Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

There are some things that look like strength, but aren't.

An aggressive mean person can seem strong, but oftentimes they aren't. It's an

act. All cruelty, Seneca wrote, springs from weakness. The bully, almost invariably, has been

bullied. And so it goes for ego. To the untrained eye can be mistaken for confidence. The person's

self-centeredness, their certainty, their entitlement. This seems like

the way that only the most important and gifted person in the world could get away with acting.

In reality, that person doesn't feel that way inside at all. On the contrary, they feel very small.

Nero, for instance, demanded that enormous audiences celebrate his greatness. This was also the same emperor

who banished a poet from Rome for being too talented and thus a threat. We have to be wise

enough to recognize these signs of weakness in our leaders and our bosses and the people that we

look up to. Most of all, we have to recognize it in ourselves. Confidence is quiet. It doesn't need to

be celebrated or worshipped. True strength and power are restrained. They are not easily threatened.

They don't need to make themselves felt, except for in the most extraordinary circumstances.

Ego is not just the enemy. It is the canary in the coal mine. It is a sign that you're going in the wrong direction.

They're not as good or as strong or as secure as you think you are. Ego is the enemy. I mean, I got a tattooed on my arm and of course I wrote a book about it, which you can grab signed copies of here at the painted porch or at store.dailystow.com.. And we have, uh, the ego is the enemy coin,

uh, which I know plenty of people carry around with them. I've seen coaches hand them out to

their teams. You can check all that out at store.dailystoic.com. All right, so I got these two talks in Portland and San Francisco in early June, and I've got to figure out what I'm going to wear.

You know, normally I just wear a heavy metal shirt and running shorts or something, but I can't do that on stage.

And I can't wear the same stuff on stage for all of the events because it would screw up the video.

And that's why I'm shopping on Quince right now. I want something that looks good on stage, that I'm not going to

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