This is the Day You Start | What Does Living A Virtuous Life Look Like?

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Obviously, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The earlier you get started on something that takes time, the bigger and better the results will be. But all those moments are gone, just as your chance to plant that tree two decades ago is gone. Missed opportunities, they belong to death, as Seneca once said about the days that pass us by. They are gone, never to return. And that's sad. But as the second half of that expression about trees goes, the next best time is now. Today, now, now is an opportunity to start. This is what you deserve, Marcus Aurelius wrote. You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow.

0:59But no, don't choose tomorrow. Choose to be good today. Adopt the mindset of the great Stephen Pressfield, who writes in his book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. Here is my frame of mind as I sit down to work. This is the day. There is no other day. This is the day. Don't wait for the bus to come around next year. Don't tell yourself you'll do it later. This is the day. Now is the best time to start being the person you want to be. which is actually why we're relaunching the new year new you challenge typically we do it you know live the first 21 days of the year but we've actually found that most people abandon their new year's resolutions by the 21st of the year so maybe that's you maybe you fell short maybe you delayed maybe you didn't even get started but now is the time we heard from a bunch of people they came back from vacation late they procrastinated they changed their minds and uh they asked if we could bring it back or give them a second go at it.

1:54And that's what we're doing. Today is the day. It starts today. It's your last chance to sign up. Sign up now, dailystoic.com slash challenge. You'll see me in there. I'm already riding on a lot of the changes I made from starting the challenge a little earlier than you, but I'd love to see you in there. Join us with this awesome new cohort in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It would have been better if you started at the first of the year, but today's not too bad either.

2:27Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Q &A episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Okay. I got a call last year, year before, I think it was 2024. One of the weirdest calls I've ever gotten in my life. It said, okay, Danny DeVito has backed out. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to know if you could interview him at the 92nd Street boy. And I said, yeah, of course, that would be amazing. So I did. I flew to New York, I think in December. I don't remember when it was exactly. For some reason, I'm feeling like it was also in December. Flew to New York. We had a lovely conversation. Probably the only time in my life I will ever be filling in for Danny DeVito.

3:01Very big shoes to fill. Obviously, I would have loved to watch that conversation, Arnold and Danny. But I got to interview him on stage. We've run chunks of that before. It's a lovely conversation. And I thought, wow, this would be cool to do sometime. And lo and behold, for the Wisdom launch, the 92nd Street Y asked if I wanted to come out. Now, I don't know Danny DeVito, so I couldn't ask him and I wasn't going to impose on Arnold either. So I reached out to my friend, Stephanie Rule, the host of MS Now's The 11th Hour, and she graciously agreed to swing by. I guess she probably did this before she went to tape her show.

3:36It only occurred to me after what a long night had been for her. But we had a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed it. If you want to come see me in person and ask me some questions, I'm going to be in San Diego on the 5th and Phoenix on the 27th of February. You can grab those tickets at dailystoiclive.com, and I will see you there.

4:00What does living a virtuous life look like? Because again, I think the idea of it is different from the reality, especially in 2025. What is the virtuous life? well, is it sort of retreating to your books and just studying philosophy? I don't think so. What I love about the Stoics is they didn't want to be what they called pen and ink philosophers, meaning just talking and writing about the things. They wanted to be engaged. The difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics is that the Epicureans were just very interested in their own personal enlightenment, personal happiness, personal realization.

4:40And the Stoics were in the public sphere. Seneca says, you know, an Epicurean will get involved in politics only if they have to. And a Stoic will get involved in politics, that is to say public life, unless something prevents them. And so... Really? Because I think people don't think that about stoicism. People think about stoicism as someone who's resigned to say, the world is what it is, you know, you do you, I won't mess with it. And that's not the case. That's not only not the case, I think, you know, being centered around this notion of justice, the idea of not being involved means you are accepting the injustices of the world.

5:20Obviously, stoicism is built around accepting that there are some things that are out of our control, that there are some things that we don't get a say in, that humanity and the world does what it's going to do. And yet the Stoics run for office, the Stoics lead troops into battle, the Stoics run businesses, the Stoics speak out about injustices and problems of their time. At one point, the Stoics are so sort of politically radical that one of the more tyrannical emperors, Domitian, just puts through a blanket ban of all philosophers in Rome. Epictetus is part of this. He's sent out of Rome. I just can't imagine today philosophy being transgressive and active enough for the government to bother, because that's typically not what we see.

6:07But that's because we're calling it philosophy. Yes. Yet there are tons of ideologies right now that are more involved in government today than we've seen in modern history. We just don't call it philosophy. I think that's right. I guess the point is, what is the purpose of this study and reflection and these teachings if you don't try to make a difference in a small way? Then is Stoicism, is there faith and is there hopefulness? I think so. Well, certainly the Stoicism makes room for both God and in the Roman times for the gods. So there's plenty of space there for whatever sort of your faith tradition happens to be.

6:51But I think mostly the Stoics are, instead of sort of being hopeful, like, I hope someone else will take care of it, I hope things will magically get better, I do think the Stoics are saying, well, what is in my control to make better? So there's this interesting line in meditations that I've been thinking a lot about recently. Mark Aurelius goes, you know, he says, at one point I was a fortunate man, but at some point fortune abandoned me. And he had every reason to think this. Mark Aurelius buries multiple children. He lives through a plague. He lives through wars. He lives through coups. He lives through floods, like one disaster after another.

7:30And he could have said, this is unfair. I got a bad break. The gods are picking on me. And he says that he corrects himself in this passage. He says, Actually, no. He says, good fortune is something you make for yourself with good actions, good intentions, and good deeds. And his point is that if you want to feel good, like, you should do good because that is something that you control. I don't think he's saying, although it is interesting to hear this sort of from the most powerful person in the world, I don't think he's saying you can magically transform everything overnight. But I do think he's saying that, like, if you want to feel good and you want to experience good, there's plenty of good you can do around you right now.

8:12What is it about this moment in time that are drawing these people here tonight that are drawing people to listen to you and read your work and care about Marcus Aurelius? What is happening in 2025 that he's hot? Well, it probably doesn't say anything good about the moment that we're in that the Stoics are popular again Or it does, or it says something truly great about humanity That we're looking at this moment that we're living in and we're digging deep in our past to find resolution I just mean it's a little bit like that Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times Living in a time where Stoicism is resurgent says something about the moment And it's not because everything's going amazing that everyone's like, let's turn back to this philosophy about resilience and acceptance and grim determination.

9:05But I think it says something about these ideas which have been tested in the laboratory. You know, Stoicism is founded by Zeno in the fourth century B.C. when he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He just washes up penniless in Athens. And that's the origin story of Stoic philosophy comes out of a personal disaster where someone loses everything. And then there are other moments. You have Cato living in the fall of the Republic. You have Marcus Aurelius living in the decline and fall. All the way to, you know, 1965, James Stockdale is shot down over North Vietnam. And as he's parachuting down into what he knows is going to be imprisonment and possibly death, He flashes back to Epictetus, who he'd been introduced to as a graduate student at Stanford.

9:52And he says, you know, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. So it's these ideas, these virtues, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom, have been tested in some of the worst moments of human history. And have just really been battle tested literally and figuratively. And so I think the reason we're turning back to these ideas is that we are in a moment of flux. We're in a moment of disruption. We're in a moment of corruption. We're in a moment of dysfunction. And these ideas give us a framework or an operating system for how to make sense of it and then how to survive it.

10:35and then I think most optimistically how to thrive in it, how to be the person that we're capable of being in this moment and rising to the occasion, which is what the greatest Stoics did. I'm sure Mark Aurelius would have preferred a reign where everything went well, and it didn't, and if it had, we probably wouldn't be talking about him.

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12:02back and dusting off Marcus Aurelius. Isn't that inspiring? It's absolutely inspiring. I mean, first off, it is all those things. So the acceptance is the world is those things. People are acting that way. And then what stoicism is, is like there's some things that are in your control and some things that are not in your control. That other people are that way, that this is the moment in time that you happen to be born in, that this is what the world is doing. That part's not in your control. But you, each of us individually can decide, as Mark Schroeder says in meditations, to not be like that.

12:37We can decide to be different. We can decide. So this idea that the obstacle is the way. What that means is that every moment, especially the moments that you don't like, that you didn't choose, that you wish were otherwise, what they are is an opportunity for you to be great, to be the exception, to be different. and to maybe, quite possibly, lead people in the other direction. That's what I want to talk about because we sit here now, many people deflated because they don't believe in our leaders or they're disappointed in higher education or whatever it is. Is stoicism the path to actually live the idea, be the change you want to see?

13:21People can moan like, I don't like these leaders, there aren't great people to follow. So you can make a choice to do small, good things every day and small good things every day is how is what leads to greatness. You know, it's funny. I had a conversation with Stacey Abrams about this when she lost that first election in Georgia. She famously someone asked her about it and she, you know, she contested the outcome of that election or she believed it wasn't fair. And she said something like, I'm not going to be stoic about this. Right. And she meant stoic in like the lowercase sense, like I'm not just simply going to accept this.

13:55But in fact, what she did in response was quite stoic because she went and built this voter outreach. She changed what she could. She changed what she could. She built this whole organization that quite literally flipped not only the presidential election, but the Senate subsequently in 2020. And that's to me what stoicism is, is the acceptance that, hey, I lost the election or, hey, it didn't go the way that I wanted it to go. Hey, I don't like how things are. But what is in my control is my response to that, what I do next. what choices I make about who I'm going to be in this moment. And I think that's obviously the definition of leadership and activism.

14:33And I don't think in any way is antithetical to stoicism. Again, to go back to the founders, if stoicism was simply acceptance of the status quo always, how did a group of stoic inspired individuals create a new nation from effectively nothing? And so stoicism isn't simply, this is how things are. There's nothing I can do about them. I just have to get used to it. It is an acceptance of the facts on the ground. And then it is a sense of empowerment to say, that presents me the opportunity to do X, Y, or Z. It's amazing that you give Stacey Abrams as the example, because when Stacey lost that election, she came to see us at NBC and she said that in her next path where she was going to build this voter outreach platform she said people who have a belief system already right people who belong to a church people who have religion you can't convince them to convert right this is her argument that there are no swing voters you can't pull anyone that has a belief system but in society we are filled with people that haven't touched religion or belief system or people who have completely been left out.

15:46And so she said, brick by brick, educate people, connect people, and perhaps when you open your door, they'll want to enter your church. But she did this at a way where she said, I just lost a battle. The answer isn't continue to battle, it's build. That's lovely. And so I think this idea in Stoicism is to be a builder more than it is a fighter. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there is obviously a sort of a military tradition to the Stoics, and it's been popular there. But I think the idea of duty and responsibility and ownership is a big part of the philosophy. And I think what the Stoics were wrestling with is like, hey, if we, the people who are interested in, trained in, believers in a virtue, decide not to participate in politics or in public life or in business or culture because we're too pure and it's too dirty or complicated.

16:43What you're doing is ceding that space to the people who are not interested in those things. And so I do think there is an onus on us to be involved. Then how do we create in people the desire to learn? The desire to learn? Well, I mean, to me, the wisdom is driven by curiosity. It's driven by questioning. It's driven by openness. But also skepticism. Sure, sure. I mean, Epictetus's famous line, which I love, he says, remember, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Say that again? It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And so being a know-it-all is one way to make sure that you don't know anything else, right?

17:29Because you know all that is possible for you to know. But if your wisdom or your sense of wisdom is driven by a kind of an intellectual humility and a curiosity and a desire to know rather than tell, then you're always going to be learning. You find out there's always more for you to learn.

17:51Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.