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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.

Hello, it is Matt and Alice from British Scandal here and we wanted to let you know that this season we are very excited to be covering the Cambridge Spies.

It's got everything you could possibly want from a series of British Scandal, treachery in the establishment, overconfident public school boys and strange meetings on part benches.

Check, check, and double check. You can search and follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and add free via the OneDriPlus subscription in Apple Podcasts or the OneDriApp.

Hey, I'm Cassie Depegel, the host of Wanderies against the odds. In our next season, Amelia Earhart wants to make history by flying across the Atlantic alone, but brutal weather and malfunctioning equipment could leave her lost its sea.

Listen to against the odds on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. So we have this idea, right, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And it's pretty much universally undeniably and disputably true. I mean, you've even probably experienced it in your own life.

Not just watching power sort of work at or change people in your lives, but you've probably even caught yourself doing it. I mean, when I'm writing an ego is the enemy, I'm talking about how the ego is this kind of insidious voice that changes us. And so what's so fascinating to me about Marcus really is, is not just like, here's a guy who had absolute power.

Here's a guy who's selected for absolute power at a very young age, not just like selected for bloodline reasons, he's like he's chosen for it. Hadrian, see some potential in this boy and begins to groom him to eventually take over.

And so for, for literally decades of his early life, he's the king in waiting. And that can't be good for someone. It certainly wasn't good for Nero who had a pretty similar trajectory to Marcus realist.

And so how do their reigns end up being so fantastically different, right? Just on a human level is it just one was just born special and the other was born broken. I don't think that's right. I think something happened, right? And so I'm fascinated by Marcus, really as a leader, the ancients were certainly fascinated by Marcus as a leader because they'd seen all the other emperors go the other direction.

And so how did he, as Matthew Arnold said, here's a guy who's given all the power and responsibility in the world and yet yet he proves himself worthy of it. So I think the leadership strategies of Marcus are really are worth exploring certainly worth learning about and I would say worth emulating.

And so in today's episode, I want to look at some leadership lessons, some leadership secrets, if you will, of the great Marcus are really us and I'll leave it to you to compare and contrast them to the current leaders that we see locally, nationally, internationally today.

And if you can, you have any say on who those leaders are. Look, I'm not saying everyone should be Marcus realist, but we can expect certain things of the people that we pay and place in power. And I think there's some lessons here for that, but most importantly, most directly, I think these are some lessons you can apply in your own life and I hope you do so.

He wasn't a natural born leader, he was reclusive in bookish by nature. He didn't like telling people what to do. He had no interest in fame. He had spent his entire reign as an emperor at war without any prior military experience. Yet as one contemporary put it, Marcus are really not only possessed all the other virtues, but also was a better ruler than anyone else who had ever done emperor.

Imagine he had absolute power and it not only didn't corrupt him, it made him a better person. A later historian tells us that in his own time, people referred to him as Marcus my father and that it was nearly impossible to find someone who didn't have some kind of display of the great leader in their home.

Never was worship more legitimate he writes, thanks to Marcus areelius the world was governed by the best and greatest man of his age. How did this happen? What did Marcus do to become one of, if not the greatest leader in history? Well, here is how.

It begins with preparation, the emperor Hadrian never had a son so he devised a very specific succession plan. He adopted a 51 year old man and Antoninus Pius on the condition that he adopted Marcus areelius in turn. Hadrian thought this would provide for something like five years of training for Marcus. Instead Antoninus lived and instructed Marcus areelius for 23 years, an incredible unprecedented apprenticeship.

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