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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four

Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school.

We have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Obviously one of the perks of my life is that I get to have conversations with the great Robert Green, I think one of the best living writers on the planet.

We have these phone conversations every couple of weeks. And so what he and I thought we would do is we said, why are we just doing this privately? What if we just got on zoom and recorded and people could listen?

Because maybe some of the things that we're going through that we're thinking about, some of the stuff that's influencing his writing could be beneficial to everyone.

So I'm really excited to have this episode for you. We talk about the rampant irrationality of our time. We talk about political polarization. We talk about falling for scams and cons, which I think is a, it's own pandemic these days. We talk about conspiracy theories.

We talk about how one if one wishes to be politically or socially engaged, how one does that strategically, how one does that rationally, how one does that and actually has some real effect or impact on the world.

Talk about all this and more. I love talking to Robert. I feel like, you know, I've been, I've been having these conversations with him since I was 18 or 19 years old and it has transformed how I see the world that's helped make me into the writer that I've been lucky enough to become.

So I'm so excited to share this with you. Here is my interview with the great Robert Green. Obviously you should check out all of his books and of course if you have checked them out and want to follow him online, he's at Robert Green official on Instagram.

You can also go to his website, sign up for his email list at power seduction to war.com.

Really excited to chat. I feel like in a world that seems like it's sometimes tearing itself to pieces. There's this line from Churchill that I like where he talks about as World War II is breaking out. He says, it felt good today to put a thousand years between me and the 20th century, meaning he was reading and writing about history as a way of calming himself down and getting perspective. And I feel like

your books are a great opportunity for people to understand the present by looking at the past.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I agree with the fact that it's kind of calming. It gives you perspective. It makes you realize that the bad days will end that we're in a particular cycle of history and that nothing lasts forever.

In my last kind of podcast, I was talking about irrationality and I brought up the story of paracles and of the plague that hit Athens kind of drawing a comparison a little bit with COVID.

Although, obviously, I recognize the plague is not the same thing as the coronavirus. It was sort of as a metaphor for what we're going through and the kind of irrationality that erupted in Athens kind of triggered this very powerful plague to give people a sense of 2000 years, essentially, of perspective on this or more than 2000 years of how these cycles occur and how outbreaks of irrationality occur.

Even in the richest times in history, which is fifth century BC Athens, the height of what we would call rationality and that it led to a whole century, the fourth century BC and Athens of incredible irrationality of superstitious beliefs.

It's also the period of Plato and Aristotle. So it was very contradictory. But these things happen in waves. People go crazy, they go insane collectively. It's not just a pandemic of a virus. It's a pandemic of emotions of irrationality that people can't handle.

So very much I agree with you. History gives you a deep sense of perspective and can help you live some of the depression that comes from being mired in a moment that seems so chaotic.

It's interesting. Yeah, you read your books and it's filled with stories of irrational people and a con men and it's filled with stories from history. And I think maybe we look at those and we go, oh, that was a long time ago.

It's different now. And then we're we're surprised when we see those traits or those tendencies reemerge in our modern world.

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