Stoic Advice for the Problems We All Face

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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.

Back in February, I was in San Diego doing a talk.

It was lovely.

I'm actually going to be doing a bunch more talks.

We just put up I think five dates in the US and then five dates in New Zealand and Australia.

So you want to come see me in Sydney or in Perth or in Detroit or Portland or San Francisco.

There's a bunch of other dates on there.

We've got five more US dates coming to as well.

You can grab tickets for that over at DailyStoicLive.com.

All the events have been selling out.

So grab those tickets sooner rather than later.

And come see me.

The Q&A is my favorite part and I hope to see you all there.

Here's some questions that the folks in San Diego asked me.

With everything that Marko sorority has got to go in on, did he have friends?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I think so.

I mean, he doesn't have a chapter in meditation

talking about his besties or anything.

But the opening of the book is him thanking all these people that were in his life.

It wasn't a solitary loan some life.

I think he did have friends.

I think he's been time with people.

We have some of his letters that he writes to his rhetoric teacher,

Fronto, who clearly becomes a lifelong friend.

Did Marcus have the best time of all the Stoics?

Probably not.

I think Seneca had a had a better time.

And letters of the Stoic is Seneca writing letters to his friend,

Lucilius.

And they seem to have a real close relationship.

So like we can only guess.

And there's certainly nothing in Stoicism that says you have to be a lone wolf

and love no one and be attached to nothing and never have fun.

To me is not what the philosophy is at all.

But I think we could all probably use,

especially if you're introverted or philosophically inclined

to sort of get up from our books more often than we do

and go out and do things in the real world,

which is something Marcus does talk about in meditation.

He's like just put the books down man and get outside,

touch grass as they say now.

So I think that matters too.

You mentioned justice and it's starting with the individual.

I think something that I'm doing right now

is working on that.

I'm currently reading the right thing right now.

But that balance between knowing what's right internally

and then seeing what's wrong and responding to that correctly.

Sure.

What are some actionable things that you can transfer from the

internal to the external and kind of bring the community

with you in identifying those things?

The interesting thing about business is that ultimately

you're making decisions on a P&L, right?

Is it good for businesses?

Is it bad for businesses?

Is it increased profit?

Decreased profit?

You know, does this deliver a return for my investors?

So there is this pressure that's being exerted on a business.

Because if it doesn't make money,

it ceases to be a business and eventually it goes out of business.

So one of the things I've learned with the businesses I built

over the years, one of the most important practices

you can develop is the ability, though,

as profit driven and capitalistic as you need to be,

to build the muscle memory of overriding that impulse

to do what you think is right.

I remember I was the director of marketing

at American Parallel for many years,

which is a crazy insane company for all the things

that you heard about it are mostly true.

But I remember someone was talking to Dove the founder one time

and they were showing him, you know,

per this spreadsheet, how much cheaper it would be

to move the factories to Guatemala or something,

putting aside the fact that it was called American apparel

on that probably wouldn't fly.

He said, I don't care that it will help me make more money.

He said, if all I cared about was making money,

he says, I'd just be a drug dealer.

That's the best business there is.

And so, you know, for most of us money is not the most important thing.

And yet, you know, we just sort of default in our professional

and business lives to just whatever is cheapest,

whatever, you know, the best practice is per, you know,

profit and loss.

And I think developing the ability to go,

hey, I don't care that it's cheaper there.

I don't want to do that.

That's not why I got into this.

You know, they say it's not a principal unless it costs you money.

The first time you make a decision

and your business is small and it costs you $1,000.

That's like a hard pill to swallow and it's a lot.

And then, you know, that also though,

we're talking about discipline and courage,

like you're building up the capacity to then make a $10,000 decision.

That's right, but expensive.

And then $100,000 or a million, or imagine, you know,

some of these people that make decisions that, you know,

theoretically could impact the bottom line by billions of dollars.

And they have to decide, you know, why did I do this?

I do think it's interesting that some of the richest people in the world,

the people that have what we would call fuck you money,

don't seem to ever use it to actually say that.

And then you sort of go, what's the point, right?

So I think it's a muscle you develop

and you get better at it as you go.

And I'm not perfect at it.

There's decisions I wish that I made earlier.

And then I try to tell myself, okay,

with the decision I'm making now,

I'm setting myself up for it in the future

to make a better one and a better one and a better one.

So that hopefully when it does counter

when something really does matter

that I have the chance to impact on,

that is the empowering and awesome thing about being a business owner.

And why the Stokes didn't just, you know,

stay with their books, it's a chance to make a difference.

Not maybe for the whole world,

but for your customers, for your supply chain,

you know, for the people you interact with,

you doing the right thing makes there be more right thing

and justice in the world.

I don't intend for this to be a divisive question,

but it's really important that it's asked

in your opinion, what is the best album Metallica ever made?

That's a good question.

You know, I'd probably say ride the lightning

or master puppets,

but I will say in someone was wearing a 72 seasons jacket I saw earlier.

I would say I am so much happier living in a world

where Metallica is making good albums again.

That's the world that I want to live in.

Ryan, I just want to say thank you for being a light in the darkness

for using your platform to share some of the virtues

that we talked about today.

I try to do the same with my friends,

with my family, my Republican friends,

my MAGA family members, but it's hard.

It's hard to have these conversations.

I also don't know how much effort I should be putting into that.

So I guess I wanted to get your take,

like how important or how do we balance?

Trying to influence people,

but also knowing that, you know,

like it's their life, it's their choice,

and they're going to vote.

I think stoicism helps us in a lot of ways

dealing with people that we disagree with,

people who have crazy things, people who think evil things.

Obviously, that was just as common in the ancient world as it is today.

And there's not one magical formula for how you handle it.

But I mean, obviously, first and foremost,

we go, we got to focus on what we control.

That's what stoicism says.

And we don't control what other people think.

Maybe we can influence it a little bit this way or that way,

but we just don't control other people,

and what ultimately matters most is what we think

for living in accordance with our values,

if we're doing it, not going around policing other people's views.

That, I think, is first and foremost.

Number two, it's remembering, as Socrates tells us,

that nobody is wrong on purpose, right?

Think about all the abhorrent or stupid things you believed earlier

in your life, and I think we can all say that we have.

You did not think that those were stupid

and abhorrent beliefs, right?

You thought they were right,

and it wasn't until later on that you came to see the error of your ways,

or someone kindly and patiently instructed you otherwise.

Right?

Three, I would say that we have to remember

that saying nothing, just riding it off,

is also in some ways tacitly endorsing

and accepting the status quo, right?

Like, yes, obviously we can't go around trying to change everyone

on all things, but if everyone thought that,

if we never tried to convince anyone,

if we never persuaded, if we never tried to change things,

well, the world would never get better or improve.

So the Stoics were not resigned in that sense.

They just understood that there were some limitations,

and they had, I think, some intellectual humility about it.

And I think that's the last one.

Mark's realist was the most powerful man in the world.

I imagine he didn't get told he was wrong very often.

And that's probably why, in meditations,

he talks over and over again about how he wants to seek out criticism.

He wants to hear opposing views.

He wants to be challenged, because how else can he learn?

How else can he grow?

And he says, you know, when people are correcting you,

the decision to change your mind is a free choice

that you get to make.

They know it's forcing you.

You get to make this choice, and you should make this choice.

And they're doing you a favor by helping you.

So the other thing is to always try to put our own views

up for scrutiny and evaluation, too.

And then, yeah, I guess, fifth and finally,

some things are simple and pretty straightforward.

And I think our job as people in this moment in time

is to call a spade a spade, to speak the truth as we see it,

as Mark's really said, and to not dance around what's,

I think, obvious to anyone whose eyes are open.

I think that we have to do it also.

I am a mental health counselor, and I work

in an elementary school in these times.

Yes.

And so I would like to know what practices do you think

are most translate well for younger children?

And also, what do you think that educators should emphasize

in these times?

Yeah, I mean, I think about this with my kids.

I don't want to shelter them, but I also

don't want to rob them of their innocence.

I don't want to make them cynical and disillusioned

prematurely.

And so there's a balance there.

And I think it's hard to get it exactly right.

But I think our draw, I think that the purpose of myths

and stories and history is to instruct and to teach.

It's not propaganda, as some people

seem to think it is.

It's also not supposed to be fun and comfortable either.

If history doesn't make you uncomfortable,

you're probably not reading history.

It should challenge you.

It should shame you.

It should open you up.

It should make you consider things.

It should make you a little uncomfortable.

At the same time, it can also inspire you.

I think so often, because history has been whitewashed,

and people have been left out.

Some people want to throw out the hold,

sort of study as bankrupt, or they only

want to study at all the bad things that have happened,

and the evil things that have been done,

and then what we lose in the process

is all the people in that moment in time who

didn't go along with it, who challenged it, who resisted,

who were lights in that dark.

And so I think our job at Alex Haley

said this, the author of Roots and the autobiography

of Malcolm X. He's Malcolm X.

It's Ghostwriter.

He says, the job of the writer is to find the good and praise it.

And I think that's the job of adults, as a job of society,

is to find the good inside all of us in world and history

and celebrate that so we can carry that tradition forward.

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I fucking hate bullies, okay?

Good, yeah, but then I open up meditations

and there's Marcus Raleigh is saying,

kindness is invincible if it is sincere.

So how do we reconcile that righteous anger

that desire to stop bullies from hurting innocent people

with this need to show kindness to them

so that maybe we actually can destroy their hatred?

Yeah, one of the people I talk a lot about

in the Justice Book is Gandhi.

Obviously, Gandhi does this beautifully,

which leads to the civil rights movement

who does it even more beautifully.

The idea that these sort of great activists

and people who have changed the world

and that goes to what we're talking about

if you just accepted things, they would always stay the same.

They sort of challenged the status quo

but they do it not from a place of anger,

although they are outraged or aghast at the injustice.

What they refrain from doing is hating

because that hatred is corrosive and corrupting

and what they do instead is focus on the shared humanity,

the connection, they celebrate,

you know, what Lincoln called their better angels,

they point to those, they point to that.

Like fundamentally what Gandhi did is understand

that what the British were doing was very misaligned

with what the British believed

and how they saw themselves.

And the jujitsu of Gandhi was that he forced them to stare at it

until eventually they had to change one or the other.

And this is, of course, what they do

in the civil rights movement too.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the other civil rights activists

don't get enough credit for what astute manipulators

and masters of media they were

and they were able to show over and over and over again

what the South was like to the North

and then also what the South was like to the South.

Not the South's lies to itself about what it was

and what segregation was and who black people were

but what it actually was in practice, what it looked like.

We're turning firehoses on children, right?

We're beating up people who are trying to get a sandwich.

And the power of that, the genius of that

without also becoming bitter and angry and cynical

I think that's the power of that.

There's an amazing book by someone who's also

written interestingly about Stoicism

before his name is Tom Ricks.

You're at this book called Waging a Good War

and he looks at the civil rights movement

as a military campaign.

He's a military historian and he breaks down

the civil rights movement as if it was a military campaign

which it effectively was.

And people don't know what the Highlander School was.

There was a school that almost all the civil rights leaders

went to from Rosa Parks to John Lewis

where they literally trained them in nonviolence

like in provoking them and not responding and beating them up

and not responding and they planned out these campaigns

like clockwork and then they worked to keep each other in line.

So when they were angry when they were getting disillusioned

when they were burning out,

they sort of remembered what these principles were.

And so again, you have to study history

and you have to really study history.

If you're a lesson from the civil rights movement

it's like a bunch of people got together

and went on these peaceful marches

and then the North or the America magically changed his mind.

Like you're just missing what actually happened.

Martin Luther King Jr. would say persuasion matters

but coercion is more important.

He was forcing people over and over again to not just see things

but forcing them into profound moral dilemmas

where the hypocrisy of segregation and racism was exposed.

So it requires an incredible amount of discipline

I guess is what I'm saying.

And discipline and justice are inseparable from each other.

There's a story about Martin Luther King

standing on a stage like this and a man,

and neo-Nazi just runs up on stage and starts

just beating the shit out of him.

And he was talking to other civil rights leaders

and you could hear this gasp in the room.

As total silence they said you could hear

the sickening sound of fists on flesh

but they were all in that moment

as actual practitioners of the civil rights movement

curious in a way to see if Martin Luther King

actually believed in nonviolence.

Like in that moment in front of all of his peers

would he fight back or not?

And they said in this moment he tenses up

and then they said he drops his hands like a baby

and he just allows this person to beat him

until other people intervene and stop him.

And then after as the man's being taken away

he says you know don't hurt him,

don't hurt him I want to talk to him.

And then backstage they talk for like 30 minutes

and he just tries to understand this person.

And so again we don't celebrate enough

the sheer determination in will and self mastery

that went into that.

We think it's just signs and marches

and it's so much more than that.

And I think that's what that's the lesson

we have to be teaching children

and also to learn ourselves to get us through this moment

in history that we're in right now.

For me anyways one of the things

that I am constantly working on

is the voice in my head and the things that's telling me.

Me too.

I'm just curious whether it's something about gratitude

and trying to be you know happiness is a choice

I've read a lot about.

And one of the areas I need to get much better at

is the story I tell myself about somebody

especially a couple of people in my life.

When they're doing something the story I tell myself

is always kind of like the worst version of why

they're doing it versus maybe giving them

the benefit of the doubt it could be something better.

And I'm just curious what disciplines

or advice you ain't have for somebody

who's trying to change the story that's in their head.

Yeah nothing tests us philosophically

and spiritually quite like our family.

Epictetus is talking about somebody who has a difficult brother

or difficult sibling and he says you know

every situation involving this person has two handles.

You can say oh they did this to hurt me on purpose

says oh you can remind yourself that this is your brother

and you come from the same family

you share the same blood you had this childhood together.

So it is saying that every situation has two handles

and you can choose the one where you take this thing

personally or you can choose the one

where you think about connection, right?

You can choose the one that emphasizes your differences

or your similarities.

You can choose the one that grabs something, judges it,

holds it up, doesn't let it go

or you can choose to do the opposite.

Kato has a difficult brother who is not so philosophical

but he loves him anyway.

Reminds me of that Bruce Springsteen line

in highway patrolman that sometimes when it's your brother

you look the other way.

I think this idea that hey what they did,

the consequences of it that's real.

I don't have a say in that but I do decide

what I tell myself about this.

I tell myself this frustrating story.

I've been telling myself my whole life

that I didn't get this or should have been this way

or I wish it was that way

or do you say something about your family

of origin, your parents, or you focus on what you did get

or how lucky you are that this or that happened.

The story we choose to tell ourselves about our lives

about what's happening, it really matters

and it's the difference between dwelling

and ruminating and being hurt

and it can be the difference between feeling grateful

and lucky and appreciative and alive.

Come see me at DailyStay with Live.com.