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

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

This is how it's meant to be done.

Because so much of Stoicism comes down to us in books, it's easy to assume that it's

a written philosophy. That philosophy was something the Stoics did alone, in private, hunched over

a wax tablet or some unfurled scroll. Isn't that how we got meditations or Seneca's letters?

Yeah, but that's not how we got the philosophy itself.

Stoicism began on a porch in Athens, the Stoapokile, the painted porch,

where Zeno would talk and trade ideas with whoever was around.

The great playwright David Mamet had a funny way of putting it on the Daily Stoic podcast a while back.

He says what he loves about the Stoics is that they were just porch guys,

just regular people hanging out talking about how to become the best version of themselves.

Cato, the man widely admired as one of the greatest Stilics,

we don't even have secondhand reports of his words,

but we know that he liked to do his philosophizing on foot, or Plutarch tells us that he would

take meandering walks through Rome, talking with whomever he met on his rounds, and that for all

his austere habits, he loved philosophical dinner parties, where they talked about ideas long

into the night. You know, Epictetus never wrote anything down. His discourses comes to us from a student

who tells us that whatever he used to hear him say he wrote down, word for word as best he could,

as a record for later use of Epictetus's thoughts and frank expressions.

And that's how Epictetus taught in person going back and forth in real time.

So for most of its history, Stoicism was a spoken conversational philosophy.

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