Robert Greene on the Wisdom of the Stoics

you're prepared for the worst you're not expecting the worst but you're prepared for it if it happens and if some kind of crap comes your way you know how to fight you know how to defend yourself and how to get out of bad situations [Music] so i thought we'd start with your i think it's your favorite quote from the stoix it's the one you you've said to me the most um maybe can there's two but i think i think you know this is this is the boxing one yeah yeah yeah well what is that quote and what does it mean to you well you're gonna i'm gonna butcher it to hell it's you know it's better if you tell it to me i know that's the one about the boxers in the ring right yeah yeah so i think marcus is saying you're like a boxer in the ring and when someone uh he says when someone gouges you with your their nails or butts you with their head you have to you can't just run away crying or even accuse them of being a cheater you have to adjust your fighting right uh style accordingly and you have to he says you can be wary of them but like you can't get out of the ring right right yeah um so it's kind of a metaphor for life and um so the idea is that when you enter the world as an adult the work world it is like an arena it is like a boxing match some people play by different set of rules i forget what the normal boxing rules are called the uh you know that guy his name no it doesn't matter there's sort of a standard for behavior in the boxing ring some people abide by it some people don't they hit below the belt they hug you they do all kinds of things that are not you're not supposed to do um and you know this is like human nature so schopenhauer has this quote that if you're walking down the street and you hit your foot against a rock you don't go get angry at the rock right well people are rocks in your way sometimes right they're just i don't mean that to to de-personalize them i mean in the sense that they are who they are they have their own nature and that nature isn't yours and it's going to clash with you sometimes and that is just what it means to be a human being an adult in in the world today in any world so are you going to be like complaining and blaming the fact that it is a boxing ring are you complaining that people have a nature where they have an ego or they're full of envy or they're passive aggressive and then in the in the source in the in the process of complaining you're putting yourself at a continual disadvantage because you're draining yourself with all these useless emotions and you're not playing proper defense against them because you're all consumed with kind of personalizing the situation or are you gonna have some distance and be like a boxer in a ring and be smart and intelligent about it you know and i just think it's a brilliant metaphor for life it's a brilliant metaphor for being in control and for accepting the fact that some people play a little bit dirty some people are going to hit you it's going to hurt but you don't whine and complain you just figure out how are you going to defend yourself better i thought it was like a perfect metaphor for the 48 laws epictetus said that philosophy wasn't this dry abstract thing it was a thing he said you should be talking about writing down reading about exploring with other people all the time he said constantly have it at hand that's how i think about philosophy and it's weird for the last five years every single day i've been writing this free email about stoic philosophy it's been not just cool to meet all these fellow practitioners of snow philosophy but in writing about it talking about it reading it for our podcast i have got to internalize these ideas in a way that i never would have been able to under any other circumstances that's the idea philosophy is something we're supposed to engage in not keeping these dusty old books or read once and be done with it's a constant process and i think that's why the email has worked so well for the people reading about it and sharing it and talking about it all of that as well so i'd love to have you join us on this email you can sign up at dailystoke.com daily email it's totally free no spam you can unsubscribe whatever you want i've basically given away a book for free every single year for five years and i'm going to keep on doing it until i drop dead check it out dailystoke.com daily email he does seem to really like boxing metaphors there's one passage he says like um some people say life is is a dance and he says actually it's more like wrestling yeah because you have to be dug in and ready for sudden attacks right right do you agree is is life a boxing match or a wrestling match like is it is you know because you say this in your books all the time you go as in war so in life right do you is that the the lens that you look at the world through well to some degree i mean um conflict is kind of inherent in the human condition so your path through life is never going to be easy there's always going to be resistance there's always going to be people who oppose you i i got when i wrote the war book i also the other metaphor was the samurai warrior that was a major theme in it and musashi talks about the stance of the warrior yeah and it's the stance that matters it's how you meet the adversary how you position yourself how you're calm how you position the sword and how you're ready for the attack the attack might not come or the opponent might just give up and walk away or there may be somebody who come from behind but you're ready you're prepared you're in the proper stance so i always think of it kind of in those terms are you prepared so i don't want people to be paranoid i don't want them to go around thinking everybody's evil and they're about to attack me i want you to be in life to have this kind of composure this stance like a warrior you're prepared for the worst you're not expecting the worst but you're prepared for it if it happens and if some kind of crap comes your way you know how to fight you know how to defend yourself and how to get out of bad situations and i say that because i myself before i wrote the book i violated a lot of times the stance that i was in was all wobbly i was too emotional i wasn't strong i wasn't like in a firm position etc so i was thinking my other favorite marcus sort of wrestling boxing one is he says um it's and maybe maybe musashi would get mad at this but he says it's better to be a boxer than a fencer or a swordsman because the boxer's weapon is a part of them and the swordsman has to pick up their weapon and i always took that i when i read that passage the first time i thought of the final law of the law of power about formlessness becoming one with whatever it is that you do and not needing any external things you are fused with the defenses or the the the tools that is a part of what you do well um you know musashi would counter marcus aurelius would be a great discussion i wish we could bring them back together um but musashi would counter it in that the great summer i worry becomes one with his weapon is simply an extension of his arm and he had a famous sword fight he had many very classic famous sword fights where um he didn't have a sword and he was like a stick he used like a a a an oar yeah right and he defeated his opponent so it didn't matter that it was necessarily this hard piece of steel it was how he used it and he thought of it as an extension of his arm so you know it was literally not not like a prosthesis it was literally a part of him i'm writing about musashi a little bit in the temperance oh good he's amazing and there's a story that i didn't get to use but i i loved it so much he was he was in this fight and uh he you know he would always do these sort of destabilizing like he would always win the fight before he got there yeah he'd be late or yeah you know he'd be weird or yeah yeah you know dress strangely but in this one um he shows up and uh he's late or something the guy's really angry and the guy takes out his sword and he throws his scabbard into the ocean and uh musashi says ah so you know you're going to lose because a winner would not have thrown their scabbard away and i just and you could te like that would have just confused and broken the spirit of the per i love like his sort of quips and his ability to sort of think through what the other person is expecting what they want and he'll do anything even potentially a dishonorable thing or thing that we viewed as dishonorable to destabilize that person so even though they might have been equally matched or he might have been outmatched musashi would win he was the bill belichick of samurai warrior whatever your strength is i'm gonna i'm gonna uh undermine it yeah so the other thing about musashi that's brilliant that's very applicable to life was he treated each opponent as different he never repeated the same strategy twice he surmised the opponent either before the fight or during the fight to see what their psychology was see what their weaknesses were what their strengths were so he could neutralize their strength and he never repeated the same strategy twice he always looked at his opponent as an individual i have to adapt to their style i have to mirror them sometimes so he had this one quote about if i yawn and i feel tired i will induce that in my opponent because emotions are contagious sure sure although i'm not really yawning and feeling it i'm going to make this person tired by my apparent lackadaisical attitude so i found that brilliant you know because so many people in life they're bad strategists most people are awful strategists because they're locked in the past and they're constantly repeating what worked a week ago a month ago a year ago they don't look at the individuals they're dealing with their employees and say this person has a particular psychology this one's very different i have to approach each person differently they take the path of least resistance and they do this kind of cookie-cutter approach where i'm just going to apply the same strategies to each person and musashi was the complete opposite of that i almost i was thinking about doing a chapter about that towards the end of the temperance book because people tend to think stoicism is having no emotions but what i thought was so genius about musashi and uh i'll give you another example of this but like he's not only not not emotional or he's so transcended his emotions that he's able to use emotion effectively right and like i think about this like when a basketball coach would get a technical on purpose or like how does one if you think it's about stripping emotion out of things maybe that is part of it but that's like beginner level that's like that's like basic but the real thing is to be able to understand emotions process them and then use them or at the very least understand other people's emotions and be able to manipulates the wrong word but but but use those emotions to help them or you accomplish what is supposed to be accomplished yeah i mean the the proper idea to me is sort of a lot of what i meditate about and is in buddhism where you don't try to repress your emotions because first of all you can't we are emotional animals and if ever you have tried to repress your emotions particularly in the state of meditation you see you have zero control over them right they're popping up you know it's the way we're wired um so the proper i stance is i'm not going to repress emotions but i'm going to understand them i'm going to see them as they occur with a degree of distance i'm going to see that i'm angry in this moment i'm gonna almost like have a i like to imagine it as if i'm like six inches away from myself i don't know why that metaphor come up but i'm only six inches that doesn't seem that far well i'm it's out this side it's like here however that's like more like a foot i guess right and i'm looking at what i'm thinking or feeling from that distance almost from the outside and i'm still feeling it but i'm seeing it as if it's from um as if i'm another person i know this is a strange concept yeah but you can observe your own emotions while you're feeling them and then you they don't have power over you then you can say okay i'm angry why am i angry so number one i recognize the emotion number two why am i angry does it stem from something weeks ago months ago or earlier today and then what do i do with my anger sometimes you want to use your anger you want to channel your anger so when you're in sports if you don't have that kind of drive and that anger when you're in a bet you know when you're down by 12 points like an extra gear yeah you can pull yeah there's a little bit of anger and even i don't know a hatred or something you just despise the enemy you're gonna crush them right you use that emotion but as phil jackson said if that emotion controls you throughout 48 minutes of a game you're useless you drain yourself you can't control it you also make mistakes you make mistakes so you need to be focused but you also need to be able to use those emotions that's where i use that metaphor of the rider and the horse which i've repeated many many times maybe that's another medallion that we could yeah could manufacture no no that's a great idea the um the the the other belichick thing i was thinking is you know that's what everyone goes bill belichick takes your best asset and he he brings it to zero he basically if you're throwing team he figures out how to stop the throw if you're running team he stops to run but i think he also doesn't get enough credit like did you watch the the patriots uh buffalo game i think it was last week painful but i did he he also is aware of whatever his weakest thing is and he makes that a non-entity in the game what was that in this case well so they were playing in buffalo in like the strongest win and and he uh they threw the ball three times that's right and it was the most boring like it was the pain in the sexy game but they they gutted it out i mean but like it it it i was amazed at this both the self-control but then you also have to have a certain amount of confidence and not giving the what other people think because like think about how many people he made unhappy by only throwing the ball three times quarterbacks mad the offensive coordinators mad the quarterbacks is mad the announcer is mad the fans are mad uh and he's like i don't care like he he will win in the ugliest possible way yeah and he almost likes winning that way more yeah and he also adapts as we were talking about adapts the strategy so right he's he's very good at like figuring out the opposing quarterback and what their weaknesses are the weather conditions the conditions of the field the psychology of the moment he's very aware of all of the details which is what made napoleon such a great field general because napoleon people don't understand he was not only brilliant at coming up with a plan but he was brilliant in the moment adapting his strategies to what the opponent showed him because he created what's called maneuver warfare which is probably similar to what a belichick does and maneuver warfare isn't about the position you occupy it's about the options that you have right so you put yourself in a position where you can go in five different directions five different arrows and if the moment comes you can go here here here depending on what shows up right as opposed to the typical prussian general hood i'm going to go this way and attack you know i'm going to worsen strength or even i'm going to make a a flanking attack this way and they only have one gear and they only go one way so and belichick he's always kind of adapting his strategy to each game instead of like running the ball completely sometimes when brady was the quarterback he would throw 54 times etcetera yeah he's amazing yeah and they were so he he he the way he chose uh to like after they won the coin toss or whatever he chose it so they would i know they'd be playing they'd be playing with the wind at the he's like i don't care how bad we are for the first three quarters what matters is is the wind at our backs right when we need to make the final play right exactly exactly i love i it was it was that's like one of my second i think obviously the ram super bowl is another great example that was so painful but that was but but imagine how hard it would be to play a painful game in front of literally the entire world like you know everyone's watching everyone's mad at you and you just don't care well he's also a bit like the character i wrote about in the 48 laws of power chuco liang and chuco liang was in in the chinese with the the war of three romances whatever it's called um was such a brilliant general he was the one who sat on top of the gates playing a guitar and humming and he had no army yeah and the opponent comes up with like you know 20 000 men and they see him on the gates all tranquil and in monks robes he's like singing this guy's up to some trick because he never he's always has tricks up his back right we're gonna turn around and leave and he only had like 40 people defending this castle yeah it was his reputation and it's almost like people are defeated by bill belichick before they get in the stadium because they're in entertainment because he's david he's playing with your mind before you even get there and i know that's what happened to jared goff when he was the quarterback of the rams um another uh marcus quote that i think ties in really well with your books he says you can't go around expecting plato's republic and what i love about the stoics although seneca is sort of an edge case in that you know he's not totally admirable but like the stoics weren't these sort of uh theoretical uh philosophers but they had to be philosophers in the emperor's court or in the real world in the army in business in the roman empire just what does it mean to you when you hear like you can't go around expecting plato's republic uh you know seneca first of all um you know they're trying to like um that maybe nero wasn't so bad he did kill his mom okay but for the time that was pretty normal he only tried to murder his mom several times and was successful right but his maybe his reputation is his mom was pretty evil too no i know what you mean yeah some people are arguing that maybe nero wasn't as bad as okay but you know rehabilitate seneca's reputation here a little bit because i feel bad for him but um yeah i mean machiavelli has that quote so that if you expect everybody to be good in this world you're in a lot of trouble you know what are you going to do when you deal with people who aren't good but yeah you have to be willing to get your hands dirty so let's say a classic example like you're there's a cause that's very important to you like the climate or you know justice in america you know racial justice in america all very important issues that we all most of us believe in you know if you you have to be willing to get down and dirty here because you're playing with politics you're playing with people who are going to resist you're playing with major corporations who are going to bust your balls who are going to be incredibly manipulative and downright evil in co-opting your good idea and and kind of you know neutralizing it so if you're going to be if you want to create something if you want to actually have results you have to be willing to get a little dirty and you have to be willing to be strategic you have to understand that the other side might not be playing by the same rules that you're playing with you know a lot of warfare is with asymmetry not just of weapons but of also of ethics you know like the democrats and the republicans i know those people are going to rant about that or when we play we're going against vladimir putin these are people who have more options than we do because they're ethically not bound by the same nor normally there's self-imposed limitations the self-imposed limitations are a one-way street yeah yeah so you know and i talk in my books about two people mahatma gandhi and martin luther king and how at certain moments where they were so invested in the results of getting the english out of india of bringing racial justice to america that they were willing to do things that were actually a bit kind of manipulative downright manipulative so that's where it's you know but that's another point too it's not just that it was manipulative like in that they would they you know martin luther king deciding like hey we're going to use children in some of these uh marches because even though we know they're likely going to be in danger because it will help but i think it's also the key there to me is going just because your cause is right and this ties in directly to the laws of power about uh never appeal to mercy always appeal to self-interest like just because your cause is correct or right or just you can't just expect everyone else to be on board with that so it's not they were they also understood they had to convince people they had to get them to see something so they they they understood that it just wasn't theirs because they they were on the right side of history right and and so he made an exchange where he was putting these children in danger because it was bull conor whoever was the the sheriff at the time he was good you had the dog the whips out and everything but he knew that it was going to play on television in white people's homes in chicago who had kind of they didn't have an image of america being like this they never saw the dogs being taken out in the whips and the water cannons and he was going to put it on your television set right yeah he could he was going to make them understand the lies they were telling themselves about segregation and gandhi's strategy was exactly the same they didn't have television back then but in his salt march he literally was inviting his followers to be beaten up clubbed by the by the english um police or whoever it was and that would be in the newspapers and english people who were very liberal and thought their country was you know the great hope of the world we're reading in this paper about defenseless people being clubbed and it would turn them against the empire right right so yeah that's exactly what your point is yeah it's like uh might doesn't make right and right doesn't make might you have to figure out how to sell whatever it is that you're selling and understanding that yeah most people are indifferent as best or they have some vested interest in not caring about what you're talking about i think about that even as a writer it's like no not that many people like books you know like you're you're it's an uphill battle to get people to read a book and so you can't just expect that because you care a lot about it everyone else will care right well it's hard it's not natural for us to get outside of ourselves our natural position which is sort of what i talked about in human nature about our narcissism that we all have is i have a great idea everybody must think it's a great idea right i i think the world is this way and should be this way everybody should be feeling that way you know it's just natural sure but it's it takes it takes effort to get outside of yourself and to imagine that people come from different cultural backgrounds they didn't weren't raised like you they're a different gender they're a different race they have different backgrounds and different belief systems to try to think about that and to also think about the universal qualities that all people share you know and so the problem if you could if you could boil down the problem with humans into one line it's the fact that they're always taking the path of least resistance they don't want to put effort and that and it requires effort to strategize to think of your opponent to think of what makes them different it takes strategy to think about what will persuade them what will get people to join your cause you know it takes effort to get outside of yourself to see how other people might view it but we don't want to do that we want to just be lazy and just assume that everyone's on our side here we just want it because because it is better for the world of course the world should do it and that's people do the wrong thing or act in not their self-interest all the time yeah i love this quote and i read it at the beginning of the pandemic and it's been helpful to me i think it kind of connects to what you're talking about on the sublime book mark surrealists in meditations he says he learns from one of his mentors that the key to happiness is to be free of passion but full of love what does that mean to you i'm not quite sure i i don't know if i uh can you help me a little bit and then i'll riff i i was taking it as meaning like you're not angry you're not jealous you're not frustrated like the passions the sort of negative emotions is the social so love is a depression but that love is some sort of deeper emotion some better way to go through the world um that of all the passions that was the one that was okay okay so love is a passion yeah yeah well um yeah it's something that you know i i believe very much so and it is it is kind of touching upon the sublime but um all the other passions are very inward moving right they're about you yeah about your anger about your frustration yes you could be angry because some people are doing some really up things to you at some point right so it's not completely you but the emotion is geared towards how you feel and you want to get retribution if someone's hurt you want revenge you know so it's all very kind of self-centered but love is the one emotion that you forces you outside of yourself true love because there can be fake love where you you really it's just a form of narcissism where you want people to give you the attention and feed the image you have of yourself but true love the ability to get outside of yourself and to feel what other people are feeling which is empathy and empathy which is a word i'm afraid it's overused i'm getting a little tired of it i wish we could find a better word but it's a major theme in the sublime because the idea is the highest mental power that we humans have the source really of our intelligence is what they call theory of mind that we are able to place ourselves in the bodies and the minds of other people it what's made us the supreme social animal right to be able to think about what someone else is thinking yeah and it's not only just for for love it's also for fighting your opponent etc and for dealing any kind of social situation but it's the source of all of our intelligence right it's the source of our science a great scientist like at einstein is thinking inside the very subjects he's he's trying to get into right and that's where his metaphors and analogies often come from because he's able to think about it oh this is like this right yeah so that's the source of our power and so high level empathy where you're able to think inside of other people to kind of imagine what they are going through what their feelings are is to me the highest passion of all which is a form of love and it is extremely sublime yeah no i think it's like so instead of being like you look at what's happening in the world you could be angry someone's behaving this way or doing this selfish thing and then it's like to me the extra the stoic exercise is like why are they this way well it's because someone misled them they're actually a victim of the although they're perpetrating you know something unethical or unfair unjust they're a victim because someone they're a victim of a scam or a scheme or a bad actor and that also they are suffering for that it's not fun to be them right um and that that i'm lucky not to have experienced that and that they're they're so so if you can experience this sort of compassion it's almost more than empathy it's like a compassion or understanding right uh for that person then then you can be you can feel love towards them instead of anger or rage or despair about like why are people that way but can you do that with the anti-vaxxers it's hard on a good day i can i was wondering if you're maybe reaching your limits of that there well i mean i'm it's it's a tricky thing right because it is you can understand where they're coming from just in the same way that you could understand you know let's say addiction is a disease and that this person this being addicted to this or that has caused so much pain and suffering for that person and it's part of some wound that they had as a child and it's not fun to be them and that life would be better for them if they were clean but you know they still broke into your house and stole a family heirloom to sell to buy drugs or they still got high and crashed their car and they killed someone so i think we're really struggling with that particularly is you can have em empathy and understanding for the person but that doesn't negate the fact that the thing they're doing has real consequences for other people definitely but but if you want to um pursu if you want to win this war but let's call it a war against these this this type of thinking you have to you can't just like get angry and close the door on them and just say go go away you know you're just you're evil you're bad we have to live with them right they're in our midst every day and so if our politicians and people in charge were smart which they're not they would have that mentality they would have the idea that you can't just alienate people and antagonize them and push them further into their corner but to go to say like the civil rights movement obviously martin luther king talks a lot about justice and loving the enemy and even though they hurt him and you know there's a famous moment where martin luther king is on stage and a man just comes in a nazi just starts punching him in the face right right and martin luther king has this almost superhuman discipline right he not only he people said he dropped his hands like you think you're going to temperance yeah yeah yeah yeah like to me that's the heroic level of temperament it's not just oh someone called you a bad name and you didn't react like he he conquered it to the level where he didn't go like this yeah it's amazing that's amazing um he talked about all that and yet he also understood that segregation could only be destroyed through the force of law but how do you get the force of law i mean you can't force the force of law i mean those those little girls and boys didn't go to school at little rock high school without the 101st airborne yeah but how did you get the 101st airborne how did you get kennedy or johnson to do that how did you move public opinion to get to that point no i'm just saying you can't you can't compel people in any way so even to get congress or the president to mandate vaccinations like they've done in other countries you're going to get immense pushback right right so how are you going to deal with that well i think martin luther king said somewhere i'm paraphrasing it was like you know you can't make my neighbor like me but you can't prevent him from killing me like so so it's both it needed sort of the force of law as well as a sort of a public opinion campaign we need we need both and we kind of have neither yeah yeah um seneca has this thing that it's really popular when we posted on daily stoic but i still struggle with what it means he says we suffer more in imagination than reality now i think he's saying and i was talking to a friend who's sort of dreading this thing that's going to happen he's worried about this negative news article that's going to come out and i was talking to him about it i was saying look like it's going to happen and it's going to either be really negative or not that negative but you're you're borrowing the suffering in advance you're you're you're feeling crappy about it before it's happened it's like it's like if they told you robert you're going to have to spend 10 years in prison but you have six months to get your affairs in order those six months of your life should not be miserable even though the 10 years probably aren't going to be fun because then you're actually serving a 10 and a half year sentence but i think seneca's point is even a lot of things we dread don't even happen so it's even worse we dread it in advance and then it doesn't happen yeah so what don't you understand i'm just curious what does that quote mean to you well it ref it makes me think of of my meditation again i hope i'm not sounding like a one trick pony here but um so when i'm meditating i become extremely aware that thinking is almost a form of a disease i get that idea constantly as i'm as i'm meditating like thoughts are coming up and they're negative thoughts ninety percent of the thoughts that come up uncontrollably are about anxiety they're about people who've done things to you that you don't like it's about problems with people etc so many of the thoughts are negative and you're anticipating as you say negative things happening to you and it's almost like thinking is the problem itself because it divorces you from the moment right so i often have the ideas i'm meditating there's a world out there that has nothing to do with me that's completely indifferent to robert greene the birds could care less about my fate the trees don't know anything about my existence the sky doesn't care at all about me right okay that's reality that's the world but my thinking creates this thing as if i'm the most important thing in the universe that everything that happens is is going to happen to me and it's going to be bad etc so to be able to see that thinking traps you so many times into patterns that you've been programmed to respond to situations a lot of times by anxiety you know like thoughts pop up about i've got to do this phone call or oh i forgot to email that person or damn it this this interview is coming up but i don't want to do it or blah blah blah blah so much of the thoughts are anxieties that you're anticipating right what's going to happen right if you can just control that if you could just see that that is the source of your problem and that the world is indifferent to you and that circumstances are totally neutral and that newspaper article that comes out you can't control it and maybe the bad stuff will actually in the end rebound to your favor or it'll make you tougher it'll make you realize certain things if you can just see them as facts as opposed to like these horrible things inside your head these fantasmas whatever the latin word is you know then you've got the power well and and the irony and i think this is very common so i'm not singling this person out but like so he's dreading the thing he's worried about it what's what's going to mean what's going to happen blah blah and then i was like so have you made have you written your response you know we've talked about it like a dozen times but the one thing he controls would be like what's he going i was like you should have written this is your response if they say this this is your response if they say this this is your response if you say this this is how you've already prepared all the people in your life that this thing might be happening but of course none of that was done because it was almost even though it was he's making himself miserable it was more pleasure it was more yeah yeah rewarding to just sit and stew and worry than to like the stoic say look you don't control what's in the what's going to happen but you control how you respond to what happens and you also can control how you prepare for what happens but we don't do that you know who one of the great stoics of the 20th century was no alfred hitchcock he had a plan for everything so directing a film if you've known other people who've done it is an extremely stressful job it's like directing an army into a campaign because problems are arising that you cannot anticipate there's all this pressure there's all this money you've got insane egos of actors producers etc and so it's like it's a constant adrenaline rush going through you can't control your emotions so hitchcock people would look at him on the set and he'd be falling asleep in the director's chair he'd look like buddha his eyes were closed why because he prepared for everything he anticipated everything that was going to happen right and so by the time the film came he was completely bored because he knew he he was able to control every aspect of the production so i know for instance if i have to go on live television which is almost like having a sword fight with musashi right for 10 minutes everyone around the world is seeing you live if you say something stupid or you blank out you're humiliated or if you're boring they can they'll cut the interview short yeah exactly okay it's it's the worst thing it's the word i don't know if you can agree with me but it's one of the worst things ever so what i've learned is i'm going to prepare the hell out of it i'm going to have everything nailed down right and then sometimes they don't ask you the questions you anticipate it goes off in other directions but when you enter that green room or where you're ready to be interviewed you have a calmness because you're prepared you know what your answers are going to be you're able to you're not sitting there in the moment trying to figure things out so i think that's kind of similar to what you're saying there i had i heard a thing about bill walsh the football coach he would he would script his first 15 plays of the game so it was irrelevant what was happening in the world because he had his plan now that might have made him a little unflexible in some ways but it also meant that if something went wrong he wasn't scrambling running around with it he wasn't looking for order and direction because like there was a plan and all he had to do was stick to the plan right and those 15 plays were also geared towards the opponent they weren't just random plays that he right devised you know right no and it's about so much of life i think even like the interview you're talking about it's about settling into a rhythm it's about you go into it with nerves that are not beneficial so it's really about just you have the initial rush how do you prevent the crash after the rush how do you just get into the groove that you need to do your thing the other thing i advise people a lot of it stressful situation or job interviews and the best defense is to be so thoroughly prepared you've studied that that company like like it's the back of your hand you know the person who's interviewing you've done massive amounts of research you've just done all the detail work and you've prepared what more or less you're going to say then you go in it's a completely different mindset than if you're just going to like wing it but i think some people think the anticipation thing can lead to anxiety or worry but there's a napoleon quote i like where he says the general should ask themselves three times a day what would i do if the enemy appears here here here yeah i don't think he wanted the generals to be anxious he just wanted them to be aware like to have a plan well preparation that's why hitchcock could fall asleep when you're prepared you're calm right so when you've done your work you know and you get on the golf course or you get in the boxing ring or you get on the interview stage hey you're going to be nervous and yeah you're going to have adrenaline because i found if you don't have adrenaline you're not focused enough you need a little bit of nervous energy but there's a difference between being nervous energy and it forecloses your ability to think in the moment but when you're prepared you're able to be calmer and then if people surprise you with a question you're not suddenly flustered because you entered with it with a much higher degree of calmness than when if you try to just completely fling it i don't know if you've had that experience no i think you need a little bit of that energy it's like it's just a heightened state of awareness it's not sustainable like you can't do it every day of your life but you need to go into an extra enter an extra sphere or a plane to do your your best work i feel like um seneca talks about he has this latin expression which i won't say because i'll probably butcher it but he says like the whole world is a temple of the gods and i think one of the most you know people think of marcus surrealists is this sort of dow or depressive like really guy but i think my favorite parts of meditations are his like observations about nature yeah talks about like weight and wheat bending low under its own weight he talks about the flecks of foam on a boar's mouth he talks about olives falling from the tree yeah it's clear that he would walk he was a he would go outside yes but he was also aware of what's happening outside he was connected and present like da vinci the way he would fall in love with the way a bird flew or even like what a body looked like when you cut it open to me that's part of the sublime stuff too actual understanding and awe like we use that word awesome but we don't really think about what it means but just awe seems so important what the etymology of awe is i should look that up yeah um yeah and the other thing that that's similar to and it's from marcus aurelius that's related is look at things as they are so you're drinking wine think of the grapes being crushed you're having olive oil think of the olives being crushed i don't remember what the other examples are it's a little this is i think one of the reasons people think it's kind of depressing is like this is a dead pig this is a dead bird well yeah but that's what the food that you're eating you know sure yeah and so you know that's a lot of the sublime because you're walking around in your world and you're kind of sleepwalking yeah you're not paying attention to things and you're not really seeing things as they are so you're you're drinking your orange juice from some some plastic bottle you're not aware of the oranges or the process or what people went through i mean i know that if you were that may not be that exciting so that's maybe not the best example but being aware of where things come from of what they are what their true nature is you know that's sort of what children how the children think because they're constantly curious they just don't assume that something just came into the world the way it is they want to know how and they want to know why so you live in a world where you're surrounded by things that exist that kind of you don't really know what where they come from or what what makes them so interesting and you're not paying attention to it so some people have this idea of the sublime like you have to do these incredible things it has to be some amazing experience you have to climb mount everest to have that rush and just look down on the world and where you have to be in in a space you know you have to be with jeff bezos on blue origin you know it's it's pathetic it's stupid it's silly the sublime is like around you it's around just looking at your skin realizing your own body your own physiology it's in everything around you is weird and sublime if you look at it a certain way i think about that with so it's like it's easy to look at the grand canyon and be awestruck yeah it's easy to uh yeah like look at something amazing and be awestruck but the point is can you find that in the ordinary or even in the ugly right can you see the the steam coming out of a sewer in new york city or like cat footprints on a car i just i just wrote about that in the pagan chapter because in the aztec cosmology they have a word that i'm going to butcher but it was called telazo keoto and it meant literally means sacred excrement and it means that there was a god of excrement and filth and even the filth is beautiful and sacred and so i write about how you can look at things that are kind of decaying or that smell kind of funky and you can find that kind of exciting and interesting in its own way decay has a certain kind of poignancy to it right some and some decaying things almost have a sweet smell to them yeah yeah um so um i forget what we were talking about well no i i relate that to you to gratitude right so people go it's important to be grateful so then like on thanksgiving they're like i'm grateful for my family i'm grateful for my health i love you i remember right and then and that is important but i also think gratitude as a practice should be like how do you find a way to be grateful for the that you don't like that you didn't want to happen right again it's easy to be grateful that you're rich or that you're like free or that you're this or that but can you be grateful for like your broken leg or can you be grateful for that terrible relationship that you are in can you be grateful that all this i was trying to think about this the other day how can i be grateful for all the frustr like the frustrating state of the world well what's to be grateful there well it's an opportunity right to be not those things right right i was thinking about uh the town that i live in if if it was perfect and the things that i didn't like about it were not there almost certainly i would not be able to afford to live here well this town's pretty perfect no but you get what i mean like if it well if it even writing a book if writing the book was easy either everyone would do it or they're you wouldn't be paid what you're paid to do it right it's you you find you you realize that the whole fact that it's hard or difficult or not perfect is what made it possible accessible or um potentially rewarding yeah it makes me think of two things so i was reading recently biography of william james the great american philosopher psychologist and he has this great essay i forget which one it's called where he went to this like perfect utopia colony in new york called chautauqua where everything was easy and wonderful and everybody was so polite and they were all playing games outside and it was nature there was no conflict and it was like this paradise and he felt after he was there for two days he wanted to throw up he thought the most repulsive thing he'd ever been to he says when you take conflict away from a human being it's like castrating them you you remove something essential from our nature and he found it horrifying and nightmarish which is kind of like what a utopia could be like um the other thing is well you know what about like i'm not trying to be so self-centered here but i guess i am having a stroke you know it's it's not fun you know you can't wish it on someone i wouldn't wish it on anyone not even a certain someone whose name i won't mention um so you know you your active life is taken away from you and you you have to learn a patience that just never existed takes you five minutes to tie your shoelaces etc what could you be grateful for that well it's true you can it's taught me a lot of things it's made me very kind of humble and appreciate what i had and also understand what it feels like for other people to be helpless physically to have greater degrees of empathy it has taught me to appreciate the smaller things in life it's for example i could have had a stroke that damaged the left side of my brain in which case i wouldn't be able to write a book so which would be worse having the right side of my brain damaged so i can't walk or the left side of my brain where i can't write another book i would take what happened to me over the other one so even this kind of worst thing the worst thing that's ever happened to me but of course getting covered could be theoretically a lot worse and i have a friend who got coveted and then had a stroke um so yeah there's always worse in this world but you know there's there's even good to be extracted from what from the worst thing that happened in your life without getting pollyannish about it because a lot of it's painful and frustrating but you do have to look at it that way because you can't control it you know there's nothing you can do that's one of my favorite marcus quotes i think it ties to what you're saying he says um in meditations marcus says uh a fire diges he says a strong stomach digests what it eats a fire turns everything you throw on top of it into flame and brightness that's a great quote i love that quote does it mean to you it just means that you everything that happens you consume it in a particular way and you turn it into you know that fire inside of you just consumes all circumstances into something positive you just burn them up and you evaporate them and you make them part of your life and you incorporate them and i don't know i might be butchering it but uh or i might be getting the context no no i think you're totally right as i thought about that quote more the one thing that i've came to understand is like if you've ever started like a campfire or something and then you're like it starts to get going and then you get excited and you throw too much on it it puts the fire out right right so what i think he's really commenting on is like how strong how robust is that fire inside of you yeah if it's just a puny little spark or a you know it's that one of those fires that's more smoke than heat um you can also putting stuff on top of it can also dampen it out or or or block it out so it's really about how much you have going on in here that's the per like that's how you hear about somebody who goes through an incredible amount of adversity marcus aurelius lost i think seven children like you think about what kind or you think about admiral stockdale in the hanoi hilton just what kind of inner fortitude and strength and drive and inner power you would have to have for one of those things not to break you not every single one right after another yeah yeah i mean um i i so this makes me think of two things so i'm right now writing a chapter about um childhood sublime and kind of the main story the icon of it is the writer vladimir nabokov lolita among many other great novels and um he had this kind of idyllic childhood in russia a wealthy father and really kind of this doting mother and this country has stayed it was kind of like here he just was paradise and then it's 1918 or 17 and he's 18 years old and the russian revolution breaks out and his father is a marked man and they have to flee they have to leave behind all of their possessions they flee to europe they end up in berlin his father is assassinated by a fascist his wife is jewish and they're there when hitler's comes to power and they have to flee germany he has to leave behind his mother and all his siblings the second time yeah second time and his brother dies in a concentration camp and he flees to new york and here he is he's in his 40s and he had the most happy childhood and yet he has no photographs no souvenirs no family members to share it with he can never go back to russia because of stalin in the circumstances and what does he do you know that's that's like just horrifying so his idea was he was going to recreate his childhood in his mind he was going to make it come to life just by imagining it and feeling those emotions again so that was kind of his fire i don't know if that's sort of no no like any one of those things could be if you're like why is that person a drunk it'd be like because one of those things happened to them yeah but the the people that i think are so amazing the people who sort of keep going like um they just published this new edition of some of the writings of victor frankl yeah and it's called um yes to life right and the subtitle is in spite of everything well who went through worse than victor frankl but i love that phrase like in spite of everything no it's not life is not plato's republic it's not your idyllic childhood it's not how you want it it's auschwitz you have to do these things we're talking about in spite of so you think about marcus aurelius and what he's talking about like how to be free of passion full of love you can't expect plato's republic this that she's he's not having a good time like that even the ancient historians were like this was this wonderful man who who met with continual bad luck in life but it never seemed to pierce that inner scent like you never became bitter you never despaired you never abandoned would have been so easy as you're burying your second child to be like you know what it's all like i quit but he never he never did that yeah that's that's unbelievable it would have been interesting to um to be inside of his mind at that time and to see like the struggles because you know there was a struggle of course i know it wasn't like easy to do that and then it took a process and that it would be interesting because we only have his meditations basically but what if we had more of that it would be so exciting to see you have to kind of just completely read between the lines because so little is known of his life well when i read between the lines i see him talking about not losing your temper yeah he talks he taught he's clearly he says like um he talks about reaching for your child and they're not there yeah so clearly he was struggling with all these things but the journal was where he worked it out yeah but so so people have this wrong impression about stoicism which came back to sort of something we were talking about yesterday where they kind of accuse you sometimes of not being stoic or it's a struggle yeah even for marcus aurelius it was a continual struggle even for epictetus however you pronounce it um it was a continual struggle it's not like you're suddenly a stoic you've reached you got a diploma and now you've you know you're continually struggling with your human nature and if it wasn't a struggle would it be that admirable like if if you were just born that way or if it was you read this book and then you magically become this way how impressive would that be it's like we love the tom brady's of the world or the whatever because they sh they shouldn't be able to do what they're doing because they were a six-round draft pick because they're not drew brees isn't tall enough you know spud webb isn't tall enough uh tom brady's too old it's it's that they're doing it in spite of everything right that makes it impressive or admirable right so it's the resistance that kind of makes you stronger and the more so sometimes like the times that you're born in like sometimes i wish dammit why couldn't i have been born in like the 19th century or in ancient athens you know uh there's some things about the 2020 that 2021 that i just don't like you know i would have been so much happier but then i have so much to resist against yeah that it almost is almost like a form of pleasure that i have to like struggle even harder to focus on reading and reading a book now reading nietzsche or reading marcus aurelius is triple the pleasure when you re live in a world that's so antithetical to it right stefan zweig uh who i know you love wrote this amazing biography of montagna yeah i told you about that yeah and and when you read it and you go oh this is a guy writing he's a refugee from hitler writing about a guy who's a refugee from europe civil war and then you're i was reading it in 2016. right right right and you're just getting you just sort of realize it's all and mark zurich talks about the cement it's always been this way yeah people are people yeah this is the rhythms of history uh insane things happen unjust things happen and it comes back to the fundamental question which what that zweig says in that book and that i think hugh says was montana's primary question which is how do you find freedom right despite the constraints or difficulties or chaos of the world around mountain was a great lover of the stoics and uh he had a quote of uh epictetus on his uh on the ceiling in his in his library yeah he was amazing he was he was so far ahead of his time in so many ways because he was appalled at the uh treatment of of uh in the colonization of brazil etc of the treatment of slavery etc and he was kind of uh saying that the cannibals were were more were more ethical than the europeans of his time etc it was amazing people like that who were outside of their time he loved cats he loved cats well there you go what's that what's wrong with you yeah that's true um no that maybe that's a good place to stop because you were describing your near-death experience earlier and i was thinking of montana's near-death experience he falls off this horse yeah by the way his brother died he was hit with a tennis ball uh i don't remember that his brother died in a tragic tennis accident which doesn't seem possible for the 15 maybe they're covering it up for something but it was but so he's he's falls off a horse and he dies and he as they carry him into the house he said he could feel death dancing on the tip of his lip or life dancing on the tip of his lips realizing that it was this force inside you that can go away and basically all of his work comes after this near-death experience yeah yeah and how so how has your brush with mortality change well it it's very true that life is like so we we so and verbalize things but life is a feeling inside your body it's an energy it's a force how could you ever put the words that would describe what it's like it's inevitable it's inevitable but you know it when it's like leaving you what that feeling is like so there was another woman who i've she wrote a great book about her stroke called stroke of insight jill bolte she became a neuroscientist she had a much worse stroke and she literally felt all of the life draining out of her body inch by inch by inch as like as death was passing through her i had a little bit of that and i also felt that this kind of force that is being alive is like being drained out of me it wasn't as strong as that because my stroke wasn't as bad but i did connect to the feeling of life and the feeling of death because i had the feeling of death in my body as i described earlier the sense of my bones kind of shriveling and melting and getting soft and kind of everything that makes you alive kind of leaving your body so it makes you aware that there's a physical physicality to being alive to being conscious and to that you carry your death within you and sort of so you know i'm writing a little bit now about i'm writing about childhood and what's interesting is children are actually very much closer to that than we are as adults because they were just born they were just born two years ago three years ago they came out of the when they came out of the darkness it did not exist they did not exist so they have a feeling of what it means to like not exist and to have that sudden burst of light and to scream and you're alive it's kind of a mix of horror and and something pleasurable i suppose i don't know but it is true that children have a much more visceral connection to life and death as we do as adults we lose it because as we get older we just we take the force for granted completely for however many years you've been alive yeah so that sense of like dancing on your tongue that's brilliant you know that's it's just like it's it's like pervading your whole body it's a feeling that you're being alive and consciousness itself is a weird sensation so sometimes when i'm meditating i almost have this idea that the world itself is conscious that it exists outside of my brain that everything in the world has a kind of consciousness to it but we don't think about these things we take it for granted that we're this one animal that's able to think that has a consciousness so many of the things that we take for granted goes back to that marcus aurelius thing about the the dead pig or the or the wine that you drink what does it actually mean to have thoughts etc and so nearly dying kind of brings that stuff home to you so so understanding that life is a force and that you watched it almost leave how do you protect it now that you got it back however briefly how do you think about that force as you go through your life day-to-day well i'm a very aware of it i'm very aware of the precariousness of it you know i'm very aware of the fact that it could leave me at any moment so just the awareness is kind of uh something that makes you feel a little bit more alive it's you know um so the other thing is in in writing this book on the sublime and kind of studying the history of evolution and um how we certain things evolve like the i and emotions and in in the skeleton etc it makes you look at you at your own body in a completely different way it's like this insane miracle so life almost seems like it shouldn't be there it's uncanny absurd it's absurd you know um and so i have a lot of kind of surreal moments where um i almost feel like i'm taken out of my body a little bit as i was saying earlier it was just for a flash but i was watching a squirrel climb up the telephone pole and i was kind of feeling what it was like to be a squirrel i do that often in my backyard i watch squirrels i'm kind of fascinated by them and i think they seem like they're having a good time oh they seem like they're in paradise continued paris they're trees everywhere they're nuts everywhere their fruit plants in my backyard that they're decimating the thing i heard about squirrels is they they lose like 40 or 50 percent of the nuts that they hide but the accident but but in so doing create the forest that we then love right so it's like the accidental absurdity of their like the byproduct of their stupidity is could be that tree well i would hey wait a minute i wouldn't call squirrels stupid because they have this they've shown they have incredible memory but clearly not that great if they lose fifty percent of the nuts that they have now it's going up to 50 i heard that they they have these certain kind of things in their brain where they can remember exactly where they buried that nut in the pot in your backyard but i could be wrong you get my but but yes they seem like they're having a good time they're always having a good time yeah so sometimes i just have flashes of how weird life is they're only like for a second or two but they're they're that's how kids think too i think yeah they just they love they love that yeah yeah well uh hopefully you'll have many many more of them kids no of those moments of those moments if life is fleeting i think that's also one reason to soak in whatever the moment is even if it's banal or strange or you know we want to see the grand canyon to go we're talking about but then we ignore the slightly harder beauty of the squirrel which is a lot more prevalent and accessible would just take five minutes to watch a spider on a web i did that in my backyard the other day oh man it was it's like better than any movie you could watch streaming on netflix to sit there and watch a spider on a web it's created just waiting there as the wind kind of and how it feels every single vibration i mean it's just everywhere around you little weird things like that you know i hope i don't sound like a like pollyannas or like somebody who writes from reader's digest or something i don't think anyone has ever accused robert greene of sounding pollyanna okay no this is amazing thank you robert thank you very much ryan

Channel: Daily Stoic

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Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: a7pYtvo2u3I

Length: 67min 32sec (4052 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 24 2022