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 the main thing. There's nothing wrong with success. There's nothing wrong with power. There's nothing wrong with living a

nice life with achievement or admiration. Certainly many Stilocks did precisely that. Seneca, Cato,

Marcus Aurealist, they were important and well known. They were admired. They were influential.

But you know what? They would have shrugged all that off. They appreciated the success, but it wasn't

something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn't how they defined themselves.

The main thing, Walter Wade says in Walker Percy's Stoicism-inspired novel, The Moviegoer,

the main thing, Banks, is to be humble,

to make golden fleece, and be humble about it. It might have meant a lot to others, you

was saying, but it didn't mean anything to him. That's how we might assume that Marcus Aurelius

felt about a lot of what was thrown at him. In fact, one of the lines in meditations suggests as much,

where he says that he measures himself not by how many honors he's received, but how many he's

turned down. He didn't make golden fleece, but he did remind himself that the purple cloak of the

emperor was nothing more than an ordinary one died by shellfish blood. Clearly, he still tried to do things. Clearly,

he was still active in the world. He just measured himself by his humility, by his indifference,

more than he did, by his achievement or status. And so must we. We can still try to climb the ladder

of success. We can be powerful. We can live a nice life.

The main thing, though, is to do this and be humble even so.

Humble even if you have achieved an impressive amount, even if you have done many impressive things.

These A.R. things. These AI tools are super powerful.

They can be super helpful.

But like anything online,

...