I'm my Boris and this is strike talk.
So the idea of philosophy be this way of living, this standard to aspire to strikes me.
It's really interesting and really urgent.
Ryan Holiday, Welcome to strike talk. Might tell me right back to when you first start thinking about this stuff.
I was nineteen or twenty years old.
If you had told me that philosophy was something that would be interesting, I would have laughed at you. I came to understand that wasn't this dusty, stodgy.
And practical thing.
It was ordinary and extraordinary people alike working to become what.
They're capable of being.
Courage, self discipline, justice and wisdom. Every situation in life, big and small, is this opportunity to practice those virtues.
Ryan Holiday, Welcome to strike Talk.
Mat Yeah, thanks for having me.
Where do you come to me from?
Now?
Where are we talking from?
Right outside Austin, Texas?
Wow, that's cool.
Everybody wants to live in Texas eas day, I know, almost living in life for some reason was going on in New York and l A. Just emptying out into Texas. What's the deal? Is it tax? Is it bed tax?
It's it's taxes, it's space.
You know, it's a it's a bunch of things, some good reasons, some not so good reasons. But I'll tell you I'm I'm very excited to get to Australia this summer because most people I know that live here flee Texas during the summer.
It's it's so freaking.
Hot as in your summer.
Yeah, yeah, I'm coming our summer. I guess your winter. But it's gonna be uh. You know, last year, I think we had one hundred days over one hundred degrees fahrenheit, So it gets pretty hot here.
So when are you arriving in Australia and what's and what's the deal?
Uh?
Middle of July? I think I'm doing it. I think I'm doing Sydney the last day of July and Melbourne maybe the first day of August something like that. And this will be my first appearances there.
And what and what what are you presenting to us? Like what's your program looking like? The thesis?
Well, you know, just to just to really get people excited, I'm gonna do an hour plus lecture about an obscure school of antion philosophy, you know, about as exciting as it can get.
Well for me, that actually is exciting for me. So I quite like, I quite like what we're about to talk about. I mean, I've read the brief but and you're only a young guy, which is pretty amazing.
It's funny. You know, many many years ago, I.
Used to talk about a concept of virtues, used to go on talking tours in Australia to about virtues, and a lot of young people, like the younger audiences, didn't really know what virtues were. They don't even really understand the word. I mean, and stoicism is sort of somewhat related to that. Maybe you just take me back a little bit, and you're already young, but take me back to the period when you first started becoming interested in
concepts of stoicism. But probably more importantly from my point of view, this concept of virtues.
What are virtues?
And you know, where's courage versus you know other things? Those types of virtues take me right back to when you first started thinking about this.
I think that's a great question because I relate to that. You know, when I was nineteen or twenty years old, if you had told me that virtue was something I should care about, or if you told me philosophy was something that would be interesting, I would have laughed at you,
you know. And so it wasn't until I read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in my college apartment that I came to understand that philosophy wasn't this dusty, stodgy, you know, impractical thing, that it was you know, ordinary and extraordinary people alike, sort of working to hold themselves to higher standards, to become what they're capable of being. If there's a line in Meditations or Marx Shois talk, he says, fight to
be the person that philosophy tried to make you. And so the idea of philosophy not being these abstract questions, but this way of living, this standard to aspire to, strikes me as really interesting and really urgent.
You know.
I think when people hear the word virtue, they think, yeah, religion, Like car if you say the phrase the cardinal virtues, people think of, you know, a religious figure, right, they think of a cardinal. But cardinal comes from the Latin cardos, which means pivotal, So they're talking about the pivotal virtue. So that's the other thing. It's not virtue, it's virtues, and the virtues to the ancient stoics were I think
pretty straightforward and pretty timeless. They were courage, self discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the idea was that every situation in life, big and small, was this opportunity to practice those virtues. So if we think of every situation, instead of going through the life going what can I do here?
What should I do here?
We think, well, what opportunity do I have to practice one of these ideas or all four of these ideas? What is philosophy asking of me? I think that's a much more interesting way to approach these, you know, admittedly very ancient ideas.
How did you get the Marcuisraelis Meditations book? Because I mean, I'm sixty eight and I more recently bought it maybe a year ago, and I just look at it every now and then. It sits on my bedside amongst seven or eight other books, which I'm sort of reading different books at different times depending on how I.
Feel at night.
And you know, so I'm sort of relatively speaking advanced relative to you when you're you're nineteen? Who who mentioned you? Or how did you become a cross? Looking at a book like Marcus Realist's Meditations? Because it's sort of fairly dense for a nineteen year old.
That's what I think.
Yeah, I was.
I was at a conference and I went up to the speaker after and I just said, hey, you know, are you reading anything interesting?
And then that's how I got pointed.
To the Stoics. And I think, what was so great about that? I didn't realize that at the time, but this is how Stoicism has spread for twenty five centuries that It's been this process of Hey, I got something out of this. I think you'll get something out of it too. And that's one of the interesting passages in Mark Surrelis's Meditations. Marx rewis being the Emperor of Rome. He's thanking his teacher Rusticus for having lent him a copy of the writings of Epictetus, who is his favorite
Stoic philosopher. So if we can think of, you know, twenty five centuries of people going, hey, check out this book. I think it's good. You know, that's what Stoicism is.
You know.
I don't think people are doing that with Heidegger or Kant or.
Even Aristotle these days. Right.
The idea of philosophy being something closer to self help is to me really really interesting and I think, you know, some people turn up their notes at that, but I think that's wonderful.
Yeah, mean, a lot of people always searching. Some people in their life, they're always searching. They don't really know what they're searching for. Do you think that Macros surrealis is because given that you mentioned earlier on it was
sort of going back to twenty five centuries. I mean, we probably can go back to the original writings of Stoicism, which I'm sure go back beyond this, but in terms of what's available to look at, you can probably go back to you know, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle back in the five hundred BC six BC, and I'm sure it goes beyond that. But this is just what's in evidence in terms of what's written down. I'm sure there's lots of other places. There's probably Asian cultures and Egyptian
cultures would go beyond that. But the thing that's most popular, but it was a bit, it was a bit sort of complex, and sometimes this stuff could go on for hundreds and hundreds of pages, especially if you're go and buy some of the books, some of the writings of these guys, the thing that I really just did is that he made it pretty simple in terms of he gave it to invite sizes. It was sort of like
a practical application of this little tweets. Yeah, that's perfect nearly yeah, yeah, like little tweets.
Correct.
It's a mod version of tweets, an old version of what is my version of tweets? So why do you think that is important to people? Though?
Because? Is it because today.
We don't want to sit down and read Plato and Socrates and Aristota would go on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages and it gets very very complex. Do you think today that we do only one of digestings and bite size amounts?
You know what, No, I think Marcus Aurelius was doing the same thing that I'm doing, that that people have been doing for thousands of years, which is he was taking ancient philosophy. And that's kind of a mind blowing thing to think about. This was ancient philosophy to Marcus aureli He's writing in the second century AD, and you know, the founder of Stoicism was writing in the fourth century BC, right, and so to him this was already stuff that was
thousands or hundreds of years old. Socrates to him was older than Shakespeare is to us. Right, And so you think about what he's doing is his reading this stuff and then he's trying to digest it and make it accessible, not to an audience per se. I think that's a
little different, but to himself. He's what meditations is. These little bite sized sentences that you're talking about, they're they're his summaries and re articulations of the ideas and the things that he believes and the standards he's trying to live up to.
That's what he's doing.
It's his private riffing on these you know, timeless ideas. And so I think it's always been tough to go back to the original sources and get exactly what they mean. And so philosophy, just like music and art and uh and and all the mediums, is this process of remixing and rephrasing and re examining, and sometimes it comes out very close to the original, and sometimes we come up with something totally new when we do that.
It's interesting you just mentioned music, and music is one way of conveying stories or important things to us. And if I go back, you know, and I don't want to, and I just.
Want to stop. We'll stop off because I don't want.
To sort of overload the whole discussion around this particular aspect. But for me, if I go back and to the stories of Homer, which predates all of the dudes, sure Homer had this ability to talk about the philosophical things that you're talking about, Like, you know, we talk about virtues and ways of life and things that get us get us closer to.
Being better human beings.
But I'm putting into stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and by individuals within those stories, let's call them the heroes and heroines. Usually they're heroes, but who were able to endure in terms of endurance for example, and endure terrible outcomes just to get to a certain point in their life. And the best one is the Odyssey of
Odysseus trying to get home to his wife. But how important is it to either put this stuff in by sized tweet sort of versions, or alternatively, how important it is it because you're a writer, how important is it to put this stuff into storylines and an add a story around it so that people can become interested Because it can be a little bit dry. Ethan know what I mean to some people. To you and I we think is great.
But well, I'm in the middle of reading the Artissey to my seven year old right now, so I've been thinking a lot about this.
You're reading Robert Graves's version.
No, there's an American translator who's actually a biographer of one of the Stoics. She wrote a biography of Seneca called her name is Emily Wilson. She did a new translation a couple of years ago, and she just did the Iliad as well. The Rabert Graves edition is quite good. Rapper Graves, I think the Fagels transition I've also read. But the idea is to me, what I try to do in my writing is take the ideas of the Stoics and then demonstrate them through story or illustrate them
through story. So I feel like the Stoics already said it as good as it can be said. You know, they've distilled it down to its absolute essence as an idea or as a statement. But that's not typically how humans learn things. There's a reason Jesus spoke in parables. Abraham Lincoln probably the great you know, American communicator spoke in terms of stories, right, he would, he would tell anecdotes to make his point. There's something disarming about a story,
there's something memorable about a story. There's something about the way we understand things that I think makes stories particularly powerful. And so what I try to do in my books is is take an idea from the Stoics, how they treated obstacles as opportunities, and then I'll write a book demonstrating that or or extrapolating that out in the form of stories from men and women past and present. You know, great and evil people who who who illustrated that idea
or illustrated the perils of not living that idea. So that's that's what I try to do in all of my books.
It it's interesting you just mentioned the word parables, and you know, there's been many great storytellers who tell a story about in parables. When I look at today's leaders, and I don't want to let's just concentrate on some two of your leaders in your country, one of the biggest nations of the world.
They doesn't seem to talk in powables.
They sort of seem to me, and I'm not mean to be mean, but they sort of speak in riddles.
It's actually they're just confusing.
They make a lot of statements, but they don't they don't. Not only do they not tell a good story about how they want things to go, but they tend not to tell real stories. So they'll go I'm speaking of Susie as uh uh, a single mother of three living. You know, they make up these stories about these fake people. And and what the great leaders throughout history did was draw on myths or commonly known stories and use them
as as a way of illustrating ideas or principles. So so that that is a problem with the collapse of the teaching of the classics, of the collapse of the humanities, is we we don't We no longer have the same myths and ideas, you know. Like the last sort of thing that kind of pierced the cultural consciousness was probably like Harry Potter or something. And you can't have the president, you know, telling a story about Harry Potter.
It just seems silly.
But you need you need a common you know, you need a common sort of shared consciousness of figures big and small. Like that's what's so interesting the founding of America, that all the American founders were steeped in these ancient stories about the Greeks and Romans, and so they were
kind of almost play acting. And so when they would say these things that sort of get written down in history, people who knew their classical history understood, you know, the plays they were referencing or the historical figures they were alluding to, and it sort of imbued everything with this kind of epic noss right, And we lack that today, and I think that it makes it hard for us to come together when we don't sort of share a culture in that way.
And do you think it is that because the audience lacks the general knowledge so much so that the person speaking to them is no point talking to him about these epic stories, which, as you said, like Abraham Lincoln, his audience knew this history and generally speaking that we was toward the stuff at school. I guess well, parents talked about it. You know, parents probably told stories because you know, we didn't have all the other distractions.
Do you think therefore it's impossible for current leaders to be able to.
Do what say someone like Abraham Lincoln did and tell those to have stories, And therefore our current leaders and more talking about falsehoods and fakeness and all the short term stuff that we generally get out of social media.
Is that the reason I don't.
Think it's imposs I don't think it's impossible. I just think it's it's much harder, right. And so that's what that's what demagogues do or populists do, is they they they do tell a story which is like, they're those people over there, and those people are bad, and those people are the source of all of the problems and evils of life, right, And that is a very timeless story. The story of the scapegoat is a very sort of timeless, uh you know, universal.
Sort of trope.
And so I do think we're seeing some of the negative of it. But but I think it's been a while since since any of the major nations had had a really great leader who could tell a story about.
You know where we're going.
I mean even even even Trump. You know, Trump's saying make America great again. He's saying, like, make it like it used to be. He's not able to say, I here's how I think it should be going forward. So there there's just something there's something lacking about our ability to to sort of share ideas or or aspirations that I do think is a.
Problem if I if I got back, because I'm trying to work out where you became.
Two things, you developed yourself into a great rata, and that's a skill, thank you. The second thing is that what you're write about you also had learned about. And we've already you've already explained to me that NINETEENA started with reading the Marcus Releases tweets. But how did you become a great writer? Because that's a big skill. I mean, what is the process if you go back to when you're No. One in twenty how'd you start this process off? What was you and what were your influences?
Well?
I was I became a writer in a very old school way in that I was the apprentice to a great writer. So I was a research assistant to a writer named Robert Green, who's one of the great nonfiction writers of the of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. And I learned the craft from him, and I worked for him for many years. He showed me how books work, he showed me how to tell stories, he showed.
Me how to research.
I learned in that way and I think, you know, today people think it's you know, you throw something up online and he either finds an audience or it doesn't. I wrote every day on line for you know, several years between my first book and hitting a best selling you know, hitting the New York Times bestseller list was a.
Period of several years. After that.
It was a It was an apprenticeship literally and then an apprenticeship figuratively in sort of doing the thing over and over and over again and learning not just how to do the thing better, but also how to engage and interact with an audience. You know, comedians talk about you just got to get up on stage a lot of times.
And that is one one advantage.
That the internet, you know, offers people is that it is possible to get a lot of reps. And I got a lot of reps in my twenties just writing and writing and writing and writing, and you know, eventually that I think that paid off.
It's pretty cool that you got to sort of deal with, you know, someone write a book as powerful as a forty forty eight Laws of Power, Like, I mean, that's not necessarily saying that that book's are exactly my piece of cake. But none it is a pretty it's a
pretty big deal and great a pretty successful person. Lots of people always ask me questions about mentorship, so maybe, you know, maybe you can tell us in a philosophical way, the philosophy and the philosophy around seeking a mentor and how you I don't want to use the word make use, but how you take advantage of what the mentor has to offer.
What does it mean? Mentorship?
It's a weird thing because a mentorship is something essential and yet it is also something that's a little bit ineffable. I sometimes I'll get emails from people and they'll say, hey, will you be my mentor? They say, what's the How can I find a mentor? And that's not really how it works, you know. In the old days, yeah, you would be attached as an apprentice to someone and there would be a contract and you're basically like an indentured servant.
It doesn't work that way anymore. You have to you have to show potential, you have to have some momentum and somebody who needs someone. It's weird to say, like they'll find you, but that's kind of how it works.
Right.
You don't go around, you don't go to a bar and you just ask people, Hey, will you be my girlfriend? Will you be my boyfriend? Right, it's a process that ensues, and part of why it ensues is that you show yourself as someone who's going somewhere right.
And so my.
Relationship with Robert Green began because I was already working for another author and I was working for someone else and as sort of we were, you know, in the same proximity to each other, and he happened to need one at that time. And you know, I got a shot, and I think that's really important. You'll get a shot. It's just what do you do with that shot? And I think I managed to take good advantage of it.
And then you have to understand, you know that the mentor is paying you with the most priceless thing there is, which is their time, their very hard one insights, and so you have to figure out what is it that you're trying to get out of this thing?
How?
How what is success to you? I find sometimes in young people that I've worked for, I see something in them, but I seem to want it for them more than they want it for themselves. And that can be you know, that's the death knell to a potential you know, mentor mentee relationship.
How important is it do you think in terms of your career and and perhaps more importantly your opportunities, like you know, mentorship opportunities for example, you know green.
Is it for you to show value?
So you know, like one thing I know in my life is that the people that I'm attracted to is someone who's who's building an awareness campaign, maybe unnaturally not even realized in doing it, but that's something that's valuable to me. And as you say, I think mentors choose the mentee as a party exact.
So how important because you're putting something you know, you're.
Putting value out there, and obviously someone's will the value. Did you know you're putting value out there? Did you actually say I'm going to put value out there or this is a topic I'm really really interested and I'm going to become the best at it.
Yeah, you got to find something that you're good at that maybe other people aren't good at yet that is a value.
You know.
I'll get emails from people and they'll say like, hey, I want to work for you, I'll work for free, I'll do anything. And what they don't understand what you're saying when you say that to a busy person, is hey, i'd like you to figure out how you can help me, right, And I don't have time for that. But if someone emails me and says, hey, I notice you're doing this thing.
This other person who's a successful writer is doing this other thing that I think you should be doing, and I can do that for you, or hey, why aren't you doing X Y or z? Or have you thought about doing X, Y or z. Now, me and that person might have a conversation because I'd be like, oh, I didn't think about that, or oh, sure, I'll give you a shot to do that. And so what I
did are very early on. The reason I was able to work with all these different authors is I really I came to understand, you know, how internet marketing worked and how blogs worked at a time when this was still very very new. And so I there were so many things that Robert could teach me, but there was one thing that I could help him with, and that's where the exchange.
And what was that?
What was that I could help him with Internet stuff? You know, I was the young kid who understood how computers worked. And some of these authors whose work I really admired, you know, didn't have time to figure all that stuff out, and that's where the exchange happened.
Yeah, so it was so more of the reverse.
It wasn't so much you wanted to ask him to be your mentor. It was more like he wanted you to become his mentee because there was something valuable in exchange for what he needed as well, and because you know, lots of times. I recently was talking to some real estate agents and they were saying to me, you know, how do I become valuable to you know, how do I get more listings in Australia. You got to get listing, that's how you make money as a real estate agent.
And I said, well, if maybe you've got to present yourself as something valuable to these individuals, I suppose just another transaction that they're all put.
You know, there's every real estate agent, does.
You know what's valuable to people in your in your district and just write about it, you know, and publish it somewhere wherever. It's on Instagram, I don't care where you do it, but just get to your audience and they will select you. I mean, people get selected.
That's how I That's how I got my start as a writer, before I published a book, before I was even writing anything publicly, I started an email list where I just recommended books that I thought were good, and over time I developed a small audience of people who loved books, and at some point I was able to go, hey, I've recommended hundreds of books to you over the last several years and you like some of them. Is there a chance that you might like this book that I wrote?
And that's what kicked off my career. And so I think whether it's mentorship or building a client base or you know, an audience, it's all rooted in this idea of where are you providing value? And you start there instead of which is you know it's funny one. That's one of the laws of the forty eight Laws of Power, Robert Green says, always appeal to self interest, never mercy or gratitude. And so when you say, hey, help me, I really need something from you, that's not a compelling offer.
But when you say, hey, look what I can do this is valuable, that's a very that's a much more compelling thing to say.
And no doubt you've read these the letters of Mackievelli to the Prince, which when I used to set up my business as many many years ago, any young guys just to come and iced to give them the book. There was a book with all the let not all the letters, but some of the letters in and I used to talk about, Yeah, I used to just say read this because we used to take over other businesses.
And Mackievelli was about trying to say to the Prince, look, when you take over another territory, this is the way you've got to be a lot of people attribute Machiavelian principles as been quite evil and manipulative. An actual fact, I don't find him that way. I find them quite practical practically outcomes. How how do does how do you
see Machiavellian principles sort of panning out? Let's say, for example, for importance of a business person to have read those principles, someone who goes and makes buyers business and bill's employment people and employees, bills, audiences. How important those principles to you?
Do you think that reallyvant?
I mean, I think they're very principal. I think they're very principal. And I would actually say Machiavelli was a very principled game. And this is a guy who's tortured for his belief that that that Florence actually should be a republic. He was, he was actually anti prince, but he was he was smart enough to see how how a powerful print should operate. But I think a lot about this a lot with my books. Look, I love
ancient philosophy. I'm a nerd for these things, but I'm also very realistic, and I understand that most people are not. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build my platform. I spend a lot of time thinking about the titles, the positioning, the pricing, the approaches of the books, because I'm doing exactly what Machiavelli and Robert Green talked about, which is, I want to make it clear that this book is what you need. It's
not what I think you need. I want to make it clear that this is this is valuable to you, This does something for you, as opposed to coming at it the way I unfortunately too many people do, which is they go, this is really important, and you're an idiot if you don't know about it right, And No, you have to meet the audience where they are and the audience is busy, the audience is distracted, the audience preconceived notions about things, and you have to find a
way in. And if you can't be strategic, and I would say a little bit Machiavellian, you're probably not gonna make it.
Would you?
Would you mind explain to the audience, our audience. I'm given what you just said. What do you say the difference between some like Machiavelio, not the one of us knew in but what he's led us said to the prince versus, for example, the stall and the process of say resputant.
I don't know that that's not my uh my area of expertise historically, but but I think you know what's interesting about Machiavelli is that Machiavelli was trying to look back at history and deduce some patterns, good and bad that we can learn from. He's not saying you should do all these things, but he is saying that you
got to be aware of all these things. And that is a thing I talk a lot about in the new book, this idea of how having some a pragmatic streak that if you just think that because you're right, if you just think that because your cause is just it's going to succeed, you're going to be sorely mistaken.
At the same time, if your cause isn't right, if there aren't if there isn't something behind it, if there isn't some real principles to it, you know, you may succeed, but I don't think it's going to be a particularly meaningful and significant success. And so there is a balance there. I think the Stoics tried to strike it well, you know, they tried to They tried to understand the ways of the world and try to inshit a little bit closer to where they thought it should be. And I do
think we need more people like that. You know, just tweeting about a problem doesn't do anything about it if you don't have the power to bring it into existence, and that is a really important, you know, aspect of all of this.
You said something really interesting about, you know, how you set your title, and in twenty twelveies you put out of the book trust me, I love this one.
I love you. Trust me.
I'mlyining Confessions of a Medium manipulate. He's plain what the book was about and obviously gets our attention. The headline gets the attention, but obviously the headline's more pisstike as not really what the book's about.
I guess no, I was doing an expose of the media system. But what I looked at is that there were a lot of really interesting books of media criticism, historically and contemporary, but they tended to be read only by people in the media and therefore had almost no impact and did not sell well. And so as I as I thought about how I was going to position and write that book, I thought, I want to reach a bigger audience than that, and so I, you know, I decided to put some of the ideas in the
book to practice. And you know, to me, if it's one thing to talk about something, but you've also got to be you've also got to have some proof that you know what you're talking about. And that's what I was trying to do that book.
But was it did you learn something in particular? Because it's not really philosophical as such, but it's is it more like a.
Although that is trust me I'm lying. Is the thing we call the liar's paradox, which is can you trust someone who's told you they've they're lying? So it's you know, I was supposed to be provocative, but but but the idea in that book was, look, these are the forces that are acting on the information that you are consuming. And and I'm not saying it should be this way. I'm saying this is the way that it is. And I know this for a fact because I've not only
seen it, but I've done it. And you know, it's funny that book came out and and it did do very well, but there were a lot of people, particularly people in the media, that said, you know that they've kind of played a game of shoot the messenger, and the result was they were slow in making a lot of the changes that you know, we have needed to make as a society, and that we're still dealing with
the consequence. So, you know, I have a mixed, you know, feeling about that book, you know, twelve years after it came out.
But what it did what I wanted.
It to do, which was it it made public things that I felt like were kind of open secrets in that industry.
So your new book, what's your new book called? Which you are about to release?
So I've been doing this this series on the Cardinal Virtue. So I did a book on courage. I did a book on self discipline, and this new one is about the virtue of justice. It's called right thing right now, good values, good character, good deeds.
That's a very interesting one given the American situation politically at the moment in terms of justice. Can you give me a little bit of annoyed about the thesis in that particular book that won on justice?
Well, I agree with your sentiment about the American situation, but I very much wrote a book that's not about legal justice. I tried to write a book about about the more personal form of justice, the standards we hold ourselves to, the principles we act with. That Mark Suwas said that basically the purpose of life was good character
and acts for the common good. And to me, that's a much more urgent definition of justice than the one we think about, which is, you know, what did the jury say, What did the judge say, what does the law say. It's not that these things aren't important, of course they are. The justice system is the cornerstone of a free and fair society. And yet just because something is illegal or not illegal doesn't mean it's right or
it's wrong. There's something above and below that the sort of standards we hold ourselves to that I think are much more important.
And I mean, I have a view that the law is just legal fiction. It's fictions turn into legislation by parliaments precedents, which you know should actually reflect the sorts of philosophical points that you're making. So justice and legal system should reflect what's your book and justice talk about. But unfortunately it's forever failing us these days.
I want to go back to the first book, the book I think it was on courage.
Yes, okay, it's a very difficult concept courage, And I remember reading once and I think it was Aristotle said this, but courage sits somewhere between recklessness and cowardice, but not in the middle. So how do we how do we work out what courage is, particularly at a personal level?
Yeah, Aristotle was that's the famous Golden mean or the Aristotilian mean, the idea that the virtues often set between two vases.
And I think is right.
Look, the virtues are inseparable from each other, right, because courage in pursuit of in unjust gore is not courage as a virtue. Right discipline, disciplined commitment to the wrong idea is also not wisdom, right, and so so the virtues all kind of balance each other out. But but I agree, you know, courage isn't just recklessly charging into battle. It's not putting pushing all your chips into the middle of the table. On every hand, it's it's knowing what's important.
It's knowing what the right amount is, and it's knowing when you're going to put you know, your ass on the line, so to speak. And so when when we think about courage, it's easy to think of courage and isolation, but of course what that courage is pursuing is where.
Justice comes in.
So it's been an interesting series to do because it's hard to say where one virtue begins and the other ends.
And it becoes.
You know, some we are younger people in particular, but continually continuously confronted with that person is being aloki to the at least being said they're courageous. It could be an an NFL player, it could be a rugby league player, it could be a basketball it could be a business person. You know, and we get these iconic people up there that we sort of in social media sort of does this to us, tries to force the young people to look to that individual as someone who represents all forms
of courage. Yeah, we don't know anything about their their story, and I find courage to be one of the most challenging things to explain to younger people. And your book doesn't go through it like in a in a deep storytelling way.
It does, it does.
I tried to look at examples of of, you know, just overcoming simple fear. I tried to look at it as you know, sort of taking severe risks in the endurance required to sustain that courage. And then I wanted to look at that sort of true selfless courage, you know, when when people give everything in pursuit of an idea or a country or a cause. So yeah, I think courage it's hard. It's hard to distill courage down to
a tweet. That's why I wrote a whole book about it, right, It's it's a tough thing to wrap your head around, but it's hard. It's also hard to find, uh, a country or a cause or a tradition that doesn't hold courage up as one of the most important of the virtues. So I think courage is is this, you know, courage is one of those things that you you can't give it a simple definition, but we also seem to know it when we see it.
Well, we're looking forward to seeing you in July when you come out to Australia's any Melbourbrisman and I'm sure the dates all be coming up shortly and we'll be able to put up on our website just quickly. Your one hour talk. Are you going to talk about your last the last the latest book in the previous two books? Are you going to just give us a full rundown of the the you know, the four sort of categories you want to talk.
About I want to talk about.
I want to talk about all the ideas in Stoic philosophy and how we can apply them to our actual lives, which to me is what what philosophy is all about.
Well, it's going to be awesome and and I'm going to try to get one of those three because I'm always traveling around the joint. So I'd love to hear you and good luck, Jan Thanks very much for coming on today. It's been awesome.
Thanks so much, Mark, I appreciate it.