of weird that there's not an Iron Maiden song about stoicism. The only place they remotely interact is in the song The Evil That Men Do, which is about Julius Caesar. It quotes a line from the Shakespeare play about Julius Caesar, which would involve Cato and Brutus. Brutus is married to Cato's daughter, but that's like as close as the six degrees of separation that we would get from Iron Maiden and the Stokes. But there is something in Iron Maiden that I like, which is that they base most of their stuff on the great works, figures, and ideas from antiquity. Iron Maiden has songs about Tennyson and Coleridge poems.

7:13They've got songs about Alexander the Great. They've got songs about Genghis Khan. They're always sort of trying to take great ideas and remix them and rework them in the way that Plutarch was doing in the ancient world, in the way that Shakespeare was doing about 1500 years later. The idea, I think, in Iron Maiden's work is you take the sort of core monomyths, stories, and figures from history, and you remix them, you update them, you transfer them to new mediums. That's what Plutarch was doing. That's what Shakespeare was doing with Plutarch. And that's what Iron Maiden was doing with their song, The Evil That Men Do.

7:48And it's what I do in my work. I take stoic ideas, stoic wisdom, and I illustrate it through stories, sometimes from the very ancient world, sometimes from modern pop culture and sports, sometimes from American history. But I try to demonstrate ideas through story. Story is what drives great art. Tragic characters, heroic figures. This is what inspires us. This is what we connect with. And this is what I base my work on. And that's something I took very early on from my love of Iron Maiden.

8:23And that actually reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Iron Maiden stories. The manager of Iron Maiden, he's been the manager basically since day one. His name is Rod Smallwood. And someone once came up to him at an event or a party or something. And they said, you know, you're one of my heroes in the music business. I so admire the work you're doing in the music business. And he said, I'm not in the music business. He said, I'm in the Iron Maiden business. And this is that same idea. Put the profanity aside. What he's saying is you're not in the larger industry you're in. You're not in this space or that space.

8:54You're in the space of realizing your potential, serving your audience, doing your thing. That's what you control. If you're in the music business, you're ranked compared against all these other people, right? How is everyone else doing? What's everyone else doing? If you're in the Iron Maiden business, if I'm in the Ryan Holiday business, if I'm in the Daily Stoic business, what matters is my space, my field, what I'm doing. I want to focus on that. I'm measured by how well I realize my potential, how well I do what I do, how well I take advantage of the opportunities inherent and available to me.

9:28I write and talk and make videos about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. I love that you're paying attention to this. We're vibing. We're interested in the same things. But I also understand that a lot of people aren't. And understanding that and accepting it and being okay with it, that's part of being happy and content and doing what only you can do.

9:51I admire people who have range. I'm not talking about vocal range here. I'm talking about range like they can just do a lot. Seneca in the ancient world is such an insane example of this. It's almost unbelievable. Seneca is well known as a Stoic philosopher, and he was also well known as a political power broker. He serves as consul, he's an advisor to Nero, he's a senator. And then there was also this playwright, a playwright who was so famous that one of his lines survives to us as an archaeological artifact. It's entombed on a wall as graffiti that was preserved by a volcano. But it was unbelievable to scholars and historians for many centuries that this also could have been from the same Seneca.

10:35James Rahm, one of the biographers of Seneca, says that would be like if Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was this great writer and thinker, was also in Lincoln's cabinet, right? It's just an unbelievable amount of range for a singular person. But it is true, Seneca was also that playwright. Historians didn't think it was possible for one person to be good at all that stuff but they in fact were now this isn't exactly a fair comparison but i am equally baffled blown away by bruce dickinson the lead singer of iron main so yes he is a singer with incredible range he's known as the air raid siren he hits these incredible notes if you haven't heard the note that he holds in hallowed be thy name just the recorded version is insane but if you watch it like at rock and rio or one of the live performances he holds this note for like 20 plus but bruce dickinson isn't just a singer first off he's written like some children's books he's had a radio show.

11:23He's had a solo career. These are things that artists do. But Bruce Dickinson also is a world-class fencer, like literally almost made the British national team and the British Olympic team as a fencer. And then he started to fly planes. You know, you start with a little plane, you get bigger and bigger to the point where for many years, he not only flew the band from show to show in their own 747, all the gear, all the crew, all the media, he would fly from show to show on what they would call ed force one and then he liked it so much and he was so good at he got a job at an airline where he would fly passengers when the band wasn't touring and there's a famous story where he ends up rescuing a bunch of refugees from syria or some country during a civil war it's just an incredible amount of range and i love that the stoics didn't like pen and ink philosophers people who just did that one thing they respected people who had a whole range of skills and talents.

12:24And I think Bruce is obviously an example of that, Seneca being an incredible example of this. But the point is, you don't just have to be good at one thing. You don't just have to limit yourself to one thing. You can be good at lots of things.

12:39One of the things Mark Sreelius talks about quite a bit in meditations is the worthlessness of faith. He compares it to the clacking of tongues and the smashing of hands. He says, what good is it to be remembered by posterity you're not going to be around to enjoy it you can imagine he's the most famous powerful person in the world he's literally worshiped as a god there are cults to the emperor he's having to create a sort of a psychological distance a buffer between him and his persona his him and his reputation he would have been not just cheered and celebrated when he walked the streets but he also would have been jeered and criticized when he walked the streets people literally were trying to kill him there would have been people who were lying to him every day because they wanted something from him.

13:20There would have been people lying to him every day because they wanted to deceive and manipulate him. So he had to create some distance from this. He saw how damaging it was to be stained purple, he said. That's the color of the cloak of the emperor, to become Caesarified. And actually, one of my favorite quotes of all time about fame comes from Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden. The quote's somewhat graphic, I'll grant you that, but he says, fame is the excrement of creativity. He says it's the shit that comes out the backside. It's a byproduct of it. He's saying it's a byproduct of doing the work.

13:56Now, Mark Surilis' relationship to fame would have been a little bit different because he sort of has this all foisted upon him. He doesn't earn it fan by fan, show by show, album by album. And yet at the same time, if we can understand that our reputation, our renowned, our amount of followers or fans is a byproduct of doing the work as opposed to the reward for doing the work, it's a better way to think about it. Actually, Mark Schroes does talk about sort of these accidental byproducts of things. He calls it nature's inadvertence. If you can see fame as the byproduct of mastery and hard work and luck and randomness, and that it's this sort of beautiful thing that's separate from you, that's a much healthier way to see it than, oh, I'm a good person because I am famous.

14:39I am important because I am famous, that this fame says something about you as a person. Like I try to focus on writing my books, pouring myself into them, doing the work, and how it's received is not what I focus on so much. It's wonderful to hit number one. I've had that experience, not at the level that Iron Maiden has had it, but I've had books hit as high as books can hit in publishing. The way I try to respond to that is by immediately focusing on the next project. Go into the next thing. Don't get sucked into patting yourself on the back, celebrating, letting it say something about you as a person.

15:18Just keep doing the work.

15:30Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

16:16We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

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17:12What's interesting to me about Iron Maiden is despite now having been at this for essentially 50 years, putting out more than a dozen albums, dozens of singles, thousands of performances. Like if you listen to the first album and their most recent album, even though the singers have changed a few times, Bruce Dickinson has been there for the bulk of it. But the sound hasn't evolved that much from beginning to end. There's a consistency to Iron Maiden that I love. It's not for everyone, but I like it and I respect it. I would say they are better. Right. You can you can tell how much better they've gotten at musicians.

17:45But like what an Iron Maiden song is remains what an Iron Maiden song is. There's a quote where Bruce Dickinson said something like, there's an unspoken contract between the band and the audience. Now, sometimes an artist, he says like David Bowie, it's all about reinvention and change. And then there's other artists where it's about straight down the middle. This is what you expect from me. I've done some experimental different kinds of books, like my book Conspiracy. But for the most part, like, you know, if you're reading one of my stoic books, you know what you're going to get. Courage, discipline, the justice book.

18:17I'm working on the wisdom book. It can't be five times longer. or it can't be half as short. It couldn't suddenly be a weird stream of consciousness. I have a thing. I have a contract with the audience. Now this maybe to some is constraining or constrictive, but there's actually a stoic lesson in this too. Kleinthe is one of the early stoics, is a big fan of poetry. And he would say that actually the beauty of the medium of poetry is in the constraints. He would say that the fetters are what unlock the creativity. Now he wouldn't have known what a haiku is, but a haiku is a great example of, because it can only be this many syllables and this many syllables and this many syllables, it forces you to be creative in a way that you, if you could do whatever you wanted, you wouldn't do.

18:58There's something in the sort of consistency, the constraints, the boundaries, the formula that is an Iron Maiden song that kind of becomes an obstacle is the way thing. It forces them to be creative in a certain way. And I think about that with my books. If I could do anything, if it could be anywhere and go in any direction, it might not go in any direction. It's about the channeling, the constraining. I've just always respected the consistency, the day-to-dayness, the ability to find something new in doing something the same way.

19:28I'm taking my son this weekend, actually. We're going to go see Iron Maiden in Sacramento. He's turning eight. This will be his first. But I grew up in Sacramento and it occurred to me that that's where I saw my first Iron Maiden show exactly 20 years ago. Probably seen the end videos wear the shirt that I bought at that concert. I still fit in the same shirt, but I'm a different person. It's going to be a different show, but it'll also be the same show. It'll be in the same place, but also in a different place. The Stoics talk about how we don't step in the same river twice. And there's something to me about finding a band, falling in love with the band, following the music, even though the stuff stays the same, you change.

20:07And yet it also brings you back. That's what nostalgia is. What you take out of something early on is different from what you'll get through it later. And I've had a relationship with their music almost as long as I've had a relationship now with the Stoics. And every time I pick up Mark Schwartz, I get something new out of it. I notice something that wasn't there before. I appreciate something that I couldn't have appreciated before. And having this sort of long, in-depth relationship with art is such an important idea. Seneca talks about how we want to linger on the works of the master thinkers, that you don't just kind of dip in and dip out of stuff, that you don't just consume it once.

20:43You don't just watch it, but you have to be watching it. You don't just read the Stoics. You have to be reading the Stoics on an ongoing basis. There's just something powerful about not just staying with something, but also powerful about someone that keeps going, right? Because as they continue, the songs take on a new light, how they perform them live changes and involves. I've talked to musicians on the podcast about this. Yeah, it's the same song, but the energy inside it, what it means, what it represents changes. And of course, this is obviously true for something like Mark Sturilius' Meditations, which has endured now for almost 20 centuries.

21:18Every audience, every era, every person is going to take something different out of it. And those same people are going to take something different out of it over the course of their lives and their many readings and rereadings.

21:33When I first heard Iron Maiden, they were not a new band. They were new to me. I think that's an important idea for every artist and creator out there. You are new to everyone that hasn't discovered you yet. When they discover you, you are new. But Iron Maiden had been around for almost 30 years when I heard them for the first time. So it's unbelievable to me that they would still be going 20 plus years after that, almost 50 years. The day-to-dayness, It's the consistency, the staying at it. That is what makes a great person, a great artist, a great creator, a great business person. It's the sticking to it.

22:08It's the not giving up. I think quantity is a way to get to quality. Iron Maiden has some great songs and some not so great songs, but there's no singular album that has all their best stuff. Those songs are interspersed on each of the albums because each time they go back into the studio, each time they sit down to write, they come up with something new. And some of that, as you sift through it over the course of the career, Lassen and Dersen, some of it doesn't. You know, if you think of your career as like, you know, those booths that you get in and there's like just the money blowing and you're trying to grab it, that is the wrong way to think about it.

22:41You want to build a machine and an edifice of an operation that can endure and sustain. It's wonderful that some of my early books have worked, but what I've tried to do is build consistency into my practice. I've tried to keep going. Again, that quantity is a way to get to quality, that you keep doing the work, you keep growing. There's a story about Mark Aurelius. He's an old man who's seen leaving the palace in Rome. The man asks him where he's going and he says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. The man was amazed. He says, here you are, the most powerful man in the world and you're taking up your tablets and going to school.

23:16There's still stuff you can learn, things you haven't quite figured out, problems you can still be working on? How do you continue to grow and change and evolve? How do you keep doing that thing? And how do you set yourself up? How do you take care of yourself in a way that you can still be doing? It's amazed to see these guys in their 60s and 70s just still going at it. But that's the result of taking care of yourself, putting in the work, thinking about it in a sustainable way, building a platform, building some level of independence and resilience into what you do and most of all it's a result of just not quitting action by action step by step marks really says no one can stop you from that he says that's how you build a life that's also how you build a career that's how you survive ups and downs fads moments recessions and setbacks you do it by step by step action by action song by song show by show book by book video by video whatever it is you keep going you stay at it and when you look back in retrospect at years or For decades, you're going to be amazed at how far you've gone.

24:23Seneca's line was, it's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it. And one of my favorite Iron Maiden songs, and actually one of their biggest, came sort of in the middle of the 80s, is this song, Wasted Years. It's on Somewhere in Time. It's a song about how we often think of like the golden years. We think of our youth. We think of things were amazing. But that time is now. you will look back at this time, whatever age you are, if you are lucky enough to continue to live into the future, you will look back at this time and think about how young you were, think about how much more energy you had, think about how great things were, even if this moment in time is incredibly hard.

25:00I'll play backwards. You can't look forward. You have to embrace this present moment because the present moment is all you have. You cannot lose a life other than the one you are living, Mark Strelitz writes in meditation. He talks about embracing the perfect stillness of this moment. He talks in remarkably similar language throughout meditations to the wonderful lyrics of the song, as does Seneca in his seminal essay on the shortness of life. Life doesn't have to be short. We make it short by wasting it, by looking forward to when things are better or looking backwards to when they were easier, instead of taking this moment that we're in right now.

25:37And that's the still practice of Memento Mori. Remember you are mortal. There's even an Iron Maiden album called Dance of Death. But the idea that life is not something you can take for granted. You cannot have it forever. We will all go at some point or another, and that point could be right now. We have to remember that. We have to live accordingly. You could leave life right now. Marks really says in meditations, let that determine what you do and say and think. Every day I send out one stoic inspired email totally for free, almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe.

26:19It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com slash email. Love to see you there.

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