Do Not Let This Miracle Go To Waste | Ask Daily Stoic
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off

with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. Do not let this thing go to waste. It was a freak set of circumstances. Not the ones that led to Mark Ceruleus being emperor, although as we've talked about, they were surreal, but that he even made it to adulthood.

was a miracle of miracles. Infant mortality rates in ancient Rome were extremely high. Estimates range from 25 to 30 percent. The average lifespan was somewhere between 20 to 30 years old. Marcus could have been assassinated by some rival. He could have died of a cut on his finger or lead poisoning from the pipes inside the Roman Empire. And what are the chances that he was born at all?

We are all miracles, freak occurrences, trillion to one chances. How is life even possible on a rock spinning in space? And the lesson from all this big and small is that we should not take this gift for granted. We should not just live, but live bravely, live boldly, as the Gang of Youth's song puts it.

Do not let your heart be a snake It's here by some random disclosure of grace From some masculine with a head if it's safe Stay cool and be deadly afraid I'll let your spirit win Do not let the heat break

The whole future is uncertain, Seneca reminds us. Live virtuously, of course, but also live immediately. Don't wait for the perfect moment to arrive. Don't waste time chasing certainty or comfort. You are here, impossibly, improbably, miraculously here. And that is reason enough to act, to love.

to show up, to do what matters while you still can. Because as fleeting and as fragile as this life is, it is also full of meaning if you choose to fill it with meaning. So don't let your spirit wane. Let it burn right here, right now.

This is the insight that memento mori provides us. By thinking, by imagining that we've just given a few months to live, we can immediately see what we would stop doing, what we wouldn't care about. We'll realize that we won't have any more time to waste. And before you know it, there is this urgent, emergent need to do the things we love and place in the things that we don't. We've got a bunch of cool reminders, embodiments of this in the Daily Stokes. I'll link to that in today's show notes. My favorite is the memento mori pendant. It's a necklace. You've probably seen me wearing it. My wife wears one every day. And

And it's got the tulip, the skull, the hourglass on it. And on the back, it says live accordingly, right? Memento Mori, live accordingly. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So the coldest day I ever swam in Barton Springs was the day

I got married. I think it was 19 degrees outside, something insane. It was snowing and Robert Greene was in town and he wanted to go to Barton Springs. We'd been planning on it and it was just this freak cold day. Like I think every other day since then it's been like 60 to 80 degrees in Austin. So it was just crazy cold.

I was worried I killed Robert Greene because it took him a lot longer to warm up than me. And then the second coldest day I've ever swam in Barton Springs was earlier this year, back in February. I think it was like 28. I'd been swimming in the mornings after I dropped my son off from school. I learned from my first very freezing Barton Springs that I had to get one of those sort of wetsuit like helmet things because it's really through your head that you're losing all the...

all the heat. So I got a nice swim in and then I jumped in the car. So I thought I was doing the gig in Austin, but there'd been a last minute miscommunication. It was actually out in like Inks Lake or Lake Buchanan. I forget. It was a two hour drive.

So a long, cold drive, took a long time to get my body temperature back up. And then I pull up to this house and it was a really cool group of guys that had started basically a mastermind group. They would pick a city, they all travel in, and then they have a couple different speakers come out, give advice, ask questions, and then they go back to their respective businesses. So it was really cool. They do it once a quarter. I thought it was a really interesting idea.

and this is me answering their questions. So anyways, enjoy, and thanks to the folks in North for having me out. - What is some stuff that you do take in? - Oh, I mean, I listen to podcasts, I read books, I read different newsletters and stuff. I think Twitter will break your brain, clearly. I mean, Elon Musk's one of the smartest people in the world, and also regularly one of the dumbest people in the world because of shit that he reads on social media, you know? And I think he went from, like when Elon Musk started SpaceX,

He went and read Soviet rocket manuals. Like he went as in-depth and straight to the source as you could possibly go to learn about a complex thing. And now when he has an enormous platform and an enormous amount of power, it's very clear that he learns about stuff from like anonymous Twitter accounts that, you know, are distilling a very complicated topic down into a very small amount of words. Yeah.

And that's just not a good way to get information. And I think podcasts too, I think people like...

the medium of podcasting is you always want to think about what is the medium, what kind of message does it facilitate? That's what the expression, the medium and the messages like a book forces you to think really deeply about a topic and then at length, explain it in a form that is supposed to stand the test of time in that. Like if you're writing a book about a trend that's happening right now, it's,

You shouldn't write a book about it. You should write an article about it. But like a book is supposed to last, right? So that's what a book's supposed to get. And it's also supposed to be worth paying for. You know, television news is supposed to be entertaining. What a podcast facilitates is like shooting the shit, like people being friendly with each other and talking.

And I think people have started to mistake listening to people shoot the shit about a topic with learning about a topic. This is why conspiracy theories are so seductive on podcasts because they're just talking about it and no one's like questioning it. There's no fact checking. There's no, and if you just hear it reasonably discussed by two reasonable people, you're

you leave thinking, oh, maybe that is reasonable. And it's not. A little more excited about it. Yeah, but if they've been forced to write even a 2,000-word article about it, all the problems with what they're saying would be very obvious to you. And so I do think I would say people listen to podcasts too much. Like audiobook and podcasts,

Similar app, similar thing, not even on the same level of quality of information, but they feel the same. Your kids are pretty young, so I don't know that you're necessarily getting close where they are going to be seeking information that isn't from mom and dad. And we know, like, I got to middle school and in my house, but there's no phones. They don't have access to anything. YouTube is history. Yeah.

nine yards but like what would you want to be introducing now knowing what we just discussed about the media and the information out there and how you should be getting it used

Yeah, we're not that strict in my house, but I drove my son to school this morning and he's obsessed with Hamilton, the musical. And so we're listening to the audio book from Hamilton. So like I try to take the things that they're interested in and I try to show them stuff about it. And I try to show them how when you get into something, you learn about it. If Marquis Aurelius was to open a business, what business would it be?

Oh, that's a good question. Well, so Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was a merchant. And he trades in this purple dye that they used to make the clothes and the cloaks of the wealthiest ancients. And he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He ends up in Athens and he founds Stoicism out of this disaster. And his joke is that he makes a great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck because it changes the course of his life. Huh.

There weren't a lot of stoic business men. Seneca's line was, a philosopher can be rich provided their money is not stained in blood. And his point is like, there's no problem with making money as long as you do it in an ethical, honest way, as long as it's not coming at the exploitation of someone or something, I think is his point. So I don't know what he would do. Is there any historical precedents?

to like what we're experiencing today without everyone being super divided. I'm more interested in the historical precedent of like who gets drawn to power and what happens when you have...

like an unstable narcissist in power. It doesn't tend to go well. And I think, you know, Seneca's life is interesting in this. Like Seneca is the teacher. So what's fascinating is Mark Ceruleus and Nero, two kids not born to be emperor. Their father is not emperor. Get chosen for it at a young age. Get trained in philosophy, in stoicism specifically. One is terrible. One is good. What happens?

And Nero specifically, Seneca is his teacher. At 15 years old, Seneca is recalled from exile to teach this teenage boy.

And for the first couple of years, Nero's okay. And then I think he had a screw loose. He was vain. He didn't actually want to do the work. And he sort of spirals into insanity and conflict. And, you know, it was just like a fragile snowflake of a person. It doesn't go well for anyone. So, I mean, there's a lot of historical precedent for what happens when you have like someone like that in power. So I think America being evenly divided is,

I don't know if anything has changed that much. I think always presidential elections are largely pretty close and have been for a long time. I think we are in uncharted territory in the sense that you have not just a sort of a vain egotistical person, but you have a cult of personality around that person. And that tends to be a dangerous combination in my understanding of history.

Hey, 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.

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