Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's just starting to get real hot here in Texas. So I'm excited to get on the road. We're going, at the end of the week, we're going to the West Coast because I've got to talk in Portland and I've got to talk in San Francisco, both much cooler places than Texas during the summer. You can come see me and grab tickets at dailystoiclive.com. Then I've got some other dates, I think in August. I think I'm doing like the Midwest. But in October, I'm going back to...
Australia and New Zealand, where not only am I going to be doing some talks, but I'm going to be doing a lot of swimming and sightseeing. It's one of my favorite places in the world. Because of those gigs, I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Ryan Shelton and Hugh and Josh Van Kulenberg. They gave me a dose of that Australian hospitality. And I don't know. I thought there was some good stuff in here I wanted to share. I asked them if I could run a chunk of that interview. You can listen to the full episode over on the Imperfects podcast. You can watch it on their YouTube channel at the Imperfects. Look, the Stoics are not perfect. Stoicism is not about perfection. It is about...
trying to get better always. Hepatitis says, just because we despair of perfection doesn't mean we despair of the pursuit of it. So how do we get better? How do we work on ourselves? How do we make...
those little improvements day to day. That's sort of what we talk about in today's episode. And, you know, I try to get better on each one of the talks that I do. So I hope to see you in Portland on June 8th, San Francisco on June 11th, Minneapolis on the 18th of August, Chicago the next day, Detroit the day after that. And then I'll be over in New Zealand on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, Perth on the 21st, and then I think some East Coast states in the US closer to November and December. You can grab all those tickets at dailystoiclive.com. But let's get into today's episode.
What we thought we would do today is the three of us have thought about an issue or something we're struggling with in our own lives. We'd love to share that with you and just get your thoughts from a stoic point of view and how maybe Marcus and his mates would respond to the issues we had if we were able to take them to them. I don't know, Josh, if you want to go first, maybe. Yeah, well, yeah, all right. I'll start with something small. So you sort of alluded, there's been a bit of alluding to it today already, but I find myself...
really struggling with the reality. This is broad big stuff, actually, but the reality of the world, there's so much to be go on a day to day basis. I get by pretty well. I've got two kids. I love them. I've got a wonderful wife and things are good. But I find that if I open myself up to the reality of the compounding existential threats in the world, so global warming, nuclear annihilation, AI, and I don't want to be, I find myself thinking, am I getting sort of
drawn into the sort of moral panic that comes along with any new technology with AI or is this genuinely a threat? And I feel like if I'm not, if I haven't slept perfectly, if I haven't eaten well, if anything has pushed up against my day that's made my mental capacity a little under and I look at this stuff, I'm bogged down and overwhelmed and overcome with dread. And then that pulls me out of my life and the life that I want to live. I'm unable to be the dad I want to be. I'm unable to be the partner I want to be. And I think most permanently for me, I think the thing I feel most precious about in the world is time and I feel like I'm wasting it.
Yeah. I mean, look, if you're worried about what's happening in the world, I guess as an American, I'm obligated to say sorry because we're responsible for like half of it right now. And when I was in Australia last, I guess this was like maybe 18, 19 months ago, one of the interesting things was like it was so different to be in another country and watch your guys' news. Because like, unfortunately, a lot of it still was American news. It's like inescapable. It was sort of run up to the 2024 election here. But it was, you know, from the distance of a different country thousands of miles away.
it did feel less like hair on fire. And I think it's just a reminder that like sort of the inputs often determine sort of how we feel and think about these things, right? And if you're sort of mainlining disaster porn and, you know, sort of worrisome, horrible information all the time, like the human brain is just not designed for that. Like I think about, so Marx is the most powerful man in the world. And basically everything that could go wrong goes wrong during his reign. There's a famine, there's floods, there's a plague, there's wars, there's a coup. It's like terrible stuff all the time.
but he probably got less bad news over the course of his reign than like we get in a week or a month just because like you know he gets like a scroll with like some information on it meanwhile this is like mainlining it directly into our brain you know um it's just not it's just not our information diets are just as unhealthy if not more unhealthy than most people's like actual diet in the modern world, right? Like if there's, you know, sort of literal obesity, there's also kind of informational obesity. And then there's also like sort of anxiety obesity. Like you're just consuming information that's just impossibly bad and designed to sort of put you in that catatonic state because then you'll keep watching, right? Like you'll refresh it again and you'll check it again. So this isn't to say that we don't have an obligation to be informed and we shouldn't know, you know, the broad strokes of what's happening in the world. But I try to remind people like, unless you're like working for a hedge fund or you are literally working in, you know, the highest levels of government.
you probably do not need to follow things as closely as you are. Like I always, you were saying you're worried about AI. Like I would ask like, you know, so how's that worrying helped the global AI situation so far? Like you feel like it's making a difference, you know? Are they like, oh, well, was those three guys in Australia, they're putting a lot of brain power on it too. And, you know, we can feel it's making a difference. Like we tend to monitor situations in real time as a kind of substitute for action as a, I don't know, like a junkie basically of just getting our fix. And I try to remind myself like from my study of history that there's not a single time in human history when
existential dread was not a pretty pervasive emotion and obviously we wouldn't be here if that had come true but the feeling of the existential dread like okay nuclear annihilation is a like i would say that we are probably closer right now to nuclear war than we have been in a very long time again largely because of america's totally incompetent and uh irrational leadership but um unless unless i'm going to channel this energy into building a bunker in my backyard like me thinking about it is not really doing anything. What do the Stoics have, I'm sure they do, insight into why it's more alluring to worry than to act? Yeah. I mean, the worry kind of puffs you up, right? The worry is like, well, I'm the center of the universe and obviously this affects me. And obviously I have a better version of how this should go, blah, blah, blah. And then the doing it, you know, hey, I'm going to vote. Hey, I'm going to donate to this campaign. Hey, I'm going to go to this protest. In that, we're sort of reminded of how little impact we actually have. I do think there's part of it there. Just the, you know, do you want to think about it and feel fully engaged? Or do you want to...
do your little part and then go back to your life so i think that's part of it but but you know negative emotions tend to linger and be felt more profoundly than positive emotions. Like they find like, for instance, in news articles, like negative articles have a higher virality potential than positive articles. And certainly, you know, that's, that's just the extreme between like negative and positive. Like nobody shares, Hey, things are pretty okay. It wasn't as bad as we thought, you know, like that obviously is super not spreadable, right? You do want to share something about the latest outrage about something that's incredibly scary about something that is uncertain because you can speculate about it.
But like, okay, hey, they, um, they caught the guy and, uh, you know, now the law is going to take its course. You know, that's not super interesting, but like fugitive at large in your neighborhood, you know, is incredibly activating. And so I think that's part of it. Yeah. It's a, it's sort of at a place where like the news is a genre of entertainment now and it's, it's a news, not even just news organizations, but I think any media.
publisher including us it's like you you have to put everything through the filter of like well we want as many people to see this as possible and so this is like a thing that we struggle with all the time especially on like youtube where it's like we know the tricks that we've been told that we have to use in order to get more people to see this but it just feels at odds with our it's icky it feels icky and so it's it's a tricky thing because even you know we're so conscious of it but at the end of the day it's like if you want to if you want to if you want people to see this really helpful content that we believe is helpful at a certain point you have to kind of play the game and then it just makes everyone's playing the game then you're playing at these extremes. Yeah. And it's like, I think having some insight into the game, how the game is played should affect your own habits as far as what you consume. You know, like, I think it's really important to be informed about what's happening in the world. I would just dispute whether like refreshing your Twitter feed is the best way to do it. It's like, pick up a book, right? Go travel, talk to an actual expert. You know, there's a lot of things you can do to understand what's happening. And a lot of what's happening is not good. And it's going to require action and change and involvement and creative solutions. It's just, you know, following the news in real time is probably not the way to do it.
You know, sometimes you hear people and they're like, well, I'm just really concerned. You know, what's this going to mean for my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren? It's like, dude, you're going to be dead. Like, I'm not saying you shouldn't care. I'm just saying you have children in front of you right now that you're neglecting for worries about, you know, how they're going to handle something 20, 30, 40 years from now. And that's really the thing is like, we sometimes spend a lot of time and energy thinking about what things are going to mean in the future. And what that takes us away from is the things we can and should be doing right now. I mean, this is a sort of a massive hypothetical question, but.
If Marcus Aurelius were alive today and was elected into power and was running America and, you know, or maybe like in the not too distant future, we will be able to elect an AI version of Marcus Aurelius to run the country. How do you think he would be, how do you think it would be different? Like what would he implement? Obviously lots of differences, but what specifically would change do you think that we need? Yeah. I mean, look, hopefully he wouldn't be, you know, taking billions of dollars from foreign governments, starting stupid wars, you know. Marcus Aurelius is an interesting leader because
He's sort of late in the Roman period. Rome's already having a number of problems. It's sort of coming apart at the seams. He deals with one crisis after another. I do think it's really interesting.
Obviously, we went through the pandemic six years ago, almost exactly. You know, Marx really lived through what's known as the Antonine Plague, one of the worst sort of plagues in human history. And he seems to have done a reasonably good job, you know, listening to the experts. He doesn't he doesn't take rash action. He doesn't run around with his head cut off like he's sort of calm and collected and he's empathetic and and, you know, tries to do what he can. So obviously, it was striking the first go around with Trump to just sort of watch what, you know, sort of totally ineffectual leadership looks like in the middle of a crisis. But, you know, sometimes philosophers don't make the best the best rulers. We'd like to think they would. But but politics is is kind of a.
a tricky, you know, unsexy business of a lot of compromise. So there was another stoic, um, a few generations before named Cato who was widely considered, you know, one of the most principled and honest and, and, um, you know, sort of, uh, towering figures of integrity. And he was just horrible. Like he was just really bad at it because he couldn't do the kind of deal making and campaigning and compromise that was required. So it's, it's kind of interesting. I would like to think that, you know, good people can make for good leaders. That's not always the case.
But I certainly think, you know, you want from your heads of state both sort of competence and cunning as well as, you know, integrity and values. And I think we're seeing in America what happens when you sort of throw all that out and replace it with, you know, what's effectively like a cult of personality. I'm keen to move to your challenge in a minute, Ryan, but I just have a question for you around. I think I'm particularly interested in maybe Epictetus, like what his thoughts would have been on empathy, because going into slavery, I feel like empathy can be a double-edged sword. It's something we talk a lot about in our school programs. Empathy can often lead you to action that you mentioned before, but it can also be overwhelming and lead you to worry. Yeah. Stoics in general, but also Epictetus, how would he talk about empathy?
Well, what's really interesting about Epictetus, so he is a slave. He's not working in the fields. He's owned by a high ranking member of Nero's administration. So he has this interesting life where he is owned by someone else who treats him very poorly. And yet he's surrounded by incredibly wealthy, powerful people who are jockeying, you know, in the king's court. And what he comes to understand is that there are a few different kinds of freedom, right? There's sort of the literal freedom. And then there is sort of emotional freedom. There's spiritual freedom. There's intellectual freedom. And he sort of realizes looking around at Nero's court.
that he's actually freer than a lot of these people. He notices at one point, he tells a story about this guy, this sort of powerful Roman who comes in and he tries buttering up Nero's shoemaker, like Nero's cobbler, because he wants to get in good with Nero, right? And so he's kissing this guy's ass and Epictetus goes like, oh, I'm more powerful than this guy. Like I'm freer than this guy who, because of his business interests. Can't tell the truth. Can't afford to piss off this person in Nero's administration. And he sort of comes to pity it. And again, this is something we see, you know, we see happening in the U.S. right now where you have these like tech billionaires who have to stay on the administration's good side. So they make donations to these, you know, silly projects. They say nice things on social media. They have to attend the like Tim Cook worth billions upon billions of dollars has to go to the White House to watch the premiere of the Melania documentary, which which was which which, by the way, another billionaire.
Another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, overpaid $25 million for as a bribe to the administration. So you're like, you would like to think like, hey, if I ever had $100 billion like Jeff Bezos does, or if I was the CEO of Apple, like that'd be pretty sick, right? Like no one could tell me what to do. I would be the master of my fate. And then you go.
No, actually, I'd have to go to the fucking Melania premiere because because if I don't go and then Trump gets mad at me, he's going to slap tariffs on Apple products. And then the stock price is going to go down and then the investors are going to yell at me. And then my own net worth is going to go down. And so the point is. But Epictetus is realizing that often power, and Seneca talks about this too, because he's there in some of the same moments, that this power is actually a form of slavery. And this wealth is actually like a golden prison. And they're just sort of talking about what it actually means to be, you know, sort of free in command of yourself, what it means to sort of live your life on your own terms, and like what we're actually chasing. And it's just a fact that often the things that we chase that we think are going to make us happy, or think are going to make us free, or think we're going to make us feel secure, have the exact opposite effect.