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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.

From Wondery comes a new series, flipping the bird, Elon versus Twitter. A story about what happens when the richest man on the planet decides to acquire a powerful social media company in the name of free speech. But does he have what it takes?

It started off promising. Or is this all just about Elon? He's essentially mad that his tweets aren't performing as well as he wouldn't expect them to. But really just felt like, okay, this really is just a platform being rolled by a dictator who does things on his own limbs.

And what will be left of Twitter by the time he's done?

Basically my entire team was gone by the end of it. Infrastructure was just completely gutted. He'll like tweet a thing and then everyone's like, we got a word on that now because he tweeted it.

I'm supposed to believe this man is a genius. It just felt like everything was kind of descending into chaos.

While I'm flipping the bird, wherever you get your podcasts, hey, prime members, you can listen episodes at free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

Ego is this sort of timeless force that is constantly getting in between us and what we want to do. And it's taking this goal, this brass ring we're after, and it's moving it a little bit further away each time.

So if Ego is so destructive, right? Why is it so common? My theory is that Ego is sort of a defense mechanism.

Things are hard, things are scary. We don't have a lot of good examples of what a humble, confident leader looks like.

And so because it's scary, because we're far from home, because we are trying to do things that we don't have a lot of good examples for Ego's like a blanket.

It's a shield. It's a way to make us feel less scared. Rather than owning that feeling, we put this sort of falseness in front of us.

In alcoholics anonymous, they say that Ego stands for edge in God out. The idea being that instead of sort of being humble, instead of being small, instead of appreciating the reality of our situation, we take up Ego as this sort of protective armor.

It's not armor because it makes us more vulnerable in the long run. Instead of Ego, I want you to have confidence. Confidence is strong, confidence is earned, confidence is based on information.

It's not based on that voice in your head. What we're going to go through is sort of the three phases that we happen to be in in life, right?

We're either aspiring to do something where either in the middle of great success, or we are experiencing adversity.

Every person is at one of those three phases at some point in the course of their life. We're constantly rotating through all that.

You were aspiring to play college football. Now you're here playing college football. Tomorrow you could be benched, you could experience some injury, you could struggle in school, you could struggle on the playing field.

We're going to be at one of those three phases. And Ego is distinctly different at each one of those phases, but equally problematic at all of them.

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