The Perspective Shift I Had in Australia (A Stoic Lesson)

0:00Ryan Holiday: Three, four times a day, I reach over and I grab my wife's phone and I check something. Not social media. I check the Shopify app. Because Shopify is how I see how the Painted Porch and the Daily Stoic are doing. We've been using Shopify for almost 10 years now. It's great. And we're not the only ones using it. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and brands all over the world. They do 10 % of the e-commerce in the U.S., from household names to Gymshark and Allbirds to little brands just getting started and little things in between, like Daily Stoic. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother.

0:42Ryan Holiday: And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer service, which we have used many times at Daily Stoic and with The Painted Porch. it's time to turn those what ifs in to sales with shopify today sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shopify.com slash stoic go to shopify.com slash stoic shopify.com slash stoic shopping at whole foods is one of the things i do in our family like the grocery shopping is my job so i was glad to be able to do that even on vacation and then you know being here in hawaii it was the same Whole Foods experience we're thinking about, but then also a bunch of regional stuff too that they only have at this Whole Foods.

1:31Ryan Holiday: We love shopping at Whole Foods because there's always new flavors and foods to choose from whichever Whole Foods you are like, whichever Whole Foods you happen to be at. So save on regional flavors at Whole Foods Market, and maybe I'll see you at the Whole Foods in Austin sometime. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

2:01Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Okay, so funny thing happened. Some people from Australia came out to the bookstore over the weekend, and they were shopping, and then all of a sudden, the people at the bookstore started to close up. They said, hey, we're going to close temporarily. And people said, no, no, no, sorry. We came all the way from thousands of miles away. Do we have to close? And they said, yes, sorry. There's a protest down the street and Ryan's speaking. We want to come watch him speak. My employees wanted to see me speak at No Kings Day. But why don't you just come with us?

2:34Ryan Holiday: You can actually see Ryan talk. And they were like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. So I got to meet these two guys who'd come all the way from Australia. They saw me talk. It's like a delightful little small town thing. Put the politics aside. It's like you're on a historic main street. and then you walk over to the county courthouse and there's a political rally going on. I'm speaking under this gazebo that's been there for 100 plus years. It's like small town democracy, small D democracy at its best. And so anyways, I was talking to these guys and I said, hey, just so you know, I'm going to be in your neck of the woods in October.

3:10Ryan Holiday: I'm doing Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Perth. So they were like, oh my gosh, we're totally going to go. From that encounter, I sort of thought I'd put down in Australia-themed episode of the podcast. You can come see me, by the way. You just got to grab tickets at dailystokelive.com. But I was in Australia back in July of 2024, and I did their version of the Today Show. Here's what I said. We're excited to have our next guest here with more than 3 million books sold worldwide. Ryan Holiday is a leader when it comes to teaching self-control. Well, now he's here down under on a speaking tour, and we are thrilled to say he joins us live in the studio.

3:51Ryan, good morning. Hi, Ryan. Thank you. Great to have you here. You've got a lot of Australian fans. A lot of your work, of course, focuses on Stoic philosophy. For the uninitiated, explain what that is and how you became so involved in it.

4:03Ryan Holiday: Yeah, when you start to talk about an ancient philosophy from Greece or Rome, people's eyes glaze over. I sort of say Stoicism is this idea, we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, which is what human beings have always struggled with in the ancient world and the modern world. And the Stoics have a lot to teach us about, you know, how to how to manage a frustrating, confusing, overwhelming world. So you've got a new book out as well as your third book, I believe, called There Is Right Thing Right Now. Tell us about the virtues in this one and what the focus is.

4:34Ryan Holiday: The four virtues of Stoicism. The idea was that everything was an opportunity to practice courage, self-discipline, justice or wisdom or all of the above. Right. That's what life presents us always the opportunities to do that. And so I've been writing about this most recent one, the virtue of justice, which when people think justice, they think the legal system, as opposed to, like, what standards do I hold myself to? What's my sense of right and wrong? What am I obligated to do in each and every situation? Not what's legally allowed, but what am I okay with? What do I think the right thing to do is?

5:08I think stoicism has had some misconceptions around it for a long time in terms of being detached from emotions, being strong and not vulnerable. Yes. How does emotion, how does vulnerability play into stoicism?

5:24Ryan Holiday: We have to make a distinction between like lowercase stoicism, right? The word stoic in English, which means like has no emotions, invulnerable. And I think the philosophy that we're talking about, which is about courage and justice and discipline and wisdom, discipline is part of it, but just stuffing things down and pretending they don't exist, that's not dealing with them. They're going to come bubbling out at some point. So I think about stoicism more as processing one's emotions, thinking about them, figuring out what they mean, figuring out the response that's best in a situation, as opposed to just being ruled by them.

5:56Ryan Holiday: So feeling angry is different than doing something while you are angry. And I think that, To me, that distinction is where the stoicism comes in. All right, let's take this a little bit more wider here for people to understand at home. Because I think that sometimes we get bogged down in sort of the guys in togas. But there was one thing that you talked about recently was about stoicism. The Stoics knew about knowing when was enough for you in your life, not desiring other things. Tell us a little bit more about that. Because I think those sort of things really resonate. Yeah, the Stoics say that the greatest empire is command of oneself.

6:29Ryan Holiday: So people always want more and more and more. And really wealth, self-control is understanding like, what's enough for me? What am I good with? What do I actually need? And so it's so fascinating. On the one hand, you have a stoic like Marcus Aurelius, who's the most powerful man in the world. Then you have this other stoic named Epictetus, who Marcus Aurelius admires. Epictetus is a slave. And who is actually most in command of themselves? Who's in command of their desires, their emotions, their fears? So it doesn't matter how much you have or how little you have. Stoicism is this sense of here's what I need, here's who I am, here's what's important to me.

7:04Ryan Holiday: I'm following the Joneses. Exactly. And social media, a world of social media where you're constantly bombarded with what everyone else is doing. You lose track of what you're trying to do, what's important to you, what's possible for you. Know your own needs. Yes. So you're taking this to the stage, to your Aussie audiences. Tell us what everyone will take away from these nights. Well, we tend to think of philosophy as this abstract theoretical thing, as opposed to something that really helps us with our real-world modern problems. What's so great about stoicism is that it's timeless. That's why it's endured for all these centuries.

7:34Ryan Holiday: So I want to help people see philosophy as something that can help them with their actual life, just as it helped the most powerful people in the world and some of the most powerless people in the world. Stoicism has always been this thing that's helped us not just survive the ups and downs in life, but thrive whatever circumstances we happen to find ourselves. I think what you're teaching is really useful, and I really appreciate you being here today. One of the things I found while we were in Australia, you know, this is a chaotic time. This is the run up to the 2024 election. I think Biden dropped out while we were there.

8:05Ryan Holiday: Stuff was going crazy in America. But every morning we would get up and we'd go to this coffee shop when we were staying in the rocks in Sydney. We'd go to this one coffee shop. And then when we were in Bondi, we'd go to a different coffee shop. But we just had this morning routine. It was like we were living there. And I would see the news while I was there. And I'd sort of see America through the lens of Australia, but I'd also see Australian politics through the lens of the Australians. And it helped me not go crazy. And that actually inspired a little email I wrote for the Daily Stoic email from a book that I'd read on the plane.

8:39Ryan Holiday: This is Bill Bryson's In Sunburned Country, one of the great classic Australian sort of travel logs. I wrote actually a couple emails inspired, but this is the point that it inspired.

9:18Ryan Holiday: This will help calm you down. a country many thousands of miles from his own. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with the local paper, he writes. I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee, than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith.

10:00Ryan Holiday: What he was experiencing, of course, was the wonder of perspective. He was taking Plato's view, the 10 ,000-foot view, the one that Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations. Two armies battling each other as horrible thing up close. From the top of a mountain, it looks like ants going after a piece of food. News near us is alarming, frustrating, disappointing. News from far away is funny, absurd, and riveting. The turmoil of ancient Rome provides us moral lessons. The turmoil of our own time simply makes us queasy. Bryson, who no doubt had problems with politicians at home, noted the hilarity of two feuding Australian ministers who were literally named Abbott and Costello.

10:42Ryan Holiday: The point is, how we look at things matters. and sometimes by noticing how we might look at something while we're on vacation or through the lens of a foreign language or culture can give us a better insight into how we might better look at things at home. And so while we were in Australia, between those two shows, I only did two while I was there, we got to see huge chunks of Australia. We went to the Blue Mountains, spent a couple of weeks in Bondi. I got the whole Sydney experience. Now I'm excited to do other parts of Australia. I jetted down to Melbourne, but the family didn't come with me.

11:15Ryan Holiday: But one of the things I was able to do while I was there was I interviewed Bridget Delaney, who wrote this wonderful book called Reasons Not to Worry, How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times. She'd actually been super skeptical of stoicism for a long time. She also has a great Netflix show that's sort of a spoof of the wellness industry. She's a great writer. And she decided she would let Marcus Aurelius guide her decisions for a year of her life, sort of a gonzo journalism take into Stoicism. And I thought that was great. So here's a chunk of she and I talking. So how did you come to the Stoics? So I was a columnist at The Guardian and I have a weekly column.

11:57One week I just listened to Joe Rogan nonstop and I wrote about that. another week I'd, you know, wake up at 4am and, you know, act like a CEO. So it was a lot of gonzo stuff. And Stoic Week was happening in the UK. And a friend of mine who's an editor sent me the press release and said, live like a Stoic for a week. I was like, oh, I'm more an Epicurean. And so I did it. I did Stoic Week. I was hungover. I was thinking, you know, I missed a few of the lessons. I didn't really like it. And I wrote essentially a piss take saying, oh, Stoics, you know, they're so po-faced and boring. And, you know, this is, I was too hung over to take this seriously.

12:39And I got a lot of pushback from people within Stoic Week, but also Stoics who said it's a real shame because it's a great philosophy and you could have actually got something out of it. And I took that on board. And the following year I did Stoic Week privately. I did it with some friends. We formed a WhatsApp group. I didn't write about it. I just showed up, did it and really, really liked it. Like the second time round, I got it. And I was telling one friend in particular about stoicism. It just chimed with him and we decided to sort of undertake a project where we would do some reading and then meet and talk about stoicism.

13:22And we did it each week. So we had a kind of almost a dialogue, a stoic dialogue, and I'd go and see him and say, I've had this terrible week. I got turned down for a pay rise, and I'd be really frustrated. And he'd say, well, was that within your control too? Yeah. And so we started applying the stoicism like it was the medicine to each other's lives, and we were out one night talking about it at the pub, and there was a publisher sitting, a publisher that I was acquainted with who was sitting behind us, and she said to me later on, you should do a book about this. Wow. I said, I can't, you know, I can't write about stoicism.

14:02I did one year of a philosophy degree at university and dropped out because it was all mathematics. And we dropped out also. Yeah, and didn't feel like I had the permission to enter the space. But my friend and I kept going with our stoic journey, and then the pandemic happened and I started writing. it just clicked in and it came out like Australia had some very severe lockdowns. And so people felt like they didn't have a lot of control. And the book came out after all of that, but people were kind of in a space where they thought if this happens again, I need to have some sort of framework that's going to help me understand or help me accept a reality that I don't like very much.

14:47And so my book did really well in Australia. It's sold in like more than 20 different countries. So it's been, and now I'm doing another one, which is more of a fable and it's a dialogue between a seeker and a sage. So, so that's really cool. And I found myself practicing it. So the books were a way, the books and the reading are a way of reinforcing stoicism in my own life.

15:12Ryan Holiday: I think that's really important, right? Like stoicism isn't this thing that you read one time, something you get a degree or a certification and it is a thing you are doing. It's a verb, right? And the writing about the Stokeful, you can't write and talk and think and read about this stuff and not have it seep into you in some way. And that the longer you do that, the more you do that, the more able you are to draw on it in moments big and small in your life. So if you see Stoicism as this thing that you are studying as opposed to a thing that you studied. You're a bit closer to what it's supposed to be.

15:52Ryan Holiday: And by the way, that's what Marcus Rullus is doing. That's what Seneca is doing with his friend Lucilius is this kind of ongoing dialogue practice process that's helping them get a little bit better every day at the thing. Absolutely. And you have to keep doing it because you drop it. It's like going to the gym. You stop going. My big thing that I'm struggling with at the moment is if people are rude to me or if someone's, if I'm having to deal with someone that's obnoxious, I get reactive back and I get shitty with them and I ruminate. Yeah. And stoicism has been, you know, you go back to the, what does stoicism say?

16:35Oh, you can't control them. Oh, of course. You know, I have to control my reactions and it's never wrong. You know, I don't always like stoicism. I don't necessarily like the fact that it's a bit unforgiving, but it hits real, you know?

16:54Ryan Holiday: You know what's funny? It's very forgiving to other people. It's not forgiving to you, right? Like the passage that I have helped popularize this one from Mark Sturrilis about how the obstacle is the way. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what he's specifically talking about is difficult people. He's saying that they are the opportunity for you to practice the Stoic ideas. So you could be trying to have a wonderful, loving, friendly conversation with someone, and then they can make that impossible, but they can't take away from you the opportunity to practice some other kind of virtue, patience, forgiveness, empathy.

17:31Ryan Holiday: And I try to remind myself that that's when the Stoics say the obstacle is the way they're not talking so much about pandemics or car crashes or injuries or bankruptcies. They're mostly talking about day-to-day interactions with annoying, obnoxious, frustrating, evil, stupid people. And Marcus actually put it very plainly in his book, you know, each day you will wake up and there will be annoying people. It's like, oh, of course. And I love the quote by Seneca, we are bad men living amongst bad men and only one thing will calm us and that is we must go easy on each other. Yes. To me that's, you know, that's the great calming quote because I think if I was to diagnose one of society's biggest problems right now, it's anger.

18:21Anger seems to me, you know, there's a huge sort of increase in reporting of domestic violence in Australia. I'm sure those statistics are. across the board. Road rage has gone up, assaults. Also every shop you go into, little signs saying don't abuse the staff. It's insane. So it's like, okay, we have an anger problem. Stoicism is so explicit in how you handle anger and how you stop yourself from becoming reactive. And I think if there's one thing I want the world to take from stoicism at the moment, it's just dealing with anger.

18:57Ryan Holiday: There's a wonderful woman named Ashley who does the customer service for Daily Stoic. And you should see some of the emails that she gets from people who ostensibly know and understand and follow stoicism. People who just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we don't control the post office. We're not the reason your package is delayed. That was the storm that you just experienced. That was the ocean that it had to cross. That was the person who stole it off your porch. It wasn't us. And yelling at this poor lady doesn't do, doesn't magically make it go away. And it's been illustrated for me because like I get to the airport and then the people tell you that the plane is delayed.

19:41Ryan Holiday: And you know, like I feel that and I've certainly acted in ways in the past that I'm not proud of, but, but just this process of, yeah, Hey, is this what in my control? Is this who I want to be? what is, what opportunity is this presenting me? I think that passage from Mark's really is that you mentioned the famous one about how today the people you will meet and he lists all the shitty things that people are going to be and do. But I think it's so easy. We forget the second half of that, which is he goes, and why are they like this? No, he says, cause they don't know any better. And he says, he says, what they can't do is implicate you in their ugliness.

20:18Ryan Holiday: Like you, that's the choice that you make that parts on you. And he says, by the way, we're meant to work together. We're meant to be together. We're two rows of teeth in the same mouth. It's beautiful. I mean, it's great writing and such a profound insight that the quote can work on this superficial level to the, to the frustrated person who's just pissed off at humanity. And then also the second level, the wiser, more philosophical level of like, okay, I've calmed down a little bit. here's how I should think about this. And I think also just thinking about anger is that not being angry may not necessarily, you might not get on the plane earlier or whatever, but I think you're creating a situation where if you bring the temperature down in your own interactions, it does have a knock on effect.

21:06One of my, I had breakfast with a friend yesterday who works as a volunteer counselor for Lifeline, which is the suicide hotline. Yeah. Suicide hotline. And I I always like asking him when I see him, what's the main kind of thing that people are calling up about at the moment? Like what's the big issue? Previously it's been addictions. During the pandemic it was like drinking too much. And now he's saying he's seeing a big rise in loneliness and that people feel like they don't have anyone close to them. And they also don't have any interactions necessarily that have got warmth in them either.

21:46So I think part of being a stoic is not just to not be reactive, but also to be aware that if someone's angry at you or they're in a bad mood, what's behind that?

22:00Ryan Holiday: I think about those videos. They're very popular in the US because we're awful to each other, but it's some lady or some man freaking out at someone at the store. They're basically screaming, berating. Sometimes they brandish a weapon, whatever. But when I would first see them, I would be like, fuck this person. And then I've gotten better at going, what is that person's life like? Why did they break in line at the supermarket? What happened? Why did somebody cutting them off in line? Why did this thing not being on sale? What is happening? Their life must be a pressure cooker of stress and dysfunction because this is not how they want to be acting, you know, this isn't normal.

22:44And I think underneath a lot of anger is a lot of suffering. So, you know, there's no compassion in stoicism. That's, you know, something that I grapple with, you know, it's not a stoic virtue.

22:54Ryan Holiday: You don't think it's in the virtue of justice? So my read on compassion is that compassion is wanting something better for someone else, and that's outside your control. So if you are, if you have strong emotions of compassion, you are actually wishing for something that you can't change. Yes. I don't know. The golden rule seems to me to be the definition of justice and is rooted in the sense that how do people deserve to be treated? Yeah. And there is a sense to me that seems rooted in compassion in some way. Okay. Well, maybe I can incorporate that into my interpretations. I think for me, the golden stoicism has not just been controlling my own sort of worst impulses, but it's being able to see the suffering in other people and try and show some sort of kindness to others.

23:45I think that's where Stoicism stops being this thing which people accuse it of, which is being just all about you and your responses and being actually, because it's probably a bit more, almost more Christian than most interpretations of Stoicism is, but I think it does and it should have that element.

24:03Ryan Holiday: Have you seen the circles of concern, the idea from Hierocles? Yes. I think to me that's about compassion. Why would you be expanding the circle if you didn't care? So for people who don't know, basically the Stokes say like, look, we're born selfish. We have self-interest, but we start to care about the people who raised us, the people we're related to, the people who live near us. And then they say you can imagine the world being this series of concentric circles. And he says that the purpose of philosophy, but I think namely the virtue of justice, is about pulling those outer circles inwards.

24:38Ryan Holiday: And he said this is a beautiful madness to care about someone that you've never met. It's not like you, that you're not related to. To me, that's rooted in compassion. So I think it's there. It's just not what attracts us to stoicism. It's not its most salient feature. But I think it's there. Marcus Aurelius could have been so much worse. Yeah. You know, what's the governor on that? It certainly wasn't the guardrails of the Roman system. It was some sense to him of other people's inherent value and worth. And also our own nature. I think it feels good to do good. Of course. And it feels bad to do bad.

25:15And that's the kind of interesting thing about how we are in the world. You know, we have these. I did a chapter in the book on how to be good. What does it mean to be good? The writing in it was quite, you know, wasn't fantastic because the only thing I could come up with was we want to be good because it feels good. You know, it's a, yes, it's a duty, but also, you know, I get a bit of a buzz when I've done something for someone else. You know, it's nature. It's something working within us that it doesn't really have a lot of language around it.

25:48Ryan Holiday: I definitely get the sense that Seneca saw really shitty people up close. Epictetus saw awful people up close. Mark Cirilli saw awful people do awful things. And I think they get the sense, and I'm sure you've met people like this, where you go, oh, wait, they're not getting away with anything. It's awful to be them also. You know, like that it's not just that being good feels good, but that being a selfish, merciless, you know, evil, vindictive, angry, you know, insert your adjectives there person is a real hellish way to live. I agree with you, but I also think a lot of people would see that in this world, in current times, you're not necessarily punished for being bad and you're not necessarily rewarded for being good.

26:36Ryan Holiday: But I think they're saying when you're at home with yourself at night, they're not saying karma exists and that society rewards good people and punishes bad people. I mean, there's a great line in Meditations and Marks Reo that says, to be a good king is to earn a bad reputation by good deeds. Yes. So he saw like, hey, I could be, I'm doing my best here and I'm taking all this heat for it. I don't think they meant it in that sense. I think there's this famous passage, one of the middle Stoics, he's at the deathbed of this Roman general named Marius. And that's the one that Seneca says, Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius.

27:15Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And the stoic basically sees the most powerful man in Rome in his last moments and he realizes he's sort of in and out of it and he's kind of commanding these troops that no longer exist. He just goes, oh, all of it was hollow and empty and you're a sad, dying, vulnerable man. Do you think everyone has that on their deathbed? Like do you think there is a moment where people are conscious of their actions throughout life? or do you think some people never have that reckoning? I definitely, I don't think, you know, you eventually get what's coming to you. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, full-time or a side hustle, you know, it's a challenge.

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29:45Ryan Holiday: And if you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit Duck.ai.doic today. That's Duck.ai.doic, a private way to chat with AI from Duck.duck.go, where AI is always optional and private. Let's go back to anger for a second, because my wife sent me this tweet the other day that I thought I'd get your opinion on, because I think I've been struggling with it. She says, it's from this guy, Tim Grierson. He said, being angry all the time is exhausting and corrosive. Not being angry feels morally irresponsible. Yeah, that's interesting. How do you balance that? So that's a tough one. One of the things I struggled with most with stoicism was the approach to social justice.

30:25And my friend and I, when we were having our stoic sessions, you know, we'd always come back to this, particularly the climate, and we'd be, we'd wrestle with it, you know, like really wrestle. My thinking still hasn't, I still grapple with it. Me too. There's tension in Stoicism. You know, there is tension throughout the whole philosophy. And I think this is one of the main areas of tension. And also I would put desire in this camp as well, you know, where it's, there's Stoic teachings and okay, it, it makes sense, but it also isn't necessarily human nature. Um, but let's just stick with anger for the moment.

31:01The tension is, um, that stoicism walks is that you can't control, like I can't control what happens in the Middle East. Yeah. So therefore would me going on a protest or me doing some, some action or me getting angry, would that change anything? A pure stoic would say no.

31:24Ryan Holiday: Sure. But if everyone felt that way, If everyone felt that way. So same with the climate crisis. One of the reasons I was attracted to work in politics is that you're actually working, you know, it is a system where things happen. It's the government. So I think there's ways of directing your impulses to make change. Yeah. One of them is working within a system, but people who think the system's broken would say, no, get angry, stay outside the system. Anger can give you energy to fight, but it can also burn you up and mean that you're not effective as an activist. I think about it in sports. It's like what is the single best thing you can do to weaken your opponent?

32:09Ryan Holiday: It's to make them angry. It's to get in their head. Yeah. And needle them and frustrate them and either make them give up or make them overreact or distract them. And so it's like, I've come to think about it. It's like, okay, either the person that you're angry with, like your political opponent or whatever, is either a good person who is misinformed and thus redeemable and informable. And so anger is probably not going to help. Yeah. Or they are genuinely evil and awful, in which case you need all your wits about you to be able to beat them. And that anger, the Stokes would say, is sort of the most irrational and the most difficult to contain of all the emotions.

32:59Ryan Holiday: It's precisely what you don't need in either situation. And I think it's William Irving that talked, or Irvine, that talked about fake anger. So you use it when you're teaching, say, small children who might be mischievous. So you pretend to get angry. So you don't have, so you scare. You do this in sports too. The coach gets upset to rally the players, but they're actually still in command of themselves. They're acting. So the main thing is ataraxia. Like how is your equilibrium? That's very important to me at this point in my life. I, if I feel myself getting angry, I can actually feel the chemicals, you know, leaving my brain, circulating around my blood.

33:41It's not good. It's very unhealthy. but the impulse of anger comes from a feeling of injustice. Yes. So, you know, it's catching, it's getting that initial impulse, closing it down, which is what, Chrysippitus or I'm not sure how you pronounce him, you know, like before the cart rolls down the hill with the dog attached to it, you know, you stop it before it takes off. So you recognise the impulse, you feel, oh, this is unjust, stop before you blow up and then you think, well, what's in my power? Yeah. But I am increasingly becoming more of a mainstream, like traditional stoic with anger, which is there's no place.

34:24Yeah. I recently read De 'Ira, the Seneca book. He is so unequivocal about how bad anger is and I tend to agree with him and it's just working out that tension between justice and control, the control test that I think every Stoic has to kind of deal with. Yeah.

34:45Ryan Holiday: Look, I mean, almost to a person, the Stoics are involved in politics. Absolutely. So this idea that they didn't think things could change or were worth trying or that there wasn't a responsibility or an obligation. Sometimes people get mad and they'll talk about something that's happening politically. And they'll go, what would the Stoics think? They'd be like, they probably think I'm not talking about politics enough, quite frankly. Like the idea that stoicism is this self-improvement strategy divorced from the world that you live in is nonsense. It's a way to let yourself off the hook to not have to face these things that are happening around you in the world that you have some ability to affect.

35:24Ryan Holiday: You know, yeah, you don't control what happens in the Middle East, but you control who you vote for. And most people don't even fucking do that. You know, so you, you have, you have little ways to have influence and then you have to content yourself with, have I at least done all that I can do? Yeah. And, and Mark's really says in meditations, he says, look, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. And, and that's the, most of us are guilty of those injustices of just, we could do more. We just make up excuses for not doing it. It's definitely nowhere near nihilism as a philosophy. You know, nihilism is all about, and I've had readers who've approached me after book events and said, you know, I like the sound of stoicism, but it really, it's not what we need in this day and age because we, it's such an urgent time in history.

36:14And I said, well, when hasn't history been urgent? You know, all through the 20th century, look at how many people were killed. Yeah. History is one urgent moment after the next. Yeah. How do we respond to that moment? when that tweet says the only way to respond is with anger. It's like, well, what does that look like if everyone's angry?

36:32Ryan Holiday: Is it actually true that we need more angry people? That's not what I would diagnose as what's happening. I mean, I think there's things that people are not as engaged with as they should, but I'm not sure anger is the way through them. One of the great things about stoicism is that it wasn't defensive. You know, Seneca said this philosophy is open for people to change it depending on the new discoveries. I don't know the exact quote, but I've read it in your books. And it's, you know, if someone comes along and says, stoicism isn't working for these times, for these reasons, I'll listen and, and really, you know, think about it.

37:09Ryan Holiday: There's some fundamental things that we don't control as human beings, right? We don't control other people. We don't control the weather. We don't control this or that and the other, But like we thankfully live in a society of much more dynamism and agency than the one where Epictetus is a slave. Right. Or where Marx really is an emperor. Right. So if you live in ancient Rome, you don't get to choose who the emperor is. We live in a society where we get to elect our leaders. Right. So I think it's important to think as society has evolved and invented things, we have more influence over things that 2000 years ago, the Stokes were having to steal themselves to accept and be resigned to.

37:55Ryan Holiday: And so, you know, slavery was a perpetual institution, which no one could do anything about until one day some people did something about it. And now it doesn't exist, at least in the same way, the same prevalence. And so, yeah, I think seeing stoicism as a way of thinking about things, that there's some things that are in our control and some things that are not in our control, that is timeless and always will be true. What was in our control and not in our control was different in Zeno's time than it was in Seneca's time than it was in Marcus Aurelius' time. More like society empowered, things changed, things were invented, mechanisms were created, new breakthroughs happened.

38:41Ryan Holiday: And so we should feel empowered to update and adjust stoicism for a world where we have, thankfully, mechanisms to do things that were unthinkably out of everyone's control. Anyways, I can't wait to go back to Australia. I want to swim in the rock pools. I might try to drag my in-laws with us. The kids are very excited. And I hope to see you while I'm there. You can grab tickets at Daily Stoic Live. As I said, it'll be Auckland on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, and Perth on the 21st. I haven't been So I haven't been in quite some time. So I'm very excited to go back to Perth as well.

39:28Ryan Holiday: I hope to see you there. I might bring you some other chunks from the trip over the next couple of weeks. But anyways, hope to see you in Australia.