Why EVERY Generation Rediscovers Stoicism | with Mark Manson & Ryan Holiday

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2:38Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

3:16Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's weird to think I remember the first podcast that I ever listened to. I remember I would download them in college when I would work out at the gym. This was back in 2005. And then the medium kind of went away for a while. And then for my first handful of books, whenever you do press, it'd be like two-minute radio interview or a three-minute television spot or an interview with a reporter for a newspaper. But podcasting has kind of changed everything. It's been interesting to watch podcasts get bigger and bigger and bigger and longer and longer and longer.

3:53That evolution occurred to me when I was down in L.A. over Labor Day weekend to do a podcast with Mark Manson. He has this new podcast called Solved, where they sort of do these deep dives into these topics. We recorded for three hours. We really dove into Stoicism, the four virtues, talked a little bit about the new book, Wisdom Takes Work. But really just like if someone wanted an introduction into stoicism, this could be a good place to start. And I just remember going like three hours. This is crazy. Just to think about how the medium has evolved. I don't know. It was just striking to me. Towards the end of the episode, we talked about stoicism and modern psychology and how it's persisted through history.

4:31I asked Mark if I could grab a chunk of that to run here. You can listen to the whole thing. I thought it was great. You can listen to Mark's many episodes on the Daily Stoic podcast, of course. If you haven't read his books, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Everything is Fucked, a book about hoped, you absolutely should. We carry him at the Painted Porch. They are classics for a reason. Do listen to his new podcast, Solved, which is great. You can follow his work. He has an email list that is a monster for a reason. You can find that at markmanson.net. And I really appreciate getting to kick stuff around with Mark.

5:05I think you will like this little segment. And since it's Sunday, I won't waste your time. Let's just get into it. And I'll link to the full episode below.

5:21So coming out of the ancient world, stoicism persists throughout history. It's a philosophy and a school of thought that seems to sit with the elites throughout Western culture. It's like a secret weapon. Yes. Yes. And it's, first of all, if you look at the Enlightenment philosophers, a few of them talk about it explicitly. I know Nietzsche wrote very fondly of the Stoics, but you actually find out if you read their biographies that they were very much into Stoicism and it was very inspiring for them. And it's similar with a lot of world leaders, a lot of very famous figures throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

6:02So like talk to me just about the legacy and influence through Western culture. Like why did this – why did – of all the philosophies and all the schools of thought, like why did Stoicism persist especially among kind of the upper echelon of – I wonder if a lot of it is like exactly why Rusticus gives it to Marcus Aurelius in his early 20s. It's like if you have like a promising, talented person you're grooming for success, greatness, power, you know they have a lot of the things they need, but they need this as like a governor. And so I wonder how much of it is like – it's like this kind of like open secret.

6:42Like, okay, but have you read this? And that – like the Stoics are not the thing that anyone is specializing in. It's not the sexy or the exciting or the groundbreaking field. And a lot of it is kind of intuitively obvious, but there's something inspiring and beautiful and like affirmative about it. And it's just always been there as this like person to person passing this along kind of a thing. It's almost like history's self-help. Yes. Yes. Like it's the sort of thing, like the same way people don't, or at least when we were growing up, right? Like nobody broadcasts that they were reading Tony Robbins.

7:22But like if you got one-on-one in a quiet room, they'd be like, hey, man, you got to check out this Tony Robbins guy. Like it was completely life-changing. It seems like Stoicism was that, you know, for centuries. And Seneca was more familiar than the other Stoics for a long time because his epigrams were often how you learned Latin. So you learn Cicero and Seneca as you were learning languages. And obviously that sort of fell away. But you tend to see Stoicism resurgent in turbulent times. So the Enlightenment thinkers, the founding fathers, there's a segment of it in the American Civil War. You know, I think it says it's fitting that it's popular now too.

8:11It's like when the world feels like it's out of control, people are like, oh, I got to get better at controlling myself. What's the smartest stuff ever written on that topic? It's from Greece and Rome. Yeah. It also survived because it got co-opted into so many other philosophers, like Christianity being the prominent one. I was kind of teasing earlier when I brought up Epictetus and his kind of upending the moral order. Christianity did that in a big way. Yeah. And I didn't really realize the influence that Stoicism had on those, like Thomas Aquinas, for example. So how did it, I guess those early Christian years where Christianity was starting to take off, the Roman Empire is falling.

8:53Yeah. What happens there? So Paul studies Stoicism in Tarsus as Saul of Tarsus. And then famously, when he goes to Athens, he stops at the Stoapokile, meets with the philosophers there, And they walk him up through the Agora to the hill next to the Acropolis where he gives one of his most famous lectures. And so this was all kind of swirling about. I mean, Seneca's brother is in the Bible. He's a judge who lets Paul go. There's a series of fake letters between Seneca and St. Peter. So even in the early days, they were like engaging and interacting with each other less contentiously than we might imagine.

9:31And then I think, obviously, a lot of the ideas from the ancient world make their way through the Bible. Then obviously we have the Dark Ages where we turn away from classical wisdom. But the Renaissance is kind of the rediscovery of these ideas. And I think with the printing press, suddenly you didn't—still elite-ish, but like regular people are getting some of these books in their native languages for the first time. And that's also the reemergence of this idea. You see it all throughout, though. I mean, you've mentioned Shakespeare several times already, too, in Hamlet. Yeah. Right? The most famous line, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

10:14Sure. You've mentioned some of the founding fathers of the United States. The play Cato was played before Valley Forge. Yes. Right? The Battle of Valley Forge. George Washington was a Stoic. Yeah. This play Cato is like, I've said this joke so many times, but I think it's true. It was the Hamilton of his day. Yeah. It's the play that everyone knows, and it's like in the way that a 15-year-old might not have actually paid attention in U.S. history, but they got the gist of what happened in the revolution from the play. They might not have read the Stoics, but they knew Stoic wisdom from this play.

10:52The famous line in the play, Cato, says that we have to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophy. And this is one of Washington's favorite lines that he says like over and over again in letters. Yeah. And the play was written in the 1700s too. It wasn't like a throwback or anything like that. No, no, it's new. It was during this Renaissance period that it was brought on. Yeah. But, I mean, you go all the way through. Like I just found all these like little examples of where Stoicism just pops up. But it rarely gets acknowledged. And I don't know if it was like what you were talking about.

11:24People were just like, well, that's just what it was. It seems to just be like just this foundation of Western thought that has persisted and just it gets absorbed into everything. Like Christianity, like a lot of like the founding fathers, the serenity prayer. We get to that. That's very, very stoic. What I love about the serenity prayer is like if you just gave it to someone, you're like, what year was this written? You know, they'd be like, I don't know, the 1300s or like, is that, did Jesus say that? And you're like, no, no, no. Some guy wrote it on a train in the 50s. But it's obviously the synthesis of the accumulation of all this wisdom distilled down into its stoicism, Christianity, and Buddhism, like all mixed into one.

12:14What was then the, you know, even go into that book by James Stockdale, the Vietnam. So Stockdale, the Navy sends him to Stanford to get a graduate degree. And he is introduced to Stoic philosophy. The professor gives him a copy of Epictetus. So he reads it and he kind of goes down this Stoic rabbit hole. And then he's shot down like, I don't know, two years later. but his copy of Epictetus is on is like with his stuff like it gets mailed back to his family because it was on the aircraft carrier that he took off from and supposedly as he's parachuting down into what he knows is going to be imprisonment possibly death you know he says I am I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus it's like oh these ideas that were theoretical like now they're shit's about to get real and you know Epictetus is tortured by his slave his master, he's like, he breaks his leg and he never fully regains the use of it.

13:14The same thing happens to Stockdale in this prison. So it's one of the, when we talk about like the resilience layer of stoicism, that's Epictetus. And then it's Stockdale who's like, oh, no, no, this wasn't just true 2000 years ago. It's now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it even comes, you want to get into the psychology part of it too? Sure. I mean, you really see it show up, you know, as highly influential on Aaron Beck. It's interesting, like Epictetus has this three-part little framework, I believe. It's desire, action, and ascent. Yeah. And they all work in cohorts. And you could almost copy and paste that in the CBT as the, you know, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.

14:00And how each one is an entry point to the other two. So if you want to, you can't single out any single one and only master that. You have to continually adapt to all three and work with all three simultaneously. And so there's also a lot of stuff. I mean, they used to call it narrative therapy, which you actually, I forget the name of the journaling process that they studied. But it's like you literally, I mean, it could have come straight out of Seneca. It's basically you write down your worst thoughts and experiences and then you go back and reread it and do a reappraisal of the meaning of it.

14:42And it's like there's all sorts of positive therapeutic outcomes that come from that. so it is I mean whether intentional or not like whether the psychologist kind of came across the same truths independently or if they were reading tons of Epictetus and Seneca in college it's probably both there's a shocking amount of overlap they do credit them like Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis who did our EBT rational emotive behavioral therapy they do credit the Stoics with a lot of that it was kind of after the fact One of the interesting things, I think Beck and Ellis both came up with their frameworks, which are very similar around the same time, the 50s and 60s.

15:22And it was during – so you had behaviorism, which was proving to be a little bit difficult in a lot of areas. Could everything just be boiled down to incentives? And then you had psychoanalysis, kind of the other side. Everything is unconscious. What Beck and Ellis realized was that these people were not – it wasn't – they were psychoanalysts. So the unconscious played a big role. What they realized was these people weren't unconscious of their motives and desires. They were very conscious of it. They just didn't know what to do with the interpretations that they were giving it to it, which was very, very stoic, which is what they realized.

15:58So it was – I don't know how much of it was after the fact. They write later about, yes, this was very much – these aren't new ideas. They're very stoic. But it was just interesting how that kept popping back up again. when you had to have, when there was a kind of rubber hits the road moment, like this shit has to work. And then the stoicism comes back in to save the day. I think there's something about psychology and therapy that's akin to the role that philosophy played in the ancient world. Yes. Today we think it's like people go like, oh, I studied philosophy or I was a philosophy major as if it's this like one-time thing.

16:34And then you just go about your normal life. You're like, good, you got it. In the same way that like I learned my multiplication tables. And that's not what it was supposed to be. And when you hear about like the Scipionic Circle or these dinners that Cato would have, it was like philosophy was this thing you were engaged in constantly. Like people would go and see Socrates and talk to him about their problems and shoot the shit and get ideas and whatever. Philosophy was this ongoing thing. more similar to what a therapist's role is in someone's life. Right. And that you're like, I call this person or I go to this person's office once a week or once every other week.

17:12Or a support group, right? Yes. I think 12-step groups are very similar to the stoic process of like, hey, are you sure that that assumption is true? Because like, what about this, this, and this? And like, here's some aphorisms or ideas that you can maybe try to replace that thought pattern with. And then here's a network of like-minded people who are all engaged in the same, like they're porch guys. Yeah, totally. And we're going to meet twice a week to remind ourselves to do this stuff.

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18:42As I sit here thinking about it, I feel like you could probably, if you took the Stoics, Aristotle, let's say Buddhism, that probably covers 80 or 90 % of psychology of like yeah of like shit that actually works yeah uh you even look at like a uh post traumatic growth theory it's very much uh tedeschi and calhoun they they very much credit the stoics with it but then nobody acknowledges it after that the only thing that's missing is like the mental illness side of things yeah like it's hopeful but a bit naive in the stoics of just like you control your mind get to rationality but and it's like okay but what if you were horribly abused or what you know like how do you what if you you know something happened you got a head injury but like there's something missing there like yeah i think the part the 10 the 10 to 15 you're missing is for like the edge cases that are just like where yeah but it up it works up until a point i i personally feel that stoicism is best when it is kind of in in psychology it's called cognitive reappraisal where it's basically like you take the narratives and the shit that your brain, your mind is saying to you.

19:56And then you like take a step back and you reevaluate it. You say like, what if that wasn't true? What if it was this way? What if we invert that? What if we pretend I'm the other person? I feel like stoicism is, is like the goat at that. Where I, where I feel, where I feel it lacking at times is on the more of the emotional side. It's, I don't, I don't subscribe to the common criticism that it's, you know, stoicism is just telling you to be feelingless, emotionless, robotic. And to be fair, I don't think anything in the ancient world really addresses this super well. When you are consumed frequently by anger or when you are so sad you can't get out of bed, like how do you work with that?

20:38Right. Like how do you what is the process or procedure? And I really don't think we got anything like consistently replicable that could like address that probably until modern times. Yeah. And I would also say there – if your primary concern is like not being exiled, not being murdered, how do you deal with your – infant mortality is 30 percent. There's a war every other year. Yeah, you know, you're primarily going to be thinking about, like, freeing yourself from anxiety and worry and anger and dread. You're not like, okay, well, where do I find meaning? Where do I find purpose? Where do I find happiness?

21:29And sure, I think they do have a definition of happiness, and it's not, you know, I make a lot of money and I look great or whatever. But like that's why I think it's so striking. You read Mark Sturlus and you read Seneca and you're like, which one would you rather be? You know, Mark Sturlus is more impressive as a figure, but it doesn't seem like he's having a great time. No, he seems miserable. I mean, to be fair, Seneca, you know, it's not exactly a rosy picture either. But yeah, it's it's I think we've made like we made a lot of advancements in just our assumptions. like uh there's just different i just think about like how interesting it is that's like not until gandhi that we were like oh you don't have to like kill and murder someone that you disagree with there's like other ways of producing political change you know like like non-violence is literally an not passive non-violent resistance is an invention yes that happens in the 19th century Well, to be fair, Jesus invented it, but we immediately killed him.

22:35Yeah. And we had to relearn it. Yeah, sure. 1900 years later. But it's also Jesus isn't proposing it as a political strategy. He's proposing it as a mode of personal behavior. Right. And so it's just like the idea of what a good life is was circumscribed. You know, like it never occurs to Marx to realize that he doesn't have to be the emperor. Yeah. You know, like he hates it. Yeah. And it's not conceivable to him that he would do anything other than this thing he was chosen for. Right. And like I think we've made some developments as a society about like what your obligations are. To come back to the parallel between him and Washington.

23:19Yeah. Washington fucking hated being president. It was miserable. He spent the entire time wanting to go back to Mount Burton. And so to his credit, he stepped down, you know, and it's, it says something about his character. It's ironic that a philosophy that was popular with elites kind of becomes like to every man for modern day elites to properly mythologize and institutionalize. So, yeah, you have like these college kids reading Plato when really they should be reading Marcus Aurelius. And then the grad student should be reading, you know, like, like which one is actually going to help you in your life?

23:58Like, I think I think it's so interesting, like to go back to the founders. we spend a lot of time thinking about like who inspired them from like a legal basis. Right. Which is like interesting. But again, if you're 17, what do you do with this information? There's much more of these classical ideas and these myths and these stories. Like I didn't know who Cincinnatus was until I was probably in my mid-20s. I mean, I'd obviously heard of Cincinnati. Right. But I never heard like, but that's a story that for hundreds of years, thousands of years, everyone heard when they were growing up. Like, here's this guy, he's named dictator, and then he defeats Rome's enemies, and then he retires to his farm.

24:39That's such a beautiful, inspiring story. And it's foundational to America, but we don't learn about that. And maybe you learn about Washington resigning this commission. You do learn about resigning after two terms. You don't learn the classical basis for it. So we've just been skipping that this was kind of the, it's like the Stoics, you know, that expression, like your favorite rapper's favorite rapper. The Stoics were your favorite person's favorite philosophy. Yeah. But like you kind of don't get back that far. And so people have been missing that this is the piece. And like, I think that's, if there's any reason my works and my writing has succeeded, I think it's because it kind of broke the floodgates of that a little bit.

25:17And it kind of took this thing that people of all different types have already known about or been using. And then they're like, oh, yeah, this is an entry point into this thing. That's actually – because it is hard. You go, well, what is the best entry point into the Stoics? Is it Marcus Aurelius? Is it Epictetus? Is it Seneca? The answer is like kind of all of the above. So much credit to my book agent who suggested an idea of the Daily Stoic. He was like, you know, there's not actually like one book that is the greatest hits of the Stoics. And I was like, is that true? And he's like, yeah, it's true.

25:51And so that's where The Daily Stoic came from. I was just going to say, could it be all of that and that the Stoics uncovered something so fundamental to human nature that we kind of ended up taking it for granted and just kept rediscovering it? Like if you take, for example, REBT with Albert Ellis and he's got this ABC model. You have this – the A is sometimes called adversity. It's an action event, then the behavior, then the consequence. And he says, you know, like the human free will exists between the action and the behavior, right? Very stoic idea. Sure. Also incredibly obvious when you think about it, right?

26:25There's something about it that's like, oh, yeah, I think my grandma told me that. Yeah, right? And so what I like about it is you're like, no, no, no, no. This actually isn't some cliche that you saw written on the wall of a gym. Like this, somebody made this up for the first time and we know who it was. Like I was giving a talk to the Pittsburgh Pirates at spring training a couple of years ago and they had on the wall, it's not events that upset us. It's our opinion about events. And I'm like, you don't even realize that like that's from the Stoics. Like you think I'm here to talk about Stoicism, but you already know it.

26:59Yeah. You know, and that's like, that's Stoicism all day. so let's let's back up let's talk about earlier in your career you used to write about marketing yeah and and at the time it's one of these funny things that you look back on at the time you decided to take a huge risk exhibit some courage sure uh and write about this i guess what you thought at the time was an obscure philosophy by writing obstacles the way in 2013 and then it did kind of blow up so i'm curious why do you think it's taken off the way it has in the social media age? Like, what is it about this era that suddenly has everybody calling themselves a Stoic, following Stoics, reading about Stoics?

27:42I don't know. I mean, it probably says something about how dysfunctional and weird things are. I think it says something about the tools that allow, you know, the repopularization of something in a way that can appeal to, like, my books have sold really well, but I've reached many, many, many millions more people on social media and the email and the podcast and whatever, right? Because way more people consume those things than books. So I think it did allow this idea to break outside of just sort of people who read books about philosophy, right? Or even just people who read self-help books. So that was a big part of it.

28:25But I think, I was mentored and taught by Robert Greene, and what Robert Greene is so great at is taking ancient ideas and then illustrating them with sometimes ancient stories, sometimes modern stories, sometimes literature, sometimes words. But he's like, let me – instead of let me just tell you this idea, let me show you this idea, what it looks like. It may be a story that you are familiar with or a person you're familiar with, but you didn't actually fully understand what this would look like. And I think what I have been able to do is take the ideas from the Stoics and illustrate them in a way that people go, oh, I get it now.

29:03And then I can give this to my 16-year-old son or I can give this to this person who's struggling at work or person who just found out they have cancer. And then I think also what I've tried to do is I'm not writing about Stoicism generally. I'm always writing about a very specific thing that Stoicism can help you with. the obstacles the way is about dealing with problems uh ego is the enemy is about like you know obviously dealing with ego and then stillness is like how do you find peace in a noisy world i'm not i'm taking all the things that stoic said plus a lot of other people and aiming it at a thing that there is a latent and perennial uh interest in getting better at and how do you feel it's been interesting watching this philosophy blow up over the last 10 years.

29:53And I, I, I feel like we're now in an age where it's become so popularized and there's so many, there's now we were talking over lunch. There's so many social media accounts now that are these faceless channels that are knockoffs. And in many cases, like posting absolutely terrible advice and calling it stoic advice. It's funny. There's like almost, um, uh, there's a, there's a term I've seen thrown around a little bit of, uh, broics, you know, like broicism, broicism, like it's, it's stoicism. It's, it's, it's almost been co-opted by some internet sub communities, um, that are, it's, it's been co-opted and that's a problem.

30:32I mean, look, I, I also get it. Like why at 19 reading meditations, what lit me up? Was it the, the fact that he talks about doing good for the common good like 80 times you know was it like his meditations on on mortality and wrestling with our fear of death like no that's not like i'm like wake up early work harder push yourself don't be a bitch you know like you know like so so like i understand that that's the that's if you're a young dude or if you're any person in a sort of competitive environment of any kind. There's a lot that the Stoics teach you. And I'm like, if that's what brings you in the door, welcome.

31:16I think there's also been kind of an elitism backlash to it that I don't like either. I'd rather you be in the ballpark of Stoicism than going the opposite direction. At the same time, I think if your interpretation of Stoicism is that it'll help you be a better sociopath, you're getting it totally wrong. You know, it's, it, that's, that's certainly not what the four virtues are about. And that's certainly not what virtue is about. So, you know, you take the good with the bad in the early days of something, you're just desperate for anyone to hear about it and take it seriously. And then you're fortunate enough to get in a position where it's like bigger than you thought, or there's a backlash to what you, I, I said this at this conference about stoicism, like almost 10 years ago now and people still like throw it in my face but i think it's more or less correct like if you took every person in the world who knew about stoicism and then you stack them against the people that are familiar with the ideas in buddhism or even just let's just say eastern thought generally you're talking about meditation and such it's like not even close like stoicism is a fraction of how big it could be and i don't mean that from like a business standpoint I just mean that like it can be really easy to be like everyone's talking about this.

32:38It's popular. And it's like the vast majority of people think the word stoic means has no emotions and be a robot. And they've taken it no further than that. And if they know the name Marcus Aurelius, it is from the movie Gladiator and nothing else. You know, and so I'm much more of the minds of like we should bring as many people in as possible because even if you get only a few of the teachings, that's better than nothing. And even if there's a temporary backlash or some bad actors or whatever, like this stuff is clearly timeless. Yes. It's been around for over 2 ,000 years. It will likely outlast all of us.

33:20Yeah, look, the Stoics were arguing about what Stoicism was. Yeah. Right? like you had Seneca and Thrasia and there are different definitions of it. So I think that's fine too. But yeah, like if you ask AI what stoicism is, it's like this shredded Greek statue, you know, like decapitating his enemy with a sword or something like feeling nothing about it. Yeah, exactly. And I, I just, I, that's, that's to me what I, what I think about being that person who is attracted to this sort of muscular, masculine productivity, stoicism. at 19. And then because I stayed with it, it works on you as you're working with it.

34:02And I think it's hard to actually read the Stoics at any length and not be like, these were thoughtful, fundamentally decent people. And it's not about whatever these other people are saying about what, you know, it's the opposite of Andrew Tate or whatever. How would you update anything in stoicism for today's? I mean, I would love to hear them talk. First off, I would love to know what they would have said about the breakthroughs that we've had medically. Neuroscience, too. Yeah. Like, what would they say about this? And it's only a dead philosophy because they're dead. You know, like, it's not like it's this and nothing else.

34:45It's not the word of God. You can add to it. And, you know, Seneca quotes a lot from Epicurus because he read widely. So I don't think it's a problem to update it. I would love to know, yeah, this line between acceptance and agency. And where is it? Because, like, it's true. There's some things that are up to us and some things that are not. And then there's a lot in the middle. Yeah. You know, like, you know, this as a writer, like, you put out, like, obviously you control the book. And you don't control whether people like it or not. but you kind of control the marketing yeah you know like like so there's a lot of gray area between and like i think most people need the black and white thing first then once you've grasped the black and white thing like what do you do in the middle yeah yeah which stoic philosopher would have the most instagram followers oh well you know let's get let's get into the hard-hitting questions is is the most famous and powerful so you know maybe he's emperor.

35:44He's got the official Roman empire account. I bet he actually does. I wonder what color checkmark that would be. But Seneca's the better writer. He is the better writer. And so would, you know, have been very popular with his other works. Yeah. All right. I'm glad we got to the bottom of that. Any parting thoughts? For people listening who this is this podcast is their first exposure to stoicism what what would you recommend okay yeah we usually do an 80 20 so maybe give us like the 80 20 if that's even a thing oh yeah we should do an 80 20 of stoicism like what yeah what's the 20 of stoicism that that will get you're new to it you don't control what happens you control how you respond to what happens right so the stoics believe that everything that happens including obstacles including adversity is this opportunity it's this opportunity for you to practice virtue right there there isn't a situation that you can think of that doesn't allow you to respond with courage self-command justice or wisdom and in fact it's like the worse the situation the more the more opportunity the more opportunity the virtue so like when i wrote the obstacles away i think a lot of people and I think that's where I was when I was 24, 25, is like, hey, how does this help you professionally?

37:09And it's true. There's a chance to do that. That's what great entrepreneurs and creatives do. But what they're really saying is that this is a chance for you as a person to get better or worse. What is it going to be? Because it's unfair to be like, well, Amor Fanti, you have cancer. But they're saying it fucking sucks that you have cancer. It fucking sucks that someone just stole all your money. It fucking sucks that you lost an election. Whatever it is. And now what are you going to make of this with whatever is feasible or possible next? Which could be 24 more hours on this planet or it could be 50 years of exile.

37:51What are you going to do with it? That's what stoicism is. The more trying the situation, the more impressive the virtue can be. yeah um but if you're asking me like where i would go next i mean i would pick up meditations like i would pick up seneca uh i'd probably start with those two i do epictetus last and i would make them your companions again it's not a thing i flipped through it i got it it's like no no it's a thing you come to and you come back to and my relationship with stoicism has change, the words are the same, but what I take out of it and who I am bringing to it, that's what's changing.

38:31And that's, that's the, that's what great texts do is they bring you something new every time. Nice. Ryan Holiday. Thank you so much, dude. Thanks for having me. We made it. We made it to the end. Yeah, this is awesome. Cut. Cut.

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