You Are Not Fixed | How A Stoic Would Respond To A Tyrant
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If we don't believe we're capable of change, then we are definitely not capable of change.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. |
| 0:14.6 | We all have bad habits. Some of us procrastinate. Nearly all of us, as Seneca said, are slaves to something, food or sex |
| 0:21.5 | or booze or ambition. We don't work as hard as we should, or we work too hard and too quick with our temper or we're too slow to ask for help. The point is, we're not what we could be. And in some cases, we're quite messed up. Indeed, we are all quite flawed. On an episode of The Daily Stoic podcast with Tim Urban, he's the creator of |
| 0:39.2 | Wait But Why, and he's the author of this book called What's Our Problem. I talked to Tim about |
| 0:44.4 | his lifelong struggle with some of these very habits, namely distraction and procrastination. |
| 0:50.9 | And Tim was quite aware about how his weaknesses in these areas have made things harder for him |
| 0:56.1 | over the years, but he also expressed a sincere belief in his ability to change and grow. In other words, |
| 1:03.0 | he was broken but not fixed. He retains, despite this discouragement, a growth mindset. He refuses to relinquish what the Stoics |
| 1:12.5 | believed was our ultimate power, our sense of agency over our own thoughts, our emotions, |
| 1:18.6 | and our responses to life. You know, it's easy to be cynical about ourselves. We know more than |
| 1:24.9 | anyone how long we've been struggling with things. We know how ingrained our bad habits are, how hard it's going to be to get over them. |
| 1:32.3 | But we can't give up. We can't quit on ourselves. |
| 1:35.3 | If we don't believe we're capable of change, who will? |
| 1:38.3 | And if we don't believe we're capable of change, then we are definitely not capable of change. |
| 1:43.3 | We must remember the hopeful note that |
| 1:45.6 | Marcus Aurelius strikes at the end of meditations. Within 10 days, he says, you will seem a god to those |
| 1:52.6 | to whom you are now a beast and an ape if you return to your principles and the worship of reason. |
| 1:59.3 | I really want to tell you about the daily stoic habits course, |
| 2:03.0 | daily stoic habits for success, habits for happiness. It helps you do what the stoics are talking |
| 2:08.7 | about, which is how to avoid bad habits, how to form better new habits. I think it's one of the best |
| 2:13.6 | things we've done. It's six weeks of habit formation, thinking about philosophy, applying |
| 2:18.8 | it to your everyday life. These are habits I try to apply in my life that Marcus and Seneca and |
... |
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