Late Is Better Than Never | Robert Greene's Favorite Stoic Lessons

0:01You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck that's the sound of no crowds no alerts no distractions and no telling what you'll find next you know like a detour so why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour Toyota Trucks my family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain.

0:48That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer. From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory.

1:17Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. welcome to the daily stoic podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life on tuesdays we take a closer look at these stoic ideas how we can apply them in our actual lives thanks for listening and i hope you enjoy

1:56Late is better than never. What new information could there possibly have been for Seneca in 62 AD when he finally broke with Nero? Nero had been deranged for years, as detailed in James Rahm's excellent book, Dying Every Day. He'd been bloodthirsty for years, unfit for leadership since almost the beginning. And Seneca knew better from the beginning. The man was a philosopher, a historian, and he could not have been deceived for long. So we can sit here and judge. We can shake our heads in bafflement, but we really shouldn't. The fact that Seneca eventually worked up the courage to participate in a conspiracy against Nero shouldn't be dismissed as too little too late, because later is better than never.

2:39Because not everyone did come around. In fact, most people never do, then or now. When we are wrong, when we've had our blinders on, when we've been implicated in something, even complicit in it, it's so terribly, terribly hard to change our minds. It is hard to admit air, harder still to admit guilt, and the hardest still to take steps to rectify it. Instead of condemning those who have the fortitude, the awareness, the conscience, even the desperate motivation of last-minute self-preservation, we should celebrate it. We should make soft landings for them so as to encourage future folks. We should, as Marcus Reelis tried to do, should forgive.

3:19We should sympathize and realize how easily we could be in their positions. We should take note of their example and make sure that we are learning from it in our own lives. Judgment is easy. Changing is hard. Hard enough that late is still better than never.

3:42I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a Eight Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is Eight Sleep's best product. I've used Eight Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately.

4:21It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning as opposed to some loud blaring alarm. And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better, head over to eightsleep.com slash dailystoic and use code dailystoic to get$350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it, but I know you will.

5:03Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at eightsleep.com slash dailystoic. We tend to think of philosophers as people who lived a really long time ago, right? They've got these unpronounceable names and they talk about these big abstract ideas. But in fact, there are brilliant, wise philosophers walking among us right now. In fact, no one has taught me more about applying Stoic wisdom to your actual life than the one and only Robert Greene, who I think is one of our great living philosophers and thinkers whose works will be read hundreds and hundreds of years from now.

5:44I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written books about stoic philosophy. I've been able to speak about it to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators, and special forces leaders. But almost every step of my career, I've been following in the footsteps of Robert Greene, who has been my mentor, who I was lucky enough to be a research assistant for. And Robert has, over the years in many conversations, expressed to me the essence of Stoic philosophy. And although Robert's books are controversial and sometimes poorly understood, in fact, no one has taught me more about Stoic philosophy than Robert Greene. Robert himself once showed me his copy of Marcus Aurelius, which had tons of little notes in the corner.

6:24So he's been a practitioner of Stoic philosophy for many years. And in today's episode, I want to give you some more Stoic wisdom from the one and only Robert Greene.

6:37realistic outlook on life. Where I get rid of all the bullshit, all the things that you learned in university, all the bad ideas that you got from your parents, all the bad ideas that you get from your peers. And you're able to look at the world relatively objectively. And I mean relatively. And it doesn't mean that life becomes this kind of boring, gray world of just... It actually becomes more exciting and fulfilling. And so I learned that the hard way, with that kind of realistic attitude, which I was forged through a lot of battles. It was really, really what allowed me to write the 48 Laws of Power.

7:10And the second thing was the power of daily practice, of habits. Now, I've been meditating for about 11, exactly 11 years now, every single day. I don't miss a single day. If I miss one day, I make sure the next day I do it two times. And the habit of doing it every day is just very fulfilling. because something I look forward to and it's really helped have a profound effect upon me. But habits of work and discipline where every day you attack something is where the power of our brain operates maximally. You so intellectualize and verbalize things, but life is a feeling inside your body. It's an energy.

7:53It's a force. How could you ever put the words that would describe what it's like? It's ineffable. It's ineffable, but you know it when it's like leaving you, what that feeling is like. So there was another woman who I've, she wrote a great book about her stroke called Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte. She became a neuroscientist. She had a much worse stroke and she literally felt all of the life draining out of her body inch by inch by inch as like, as death was passing through her. I had a little bit of that. and I also felt that this kind of force that is being alive is like being drained out of me.

8:31It wasn't as strong as that because my stroke wasn't as bad but I did connect to the feeling of life and the feeling of death because I had the feeling of death in my body. As I described earlier, the sense of my bones kind of shriveling and melting and getting soft and kind of everything that makes you alive kind of leaving your body. So it makes you aware that there's a physicality to being alive, to being conscious, and to that you carry your death within you. I love this quote, and I read it at the beginning of the pandemic, and it's been helpful to me. I think it kind of connects to what you're talking about in the Sublime book.

9:12Mark Srios in Meditations, he says he learns from one of his mentors that the key to happiness is to be free of passion, but full of love. What does that mean to you?

9:28I'm not quite sure. I don't know if I, can you help me a little bit and then I'll riff? I was taking it as meaning like you're not angry, you're not jealous, you're not frustrated. Like the passions, the sort of negative emotions as the Stoker's talking about. So love isn't a passion? But that love is some sort of deeper emotion, some better way to go through the world. That of all the passions, that was the one that was okay. Okay, so love is a passion. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's something that, you know, I believe very much so. And it is kind of touching upon the sublime. But all the other passions are very inward moving, right?

10:12They're about you. They're about your anger. about your frustration yes you could be angry because some people are doing some really fucked up things to you at some point right so it's not completely you but the emotion is geared towards how you feel and you want to get retribution if someone's hurt you you want revenge you know so it's all very kind of self-centered but love is the one emotion that you forces you outside of yourself true love because there can be fake love where you you really it's just a form of narcissism where you want people to give you the attention and feed the image you have of yourself but true love the ability to get outside of yourself and to feel what other people are feeling which is empathy and empathy which is a word i'm afraid it's overused and i'm getting a little tired of it i wish we could find a better word but it's a major theme in the sublime because the idea is the highest mental power that we humans have the source really of our intelligence is what they call theory of mind, that we are able to place ourselves in the bodies and the minds of other people.

11:21What's made us the supreme social animal, right? To be able to think about what someone else is thinking. Yeah. And it's not only just for love, it's also for fighting your opponent, et cetera, and for dealing any kind of social situation. But it's the source of all of our intelligence, right? It's the source of our science. a great scientist like an Einstein is thinking inside the very subjects he's trying to get into, right? And that's where his metaphors and analogies often come from because he's able to think about it. Oh, this is like this. Right. Yeah. So that's the source of our power. And so high level empathy where you're able to think inside of other people to kind of imagine what they're going through, what their feelings are, is to me the highest passion of all, which is a form of love, and it is extremely sublime.

12:17I'm actually not as secure and certain of myself as people think I am. Whenever I hold a belief or I'm writing a book, I always start with the premise that I'm probably wrong, that I'm actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try and convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn't, then I change it. But it's very painful because you want desperately to hold on to those beliefs that you had initially. So the number one thing about reality is confronting yourself. The fact that you are a limited human being with a limited cognitive abilities.

12:57You are emotion based. and so your relationship to the world is usually through thick layers of illusions that come from the media, that come from your childhood, that come from your culture that you live in and that you have to cut through those layers but you have to confront yourself and see yourself as the source of them. One of the things in our nature that's extremely powerful is our ability to get inside the perspective of others and get inside their world. but empathy is a really hard thing to write about because it's not something you can quantify we're such a culture that loves data and quantifying things you can't really write a book about empathy in any kind of realistic practical way because it's a feeling it's a visceral emotion it has to be a feeling and we have this power because as primates for hundreds of thousands of years we lived without the ability of language in our earliest ancestors.

14:01And we had to understand each other without being able to speak words. We're incredibly attuned to the emotions and moods of people around us. And I know in my life, I practice empathy on a very deep level. So when I go, I'm out in the world, and I'm in the store or something, or wherever, I'm on the streets, and I see someone, I go through this process where I go what is it like to be that person what is it like to be them to feel like them you know what is it like to grow up in that house I imagine a background for them and I use my imagination to get inside their world and sometimes I get this sort of shudder this feeling like I actually can be them that I actually can feel what it's like to be in their world now obviously I'm probably inaccurate but I get closer to it than if I'm sitting there judging and criticizing them.

14:54And so I've been doing this for probably my whole life because it's kind of what a writer does. A writer has to get into other people's skin. So you might say, well, Robert, it's easy for you because, you know, that's who you are. You were born that way. But I wasn't born that way. It's a skill you develop, practicing it endlessly, using your imagination to get inside the worlds of other people. It's obviously a little bit harder to cross gender and ethnic lines and socioeconomic lines, but it's certainly not impossible. And I know I've done it on several occasions. So it's an incredibly valuable tool that each and every one of you is born with, but that you don't use.

15:36It's like a tool in your box that just lies there and just gathers rust. And so I know it's hard to talk about and write about in a practical way, but I did my best to sink into it and explain to you how you can develop this extremely critical tool. If I'm talking about how we have certain qualities that we have to accept, and through accepting them, try and move past them. So I'm trying to tell you, you feel envy, accept that, and now find a way to make envy useful. And I explain how you can start, instead of feeling envy, you can start feeling sorry for people who have less than you. You can start using your envy of powerful people to emulate them, etc.

16:22Well, death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically, but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death. It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. And so it's like Montaigne, I end the book with a quote from Montaigne. And he says, the ability to think about death and overcome the fear of death is the ultimate freedom. You're enslaved by this fear. You're not aware of it. It's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom.

17:06I have to end the book on that. But the idea is most people are going to say, oh, that's not me, as they say for all of these chapters. But other people, they're irrational, not me. Yeah. Oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people. I watch movies and people are always dying. I'm not afraid of that. That's a cartoon version of death. Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical. It's going to happen to you. It's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it. No matter how many video black ops games you play, You are still afraid of your own death.

17:45Sure. And that fear creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life, and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks. So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book. I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use. is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species, as far as we know, that's aware of its mortality.

18:26And here you are on the shore of this immense, vast ocean. You don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it, and you turn your back to it. And we humans have the ability to explore things, to conquer our fear. And I want you, instead of turning your back, to actually enter that vast ocean and get and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways.

19:01Look, 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. We'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.

19:56And 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. Just 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.