Shownotes Transcript
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Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.
And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have
have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.
Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I didn't know it at the time. I don't think that's what we think about. But when you pick up a book, especially a really old book, you're sort of part of an unending chain or a longstanding chain of people that brought you to that book, right? Somebody read it, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told somebody else, and here you are.
I got recommended meditations by someone who in turn got recommended it by someone who in turn got recommended it by someone. Back, back, back to Mark Sebelius writing it after Rusticus passed him his copy of Epictetus from his own library. This is the beauty of books. They spread primarily by word of mouth.
And it's primarily one person saying to another person like, "This worked for me. Maybe it'll do something for you." And over the years on the Daily Stoic Podcast, I've asked a lot of people, "So how did you hear about the Stoics?" Right? "How did you hear about meditations?" Or I'm sort of reaching back, "Oh, that reminds me of this quote from Meditations." And then they tell me how they heard about Marcus Aurelius.
for the first time. I just, I love those origin stories. Like, how did you come to this thing? What was your moment? Right? You know, everyone sort of has their road to Damascus moment where it hits them, where they get it. Maybe it was an introduction or maybe it was many years later, the ideas it said, oh, that's what the Stoics were talking about. And as it happens, Paul is
studies Stoicism in Tarsus. He's known as Saul of Tarsus for that reason, because that's where Stoic school was based at that time. Which brings me to today's episode. I wanted to talk to a bunch of different folks about their relationship with meditations and
and how they came to it, how it changed them, what they took out of it. And it's a pretty, I don't want to say it's a murderer's row, but it is a pretty impressive list, pretty diverse list, different people, different walks of life about how stoicism impacted them, what they took from it. We're going to hear from Francis Ford Coppola, Patrick Dempsey, Professor Jennifer Baker, the magician Darren Brown, one of my favorite writers, Donald Robertson, Admiral McRaven,
Troy Baker. These are sections from some of my favorite conversations about meditations, what it means to them, what they took out of it. And the reason we're doing this is we're sort of doing Marcus Aurelius month here in April because 1905 years ago, this month, Marcus Aurelius was born. The philosopher king came into existence. Although obviously he didn't, right? Because he was not fully formed. He wasn't even the kid who had been introduced to Stoicism yet.
But that's the theme we're doing. The reason we're doing is we put together this cool book club about how to read Mark Stabilis' Meditations.
We're going to be doing a Q&A about it on April 26th. We'd love to have you. You can check that out. Plus, I just did a forward for the new Gregory Hayes translation of Meditations as well as the paperback. And then we have our leather bound edition. So we're kind of just doing a Mark's Realist themed month. You can check out all that stuff at dailystoic.com slash meditations. But if you have yet to dive in this book,
Maybe these origin stories will help you get started slash serious there. And then I hope you will join us in the How to Read Mark Sebelius' Meditations Club Guide course, whatever you want to call it, but it's going to be awesome. You can check all that out at dailystoic.com slash meditations. Or if you are a member of Daily Stoic Life, you can get this and all your other stuff for free. Let's get after it.
How would the Stoics approach something like that? Either going into battle or you're going into competition in some way. Well, we could imagine that that's what Mark Surilis is doing in meditations, right? What's weird about meditations is that it's not a book for the reader. It's a book for the writer. Right. Like he was writing it. He was getting his thoughts out on paper. Yeah. And we know for a fact that he wrote a
significant chunks of it while leading the Roman army. So he's, you know, maybe it's the morning before battle, maybe it's the evening afterwards, and he's just sort of sitting in this tent writing things down. And so I think journaling is a big part. Like if you can take, you've got these thoughts that are just kind of pinging around in your head,
The act of writing them down creates even just a few feet of distance, which is really powerful. So I think journaling would be a way the Stoics would do that. I'm a big believer in walks. Like when I'm sort of feeling that, like I have to walk, like I pace before I give talks. Like when they're like, oh, will you just sit in the audience and then we'll call you up when it's your turn? I'm like, no, I have to be pacing nervously in the back for like the next 30 minutes. And I try to listen to music.
I have a similar thing to what you're talking about, which are like, what are a few like sort of mantras or just reminders that are really clarifying and sort of allow you to lock into the thing in front of you? It's funny to think how timeless that I have to go do this thing in public or I have to go do this thing that's dangerous. I have to go do this thing I don't want to do. Right. And how do I calm down this part of my mind that's racing so I can be totally present in
and clear. How do you take something from what you're feeling and use it as a... Because I think people think of stoicism as, by definition, the act of either never having felt the emotion to begin with or stuffing it down and suppressing it. Right. Well, when I first came across the book, I was in Rome. I was doing a movie called Devils, a financial book. And I was walking around and I was like, you know, I hear so much about this meditation, Marcus Aurelius. I'm here in Rome and I'm starting to read. I'm like,
Well, I get stoic. You just don't feel anything. You're not supposed to allow any emotion to come up. And then suddenly you're getting into it and you're like, oh, that's not it at all. Yeah. I'm totally misunderstood. So I don't think a lot of people understand what stoicism is. And I think that's what's so great about your work is you have distilled it down into a way that is applicable today to using it today. For the sake of what we're doing, what is stoicism and what does it really mean?
Well, it's a philosophy. It originates in ancient Greece. It makes its way to Rome. And it's this way of sort of living and being. It's not about emotionlessness, I would say, but it is about, I think, being less emotional about things that you don't control. So the idea is like, hey, how do I focus...
on what I'm going to do about this or how I'm going to respond to this, as opposed to spending a lot of time lamenting that it's not the way that I want it to be. So one of the early passages in Mark's religious meditations, the most powerful man in the world, he's writing this, he writes this great little riff on how he's like, the people you meet today are going to be annoying and obnoxious and dishonest and frustrating and all these things. And he's basically going like,
It's on you if this surprises you. And then he's like, your job is to not be implicated in this. Basically, your job is to not let annoying people make you an asshole and that your job is to work with them. And so it's this really interesting way of thinking about philosophy, not as like these big abstract texts or these sort of singular books, but instead kind of this process of how we take what we
all feel and have always felt, and you kind of turn it around and you process it, then you go about your life. And you think about Marcus, he can do whatever he wants, but he realizes like, if I'm not in command of myself, it doesn't matter how powerful I am. This isn't going to go very well. So that's kind of what, to me, stoicism is, is this command of one's self. That doesn't mean that you're an emotionless robot, but it does mean that you're not ruled by, they would say you're
you're not ruled by your passions, which would mean your urges, jealousy, anger, fear, et cetera. You're a person who's like, do I really want to do that? Am I going to regret doing that? Right. What's the best way to respond to this situation? That's what the philosophy is and has been for now. Right. Thousands of years. So I'm in Rome. Yeah. I'm shooting in Italy. Yeah. Total chaos when you shoot there, right? We're first weekend. Yeah. I had a little bit of time and now I'm getting into your books, right? Oh.
And also I'm dyslexic, right? So reading for me is painful. So all the audio books now are fantastic because if you're jet lagged, I'm gonna put it on and I have my storytelling and you start to go, okay, I'm gonna digest this. And then I'll go back to the book and then I'll start to go, I wanna focus on this chapter.
And I wanna really look at it, I'm gonna underline and do the technique that you have with your cards, right? So that's reverse engineering. And I'm in this situation on this production and that's driving me crazy. I'm going, I'm gonna lose my temper. I'm like, if you lose your temper, then you lose control and then you lose respect. So I kept returning back to that. And I go, this is gonna be my challenge. This is my obstacle through this entire production is to keep in control of my emotions and to kindly direct the emotion
Yeah. And create the culture. And I'd come home and my head would be splitting because I was just holding so much in to stay calm. But as the shoot went on, everything started changing. And vibrationally, probably I started changing too, where I was a lot more-
cool about it and like, okay, it's all right. We got it. Guys, let's stop the take. You can't talk right now. Okay. I know we're all hungry. I know we're well past lunch, but let's just get this one taken. And then you kind of get back into it. And it was really fascinating to see in Rome of all places, this thing started to come up for me.
I think it's fitting. I mean, there's no way that Marcus Aurelius does not have an anger problem. Like he talks about temper and losing your cool and your emotions too much for his private journal, if that's not something he's actively struggling with. Like my reading of it over and over again is like the reason he doesn't say like jokes are funny, you know, or sex feels good is he doesn't need a reminder of that. Like he's got that covered.
The book is him really trying to remind himself of what he keeps forgetting. Right. There's an interesting passage where he's talking about, he's like, you know, it's not manly to yell at people. And we can imagine his predecessor, the Emperor Hadrian, once loses his cool at a secretary or scribe, and he picks up a stylus and stabs it in their eye.
And this is something the emperor can get away with, right? Like, they're like, sorry, you know? And maybe Marcus witnesses that or he hears about it, right? Like,
For him, he has this weird duality where people will indulge anything from him. He can do whatever he wants, but he decides that's not who he wants to be. And maybe he had embarrassed himself at some point, or maybe it caused problems for him, but it's very clear in meditations that it's something he's working on always. And that he's not perfect at it, or it wouldn't come up more than one time. Because he's not saying, hey, this is what I want my son to know, or this is what I want
you, the aspiring stoic to know. He's saying, you, Marcus Aurelius, have to stop doing this. And so it's so interesting that it's been this sort of timeless battle. And then what great art is, is usually it's so specific that it becomes general. And so his specific struggle with this temper thing
is 2,000 years later in the same city, but in a way he could never have comprehended of value to someone else. Right. And also too, as an actor, you have to generate a certain amount of emotion. Maybe that scene requires you to be angry. Yeah. So I guess it's like what Kate Winslet was saying. It's like, okay, that's the gif, right? How am I going to use this? And it's like, okay, what's pissing me off today? How do I focus in on that and be able to channel that into the scene where I'm not losing control, but at least I'm fired up?
Mens sana in corpore sano, a strong mind in a strong body. I think we sometimes think of philosophy as this mental thing, which it is, but it's also a physical thing. The Stoics were active. I try to be active. You should try to be active. You've got to have a physical practice of
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What's your relationship with Marcus Aurelius' meditations? He's quoted a number of times in the movie. I wrote down every time. There's a beautiful scene where a father and daughter, sort of the Cicero scene, and she says at first, it is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.
And that's sort of appropriate for the Cataline character, who's a futurist. And then she looks to her father and she says, the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding herself in the ranks of the insane, which is very appropriate for today. And then she...
She kisses him and she says, finally, the universe has changed. Our life is what our thoughts make it, which is Marcus Aurelius, the great Marcus Aurelius. It is. What a great emperor Rome had.
What a terrible son he had. Yeah, you could argue that Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus is maybe too generous. Like he was actually worse. He was worse. He was worse than Caligula. If anyone could be worse than Caligula or Nero. Yes, I'm fascinated with that. How does such a great man raise such a terrible son? Well, it comes down to how many wives did he have? Who was Commodus's mother?
Faustina, Marcus only had one wife. We're told he loves her deeply. There's some rumors that she's unfaithful, but we're told he loves her deeply. The problem, I think, is Marcus Aurelius buries six of his 11 children, which I don't know how a family could possibly withstand that kind of tragedy. You know, in the old days, I mean, a generation before us, people usually had
six, seven, eight kids, and they lost two. I lost one son. And I tell you, it's a sentence of 30 years before the first thing you think in the morning, did it happen? Did it really happen? And it's only after 30 years that it wasn't the first horrible thought I had in the morning.
It made me think of that great Aeschylus quote. There's an Aeschylus quote about how the pain drips on you drop by drop until by the awful grace of God. It took me 30 years for the horror of realizing I lost my son.
to not be the first thing I thought of in the morning. I've sort of thought that when people say Marcus Aurelius' writing is depressing, I think that this guy got out of bed at all in the morning after the tragedy and death and pain that he felt. Actually, he must have been the most
optimistic person who ever lived. I lost this wife of 60 years and it's sort of devastating, but there was a Marcus Aurelius quote that really lifted me, which was, if you lose, I don't know literally, but you'll know it. If you lose a loved one, honor her.
And in a sense, try to be more like her and then she'll live in your actions. And so my wife was very good at...
And I just try to be like her. And when I try to be like her, I, you know, like she was very, if someone was alone or sick or something, she'd call them up and be comforting to them. And I'm not like that, you know. So I started to do that. People that I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren are just there.
and call them up and say, how are you? And being like her. And they were so pleased and said, oh, it's so kind. I keep my wife in my life with Marcus Aurelius advice by trying to be more like her. I find that absolutely beautiful. How many years have you been married?
I have been married for, I think we're approaching 10, but I've been with my wife for 20 years. We met in college when we were 19 years old. In my movie, they ask in the story, she says to the character of all the institutions, your utopia wants to...
Preserve which is the most important to you. And he says marriage. You know, marriage is going to change because everything around it is changing. But I do hope we can preserve it because there's something so more beautiful about it than meets the eye at first glance.
You know, it's funny. I had first read Marcus Aurelius in college a few weeks before I met my wife. And I remember we were on our first date and I was telling her about this book that I'd read. We were talking about it. So many years later...
I go to the shelf to pull down a copy of Meditations. I was going to get something out of it. And I found a receipt inside. And I learned in that moment that my wife had went and bought herself a copy from Barnes & Noble like a few days after we had met. How wonderful. There was one effective altruist I was reading about who was saying that things should be priced differently.
in terms of how many children's lives could be saved at the same amount. So if you're buying a $200 backpack, but you could also for $200 buy a mosquito net that would save the life of a child in Africa, are you telling yourself it's $200, this backpack? Are you telling yourself that the backpack is actually one dead African child? Which is philosophically and rhetorically quite...
provocative also would be impossible to go through life if that was one's frame of view. Yeah. We would have no markets. I mean, the Stoics are pretty pro-market, I think, because of the benefits of general affluence. I mean...
That I understand better than Seneca's hypocrisy or misdescriptions of himself. Yes. I just think of markets as like natural phenomenon. You know, I mean, it's not going to, they aren't going to be ideal. The people we want to win aren't going to win, but.
They are sustaining when it comes to, you know, just a general affluence, general survival, as strange as they are. Well, no, I think that's an interesting point, the Stoics and the markets, because the Stoics were in the market, right? Zeno sets up the Stoa in the Athenian Agora, right? Literally in the market.
And the difference I would say between that choice and the choice of, say, the cynics is about participation. Right. Do you do you look at this thing and you say this is hopelessly corrupt and broken and and actually the only moral choice is to is to participate?
opt out entirely, or do you try to find kind of a reasonable and practical middle ground within a complex, morally fraught world and do the best that you can? I would argue the Stoics say that. Marcus in Meditations, he goes, stop going around expecting Plato's Republic.
Right, yeah, right, right. Well, one of the things I think about too is it's like you can accept the market as a mechanism, as a means of pulling people out of poverty, creating global affluence, all of that. And you can see it for what it is. And then I think the Stokes would say...
Just as the Stoics would say, look, there's this institution and Marcus Rios probably would have preferred Rome to be a republic, but it wasn't, so would Seneca. But then one has to, one gets to, the Stoics would say, decide how you are going to behave as an individual inside that system.
So how are you going to behave as a business person? How are you going to behave as a customer? This is where we have the most individual choice. And at least that's like what I try to think about with the stuff that I make is like,
okay, how am I going to make it? I just went through this choice where we do these, like we're actually just rolling out a leather bound edition of meditations that I got the rights to. And I had a manufacturer in Belarus that could make them quite affordably. We had a great relationship. There's
I like the quality of it. But then Belarus is indisputably complicit in the invasion and looting of Ukraine. And the decision about, well, do I want to do business with a person in that country? No. But that decision to switch to a different one means that I now pay about...
one, no, two and a half times as much per copy. And so I think to me that where, like, I don't control what's happening in Ukraine. I don't control globalization. I don't control any of that, but I do control who I decide to do business with within reason. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. That's exactly what I was hoping happened if people thought like Stoics about markets. Yeah.
One of the things that Gregory Hayes points out, that's my favorite translation of the meditations, and I like the one that you just did. But one of the things he points out in his foreword or his introduction is that there's nowhere that Marcus Aurelius explicitly identifies as a stoic. He never says, I am a...
I am a Stoic. He never says, I am a student of Stoicism. Hayes says that probably the closest you would get Marcus to admit to was that he was a philosopher, that he was a student of philosophy. It just happens to be that what he writes about illustrates a lot of Stoic thinking, and he quotes from a lot of Stoic philosophers. But I would suspect that he too saw a
philosophy as the larger umbrella, and then he's grabbing from the different schools in the different situations that he's in. There's just something interesting about meditations in the sense that it's what he was writing to himself at these different moments. Yeah.
And so we don't know all the other things that he thought that he cared about that he used. It's just what happens to survive. It'd be like if someone got a hold of my journal, they'd think all I think about are these handful of things. Yeah. But those are just the things I needed the most help with.
exactly exactly which which makes him very easy to criticize for reasons that feel unfair for exactly that reason and also means that it's its weaknesses are its very strength it's you know the fact that it isn't a book written for a readership it's written as notes to himself means of course that it lacks any really any coherent or obvious structure it repeats itself again and again in a way that
You might find a bit tiresome after a while. I don't think it is, but you might see it like that because we instinctively want to read it as a handbook, and it just isn't. But the strength of that is that slowly, almost subliminally, this really human picture emerges. And the fact that he isn't telling us how to live and he isn't presenting this kind of glorious picture
image of an enlightened sage or anything. He's just a man struggling. And on top of that, of course, part of its perennial appeal is that we're
We're listening to an emperor talking to himself, and yet we're finding we're relating on so many levels. And I love that, because I think an issue with Stoicism, well, not really with Stoicism, but the communication of it, is that when you've got somebody telling you, why are you thinking like this? You should think like this instead. That's a difficult line to tread without it seeming preachy. And I think we're much better at sort of taking in ideas when...
when they're not being communicated at us, but particularly when they're, you know, if we're sort of almost over, like almost eavesdropping on a private conversation. I often find myself being interviewed about stoicism. I can hear myself saying things like, oh, you know, it's fine. Pay no attention to those things. These things aren't as important. You know, just let it go. And I realize how glib that will sound, but actually those are
such key, important messages, but you don't want somebody telling you that. We spend half our life wanting our problems to be heard and appreciated and recognized. We don't want somebody telling us they're our own fault or however it comes across. Yeah, I suspect that's why no one else has published a book like Meditations. There's something, as you said, it's bugs are its features and its features are its bugs. Like,
If you sat down to write a meditations or even in the style of meditations, there's already something artificial and performative about it. It's the fact that it's the emperor of Rome writing a book
almost certainly not intending to publish it, and it surviving, perhaps even to his mortification, that's what makes it so special. And that's a bit of magic that you can't recreate. It is a singular piece of literature, certainly of philosophy. And although it's rooted in rhetoric, of course, because...
That was his background and a big part of his life. It isn't doing what any other book with a kind of normative force telling us how we should live would do, which is creating a much neater...
polished, ultimately unrealistic at some level version of what it's trying to sell. It's not really trying to sell anything. He's just talking to himself where he needs it, which of course means that sometimes the things you're saying sound exaggerated. Or if you take this bit out of context, why would you want to live like that? Of course. But that's, as you said, if somebody read your own diary and took bits out of context, they sound ridiculous too. But in those
In those moments, these are the things that he needs to hear. But you are also, it's also allowing for all sorts of, there are things that contradict each other. There are things that seem kind of a bit unpleasant or a bit unclear from time to time. And those are, you wouldn't have that in a handbook.
that would be selling you something that you know is not giving you the whole story. You'd be looking for holes in it. I think we just instinctively do that, don't we? We work away from what we're given. And somehow having this very personal dialogue with himself, because you can't argue with that. You might not resonate with his view of the world, but you can't argue with the message because it's just back at himself. ♪
And so I met people who read the meditations and I talked to them about this and they say that they hadn't even noticed that Marcus is talking about justice and society and natural affection. And I thought, how is it possible? Like, it's kind of the me, he goes on and on and on about it. It reminds me of this quote from William Blake that says, we both read the Bible day and night, but you read black where I read white.
I think, how could you have not noticed all of the references to not being alienated from your fellow man and having love? What did he point at the beginning? Marcus says that he's describing the ideal stoic. He's talking about Sextus of Chaeronea, like Plutarch's nephew, who was one of his stoic teachers.
And he describes him as being free from passions. And he mentions anger. So free from passions such as anger and yet full of philostorgy, full of love. Yeah, that's one of my favorite passages. Full of love. Yes. Kind of brotherly love he's talking about. Philostorgy is what we translate as natural affection. But it means the love of a parent for their children. It's kind of like paternal love.
we might say platonic love, brotherly love. He thinks that's the pinnacle of Stoicism. And yet people have this kind of atomistic, individualistic view of it that's just about, it's almost more like nihilism, the way that people interpret Stoicism in many cases. And I really think if Marcus Aurelius was around, he would think this is more or less the opposite view.
of what I thought the human ideal was. You guys are completely alienated from other people around you and the rest of society. And Stoics want to reverse that. In a sense, I think Stoic virtue...
Particularly in Zeno and in the early Greek Stoics, it's tied up with their pantheism. And I think one of their starting points is this idea that they want us to be more at one with the rest of the universe. They want us to realize our oneness with the cosmos as a whole and with our fellow men, with other human beings.
It's extraordinary, by the way, just as a slight aside to that, Marcus mentions being a Roman citizen a couple of times in the meditations. But other than that, when he talks about overcoming anger, feeling love, overcoming alienation, he's talking about people in general, not just Roman subjects or citizens. And the people that he's dealing with as he's writing that are often what the Romans would have called barbarian envoys.
It's strange to think that, again, we lose sight of that unless we imagine him writing the meditations in the evening after he's had a meeting with a bunch of foreign envoys in the morning. And also he'd been surrounded by foreigners. All the auxiliary units would have been Germanic tribesmen and people from other parts of the empire. He's not just talking about his fellow warriors
well-educated, rich Roman senators who went to the same schools and had the same under like he's not talking about our brotherly connection as he spent time with a couple hundred people exactly like him in a beautiful marble palace. It's in it's in the mud of a quincum. Right. Like it's it's far away. And he's surrounded by salt of the earth, regular ass people.
He says at one point, actually in Meditations 2.1, he says, I'm not talking about a bond of seed, i.e. like family or blood, i.e. race. He specifically says, and it's odd that he would say that because it really highlights the fact that he's talking about brotherly love towards the people he's at war with.
Yeah. Which is, you know, I think becomes highlighted more if we really try and visualize the historical context in which he's writing this. If we are to believe Lucian, the...
Mark, and the chronology of this annoyingly is there's some debate among scholars, but one interpretation is that 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed in a single day at the beginning of the Marcomannic War at Carnuntum, where Marcus then stations himself.
That would have been one of the biggest defeats in Roman military history. And then Marcus goes there in stations, which must have been incredibly risky. So knowing that he's in this place where loads of women have been slaughtered by the Germanic tribesmen, he's telling himself, nevertheless, I have to view these people as my brothers and sisters.
Yeah, he's being tested at the realist level because the preservation of the empire is at stake. Public opinion is at stake. He's just witnessed a horrible atrocity and he's trying to go back to his philosophical first principles and go, not what do I emotionally think in this moment, not what is politically right,
convenient to think in this moment, not what will rile the troops up in this moment, but like what at my bedrock values as a human being do I want to believe in this moment?
And that really reminds me of something that I wanted to mention, actually. And we kind of came close to earlier when we were talking about how often he'd been bereaved and lost all of those children, but also many other friends and family members that he'd lost. It only, as I was working on the graphic novel and again, like trying to really visualize Marcus's life, did it really dawn on me. I just, I remember just kind of setting up one day and thinking it really hit me for the first time suddenly that
that Marcus Aurelius, during the plague, surrounded by people who, at one point, increasingly were probably plotting to assassinate him. Also, many people...
assumed that Marcus Aurelius was going to die because he looked very frail, stationing himself at the frontier where he was risking his life. All of these things combined, when I really started to picture it, I suddenly realized he really must have woken up each morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, I'm actually still alive.
He was living on borrowed time. He really must have felt that. And even beyond the, like the, all the, like I get an impression of all these people around him were gossiping about, they thought he's not going to last much longer. And he had that going on for at least a decade, I think. Well,
like people speculating about his impending death. What must it be like to kind of know that that's the gossip and that some people in the wings are just waiting for you to die? Like he's constantly, his sense of his own mortality, I really think must have been much more pervasive and intense than it would be for most of us.
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To your point about sayings, I mean, you think about Marcus Aurelius' meditations. I mean, they're all kind of- It's a bunch of aphorisms. That's kind of what it is. My father taught me this. My mother taught me this. This guy taught me this. Here's what's important. Be people of integrity. Don't do this, don't do that.
It's pretty simple, but it's who's speaking that gives it credibility too. Well, what's interesting about meditations is that it's a series of aphorisms, but he's not doing it in the way that a typical leader or a philosopher or a general would do it in that you're writing these aphorisms down for other people. What's interesting is he's writing them for himself. He's reminding himself, you know,
You can live good anywhere. You know, we're made, he says, uh, uh, we're here to, to help people or put up with them. You know, he just saying these sort of things and you can imagine that he's doing it in the moments when he felt like doing the opposite or he did the opposite and he feels bad about it. And he's like, Hey, why did I leave this person hanging? Why did I lose my temper? Yep.
it's sort of a debrief of himself every day. Yeah. I don't know. I don't remember how long did it take him to write. I mean, it's over obviously all of his campaigns and, but what's the, I don't know the historical context of,
Was this written over 10 years, 20 years? We don't really know. And what's interesting about meditation is like you mentioned the gratitude. That's at the beginning. But like we don't have the original. So that could have just been a later editor could have said, here's all the different places he thanks people. I'm going to move that to this. That makes the most sense. There's two books that have a geographic location attached to them.
And we vaguely know that they can sort of discern from certain mentions, like when wars happened or what was... Yeah. They have a vague sense, like when... They have a sense of when it must have started. And then the last meditation, I mean, this is an interesting... The last meditation, we know Marcus dies of the plague or dies of some illness. And so the last entry in meditations is...
You've lived as a citizen in a great city, 500, five years or a hundred. What's the difference? The laws make no distinction. But he's like, oh, I've only gotten through three acts. He said, well, this will be a drama in three acts. The lengths fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace, the same grace shown to you.
So was that, did he write that the day that he died? You know, he could have. Sure, could have. Or he was doing a pretty good job meditating on death and it was years later and someone moved it. But it is interesting to think that we don't really know. We know he wrote some of it at a quincum, which is this camp outside Budapest. You know, he almost certainly did not do it, most of it from the comfort of his palace. Right, no, sure. But-
Yeah, it's such an interesting book in that we don't know what it was for, who it was for, except for it seems to have done him a lot of good. Yeah, sure. It's journaling. Yeah. Did you keep a journal? I wasn't that disciplined. I thought about it at one point in time when I went back as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, I thought, I'm going to do this and I'll tape record it every night on events that happened during the day. Yeah. But then I realized the tape recorder then was classified. Oh, sure. So I was like...
how am I going to do this? And so I said, that's Helen. It was too hard. I have a little aside and he goes, the enemy, I love George Marshall and George Marshall during the war, someone says, you know, you've got to keep a journal. And he decides not to because he felt like it would make him, he felt like the journal, unlike this, where it's totally private and he's, he thought it would be kind of inherently performative.
And he felt like it would almost like contribute to ego. Like I'm, I'm writing the first draft of history kind of a thing, which, you know, people do. It seems they're doing the thing with the eye of doing the memoir about it later. Of course. Happens all the time. You know, one of the other expressions I think is an issue on, you know, that, that saying, and it starts as a Latin saying, but.
Fortune favors the bold or favors the brave. Sure. That's from a naval officer. Do you know that story? Remind me and I'll probably remember. So Pliny, the elder, is a naval admiral in the Athenian Navy. And he hears there's been this explosion. It's the explosion at Pompeii. And he his his friend is trapped there. And he's like, we got to go rescue this guy.
And they're like, no, you're going to die. This is a horrible idea. Don't do it. And he says, fortune favors the bold. He says, head towards Pompanius, his friend who's there. And so what I love about that expression too, now we use it to, someone's fortune favors the bold. I'm going all in on this business venture. I'm FTX. Yeah, right. He's saying, no, fortune favors the bold. I'm going to go save my friend. And the tragic part is he does save his friend, but he dies. So fortune favor, I think that's the other interesting thing.
that the emphasis is on favors. It does not guarantee success. You know, most probably most of the time it doesn't. But I just love the idea that some guy jotting off some letter, you know, coins a phrase that we're still repeating, you know, all these years later. Yeah. If you have surrounded yourself
with things that do not serve the public good, as again, he talks about in meditations, you want to do what is good for the people. If you're not doing the things that we know to be good behaviors, honest, noble, honorable, humble, respectful, sooner or later, the edifice will crumble and what's left of you, if you haven't been that person, will not be standing very tall.
It's easy to skip over it, but Mark Cerullus has the same power that Saddam Hussein has. Absolutely. That's my point. Yeah. But he lived a good life because he tried to live the stoic life in all the best. Now, he wasn't always successful. I mean, he wasn't a perfect guy. We know what his shortfalls were, but in general, he was part of that epic time in Rome where it
It was, you know, Pax Romano for a very long time. And he may have been the last leader, I guess, that really kind of represented that error, I think. Well, yeah, there's this... Because his son comes after him, right? Who just is a disaster, as I recall. Well, that's what I was going to say, right? Like you have these five emperors in a row. None of them have a son. So they choose their successor. And it's this sort of accidental process. Not accidental, but it's a...
a quirk in history where you don't get bad absolute rulers for the most part. And then Marcus hands it to his son and then we revert to the rule that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And yeah, you think, ultimately, I think this is true at the individual level. It's certainly true at like the highest levels of, you know, being a head of state, which is you get to the place where
Where no one can really tell you what to do. You're in control of your own life and there needs to be the final check and balance inside of whether it's a constitutional monarchy, democratic republic or just you as an individual is what does your individual conscience or set of virtues or values allow you to do or not?
The Stokes say, you know, you have to command yourself first. And, you know, Marcus has that. And then other people find themselves in that position because their parents or a coup or, you know, they're chosen, they're elected for it.
And if they don't have those values, it does seem to corrode and corrupt remarkably quickly. Remarkably. Yes. Again, and I've seen it with Saddam. I've seen it with, you know, lesser autocrats and authoritarians and people that are just, you know. Happens in middle managers too. Happens in middle managers. You're right. So if your North compass isn't in the line properly, you know, eventually...
All you have to do is take a look at the companies around, whether it's FTX or Enron or Lehman Brothers or universities that are chasing a championship, but their recruiting policies are not right. Or they let doctors get away with things that they shouldn't and et cetera, et cetera.
it never ends well. Yeah. And yet we continue to seem to learn the same lessons again and again. Yeah. In meditations, he says, be careful that you are not Caesarified and stained purple because the, the emperor wore the purple clothes. And I've got to imagine in military circles, the, the, the stars or the bars, they can change a person. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, you know, you like to think by the time the person gets to that point in their career. So, you know, for me, it was, uh,
26 years into my career, then I get my first star, but, but it does change you. I mean, because you, now you have kind of excelled probably past the point where most of us thought we would ever get to, but it is also humbling and, and you need to take it with a little bit of humility. Waking up every morning and reading Marcus and meditating on this, reading your books, listening to the podcast, this whole thing. And again, what I, comparison, um,
All of a sudden I found this parallel between, okay, so I was raised in the church and there was a system that was given to me where here are the tenements that you live by. Here's the belief system. Here are the 10 commandments. And at one point those I said failed me. So I played 52 card pickup with my entire religious and philosophical beliefs and says, what else is out there? And that's led me to this journey. But what I realized is that
Those systems didn't fail me, nor did I really even fail them. It is, that's the gig.
great. Start all over. So what I did was I brought out and I went all the way back to the very beginning of meditations. So is that 2-1 in meditations? Yeah, man. I wake up every day and I read it. The people today you will meet are jealous and surly and stupid and annoying and blah, blah, blah. All of these things happen to them because they're ignorant of what is good and evil. But you or I who have seen that the nature of good is
is beautiful and that the bad is ugly. And that my kinsmen, the same nature exists in all of us. And to me, it's not just, this is what I learned from that passage, entry, whatever, is he woke up that morning
And that was a real thing for him. Again, it wasn't the sage-like, zen-like pontificating. It was like, yo, man, you need to begin every day by telling yourself you're going to meet the person that's going to piss you off, frustrate you. And I understood then that anger comes in many different flavors. And there's the anger that was demonstrated to me by my dad, which was yelling. And that's how you asserted power was by whoever was loudest won or throwing things or there's a physical demonstration of anger.
Or there's the very passive, what I did, which was I grew up and I was this gangly, awkward teenager. I was never going to win a fist fight, but I will eviscerate you with my words. I will cut you down. So there's the verbal anger. There's frustration where I've seen it in my son, where if I get frustrated, I see myself in him. I see this mirror of myself. He goes, oh, come on. I'm like, you got that from me, 100%. It's like a Christmas story. Where'd you learn to curse like that? Yeah, for sure.
I couldn't tell him it was from them. Fudge, but only I didn't say fudge. I said the real thing. All of those systems, I realize I'm like, oh, this is how I'm now imparting them unto him. And there's some things where you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I can't put the genie. This has been my, you'll hear me do this a lot. My therapist, I said, you know, like when you find yourself, they're like, who, me? I went, what? She goes, you said you. Are you talking about me or are you talking about yourself? I was like, yeah.
No, I'm just talking about people in general. She goes, why are we bringing people in general? I mean, they're not in this room. It's just you. What do you do? Right. And you know how everyone's exactly like me. And we can just all kind of bring everybody down to my level real quick for a minute. It makes me feel way better about myself. My favorite part of that Marcus quote is towards the end, right? Cause it,
It begins, actually, when I was on The Daily Show, he asked me if I had like an inspirational quote that I would replace or live, laugh, love with. And I said that quote. I said 2-1 for meditation. Did you really? Yeah, because I think it's funny, right? Because it ends or it begins so darkly, right? The world sucks. People suck. Your day is going to suck, right? It lists all the shitty attributes of the people. And the worst people you're going to see. That you will meet today.
And then it kind of about midway through, it takes this surprising turn, which is he goes, but you can't hate them. You can be angry with them. Yeah, you can't even be angry with them. And he says, and you can't let them implicate you in ugliness. And he says, we're made to work together like two hands or two rows of teeth. The upper and lower rows of the teeth. We are made for cooperation. And so I think that it's like,
What that quote gets at is I think actually is itself kind of a microcosm of Marcus Aurelius and meditations, which is at first glance, it's dark and depressing and resigned. And if you only skim the first part and you don't let the second half sink in, you get the wrong impression. But if you read it all the way through and you sit with it, and most importantly, you try to apply it, it's actually...
beautiful, it's actually inspiring, and it's actually profoundly hopeful, right? Like a depressed, resigned, positive person doesn't go, look at how shitty people are, but I'm here for them and we're going to do good stuff together. And I don't control the things they may or may not do, but I do control whether I let
The bad stuff in this world dragged me down. I control whether I am jealous and surly and anxious and awful and all of these things. And to me, that is the whole of meditations could just be that passage. That to me is almost a perfect definition of stoicism as a whole. There's also this notion of
You chose this. I chose this. If these people are in front of me, because at any moment I can abdicate. Yeah, you can quit. I can abdicate my throne if I want to. But if I showed up, this is the gig. So I have forfeited the right to complain. Yes. This, you knew, I knew going in, these are the people that I'm going to meet. Mm-hmm.
So remember, we're just staying in bed today, right? Just stay in bed. Yeah, exactly. Just don't do anything. Yeah. So that is why I love it. That's, that's the reason that literally, uh, the second I got back, I was like, I got to get this because I need to look down and go. And it's on my, my, I'm right-handed dominant travelers, left-handed. Uh, we think, who knows, um, all that and decide, but this is on my weekend. And to me, that is,
That's why can't wait is on my hand that I greet you with. It's like, I can't wait. So these two things go hand in hand or wrist and wrist rather. Well, there's something where Marcus talks about that in meditations. Maybe you missed it, but he talks about how he's practicing using the reins, holding the reins to his horse in his non-dominant hand. So he can get better with practice. And so the idea of like you put on...
The face, you try the thing that's outside your comfort zone, you strain to do the thing that you're not naturally suited to do that, you know, you do it the way that's not easiest.
and that's how you get better. This is interesting. I'm looking at you. You have paper on the right hand, which tells me that you're right-handed, but you're holding the pencil. No, no, I'm left-handed. I'm very left-handed. Interesting. Yeah. But that is it. I remember early on, there was some... My son was using his right hand, and it looked maybe like he was left-handed at first, and I remember going like, are you sure? And then my wife was like, why do you have an opinion about this? And I was like, you're right. Why do I have an opinion about this? It is what it is, and...
are there some benefits they think, you know, creatively to being left-handed? Maybe. But like-
pretending to be left-handed doesn't give you the benefits, right? It's literally, it's- It's like you're either wired to be, you know what I mean? Like- Geniuses choose green, but you didn't choose the- Yeah, it's like in Fight Club, sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken, right? Like pretending to be left-handed doesn't give you the benefits of being left-handed. And also when I think about it, being left-handed is also sucked, like scissors suck and getting, you know, the ink smeared on the side of my hand. Why am I forcing it one way or other? Like,
It's another thing to not have an opinion about. And when I think about this as a parenting thing, I've been, I think it's in the Daily Dad a little bit, but like the source of conflict between parents and children so much of the time is about parents having opinions about things that they don't have to have opinions about. And if they didn't have an opinion about it, things would just be.
And how much of the conflict I had even with my own parents that in retrospect seems silly because like I don't care about it anymore. But why did they care about it at all? And it's – which is a very stoic idea in meditation. Mark Sturris has something like remember things are not asking to be judged by you. Or he says you always have the power to have no opinion. Right.
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