Do Not Let This Miracle Go To Waste | Ask Daily Stoic

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:10adulthood was a miracle of miracles. Infant mortality rates in ancient Rome were extremely high. Estimates range from 25 to 30 percent. The average lifespan was somewhere between 20 to 30 years old. Marcus could have been assassinated by some rival. He could have died of a cut on his finger or lead poisoning from the pipes of inside the Roman Empire. And what are the chances that he was born at all. We are all miracles, freak occurrences, trillion to one chances. How is life even possible on a rock spinning in space? And the lesson from all this, big and small, is that we should not take this gift for granted.

1:54We should not just live, but live bravely, live boldly, as the Gang of Youth's song puts it.

2:33The whole future is uncertain, Seneca reminds us. Live virtuously, of course, but also live immediately. Don't wait for the perfect moment to arrive. Don't waste time chasing certainty or comfort. You are here impossibly, improbably, miraculously here. And that is reason enough to act, to love, to show up, to do what matters while you still can. Because as fleeting and as fragile as this life is, it is also full of meaning if you choose to fill it with meaning. So don't let your spirit wane, let it burn right here, right now. This is the insight that Memento Mori provides us. By thinking, by imagining that we've just given a few months to live, we can immediately see what we would stop doing, what we wouldn't care about.

3:22We'll realize that we won't have any more time to waste. And before you know it, there is this urgent, emergent need to do the things we love and place to the things that we don't. We've got a bunch of cool reminders, embodiments of this in the Daily Stokes store. I'll link to that in today's show notes. My favorite is the Memento Mori pendant. It's a necklace. You've probably seen me wearing it. My wife wears one every day and it's got the tulip, the skull, the hourglass on it. And on the back it says live accordingly, right? Memento Mori, live accordingly. I'll link to that in today's show notes.

3:55hey it's ryan welcome to another thursday episode of the daily stoic podcast so the coldest day i ever swam in barton springs was the day i got married i think it was 19 degrees outside something insane it was snowing and robert green was in town and he wanted to go to barton springs we'd been planning on it and it was just this freak cold day like i think every other day since then it's been like 60 to 80 degrees in Austin. So it was just crazy cold. I was worried I killed Robert Green because it took him a lot longer to warm up than me. And then the second coldest day I've ever swam in Barton Springs was earlier this year back in February.

4:37I think it was like 28. I've been swimming in the mornings after I dropped my son off from school. I learned from my first very freezing Barton Springs that I had to get one of those sort of wetsuit like helmet things because it's really through your head that you're losing all the heat. So I got a nice swim in and then I jumped in the car. So I thought I was doing the gig in Austin, but there'd been a last minute miscommunication. It was actually out in like Inks Lake or Lake Buchanan. I forget. It was a two hour drive. So a long, cold drive took a long time to get my body temperature back up.

5:11And then I pull up to this house and it was a really cool group of guys that had started basically a mastermind group. They would pick a city, they all travel in, and then they have a couple of different speakers come out, give advice, ask questions, and then they go back to their respective businesses. So it was really cool. They do it once a quarter. I thought it was a really interesting idea. And this is me answering their questions. So anyways, enjoy. And thanks to the folks in North for having me out.

5:46I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school, and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although, here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey, because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime, with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys. That will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

6:23Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

7:06My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

7:43Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. What is some stuff that you do take in? Oh, I mean, I listen to podcasts. I read books. I read different newsletters and stuff. I think Twitter will break your brain, clearly. I mean, Elon Musk is one of the smartest people in the world and also regularly one of the dumbest people in the world because of shit that he reads on social media, you know? And I think he went from, like when Elon Musk started SpaceX, he went and read Soviet rocket manuals.

8:23Like he went as in-depth and straight to the source as you could possibly go to learn about a complex thing. And now when he has an enormous platform and an enormous amount of power, it's very clear that he learns about stuff from like anonymous Twitter accounts that, you know, are distilling a very complicated topic down into a very small amount of words. And that's just not a good way to get information. And I think podcasts too. I think people like the medium of podcasting is you always want to think about what is the medium? What kind of message does it facilitate? That's what the expression, the medium and the message is.

8:59Like a book forces you to think really deeply about a topic and then at length explain it in a form that is supposed to stand the test of time. In that like if you're writing a book about a trend that's happening right now, it's not you shouldn't write a book about it. You should write an article about it. But like a book is supposed to last. Right. So that's that's what a book's supposed to get. And it's also supposed to be worth paying for. You know, television news is supposed to be entertaining. What a podcast facilitates is like shooting the shit, like people being friendly with each other and talking.

9:33And I think people have started to mistake listening to people shoot the shit about a topic with learning about a topic. This is why conspiracy theories are so seductive on podcasts, because they're just talking about it. And no one's like questioning it. There's no fact checking. And if you just hear it reasonably discussed by two reasonable people, you leave thinking, oh, maybe that is reasonable. Let alone they're excited about it. Yeah, but if they've been forced to write even a 2 ,000-word article about it, all the problems with what they're saying would be very obvious to you. And so I do think I would say people listen to podcasts too much.

10:17Like, audiobook and podcasts, similar app, similar thing. Not even on the same level of quality of information, but they feel the same. Your kids are pretty young. So I don't know if you're getting close where they are going to be seeking information that isn't from mom and dad. And we know I got a middle schooler in my house, but there's no phone. They don't have access to anything. YouTube is history, like the whole nine yards. But what would you want to be introducing them? knowing what we just discussed about the media and the information out there and how you should be getting it. Yeah, we're not that strict in my house, but like I drove my son to school this morning and he's obsessed with Hamilton, the musical.

11:03And so we're listening to the audio book from Hamilton. So like I try to take the things that they're interested in and I try to show them stuff about it. And I try to show them how when you get into something, you learn about it. If Marcus Aurelius was to open a business, what business would it be? Oh, that's a good question. Well, so Zeno, the founder of Stoicism was a merchant and he trades in this purple dye to make the clothes and the cloaks of the wealthiest ancients. And he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He ends up in Athens and he found Stoicism out of this disaster. And his joke is that he makes a great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck, because it changes the course of his life.

11:49There weren't a lot of Stoic businessmen. Seneca's line was, a philosopher can be rich provided their money is not stained in blood. And his point is like, there's no problem with making money as long as you do it in an ethical, honest way. As long as it's not coming at the exploitation of someone or something, I think is his point. So I don't know what he would do. Is there any historical precedent to like what we're experiencing today without being super divided. I'm more interested in the historical precedent of like who gets drawn to power and what happens when you have like an unstable narcissist in power.

12:31It doesn't tend to go well. And I think, you know, Seneca's life is interesting in this. Like Seneca is the teacher. So what's fascinating is Mark Cirellius and Nero, two kids not born to be emperor, their father is not emperor, get chosen for it at a young age, get trained in philosophy, in Stoicism specifically, one is terrible, one is good. What happens? And Nero specifically, Seneca is his teacher. At 15 years old, Seneca is recalled from exile to teach this teenage Nero. And for the first couple years, Nero's okay. And then I think he had a screw loose, he was vain, he didn't actually want to do the work.

13:13And he sort of spirals into insanity and conflict. And, you know, it's just like a fragile snowflake of a person. It doesn't go well for anyone. So, I mean, there's a lot of historical precedent for what happens when you have like someone like that in power. So, I think America being evenly divided, I don't know if anything has changed that much. I think always presidential elections are largely pretty close and have been for a long time. I think we are in uncharted territory in the sense that you have not just a sort of a vain egotistical person, but you have a cult of personality around that person.

13:49And that tends to be a dangerous combination in my understanding of history.

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