It Begs To Linger | Ryan Holiday Visited The BEST Swimming Pools All Over The World (Here's What He Learned)

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.

0:55It begs to linger. It's fuel for you. It's a powerful force you tap into. It's a shield you use to protect yourself. Many of us use anger in our lives. Productively, we tell ourselves. It's what's driven our career. It's what's behind our activism. It's what allows us to put ourselves out there. That desire to prove someone wrong, to punish some wrongdoer, to feel alive. But the problem with anger, as the song we quoted recently puts it, is that it begs to stick around. As a fuel, anger is both explosive and addictive. Has anyone ever actually felt like they finally did stick it to those doubters and can now rest securely in their accomplishments?

1:43Of course not. Anger finds the next target, the next slight to obsess over, the next molehill to turn into a mountain. It doesn't burn itself out, but it does eventually burn everything around it. The Stoics knew that anger was very dangerous. This is why they warned against revenge. This is why Marcus quoted that line from the now lost Euripides play, to remind himself of the impotence of rage. Why should we feel anger at the world, he asks, as if the world would notice. Once you let anger into your life, once you let it motivate and animate you, it's very hard to get rid of. It's very hard to find a substitute that measures up.

2:26It's hard to let it go. But imagine a life without anger's presence. Imagine if you had control of your temper, how much better would you be? How much purer would you be? How much lighter would you be? And we actually have two really great reminders, I think. So one is the Daily Stoic Pause and Reflect coin, which I've been carrying as my daily carry lately. It's just a reminder. It's got a mirror on the front, like, what do you think you look like here? But Seneca's line about how delay is the best remedy is the reminder I want with me. And then for many years, we've had our Tame Your Temper course.

3:01It's an 11-day Stoic deep dive into what they can teach us about anger. It's not that you have an anger problem, or maybe you do. I'm just saying that anger causes problems for all of us. And the Stoics have a lot to teach us about that. And you can get the coin and the course as a bundle right now and save 20 bucks. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out.

3:27Thanks 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.

4:12We 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.

4:51Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. 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.

5:35My 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.

6:12Becky. 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.

6:32I'm not saying that the Stoics were swimmers. Almost certainly most of them were not. But there is something very stoic about swimming. Sometimes the water is really cold and you don't want to get in. Sometimes there's big waves and it's scary. Sometimes you're nervous about what lurks beneath. Swimming gets you alone with your own thoughts. Swimming challenges you physically, it challenges you mentally. But if you do it right, if you achieve what the Stokes call the smooth flow of life, if you learn to work with the water, not to fight it too hard, there's a tranquility and a mastery and a confidence and a peace and a stillness that comes from it.

7:09And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. I've been swimming since I was a little kid. I was on a swim team. I try to get in the water every single week, not just in my pool at home or in Barton Springs, which is one of my favorite places on earth, but when I travel also. And I'm so often thinking about Stoic philosophy while I'm in the water. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

7:31Mark Cerelius writes a good chunk of meditations looking at the Danube River. He talks about washing off the dust of earthly life in the Roman baths. Seneca takes a cold plunge every New Year's Day. Stoics knew that water was soothing and calm but also invigorating and challenging. But also I found swimming to be the most meditative thing that I do in my life where I've had most of my biggest breakthroughs as a human being trying to apply stoicism in my life. I think there's a reason that every zen garden has a fountain. There's something about the running of water. There's also something cleansing about water.

8:07Whether you grew up around water, whether know how to swim whether you don't you got to figure out some way to build i think a stoic practice around water of course it's also a life force for us if you're not drinking water eventually you die right i think there's a reason that the theme of water runs through the stoics what is the role that water has in your life how is it replenishing and recharging but also challenging and invigorating

8:35one of my favorite passages in all of meditations Mark Cerullus talks about being the rock that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around there's something really special about water I just went for this swim in Lake Michigan but I'm just standing here by the water listening to the waves trying to sort of slow myself down I have a talk I have to give later today I have to travel later today I have a bunch of stuff I have to do but I want to I want to get in that place of stillness. Euthymia, as Seneca talks about, tranquility. I wanted to get to a place of peace. Even though everything is crazy, it's slowing down around me and I'm going to be able to do what I have to do for the day.

9:16The reason not to let it get to you, Mark Sreles reminds us, is that it doesn't last. He says time and events, they flow past us like a river at an incredible rate. Everything is changing. He says nothing is stable and very little actually laughs. He says it would take an idiot to feel self-important, to be irritated, to take any of this as permanent because it isn't. It's always changing, it's always moving and you don't know what's coming next. In one of my favorite passages in meditations Mark Surrealis talks about washing off the dust of earthly life and we know that he visited these ancient springs in a quincum the roman camp in what is now budapest and so we wanted to come here this is balmore the biggest spring natural spring pool in the world it's kind of like barton springs and we wanted to jump in to swim let's see about a half mile and then i went on the high dive a couple times my wife samantha didn't want to do the high dive yesterday but she convinced herself to do it this morning which is fitting being that this is the uh the trip for the courage book so she worked up the encouraged to do it, jumped off.

10:20I'm not sure she was actually that pleased but at least she's pleased with herself for doing it. Kids got in the pool, we saw some turtles and some fish.

10:32Even when you love the water, even when you swim all the time, even though you know it at some level, you almost never like getting in. Getting in is hard. Getting in takes some getting used to but you're almost always glad that you did get in. It reminds me of this thing from Musonius Rufus where he says, you know, when you do something difficult, the labor passes quickly, but the good remains. And he says, you know, when you do something easy or you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, you know, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures. And I think about it's like, I didn't want to get in.

11:02It was cold. It was uncomfortable. I didn't like getting splashed. I didn't know how it would feel. But afterwards, you're always glad you did it.

11:13look maybe there's some health benefits to cold plunges people say it's better for their circulation it's better for your immune system it helps you recover honestly I don't know it could all be complete and total bullshit in fact there's a part of me that thinks that it probably is but to me the benefit of a cold plunge is the mental benefit right Seneca said we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind the point of the cold punch is that you are doing something hard you are doing it for an amount of time that you committed to even though every part of you is screaming to stop to get out you do it anyway that's the muscle that you're building that's the muscle that you're providing benefits to the part of your body that wants to quit but the part of your mind that says no i decide i am in charge when you crank the handle on the shower when you jump in a snow melt river when you jump in the ocean when you when you get in a cold plunge, that's what you're doing.

12:04You're saying, I am in charge. I can do hard things. You don't like it while you're doing it, but you like how you feel after.

12:17I've been to some pretty incredible places in my life, but it is almost unbelievable to me that you can still bathe in the hot springs that the Spartans bathed in before they faced Xerxes and a million Persian men at the final stand of Thermopylae. And it's just pouring from the earth. It's still 104 degrees Fahrenheit. It smells terribly like sulfur, but it is just absolutely surreal. And it's free. There's not even like an entrance fee or a security guard. You just walk in and bathe in a stream that 2 ,600 or so years ago, the bravest warriors who ever lived, who gave everything to protect all of Western civilization to come.

12:58You can just get in it and wash away the dirt of earthly life, as Marcus Aurelius said.

13:08And that whole thing with Michael was interesting because it started quite benignly. Yeah. He was 12. I started working with him because we had limited pool space, like every club in America, right? The group that he was in practiced one time per day, and then they practiced on Sundays. That was the best attended practice. Everybody would come. Sunday morning, everybody thinks, oh my God, it's terrible. And there were people in the group who would, you know, Wednesdays was the day off for them when he started. And then he got good. And I was like, well, yeah, Michael needs to be challenged. So he'd come on Wednesdays.

13:37And he was just going seven days. Yeah. But it was like an hour and a half. It wasn't some big deal. Yeah. And he would go play lacrosse and all that stuff. And then he moved into my group and we were still going seven days. And we did that till he was 12, 13, 14, because he was only training one time per day. He wasn't training like, you know. a lot. Then we started doing a little bit more. We put in two doubles a week and stayed on the Sundays because we were just doing it. And we went on a national team trip, one of his very first ones. One of the older guys were on their bus, and I don't even know how we got into this.

14:07They're like, hey Phelps, I bet you even, you train every day. Do you train every day? He's like, yeah. Like he didn't know any different. He's like, do you train on Christmas? And he was like, yeah. And on Christmas, literally they came in and swam for 30 minutes. We played water polo. It wasn't like a big deal, but it was just enough to kind of keep it going. And the guys were like, gave him this look that I knew that that was a huge psychological advantage. Yeah. And Michael's like, we're going to keep doing this. They were then terrified of him at that point. And then he just kept going. And, you know, you can make the case that those 52 days a year that other people aren't training, you do that for six years.

14:42Sure. Picked up six months.

14:47I would think you would want to know. I think you would want to know what you're capable of, what your limits are. the difficult challenging things you can do you can endure. Actually Socrates said this. Of course we think of him as a wise philosopher but he was a tough guy. He served in the military, he challenged himself, he tested himself physically. He said it is a shame to grow old and not know what your body is capable of. He actually said that no citizen was exempt from keeping themselves in peak physical condition. He said because you might have to serve your country one day. I just think the point is we We don't just want to explore our limits intellectually.

15:21We don't just want to expand our brains. We got to work on our bodies too. We got to push ourselves physically. We got to do hard things. We got to train ourselves. This miraculous physical specimen, this machine, we are inside. We want to see what we can do with it. We want to see what we can make of it. We want to see where it can take us.

15:41You don't have to be an elite athlete. You don't have to be like a strong man, strong woman. You don't have to be that in order to take advantage of what your body is and what your muscles can do for you. And it was like that for why we swim, too. I wanted that book to be for people who didn't. Obviously, it's for swimmers, people who identify as I'm a swimmer. But for people who, even if they are afraid of the water, that we all have some relationship with water. And in this case, we all have a relationship with our bodies. We all have a relationship with moving through the world, which is what our muscles do.

16:15Yeah. And it's like it's about capability. It's about action. And so like that philosophy of muscle is kind of cool to me. Like that's what I took away from the process of writing it. There's a Roman expression. I have it in the book I'm doing now where they were saying like a good education should teach a child like about books and how to swim. Oh, yeah. Right. Just like if you don't know those two things. That was like a moral failing if you didn't know how to swim. Yeah. But then you just read about like pretty much like right after that, just nobody learned how to swim. like Benjamin Franklin was considered a fucking weirdo because he knew how to swim and he would swim like right sailors didn't know how to swim yeah like you're just fishermen don't know how to swim yeah it's just like I think that's kind of the point that Socrates was making it's like you have this thing and you're just remarkably uncurious about imagine you make your living on the ocean and you're like but I don't go in there right like that seems strange it does seem

17:10It's pretty surreal. It's actually warmer in the water than it is outside right now. It's like 70 but more than 70 in the water and it's like 40 out. It's pretty freezing. I just had a million gallon swimming pool filled with endangered fish and softshell turtles totally to myself. It was like five bucks to get in here. The best things in life truly are very cheap things, things a lot of people take for granted. And they usually involve getting out and getting active.

17:48I'm in Lake Bolyogimene in Greece, and one of the crazy parts of this insanely beautiful place is that there's these little fish in the water and they're eating the skin off of your feet. They're eating your dead skin. And it makes me think of that line from Seneca, He says, death isn't a thing that happens at the end. He says, we're wrong to think of death as something we're moving towards. He says, death is happening right now. His point is that we're dying every minute. We're dying every day. And there's something about this sensation of them eating the skin off of your body, the dead skin off of your body, that makes you realize that you are covered in death.

18:22That getting older, that falling apart, that decay. Death, it's not a thing that happens at the end. It's happening now. We're dying every minute. We're dying every second. we're falling apart every minute, every second. Entropy is working on us. Old age is working on us. Death is coming for us in little tiny pieces, in the form of fish, in the form of your hair going gray, in the form of your hair falling out, in the form of your muscles and bones getting weak. Even though we can't always perceive it, we are always aging, we are always dying. And that's the stoic lesson of memento mori. Not just that you could go at any moment, but that you are in fact going at every moment and that's why we have to be so conscious of how we spend our time because the way we spend our time is how we are spending our lives and quite literally we are spending our life our most precious resource on everything that we do and to waste it is to waste the most essential thing that there is when i wrote the daily stoic eight years ago i had this crazy idea that i would just keep it going the book was 366 meditations but i'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email.

19:29I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email.

20:15We'll see you next time.

20:26of our thing. Wherever you sell, businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen. Shopify.com slash listen. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic.

21:18We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here? Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year.

21:56Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.