Master Illusionist Derren Brown: “ My Job Is To Control The Uncontrollable"

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1:22Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:07Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Wednesday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. When I was living in New York, so I was just finishing the first draft of The Obstacle is Away 10 plus years ago now, which seems insane. I decided I was going to buy myself something nice, like as a treat for finishing the book. And I found this antique dealer that had a small Carrera marble bust of Marcus Aurelius. Like Marcus Aurelius himself is probably not smaller than my fist. It's more like a baby's fist. It's maybe six inches or so tall. And it's from the 1800s. And, you know, I got it. It's sat on all my different desks where I've lived and written most of my books.

2:48And sometimes when I look at it, I think, like, who had this made, right? How many people's desks has this sat on? There's actually something that Matthew Arnold talks about in a famous essay he wrote about Marcus Rios, how the bust of Marcus has adorned the houses of sort of admiring people basically since Marcus's own lifetime. I mean, there's even a statue. We did a Daily Stoic email about it, about this statue in like the Cleveland Museum of Art is of Marcus, but probably stolen. And you just think about the generations of people that owned this, that looked at it. Why this person that we've never met, who was by no means perfect, who wasn't some towering conqueror like Caesar or Napoleon?

3:35Why him? Why his bust? I know what it does for me, but I'm just always fascinated by this question. And so it was interesting when I interviewed today's guest, he was in this sort of dark room filming. And the thing I noticed out of the corner of my eye that we ended up talking about was his bust of Marcus Aurelius. He showed it to me. And I was really excited to talk to Darren Brown, who actually was one of the first people we ever interviewed as part of Daily Stoic back in 2018, before we even dreamed of doing a podcast, because he had this book out called Happy, Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine, which is about how stoicism helped him reclaim his happiness.

4:14And I'm fascinated by Darren because, you know, obviously lots of people are interested in stoicism. There were fewer back then, but I'm always interested in high performers who stoicism has helped do what they do, particularly when I don't really understand what it is they do. And Darren Brown is probably the foremost mentalist in the world. He's done a number of big specials in the UK and all over the world, including some insane ones like where he played Russian roulette live. He led a seance. You can check out his YouTube channel, which is official Darren Brown. That's Darren D-E-R-R-E-N Brown to see some of these stunts.

4:50He's toured all over the world. He's won all sorts of awards. As I said, he also happens to be a practicing stoic who just released this cool project with a platform called Rebind, where you can read not just Marcus Aurelius' meditations, but Darren's annotations throughout. I've raved about the Robin Waterfeld annotated edition of Marcus Aurelius, which I'll link to. We carry that at the Painted Porch. This would be a version we would carry if there was a physical version, because it's awesome. And in today's episode, Darren and I talk about how he was introduced to Stoicism, how this philosophy has been a guiding force throughout his career, the ways that his perspective on the Stoics and Marcus has changed.

5:32Like, you just think about it. By definition, if we interviewed him first in 2018, he's at least seven years into it. In fact, it actually goes back many years. So just as my understanding of the philosophy has grown, as I have grown and changed, so too has it for Darren. And this was his first US interview to discuss this edition of Meditations. I will link to that in today's show notes. You can follow him on Instagram and platforms at Darren Brown or at official Darren Brown. I will link to all that. Here we go. Here's me and Darren talking.

6:04I've attached this sort of ring light around the bust I have of Marcus. It just looks quite a bit like Jesus. Take a picture. We'll post it on the behind the scenes when this goes live. I have my Marcus bust right here. Oh, nice. There you go. Excellent. Well, it's an honor to talk. I've been a fan for a long time. I think you're one of the few people out there whose love of Marcus Aurelius might rival my own. Have we spoken before? I thought we hadn't. We did an email interview one time. That's what it was. Many years ago. Okay. All right. That makes more sense. Great. Oh, it's very nice to meet you, finally.

6:44I've seen many of your podcasts. Well, likewise, I've seen your stuff over the years as well. So tell me how you come to the Stoics. Well, I was reading Montaigne many years ago, and he kept referring to these Stoics, kept referring to Seneca more than anyone, I guess. And I just didn't know who this person was or what this movement was. So, you know, the Montaigne essay, so he's like a French Renaissance essayist to the massive, chunky things. And I kind of paused and picked up the Stoics instead just so I could see who and what he was talking about. And then that just became a much more appealing and richer source of interest to me.

7:23And it sort of led into this book on happiness I wrote called Happy years ago, because it just kind of resonated, you know, in the way that things, when they kind of, someone's articulating something that you sort of feel instinctively and you feel is valuable, but you hadn't quite found a way of putting it into words. And then, yeah, it kind of, it grew from there. Then over the years, my relationship to it has changed and grown, I guess, but it's still a kind of a recurring theme in my life. No, I know exactly how that goes. It's funny, I was, I'm writing about Montaigne in the book that I'm doing now.

7:56And as far as this is going to be a little nerdier than people want to probably want, but I'm interested. I think it's a conspicuous absence. So Marks really never mentions Seneca, which I suspect is deliberate, but then Montaigne and Marcus seem so similar. You'd think they would have been sort of philosophical bedfellows. So it's an interesting omission in Montaigne's essays that he quotes Zeno and Epictetus and Chrysippus and Seneca, but he never mentions Marcus really. Yeah, exactly. And the books, you know, it's around. I guess he could have had access to it up in his tower. It sort of feels to me like really, I may be wrong, but it feels like it's the 19th century that really kind of, where Marcus became sort of saturated, I guess, reading culture and where I suppose he gets a reputation of being just a collection of kind of homilies and vaguely Victorian sounding platitudes.

8:53So I guess I always sort of see that as the sort of the heyday. Yeah, it never occurred to me. I never went back to Montaigne. I never finished him. So I wouldn't know if he mentioned him or not, but I'll take your word that he doesn't. One of my favorite books, a book I've been reading and talking quite a bit about since 2016, Stefan Zweig, the novelist. He writes The World of Yesterday, which is this beautiful sort of memory of Europe before World War I. And then he's forced to flee Europe in World War II. And while he's basically on the run from the Nazis in this basement in Argentina or Brazil or somewhere, he comes across a copy of Montaigne, whom he'd never read.

9:37And it's sort of one of those moments of the right book at the right time, because Montaigne is living through the Reformation and this sort of period of civil war and religious persecution. And the reason he goes into that tower is because he's disgusted with the world. He's disgusted with his fellow human beings. And he says, I'm going to retire into inward pursuits. I don't understand what's happening out here, but I can at least try to understand myself. Zweig ends up writing this beautiful biography of Montaigne as he himself is on the run from a world that's tearing itself to pieces. And it's just one of my absolute favorite books.

10:17And it's a very haunting thing to read today as the world seems so crazy. That's fantastic. I have that book and I've never read it. I've often thumbed through it and thought, what is this? And never really delved any deeper. That's great. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Just how these things come across at the right time. When I discovered stoicism, I had graduated as a lawyer and had started working as a hypnotist and a magician. and it started on this sort of strange career that I followed. And I remember very clearly thinking, is my life from day to day, like if I take a cross-section of it, are things kind of in the right place?

10:59And if so, great. If not, that's quite easy to change stuff. And really for me it was stuff like I want to get up when I want to. I don't want to do what other people are telling me to do and I want to just kind of have control over my time and so on. But that did make me feel after a while, particularly as the TV stuff took off, like I was a bit of a kid in a world of grownups. It all felt a bit kind of childish and silly, especially when everyone else was so concerned with things like viewing figures and career trajectories and so on. And I knew I didn't have any of that in me. I didn't have any kind of particular ambition.

11:30The things that were important to me felt much more day to day. And I can't remember exactly, well, it was Seneca that I read first. And there was something in that that sort of, it was the first time I'd come across these ideas of just not sort of, I guess, not fixating on those things on the horizon that have a habit of moving forever further away. And it's stayed with me. And I think it's, on the one hand, very, very helpful. There's another aspect to it, another aspect to stoicism, which is it does slightly put you at odds with the world. I mean, that relationship is quite central to stoicism in a way that, you know, say it isn't to Epicureanism, for example, in the same way.

12:13And that's interesting. And I think particularly with Marcus, you do get a sense, I mean, you don't come out thinking this is a happy guy. This is a living, walking advertisement for the power of stoicism to make us happier. I mean, so I now have this kind of ambivalent relationship with it, where I've gone from quite a passionate, it's probably the wrong word, but certainly an all-in sense of stoicism to now a kind of, I see it as a toolkit. I see it as a really helpful, valuable toolkit. But I think to throw yourself completely in with something that sets you up with a set of values that you're consistently not meeting in the world and is sort of telling you to stick to those values and to navigate a world that will never quite live up to this sense of how you feel it should be.

13:03I mean, that's kind of, in a way, could be seen as a recipe for unhappiness. So I think for me, there's a kind of tempering of things. But as a toolkit, as a toolkit for anxiety, for stress and navigating all these sort of everyday difficulties, I think it's really valuable. And I don't think that seeing it as a toolkit and picking and choosing versus seeing it as an all-in like a religion is a bad thing or a cop-out. I think things should be seen like that. I think if you think one thing has all the answers, you're probably going down the wrong path. I would say that Marcus Aurelius almost certainly agrees with you.

13:37One of the things that Gregory Hayes points out, that's my favorite translation of the meditations, and I liked the one that you just did. But one of the things he points out in his foreword or his introduction is that there's nowhere that Marcus Aurelius explicitly identifies as a Stoic. He never says, I am a Stoic. He never says I am a student of Stoicism. Hayes says that probably the closest you would get Marcus to admit to was that he was a philosopher, that he was a student of philosophy. It just happens to be that what he writes about illustrates a lot of Stoic thinking, and he quotes from a lot of Stoic philosophers.

14:17But I would suspect that he too saw philosophy as the larger umbrella, and then he's grabbing from the different schools in the different situations that he's in. There's just something interesting about meditations in the sense that it's what he was writing to himself at these different moments. And so we don't know all the other things that he thought that he cared about that he used. It's just what happens to survive. It'd be like if someone got a hold of my journal, they'd think all I think about are these handful of things. But those are just the things I needed the most help with. Exactly.

14:55Which makes him very easy to criticize for reasons that feel unfair, for exactly that reason. And also means that its weaknesses are its very strength. The fact that it isn't a book written for a readership, it's written as notes to himself, means, of course, that it lacks any, really any coherent or obvious structure. It repeats itself again and again in a way that might, you know, you might find a bit tiresome after a while. I don't think it is, but you know, you might see it like that because we instinctively want to read it as a handbook and it just isn't. But the strength of that is that slowly, almost subliminally, this really human picture emerges.

15:39And the fact that he isn't telling us how to live and he isn't presenting this kind of glorious image of an enlightened sage or anything. He's just a man struggling. And on top of that, of course, part of its perennial appeal is that we're listening to an emperor talking to himself, and yet we're finding we're relating on so many levels. And I love that, because I think an issue with stoicism, well, not really with stoicism, but the communication of it, is that when you've got somebody telling you, why are you thinking like this? You should think like this instead. That's a difficult line to tread without it seeming preachy.

16:15And I think we're much better at sort of taking in ideas when they're not being communicated at us, but particularly when they're sort of almost eavesdropping on a private conversation. I often find myself being interviewed about stoicism. I can hear myself saying things like, oh, you know, it's fine. Pay no attention to those things. These things aren't as important. just let it go. And I realize how glib that will sound. But actually, those are such key important messages. But you don't want somebody telling you that. We spend half our life wanting our problems to be heard and appreciated and recognized.

16:54We don't want somebody telling us they're our own fault, however it comes across. Yeah, I suspect that's why no one else has published a book like Meditations. There's something, as you said, it's bugs are its features and its features are its bugs. If you sat down to write a meditations or even in the style of meditations, there's already something artificial and performative about it. It's the fact that it's the emperor of Rome writing a book, almost certainly not intending to publish it and it surviving, perhaps even to his mortification, that's what makes it so special. And that's a bit of magic that you can't recreate.

17:35It is a singular piece of literature, certainly of philosophy. And although it's rooted in rhetoric, of course, because that was his background and a big part of his life, it isn't doing what any other book with a kind of normative force telling us how we should live would do, which is creating a much neater, polished, ultimately unrealistic at some level version of what it's trying to sell. It's not really trying to sell anything. He's just talking to himself where he needs it, which of course means that sometimes the things you're saying sound exaggerated. Or if you take this bit out of context, why would you want to live like that?

18:19Of course. But that's, as you said, if you read your own, if somebody read your own diary and took bits out of context. They sound ridiculous too, but in those moments, these are the things that he needs to hear. But it's also allowing for all sorts of... There are things that contradict each other. There are things that seem a bit unpleasant or a bit unclear from time to time. And you wouldn't have that in a handbook that would be selling you something that you know is not giving you the whole story. You'd be looking for holes in it. I think we just instinctively do that, don't we? We work away from what we're given.

18:53And somehow having this very personal dialogue with himself, because you can't argue with that. You might not resonate with his view of the world, but you can't argue with the message because it's just back at himself.

19:13Thanks 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 into 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.

19:59We 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, discover your uncharted territory.

20:40Learn 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 bestselling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

21:21My 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 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.

21:58Becky. 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 percent off with code stoic 15 you just gotta head over to goodinside.com to catch the events

22:18yeah i remember i saw an art project once where the photographer and i'm forgetting the specifics but i think you'll get the essence of it but basically the the photographer told people they were going to do this photo and as they're preparing for the photo they gave them some kind of unexpected compliment. And they took the picture precisely as the person was comprehending the compliment, right? So the person thought this wasn't the photo, but actually this was going to be the photo. And there's something about meditations that is pre-publication. Like it's what he's thinking about without any kind of self-consciousness, even though the thing is itself inherently self-conscious because he's writing to himself.

23:02But because he's not thinking about you at all, when he's talking about, when he says you, he means him, but somehow incidentally means you. And there's just something profoundly unique and relatable to that that makes it this kind of singular work of literature and philosophy. It'd be like a band performing and somehow they they capture something in the rehearsal that is the essence of the song that when they went into the studio to record, you could not ever recreate. Yeah. Which happens all the time. If you watch rehearsals of anything, it's always so much more like the Peter Jackson documentary where he catches them writing, get back in the moment.

23:48And you're like, Oh, this, this is, this is the real thing right here. Yeah. It's a wonderful thing. One of the reasons why I think Rebind, this version of Meditations, is interesting to me is precisely because of this. Precisely because for a lot of people, the book might lack the kind of reader-friendly aspect that you might want from a handbook. Or if you've heard a lot about Meditations and you come to read it, it can be a bit odd. The whole first chunk is him expressing his gratitude towards a bunch of people we don't know, and that seems to go on for a bit. And then you're into this, what might just seem like a big hodgepodge of virtue and, you know, platitude.

24:28So I think having a, what we've done with this Rebind thing, and for people that don't know it, I should explain it. I think it's really interesting. At its heart, it's an e-book, but it has this AI thing built around it. So I have filmed a whole load of the various 12 books of the meditations and about it generally and all sorts of things. And then I did hundreds of hours of, that's an exaggeration, maybe a hundred, but of interviews, audio interviews about it, just covering like anything that John, who was interviewing me, could think about. And what the reader then gets is a book that they can interact with.

25:05So they can ask me questions. And sometimes the thing will suggest topics and work the other way and suggest things for the reader to think about. so that's kind of coming one way and then and the other way they could they could ask questions or what about this bit or what do you think about this and they could be asking me or they could be asking just a sort of um like a assistant like a research assistant type character and it's it's just fascinating because suddenly you've taken something that is a wonderful book but it can take a little while to find your place in it because it's not written for you and makes it this very personal interaction it's not one of those things that you can go this is what it's about let me tell you the plot in five sentences right like give me the nut of it because it's not one book it's like several hundred smaller ideas that overlap and layer as you said sometimes contradict each other but it's not about one thing actually one of the most helpful things i found on on this was pierre adot's idea so he's a i know you know him well but he's a um a french academic philosopher writing, who writes a lot about the Stoics, who kind of goes, well, there is a structure.

26:15There is a structure to this seemingly structureless book. And he divides it into three big themes, three big disciplines, he calls them. For me, there's do, desire, and discern. The alliteration is mine, right? So the do question of how we should do and how we should live, like ethically with other people and how we should act and what should motivate our actions and our interactions with others. And then that very Stoic... And by the way, I think the do, the how we act, is one of the strengths of this book. You don't get in the other Stoic sources, I think, as much emphasis on the importance and almost a kind of cosmic alignment with ideas of service and living, acting for the common good.

27:00Now, of course, this is an emperor writing. This is a leader writing. So how he balances all these things out in his life is going to be a big part of his life. perhaps more than the other Stoic thinkers. But it's a big and surprising chunk of the meditations is this sort of selflessness and a kind of kindness that comes through, which isn't, I don't think, what we instinctively tend to associate with Stoicism. And then secondly, desire, right? So that's a big Stoic topic, how we want. And a big part of that is how we manage our expectations, because our desires and our expectations are so close to each other, how we try and navigate a life where we want things to fall in line with our plans.

27:40And of course, they don't. This is a big, and for me, just the heart of the appeal of stoicism is this, there's an image that permeates through the history of so much thinking. And I think Schopenhauer put it like this first, of an X equals Y diagonal. So like a graph, right? And you've got your aims on one, your X axis, whichever one that one is going up, is your aims, the things you want to achieve in life, and then your y-axis, the other one, is all the stuff that life just throws back at you, what they used to call fortune, or when life just doesn't work out the way you want. And what we're told again and again, in this predominantly Americanized, optimistic culture we live in, is that if you set your goals enough, if you do your vision board, if you believe in yourself enough, that you can kind of crank the line of how we live up in line with our desires.

28:31That you'll get success because you deserve it. The essential premise of a meritocratic world, which is not true. It's not true. And it's a hangover from Protestantism, hangover from Calvinism, the idea of working hard for our own salvation. And the religious hangover is interesting because I think where you see it, well, there's a couple of places where you really see it. So that whole world of the secret, putting the Rhonda Byrne nonsense of the universe is going to provide for you. Normally in the form of jewelry and cash is really horrible. But the universe doesn't really care about you at all.

29:06So that's like, how do you absorb that into just how you live without that being a sad thing? How can that be a liberating thing? But the other place it's really interesting where you see it with the religious connection is faith healing. So I've spent a lot of time around those evangelical faith healers that get you up on stage and tell you you can walk again. I've done it myself. I'm an atheist, but I've done this as part of shows on TV and stage. I found it really interesting. The thing that struck me when I was watching them at it is there's this interesting dynamic of... You come up on stage and you feel healed.

29:42You feel healed because there's a lot of adrenaline, which is a natural painkiller. There's a large psychological component of suffering. If you do an x-ray before and afterwards, nothing's changed. but nonetheless, how you feel, how you identify with whatever your issue is might drastically change. So yes, you might have an experience of healing, even though nothing's actually organically happened. You might have that experience. You might come up on stage and jump around and probably do yourself terrible harm by doing that. But then the healer says to you, throw away your pills. And if the disease returns, it's your fault because you didn't have enough faith.

30:19and it's a great way of avoiding any responsibility from their part and putting the blame back on the this poor person so now if the disease returns not only have they got to deal with that but they got their own failure which is somehow worse they didn't they weren't a good enough believer and it's the same dynamic and when you and when you read something like the secret that tells you to just commit that the universe will provide and you have to just commit to it and if it doesn't provide it she says quite explicitly it's your own fault you didn't commit enough you didn't have enough faith. So that's like a really insidious kind of idea that creeps around a lot.

30:54And it means that when things go badly, not only are we in a difficult place, but we now have our own sense of failure to add to that. The reality is that life has this centripetal aspect and it pulls us towards difficult times. And when we're in those difficult times, it can feel like we fail, and it can feel very lonely. But actually, that point is when we connect most with everybody else because this is the human experience is the one thing you can guarantee is that life's going to take us to these places no matter what you do and how great your life normally is so actually it's the one thing that really connects us so this question of how we navigate this life and so he saw it scherbenhauer talks about you know we've got our um will pulling us one way and you know fate pulling us the other and uh freud of course spoke about a very similar idea of kind of the things that we want to achieve, and then sort of culture and civilization is going, no, no, you can't do those things.

31:50So again, we're torn. We're sort of leading this X equals Y diagonal. We're kind of meandering like that on that diagonal. Sometimes we are on top and things are going the way we like, and sometimes they're not. So how do you navigate that line? So that whole question of how we address what we want in line with the universe that isn't going to give us what we want. And then finally, the third D is discernment. So how we, again, a big Stoic topic of how we separate this sort of internal world from the external world. How we make decisions, how we make our judgments, because ultimately the judgments that we make, of course, as we know, familiar with Stoicism, are what create our problems, not the things in the world themselves.

32:31So all the Stoics talk a lot about this, how you separate the things that are in your control from the things that aren't. The stoic fork, you called it. I thought that was an interesting way to do it. Yeah. So it's a kind of a bifurcation. Is this thing under my control or not? And then other thinkers like Bill Irvin, for example, talks a lot about the gray area in between, which is really important to do because most things aren't that clear cut. He has the great analogy of a game of tennis. If you go into a game of tennis thinking, I must win, and then your opponent's better than you, you're probably going to start to feel a bit anxious or you might feel that you're failing and you're not going to play as well.

33:09Whereas if you go in thinking, I'll play as best as I possibly can, I'll play to the best of my abilities, then you will play better. You won't become as anxious if your opponent's better than you because you're still succeeding in your goals and you'll play a better game. So there's a lot of gray areas in terms of what really is in our control and what isn't. But that's a huge thing. And when you read Marcus, you very much read the thoughts of a leader. So if you read Seneca on these subjects, there's normally a sense of here's a well-to-do statesman who's sort of giving us a sense of balance, I guess, between self-interest and the realities of sort of middle-class life, it feels like.

33:49If you read Epictetus, it's quite urgent because he's an ex-slave. So his sense is avoiding enslavement to the passions or to a bit of a night and day urgency to it. And when you read Marcus, he is somebody navigating how to lead and how do you make these decisions? How do you serve others? You get a sense of Marcus as being the most, even though being an emperor would have been such a disorienting, strange, surreal life, Marcus feels the most rooted in reality. You can imagine him suiting on his armor and riding into battle. You can imagine him getting in an argument with a person. You can imagine him having to make hard decisions.

34:33You can imagine him as a guy with a job. Obviously, being emperor is an absurd and strange job, but he had a profession, an occupation in a way that, yeah, Seneca is very much, although he was involved in politics, a wealthy man of leisure. And Epictetus is, you know, such a low end of the social hierarchy and then is effectively just a teacher of Stoic philosophy. But there's something fundamentally relatable about Marcus's relation to the world that I think - And of course, he's really drawing from Epictetus. So you've, you know, I sometimes, Sometimes, you know, we might think, well, this is all very well for Marcus, but he was the most powerful man in the world.

35:18And is this just a, is stoicism just a philosophy of privilege? But, you know, it is interesting. He's really drawing from the thoughts of an ex-Roman slave who became a teacher. I don't think they ever met, but nonetheless, he ended up with a copy of Epictetus' handbook. and it's a really, again, another humbling, kind of touching aspect of this book and this story is that it could be something so different. Even when you read this first chapter, which is just a series of, I'm grateful to this person for this. He's not talking about things, his own great qualities that he's attributing to these people.

35:58He's talking about their great qualities. He's not doing all the kind of self-serving stuff that was very popular at this time. It's just, it's a very... What's weird is he's not doing it for them either, right? He's not doing it for them either. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's really just the, it's like a rundown of all these great qualities in these people that you can tell he so earnestly respects and is aspiring to integrate into his own life. Yeah. Especially the extended meditation on Antoninus, his stepfather. I think it's just one of the most beautiful things that a child has ever put to paper.

36:36around not just a parent, but a step-parent. I mean, their relationship is such a unique one historically, but it's such a beautiful celebration of what it means to step up and be a parent and be a good example in someone's life. It's a really remarkable bit of text. Yeah. And he resists the urge to criticize, but when he does, it's kind of all about absence. There are some subtle backhanded things. Not even insults. They're just as interesting. He's clearly referred to this person or he hasn't mentioned this. I mean, you do wonder whether there was any thought of having an audience for this at all.

37:14Well, talking about these philosophers as sort of men and women of action, I think you're an interesting case because you're clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the Stoics. You're not just someone who picked up some self-help book and are vaguely familiar with it or, you know, someone who shares the stuff on Instagram or something. You've thought about it philosophically, and yet you have a day job. You have a thing that you do, right? How do you think about the integration of Stoic philosophy into your life? And again, I think people might think, you know, a glimpse of Marx realist or some of the perceptions of stoicism, that it would somehow destroy ambition or render worthless any, you know, desire to be an elite performer or to succeed, to be the top of one's craft.

38:00How have you sort of balanced being like one of the best in the world at what you do and having this sort of longtime fascination with stoic philosophy? Well, thank you. First of all, it's very kind. And I've never had any ambition. I genuinely haven't. That thing when I was a student of thinking, well, is my life fun and interesting in the moment? Am I living a sort of a day that I'd like to live? That's always stayed with me. I genuinely, and I don't say it with any false, overwhelming modesty, had no desire. I wasn't trying to get a TV show. I wasn't trying to, you know, I did a Broadway show a couple of years ago.

38:34And in a way that's kind of a big deal for a Brit, but I was more interested in whether or not It would be fun to live in New York for six months. I have other people that are like, I've got a manager and producers and people that I'm sure think much more in those terms. But ultimately, I'm making my own decisions. There's no division there. There's no bifurcation to get into this stoic thing. And then, oh, but then there's my job. And then that's different. Where they are different, I think, is my job is to control things that I cannot. that's that's sort of like that's that's a very uh explicitly un-stoic thing that i do but you know i'm not really that's kind of like the the illusion or the effect that i create i do for those that many people that don't know me i'm um i do sort of mind reading and magic and hypnosis i should say i'm um i'm on the simpsons christmas special next next week oh that's amazing it's so exciting that the whole it's their first feature length episode it's their 35th anniversary and their Christmas anniversary.

39:36And it's all Derren Brown comes to Springfield, which is baffling to me that they didn't ask, but it was incredible to do. That's unreal. I have some sense of what that feeling is like, where you just get an email or a note, someone proposing a thing. And you're like, this is beyond my wildest fantasy of a thing I could have thought I deserved or could happen to me in my life. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. And they say, please don't tell anybody. So I think I told everybody within a week. So yeah, I only mention it because I have no idea whether people would know me or my work at all in the States.

40:09But if you watch The Simpsons, I may ring a bell afterwards. So - Well, I've been thinking recently, I think the most stoic line in The Simpsons is the one where Bart goes, it's the worst day of my life. And Homer says, it's the worst day of your life so far. That's very good, isn't it? I think Marcus Aurelius, when you think about a guy who lives through a plague, he buries half of his children. He loses his father as a young man. There's a war. There's floods. I think that just every day he's like, oh, this is the worst day of my life. It actually got worse. It was unimaginably bad before. And it was only a failure of imagination that I couldn't have imagined the fresh horrors that life had in store for me.

40:55And to me, that's, you know, we were talking earlier about how meditations is a little depressing and Marcus Aurelius sometimes seems depressing. It's like, of course he was fucking depressed. Like, look at his life. It was a series of unending disasters that he got out of bed every morning was a statement of profound hope and resilience. Like, you got to grade this guy on a curve. As soon as he becomes emperor, there's this flood. There's a massive plague that killed 10 % of Romans at the time. And even in that, there's a sweet moment. I can't remember exactly the line, but he's basically at war with these Germanic tribes up in the north.

41:34And the way he's writing about people and Romans, you would expect for an emperor that is at war and having to find that within himself, because he's clearly an introverted guy, you would expect there to be a sense of, we're great, we're powerful. And there's none of that. He draws his circles of humanity very large, which I think is, I mean, that's something we don't do nowadays, right? We've got very good at drawing circles around our own community and going, whatever, we demand this or we're this. And there's another circle around that community. And they're the bad guys. And that's a dynamic that it does something to our reptilian brains and really, you know, Jesus up and gets us in this sort of antagonistic mindset, was actually a far more effective way of doing it is to draw your circle very big around the whole of society and then go some of us within society, some of us brothers and sisters, fellow Americans, whatever it is, are being unfairly treated.

42:41And that's always shown itself again and again to be much more effective. And you sort of have it here in this sort of very unselfconscious way where he's still talking about humanity in such a charitable, kind way whilst being at war with one section of it. He had every reason to give up on life, every reason to give up on other people, every reason to be bigoted and closed-minded. I think about how, in a way, it's funny. It's offensive, but it's funny. The reasons they were called barbarians, basically anyone who wasn't a Roman citizen is because other languages sounded to the Romans like bar, bar, bar.

43:21That's like something like my eight-year-old would do, you know, like it's so childishly closed mind. And so that's the world that he's in, a world where you could basically kill or enslave someone if they were not like you. So again, to get this kind of not just occasional, but this persistent cosmopolitanism and a sense of a common good and a sense of interconnectedness is really a remarkable feat for, again, an isolated, basically imperialized, worshipped as a god human being in Rome. It's almost unbelievable that he could get anywhere close to this kind of empathy or connection to other people.

44:01Yeah, it really is. There's an interesting, the character of Lucius Verus, who's his sort of, I guess, adopted brother, who becomes co-emperor with him, who seems so much the polar opposite, which is always a little suspicious, I think, isn't it? I think we do this a lot in life. I think a lot of our arguments with our partners over whether or not we should do this or whatever, a lot of the time you're outsourcing projected. Sure. You kind of maybe want to get another dog or whatever it is, and they want the dog. And then it becomes, they want this, I want that. And actually, you've just polarized the conflict within yourself.

44:38And it's interesting that these two characters are always portrayed by history is so drastically different. It does make you wonder whether that's a neat bit of storytelling that's emerged. I love the idea that Lucius Verus was touring around the Roman Empire with an orchestra. He was such a carouser that he had his own private orchestra. I love that. I want to know more about him. I want to read his meditations. You do get the sense that Marcus at least loves him and appreciates him. So it couldn't have been a caricature. Yeah. Treat seems to come out of his way to make sure that he isn't the kind of playing second fiddle.

45:15Because clearly, I think as Marcus was growing up and Antoninus was sort of preparing his way, it does seem like Lucius was getting the backseat quite a lot. But he is surprisingly fair towards him whilst seemingly acknowledging that he can see his weaknesses and keeps him safely out of the way when he needs to. Again, it's part of a very touching portrait. But also, I just wonder whether, you know, you look around for any hint from other writers that maybe Marcus wasn't quite this dignified character, but nothing really emerges to burst the bubble. I don't know if you've come across anything that undercuts it.

45:49I mean, the only thing is, of course, Commodus. I'd like to read Commodus' meditation. Commodus, what is his read on his father? And how does one follow from the other? To me, people sometimes ask me, if I could meet Mark Surrealist, what would I ask him? I feel like that's the first place I want to know so much about that. Because it's so vexing and dark and confusing. and it's something we don't know that much about. The interplay between famous fathers and at this point, famous mothers. I mean, Queen Elizabeth is a great example. The difference between great men and women and their children or the unhappiness and the dysfunctions of their children, I find to be fascinating.

46:37Yeah, because the public role, there's no reason why that should map across to private life at all. someone that does the public role very well. I mean, it's that famous thing of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts having terrible, terrible home lives. Yeah. It's interesting when you see the – I went to Rome to kind of just be amongst it when I was preparing this Rebind project and looking at the statue of Commodus. He's got all this sort of stuff in his hair, and you can just sort of imagine him in sort of full makeup, and there was something very performative about him. And there's quite a lot of that.

47:17I think Lucius shaved his head because Marcus kept his curly. There was these funny ways that people were wanting to show their relatives of his, wanting to sort of show distance or that they somehow, they weren't living that life, they weren't that guy. It's kind of interesting. You wonder, he might have been really quite insufferable. I mean, it's the image of him at the games pretending, finding a way of, first of all, he was getting criticized a lot because he clearly wasn't interested in the games. He was just reluctantly there, but not interested. So to make it seem like he was interested, he would hold his meetings while the games were going on because it would look to anybody that looked across the Coliseum that he was talking about the games, and he wasn't.

47:58He was just holding meetings. But that is kind of interesting, who that man is and what that person's like in real life.

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48:48But your point about stoicism somewhat removing you from the world, I think that that's true. And if you're already like you're already introverted, you're already an introspective person, you're a literary person, and then you have this strange job and then stoic philosophy, I suspect he was a distant, somewhat removed person, right? And that can be traumatic and hard for a child to wrap their head around. I mean, it's something I have to work on. It's like, oh, wait, I have these kids. I have to live in their world. I can't live in my world. And that's a relatively modern parenting insight. When you read Marcus, you don't get the sense that this is a super connected, at ease with himself kind of a person.

49:39There's a distance there. The only time when he emerges as someone at ease is when he retreats, when he talks about stepping back, finding a quiet place, and returning to kind of first principles, which also for me is one of the most touching aspects of the book. Because I mean, that really, that resonates for me. We do, I think, tend to feel that if we want to get away and sit on our own for a bit, that's like a slightly embarrassing trait that we have. You know, that's a sort of failure. And actually, again, here it is, the most powerful man in the world telling us, go away, find a quiet spot, retreat into yourself, and then know what to do with that.

50:17So it doesn't just become stewing. And the idea of having a few simple principles that you return to in those times. I thought that was just sort of wonderful because again, it's that thing of life pulling you towards the difficult center where it feels really isolating. We've all lived through COVID lockdown. So that's a really great play out of that, you know, a literal play out of this idea, the things that isolate us are actually the things that we're all connected with. So, you know, there across 2000 years across, you know, from me to someone who's the most powerful man in the world is somebody who just needs to get away and sit down and gather himself.

50:53He would have known like, Hey, I can't go outside. There's a plague going on. He would have experienced that sort of forced isolation also, you know, at some level. It's so it's interesting. There is no talk, of self-esteem or anything. I mean, obviously it's before the days of that even being a thing. But again, that's really nice. I like the idea that I think we should forget about self-esteem. I think if we can find a way of gathering ourselves afresh and then stepping out into the world and taking some responsibility amidst our mess, that's what we should be aiming for. That's enough and that's huge.

51:29And again, it's really refreshing only because, I guess because it's of its time, that there's none of that. There's no talk of things like self-esteem. I am thinking, though, that there is kind of a theme of loneliness in meditations. I mean, at one point he says, you know, life is warfare and a journey far from home. You know, I imagine being an emperor would have been a job no one can relate to. There's no one else alive that has had the same experiences as you. You know, everyone wants something from you. You're also busy and you have to make hard decisions. There's something about, I think, the life of a performer that's a little bit like that.

52:06You know, those few quiet moments before you go on stage, when you're trying to come up with your next thing. There's something, I wonder if perhaps why meditation struck you and why you like it might be similar to me, which is that there is a kind of loneliness and isolation. First off, you're already introverted or drawn to that kind of stuff. in the first place. That's what drove you to say, figure out magic and spend hundreds and hundreds of hours, thousands of hours trying to master certain things. But then the actual day-to-dayness of it as a profession, there's kind of a distance and a loneliness that it creates, even if you're performing for thousands of people or on a television show for millions of people.

52:48Yeah. I mean, those sort of artificial social situations like performing on stage, that clearly has no bearing on how lonely you feel. It doesn't stop you from feeling lonely if you do. I very much enjoy it. And for me, it's like a part of myself that – because you get to be a very well-rehearsed and charismatic version of yourself on stage. That's a nice thing to do night after night. So I usually – I really enjoy that. I also enjoy the – I think you find meaning in life by finding something bigger than yourself and throwing yourself into that, and whether that's a religious belief or doing a tour.

53:25It's something to absorb you. And when I stop doing it, like a lot of performers, I get quite sort of irritable and miserable. When I wrote this book, Happy, many years ago, which was the book about stoicism, I finished it and then went on a bit of a tour of talking about these ideas to people. And I was really unhappy, and it was odd. I sort of felt this. I felt like I was such a hypocrite. I couldn't work out why. And then I just realized, oh, it's because I'm not writing the book anymore. That engagement in something is so vital. And for a lot of us that do that kind of thing, I think without it, suddenly you're a bit lost.

54:05There are moments in this book, I think, where it stops you in your tracks. I didn't have this rebind thing didn't exist. So I couldn't then ask about it and actually sort of... What do you mean? Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. What is this? Or sort of, you know, there are ways you can sort of annotate and acknowledge your thoughts as you go along. It's really fascinating. I didn't have that, but I would just stop in my tracks. And like he talks about just going back to this loneliness thing of that this might be your last day. Like the thing of living each day as if it's your last, there's a slightly different way of putting it.

54:35I guess it depends on what translation you live. But in any other world, somebody saying that live each day as if it's your last is, you know, it's a kind of, it's an encouragement to go out and go bungee jumping or do this or do that or do all those things that you you haven't done and in marcus that line i mean it almost made me cry because what he's talking about without he doesn't even really exactly spell this out but you just totally get it is if this was the end of your life if this really were that final stage or final day or whatever how would that affect your relationships how would you live differently with other people what would that do in terms of the love and compassion that you could you could find i remember uh years ago i um i had this sort of thought process i went through i was i was um i had somebody that kind of worked was part of my like production team and he just he just annoyed annoyed me drove me a bit mad and i was kind of like he'd said or done something that was just and riled me and then i kind of thought and you know what this is the guy that does that job in my sort of strange world I live in.

55:43And, you know, I'm grateful for that. And, you know, one day I look back and I'll go, Oh God, Oh, that was, that guy did that throughout his life. He did that for my life. That's nice. And then that thought sort of expanded to, I mean, any number of people, I guess, that I might come across from day to day that I might jar with or find, you know, people you meet that are a bit, just a bit disappointing or people that maybe work around you that are irritating. And the same thought, it sort of expanded as to, oh, hang on, these are the people who are populating my life. And that really means something.

56:16Like one day I'm going to look back and it's almost like a cast of people, an ex-partner that's a source of maybe difficulty. Maybe it's all a bit fresh and all a bit, but that's this person who - That's their job. Well, yeah, it is a little like a cast. And then it expanded into the people you see every day in the shops, the familiar faces in a store. And also there's people that loom too large, the big figures. It might be some celebrity that you're a bit obsessed by or someone that you've met. I do this all the time. I meet famous people. I embarrass myself and I can think of nothing. That 3 a.m.

56:53thing of, God, why did I say that? I get that a lot. So people that loom too large. Also, at one point, we probably have this feeling of like, oh, those are just these kind of people that populated my life. And it really made a difference to me in terms of affection and compassion and just enjoying people that otherwise might be a little bit like this. It was like a kind of a wider perspective. I mention it because that line from him about living each day as if it were your last, normally, as I said, it means something else. And that something else is normally about a fear of death, I think. If it's about, I better go out and bungee jump and I better go out and do all these travels.

57:33And that's sort of about death is this frightening thing. And I better do all this stuff before it happens. Kafka has this lovely idea of that the meaning of life is that it ends. In other words, that the fact that it is finite is what gives it any meaning at all. If we just live forever, nothing would have any meaning. Everything would just blur into this endless blur. So really like living with that and letting it bleed into how do you start to see people if you take that on board? How does that affect their not coming from a fear of death, but a real acknowledgement and a sitting more comfortably alongside of it?

58:09So it's not a lonely thought. It's not an asocial or antisocial thought at all. But I think it is maybe like a lot of people, if you feel like you do lack something or you lack a trait and then you learn it, you become very good often at communicating it and teaching it because it doesn't necessarily come naturally. So maybe there's a bit of that. Maybe this is these pro-social thoughts he has come from somebody who is introvert and is having to find ways of finding those feelings. But I'm maybe a lonely man, but these are not lonely thoughts. These are really, I think, quite movingly pro-social, beautiful thoughts.

58:46I totally agree. You get the sense that he might have this sort of introverted tendency, but he... There's a line that I think a lot about in meditations that I think is the essence of Marcus Aurelius, the man, Marcus Aurelius, the philosophy, and what Stoicism is supposed to be. It's a quote. He says, you know, fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. And so maybe the way to understand Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics is that it's this set of ideas, this set of ideals, this sort of what we know is the best of us, what we know we're capable of. And then most of the time we're way down here, below that, that we're aspiring to be that we probably consistently can't be.

59:29But through work, through practice, through journaling, through study, through, you know, great effort, we can get there in moments. And so, yeah, you have this introverted guy who's working to not be cynical, to not be isolated, to not write other people off. You see this guy who's experienced tragedy and loss and heartbreak and pain. And he's trying not to despair. He's trying not to give up on people. You know, you have this guy who has immense power and influence who can get away with and do anything. And he's really working to be ethical, to be good, to be decent, to not be corrupted by power.

1:00:06And so I really feel there's this kind of earnest striving in meditation where Marcus Aurelius is really trying to be better than he is. And I think, you know, in the 20 odd centuries since he wrote it, that's what's so striking and relatable to us today is like, we all know that we could be better. We all know that we should be better. We know that by looking at history and looking at the people we admire that there's something greater that we can be. And it takes a lot of work to get there. Absolutely. The interesting balance point there for me is, goes back to this idea of none of this is a recipe for happiness.

1:00:48There's another really interesting thought that is very un-stoic, although in some ways it chimes with it. I don't know if you've come across, there's a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa, R-O-S-A, and he's written a book recently called Resonance. His point is, and he's writing from a sociological perspective, so he's interested in, I guess, our relationship with the world as opposed to our intimate psychological journeys. And his thing is, surely a successful life, like living well, is relating to the world in this resonant way. So it's a mode of relating to the world where there's a kind of dynamic and mutual and kind of transformative relationship with, a connection with the world, which is about being, I guess, open and being receptive to it and engaged and feeling that the world responds to us in the same way and much less about dominating or mastering it, much less about this fight.

1:01:46And one of the interesting things, he gives an example of ways that we tend not to live. And it's not a way you can be all the time. If you're a researcher, you're a scientist, you want to create stuff, you have to think in terms of mastering and dominating. But nonetheless, this is something we should lean into more in our lives. And it's not very stoic, but it's really interesting. And he gives the example of one way that we really don't do it, one way that we live more of an alienated connection with or lack of connection with life is through constantly gathering resources rather than actually living what the point of the resources is supposed to be so he suggests like imagine two artists and they're given um the task of paint a beautiful you got three weeks to paint a beautiful painting go and paint your best one like it's a competition and one of them goes home and does the best he can and just with whatever he's got and does this thing and hopes it'll it'll you know be good the other guy goes right okay i'm gonna do the best painting so i'll uh i need a really good studio space my one isn't good enough i need a north-facing light and he finds like a perfect space for it i need a really good i want to get a good easel the one that you can crank up and down so he goes out and gets one of those and the best paints the finest uh the finest quality paints and pigments and then the sable hair brushes and i want proper um proper linen canvas and he just gathering all these resources.

1:03:05And then, you know, time's up and he runs out of time or he just has to quickly put something together at the end. And this is sort of how we tend to live. Like we're gathering resources, whether it's make more money, become more attractive, become more intelligent, make better social connections. These things that we all do all the time, we've sort of lost track of the fact that they're all means to an end, right? They're kind of resources. But actually what we're trying to do ultimately is paint the best picture we can. but we've kind of got a bit confused because those, those resources had, they've sort of become tangled up with what the end results are supposed to be like.

1:03:40They become the things that we think are the be all and end all and they're not. I rather like it because part of that, as you said, being the, being the best person you can and being on this stoic thing, sometimes it feels a little bit like that. Like, are you going to get to the end of your life and they go, Oh, fuck's sake. Like, you know, like it's just this thing. I really like the image of Martha Nussbaum talks about it. She talks about an alternative of the stoic notion of being like a rock, like a cliff and the waves are lashing against you, is to think of yourself as a porous. So the waves are, you know, it's kind of on the shore and the waves are sort of moving in and out.

1:04:17That's a really, I like that very much. I think that's a helpful starting point rather than always being a fight because I don't know that if you're just pitched against the world all the time, if that's the starting point, whether really that's the life project we should be living. This idea of presence is very different from that. I could see the word fight there taking it a bunch of ways. What I've always taken that word to mean is he's just saying to really try to be this thing that you know you can be, right? Like to be your best self, not necessarily to achieve the most or do the most or withstand the most, but you just get the sense that Marcus is trying to be something that matters and means something.

1:04:59And I like that. I agree, though, there's something fundamentally insane about the sort of modern notion of like work for decades to make enough money to retire and then then start your life. Seneca talks about how the one thing fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start. And there's something about like Marcus says this in meditations. He says, look, you could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow. So I think there's a tension between the sort of immediacy and then also the aspiration. But ultimately, what I've always loved about Marcus Aurelius is you get the sense that this guy didn't have to make himself into what he was.

1:05:39And it wasn't always natural, but he did it. He was as good as he was capable of being. You don't get the sense that he left anything on the table, which to me is part of happiness. Like if your definition of happiness is I do whatever feels pleasurable to me right now, there's something about that that I think inevitably you wake up one day and you go, what have I spent my life on? What was I actually capable of? Right. And I think there's something beautiful in Marcus's example in that way. It's not happiness as we maybe often define it as in Western culture, but there is maybe something closer to Aristotle's definition of human flourishing that I think he did embody.

1:06:22And maybe we could say that he had a kind of happiness. And again, it does come down to this thing of we're reading the points of conflict and difficulty for himself because that's why he's taken the time to write them. We're not reading all the other stuff where he may be perfectly happy and where everything's working out really well for him. We're reading the stuff that's a conflict. So therefore, we can read it and go, God, this stoicism is a lot of hard work. It doesn't mean that it is hard work in a bad way. No, totally right. And I actually tried it in my own journaling because it would have been nice if we had a couple examples where Marcus Aurelius said, today was a great day.

1:06:59It really came together. Like golden hour was great. I spent some time with my kids. The weather was awesome. You know, I helped someone. I'm lucky that I get to do this, right? I'm lucky that I'm not dead, you know? So when I try to do in my journaling, and not for anyone's benefit, but my own, is I really do try to recognize on those days where it feels like it came together and it worked. I try to go, this is it, man. Like, you get to do it, you know? You had a nice drive in the car. You got to sit and write for a while. You got to talk to someone whose work you admire. Like I try to take the time and go, hey, this is it.

1:07:41This is wonderful. There's something in meditations actually, where maybe Marcus is doing this, where he says, you know, convince yourself that everything is a gift from the gods. Yes. And I think that to me is where happiness comes from. When you're not wishing for things to be anything other than they are in this moment, you're not resigned to them. It's not this negative thing. you're saying, this is fucking amazing. We're in a rock hurtling through space, and I get to do X, Y, or Z. I'm not hungry. I just laughed at something that was funny. Life is pretty fucking good. And we don't see that in meditations, but I think your point is worth reiterating again, which is just because you don't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there.

1:08:25It's just that he didn't take the time to write it down. Yeah, he's not writing a portrait of the stoic life. He's slapping himself around the face where he needs it. Yes. And if he didn't have the other stuff that balanced it out, he's either the toughest motherfucker who ever lived because his life was filled with so much awfulness, or he would have killed himself. And the fact that he didn't means there must have been other wonderful things that balanced out the catalog of tragedies and misfortunes that, you know, marked his reign. Yeah. Well, this is amazing. I thought this edition you did was really interesting.

1:09:05I thought the forward you wrote to it was great. And I think anyone that's taking the time to make this fascinating book, you know, accessible to different people or more people is doing an important thing. So I'm so glad we finally got to chat. Thank you. And I really think this is, I was asked to do it. And I barely even like listen to audio books. Like I like reading. Me too. So I went into it thinking I've no idea what this technology is going to look like or feel like for people using it. I don't know if it's something, but I want to do it myself. And I just, I'm really captivated by it. It's such an interesting way to be able to read and ask questions and converse.

1:09:41And at this two-way thing as well, where it's prompting thoughts in you. and it's very good at suggesting pathways to think down or things to ask about as well. Because I think, you know, sometimes these things can miss the fact that it's quite hard sometimes to think of it. Go on, ask a question. Sometimes it's hard to know what to do. So it's just a very user-friendly experience for a book. It is. No, it's really cool. It's so worth knowing, but it isn't because it isn't written for people to read as such. It's not always that user-friendly in itself. It was awesome. I hope we can do it again sometime.

1:10:11And if it could ever be a service, just let me know. But I'd love you to talk to you. Really nice to talk to you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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