Welcome back, Precaptan. Let's have our chitty chat that I've been promising you, and also what will be the start of season three. So this is season three episode zero. After my impromptu I'm not dead announcement, I received a lot of feedback about, and it's important here to say that it was all respectful, all kindly worded, which I appreciated, and some of which was in support

of and some of which was not in support of my choice to make this show a bit more news and

politics focused, at least half of the time. In particular, one listener included the following,

and to this one listener, I want to let you know. I'm not going to say your

name, obviously, but I want to let you know. They're not trying to be a jerk by highlighting your

words here specifically. But they are, or rather they do, to perfectly serve my purposes regarding

this change. And so I need to share them. And then I need to talk about them. This person said,

and I'm quoting directly,

I've got a bit of a concern, especially for us novices who are still finding our footing with

these ideas. I've noticed, even in myself sometimes, how easy it is to slip from genuinely

stoic analysis of externals into simply complaining about them. It feels like many people are

looking for validation for their political frustrations, or even a kind of free therapy for not

liking the current government, rather than truly engaging with the idea that politics is fundamentally

and external and an indifferent. Now, the reason

that I am highlighting this and now talking about it is that there is a snare trap set in these words,

even if the person doesn't know it, and I believe they don't, and didn't set it themselves,

and I believe they didn't. And it represents a widespread problem

within the contemporary Stoic community. Namely, it is easy to assent to the impression that

politics, being, as this individual correctly noted, both a Stoic indifferent and an external,

that politics do not matter to our practice. This is, however,

incredibly wrong. Politics matter a great deal to our practice as Stoics, and I can hear you asking.

But Tanner, how can this be? How can something you are saying right now is an indifferent and an external matter?

...