This is How You Die Before Your Time

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1:09Ryan Holiday: If you're hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:28Ryan Holiday: This is how you die before your time. It might help you stay in the game. It might make you successful. It might even keep you alive. Worked for Seneca, right? He did what he had to do. He never criticized Nero, made some money, had some influence, got some things done. But ultimately, it came at the cost of his soul. Seneca, who wrote about how we are dying every day, also died before his time in the way he collaborated and capitulated to Nero's insanity and tyranny. He was not unlike certain politicians today who, in exchange for power, give up their power to be on the right side of the regime.

2:11Ryan Holiday: He was not unlike certain people today who turn off their consciences to stay on top. And the saddest thing was that Seneca must have known this. His writings are replete with criticisms of old lawyers begging for another case, rich people living in slavery beneath marble and gold. These were trades, he was saying, that come at the expense of life. These were people who died before their time. It's a bad deal, okay? It's a pathetic deal. It is not worth it. And besides, in the end, do you know what it got Seneca? It got him a death sentence from Nero anyway. Seneca spent his life writing about virtue and courage and what it means to truly live.

2:58Ryan Holiday: And yet, when confronted with Nero's power, he compromised, he rationalized, and ultimately paid for it with his life. In Dying Every Day, Seneca at the Court of Nero, the historian James Rom tells the fascinating story of how this happened, how one of Rome's greatest philosophers became entangled with its worst emperor. And it's a powerful reminder that there are ways to die before our time, long before that time actually comes. You can listen to James on the podcast. I thought I'd bring you a little chunk of that. Go listen to the whole episode. I'll link to that. And do pick up Dying Every Day, depending on where it's one of my favorite books.

3:37Ryan Holiday: You'll really like it. It changed my life, changed the course of my life. And I wish everyone in Washington or whatever country you live in, wherever your leadership is, I wish they would read it too.

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5:04Ryan Holiday: I just got back from San Diego. I like to stay in the places that I'm staying. I like to book places on Airbnb so I can be like a local. I not only do some of my best writing, but I learn about things that I wouldn't have known otherwise. When I was just in San Diego, I took a walk along the water. I bumped into someone who recognized me and they told me about their favorite local bookstore, which was like two blocks from where I was staying. And I never would have known about it if it wasn't for that encounter. It was cool to me to think that I have helped facilitate that experience for many, many people coming to Austin over the years.

5:35Ryan Holiday: The first house that I bought in Austin when my wife and I first moved here, we would list it on Airbnb and it helped me make the transition from my corporate life to being a full-time writer. So if you're going to be away, you should maybe think about listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to earn extra cash while you travel can offset the cost of your trip or maybe even go towards whatever you're doing next. If you've got travel coming up, check out Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think. And you can find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.

6:11With public political figures, one can never draw a fine line between what's their authentic philosophy or their authentic point of view and what is crafted for public consumption.

6:25Ryan Holiday: So is that a type, you think, that gets like, does politics turn you into that person or is it that those people are attracted to politics? You know, that's a great question, especially a pressing question in Plato's case, because he had never thought of himself as a political player and he'd never been involved in politics until he went to Syracuse. And he's at great pains to explain his motives for going there as nonpolitical, that he didn't want to meddle in the rulership of Syracuse. He wanted to, A, protect his protege, Dion, and B, convince people that he was not all talk and no action, that he had enough conviction in his beliefs to try to act on them.

7:17But he went reluctantly, he says, and he got out as soon as he could. So I think in Plato's case, it's especially that he was not naturally interested or certainly adept at politics. And his participation there bears that out because it became a disaster very quickly.

7:40Ryan Holiday: Yeah, there's like a sort of, you would think that they would be really good at reading people, but there's kind of a lack of savviness, like an inability to see what is so obviously a flaw in someone's character or approach. Or maybe it's an ability to be persuaded in the room. There's a line in Meditations where Mark Strelitz thanks his philosophy teacher for teaching him not to fall for every smooth talker. And then you think Aristotle falls for Alexander, Plato falls, Seneca certainly falls. There is this seduction that happens. And it's almost not the seduction in the way that those tyrants seduced everyone else, which is I'll make you rich and famous and powerful.

8:27Ryan Holiday: It's almost another level of it where it's like, this person's flawed. I can see that. And I'm not going to be one of the enablers. I'm not going to be one of the low. I'm going to be above them, using them for my purposes. or that I can reform them or I can control and contain them in a way that other people can't. Yeah, right. And in Plato's case, the seduction was that if he could convert a young man to philosophy, so Dionysius the Younger at the time when Plato arrived at his court was only 30. Yeah. Plato was already in his 50s. And if he says in his letter, if I could convince this one man to follow philosophy, that would start a chain reaction that might save the whole human race.

9:18Yes. So the grandiosity of that, I mean, it's off the charts.

9:22Ryan Holiday: That's what I was going to say. There's this sort of martyrdom grandiosity sort of thing that's happening where they, I don't want to do this. It's going to be hard for me to do this. It might end badly for me to do it. But also I alone can fix it. You know, I am the last line of defense and it almost never ends well. And in retrospect, it's clear that they enabled that person far more than they constrained that person. Yeah, true. Now, in Plato's defense, you could argue that he had seen enough of the disasters of Athens by the time he went to Syracuse that he could legitimately think that democracy was failing.

10:06Other systems of governance were failing. Greece was falling apart, was deteriorating rapidly. Economic life was going downhill and something had to be done to stop the slide.

10:18Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I mean, Seneca is making the same bet. He idealizes Cato, but he's like, that Rome is gone. We've got an emperor now. It's my job to make the emperor not as bad as they might otherwise be. Exactly. And we've seen this in our own times. People who've attached themselves to recent presidents and current presidents have thought, I can at least mitigate the harm. I can snatch papers from the desk. Right. Exactly. I can stop the worst things from happening. And that justifies my participation, even though I'll be forced to collude with things I really don't believe in. Yes. I read Dying Every Day when I was at American Apparel.

11:01Ryan Holiday: I had come back, they'd fired the CEO and we were trying to save the company. And I was sort of wrestling with more minor version of the same sort of temptations. And it was thinking back to how had this person who was sort of unstable and reckless and made all these terrible decisions, how at every step of the way had he managed to convince the smartest people to give him more and more money? I think it's fascinating that sort of after everything, Trump managed to go to Silicon Valley and convince these people who are primarily a venture capitalist, your job is most of the ideas turn out to not be good.

11:40Ryan Holiday: Your job is to bet on founder. Like their job is to read people and see which person is worth giving millions and millions of dollars to and can successfully build and run a company. And Trump manages to convince them that he's not what he obviously is. And then promptly, you know, tanks the economy doing exactly what he said he was going to do. And these same people are like, we didn't think he would actually do it. Right. And I think that's the timelessness of of the seduction, which is like over here, I'm saying and showing you this. And then over here, I'm saying something different and the human capacity to hear which one of those we want to hear.

12:27Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And for Plato to have gone back to the court of Dionysius II a second time, five years after departing in a terrible debacle the first time and having caused a rift in the royal family that resulted in his protege Dion getting exiled, that is really, it's another stunning example of self-deception. Yeah, the mental gymnastics that humans are capable of will never cease to surprise you. That's right. And Plato says that he devised a test. You know, this is really a testament to his naivete. He devised a test to see whether Dionysius was a suitable student, that he was going to tell him exactly how hard it was going to be to become a philosopher.

13:19And probably he had in mind years and years of studies, starting with geometry and astronomy and higher math and going up to dialectic. And he was going to see how he would react. So he lands in Syracuse for the second time, well, the third time, but the second time under Dionysius the Younger and presents him with this scenario. And Dionysius says, oh, well, I already know all this stuff because other people have told it to me. And at that point, Plato is sort of done. But the fact that after having lived with him five years earlier for months and months and seeing exactly what kind of person he was, you know, a drunk, a libertine, unstable, emotional figure that he still thought, well, you know, maybe he'll pass the test and I'll have a true student on my hands.

14:13Ryan Holiday: I imagine Seneca, you know, he's somewhere in one of his villas and the messenger rushes in, you know, we have news that, you know, Nero's tried to kill his mother and Seneca's grabbing his toga, you know, and rushing over to the palace. I'm going to tell him this time, you know, it's this has to end. You can't do this. Like, I'm really going to confront him. This is it. You know, it's like we're going to have the come to Jesus conversation, which maybe he literally could have he could have used that expression. That expression. Jesus having an overlap with Seneca. But we're going to have it. And he's walking there.

14:50Ryan Holiday: I'm going to confront him. I'm laying on the line. I'm giving him the ultimatum. And then by the end of it, Nero has talked himself out of it. Right? And then soon enough, he does kill his mother and crosses the next red line and crosses the next red line. And the real skill of the Nero's, of the tyrants, of the Trumps, et cetera, is their ability to read those people and to know what they have to say to them and what their levers are and how to manipulate them. That at some level they see through them and they know how to get them in their pocket. Yeah. There's a great phrase that James Comey used in the first Trump administration.

15:38He eats your soul in little bites. That was a description of what he saw going on in those closed rooms where people were huddled with the decision maker.

15:51Ryan Holiday: Yeah, because didn't he say like the first day they all get called into his office and Trump basically forces them to all say that it was the biggest inauguration crowd they'd ever seen. that that's really the test is like, can I get you to accept an absurd premise? And if I can, then what you have told me is, I think people think it's about loyalty, but it's more about you have shown me a glimpse into your soul, which is that you want the job more than you care about your principles or notions like the truth and honesty, et cetera. And if I can get you to make that little compromise, or if I can get you to show me that that's who you are, then this is going to go well.

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