Taking Wisdom From The Lives Of The Stoics - Ryan Holiday - #226

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back. My guest today is the one and only Ryan Holiday, marketer, author and all-round legend. I feel very fortunate to have got him on the show. And today we're talking about his new book, Lives Of The Stoics. Now, typically we'll discuss stoicism with regards to the concepts, and how does the philosophy advise that we live our lives? What does it mean to live a good life? But rarely do you actually get the wider context of the sort of environment and world that the people writing this philosophy were living in. And I really think that it adds another layer of nuance and insight into what we can gain from the stoic philosophy by understanding the world that it came from. Even if you're quite familiar with the learnings from stoicism, I think there'll be a lot to take away from today. Ryan definitely is worth his salt when it comes to being called an authority on the stoic philosophy. Also, if you enjoy this episode or any episode on modern Wisdom, please share it with a friend. That is the only way that this show continues to grow by people like you sharing it to other people like you. You might have started listening to this precisely because it got posted in a group chat or one of your friends said, check this podcast out, you listen to podcasts, have a listen to this. Do the same. If you love an episode, the best thing that you could do to support me and the show and make me very, very happy would be to just find someone else that you think would enjoy it, copy them the link and get them to listen. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Ryan Holiday.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Ryan Holiday. Ryan, welcome to the show.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:01)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:02)
Pleasure to have you on, man. Can you explain why Stoicism is having such modern day popularity at the moment? It's not like I'm seeing tons of people turn into Taoism or Confucianism, but Stoicism is like the hot new girl in school at the moment.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:17)
Yeah, I don't know exactly why that is. It's been an interesting journey. I mean, I've been writing about Stoicism for almost 15 years. So even in my own time writing about it, I've seen some sort of peaks and valleys. But I think ultimately it comes down to Stoicism as a philosophy designed both around and for dealing with adversity. So I don't think it should surprise us that it tends to pop back up when things are difficult. I mean, Marcus Aurelius is writing meditations during the Antonine Plague. So the idea that it would have something to teach us during the COVID-19 pandemic, I don't think should be that surprising.

**Chris Williamson** (3:03)
Yeah, you're totally right. It does read very modern. Why is it that Stoicism reads like it was written two weeks ago and not two millennia ago?

**Ryan Holiday** (3:13)
Well, even when you think about how Marcus Aurelius is writing, so he's writing during the Antonine Plague, but his book Meditations, it translates. He was writing in Greek instead of the less formal Latin, and the title of it translates to himself. So he was writing his book to himself. It wasn't ever intended for publication. Even Seneca's writing, who's probably the most accessible of the Stoics, a good chunk of it survives to us in the form of letters he was writing to his friend, and letters of a Stoic, letters from a Stoic, is really Seneca writing to his friend, Lucilius. And so if we can think of the literary implications of that, that instead of trying to sort of get down this brilliant theory or to perfectly craft their words in such a way, it's accessible.
And that's what I love about the Stoics, is that again, it's not a collection of theories, it's just real people talking about real problems. And as it happens, the problems of the ancient world, although unique in many ways, were not that different than the problems we have today. People are people, we get jealous, we have urges, we have ambitions, we make mistakes, people are people.

**Chris Williamson** (4:37)
I understand that, yeah. I did some research. In the time that most of the Stoics were alive, the entire global population was somewhere between about 150 and 330 million people. So at most, it was like the same as today's population of the United States. Given that there's so many more people alive today, why aren't we finding an epic titus in every country? Have all of the struggles of how to live been worked out or is no one asking the right questions anymore?