Name: Ryan Holiday of Daily Stoic on the Fascinating Life of Marcus Aurelius
Uploaded: 2022-06-23T17:56:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ryan Holiday of Daily Stoic on the Fascinating Life of Marcus Aurelius' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ryan Holiday of Daily Stoic on the Fascinating Life of Marcus Aurelius' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-23. Transcript available.

I knew I knew I didn't want to be a person who's just like taking a
percentage of what other people do I wanted to make stuff like I wanted to
actually produce and create things so I knew I wanted to be a writer and when I
first read the Stoics I was just like shit this is it like when I read
meditations for the first time I was 19 I was sitting in my college apartment
and I was just like not only have I never read anything like this I've never
even heard of anything like this because you have the most powerful man in the
world writing notes to himself that he never thinks are going to be published
like pretty much every other book ever written was like a writer writing to an
audience yeah and meditations is was never intended to be published he'd
probably be mortified that we even have it and so it was just a kind of
philosophy
and a way of thinking that I hadn't heard in any school you know in any class
from any adult in my life and I was like I want to tell people about this
Marcus Aurelius one of the more interesting things about this stuff that
he writes is how relevant it is today like when when you read it you wouldn't
imagine that this is being written by a man like how many years ago was that
eight
nineteen hundred two thousand years ago he's writing in like the mid 150s 160s
ad
it's very relevant like the way he writes the the it's the language is
incredibly familiar it's the same you know it's one of the things about you
know
we would always make fun of the way people talked a long time ago you know
wherefore thou there's a way of talking that we don't communicate like today
but
when Marcus Aurelius writes and you like you read meditations it seems very
current
well it does depend on the translation right because like if you are reading
and
people do this is I'll recommend Marcus Aurelius and they'll just like get what's
free on the internet or whatever if you're reading a translation from the
1850s or the 1600s it's going to be in Shakespearean English because
interesting
right because they're translating it into their part yeah and so the the right
translation is key do you remember which one you read I don't I like that there's
a
Gregory Hayes translation for the modern library which I think is the most like
lyrical and beautiful of all of them that's the one that I randomly bought on
Amazon and had no idea that it was gonna be the one that would hit me so with
the original ones in Latin so this is what's crazy about Marcus so Marcus lives
in Rome the Romans speak Latin but the philosophical language at that time was
Greek so Marcus was writing to himself in Greek so it gives it like when you
read
those passages or you listen to them and you're just like that is one of the
most beautiful things I've ever heard like there's this one passage where he's
like that he talks about like this a stock of grain bending low under its own
weight the way all of you know falls to the ground he talks about the way that
when you put bread in the oven it breaks open on top and we don't know why that
happens it's just this like beautiful inadvertent act of nature he's just like
writing like a poet like a great writer and again he's writing in his non-native
tongue to himself never expecting anyone would see it how fucking talent it'd
be
like finding out that's like a comedian is like funny in their diary you're
just
like wow you're just naturally that you're not turning it on or off right it's
just like intuitively part of you hmm yeah but I think your point about how it
feels timeless that actually does feel like a thing I've heard comedians say
which
is that like the specific is universal I don't think he was trying to talk to
the
audience I think he was trying he was so unflinchingly honest with himself that
he
was touching something universally human and that's why because like we should
not be
able to relate to his experience at all right I mean he's literally there is
literally a cult of the
emperor that worshiped the emperor and their spouse as living deities and he
controlled the largest army
in the world he had unlimited wealth he could kill or murder or torture or
exile anyone he wanted
um people cheered him as he walked in the streets there's no way we should be
able to be like
this passage was talking about struggling to get out of bed in the morning and
you want to huddle
under the warm covers like how how because I guess people are people no matter
where you get in life
people are people and not everyone gives in to the temptations of being in that
position
and in his case I think it made him more more apt to reflect upon his thoughts
and find the source
of why he believed what he believed and why he thought what he thought yeah he
says in in meditations
he says be careful not to be caesarified don't be dyed purple because the
emperor wore a purple cloak
and purple purple if now we're just like the color purple to get purple it was
this complicated process
of different merchants actually the founder of stoicism was a merchant in tyrian
purple but like
these slaves would smash up sea slugs or sea snails dry them on rocks and this
dust would eventually become
like the source of purple so and he's like don't be stained purple so he was
acting like when he becomes
emperor he's like this will change you if you're not careful and you have to
actively work to make
sure that doesn't happen so he was aware of that that was that was the
character in gladiator right
he what wasn't that Marcus Aurelius was it based on him roughly loosely well it's
a it's I think one of the
great movies of all time but great movie he Peter O'Toole yes he's the one that
Joaquin Phoenix's
character kills at the beginning um and then a lot of the sort of things that
uh Maximus says are
sort of very stoic inspired the irony of that movie uh is that Joaquin Phoenix
probably underplays
how bad Marcus Aurelius his son was in real life really he really did get
killed by a gladiator
he was a psychopath uh
uh immediately destroys all of Marcus's work it's one of the tragedies of
Marcus that he has a like a POS son
uh I've always wondered like how that that that seemed like it's Joffrey from
game of thrones like that is a very common thing yeah why why is that like
like it's an archetype it is uh there's another great eastern emperor uh Cyrus
the great and he has a
shitty son too um you know it doesn't look like Queen Elizabeth's kids are that
great uh but I what's
interesting about Marcus is like it's weird that he's such this great man and
then most people know
nothing about him but like Marcus's father was not emperor so there's there's
what they call the five
good emperors so there's basically in all of Roman history there's like five
good emperors and they
happen in a row and they happen in a row because each one does not have a male
heir so they don't have
sons so in the Roman tradition it was much more common to if you didn't have a
son you would adopt a son
um and so the emperor Hadrian is old probably gay does not have any children
and he adopts uh he he sees
something in Marcus that they're very Marcus is young but he sort of starts
mentoring this boy
uh they actually go like hunting together like he sees something special in
this kid Marcus's nickname
was for Christmas or the truthful one um but he's like just a kid and Hadrian
realizes it's too young
to name him emperor so he selects a man named Antoninus Pius who's the like the
great politician of the time
and makes him emperor on condition that he adopt Marcus Aurelius so Marcus and
then the thinking was Antoninus
Pius would live for like five years and then Marcus would be king and in fact
he lives for like 19 years
so Marcus has like a 20-year apprenticeship in being the emperor under a man
who like could have killed him
who could have been corrupted by power but is this incredible example and that's
why at the beginning
of meditations Marcus has like a two-page thank you letter to Antoninus his
adopted stepfather
oh wow it's fucking crazy and his son what was the the deal with the wife uh
Marcus's wife yes
so Marcus's wife Faustina is I guess it would be Faustina is Antoninus's
daughter
so they're not related but that's they marry the family together Marcus loves
her uh they're married
a very long time uh there are rumors that she's unfaithful but as far as we
know Marcus pays you know
no attention to this does not believe them um but the tragedy of their marriage
is Marcus loses like
seven children before they reach adulthood
oh wow can you imagine that well that was very common back then though wasn't
it
seven's a lot though it is a lot but isn't that that's uh one of the reasons
why
the um general age that people lived to was so low back then people think that
people died
your age of expected death it wasn't that it's just like you you died in childbirth
you died you know
when you were young you died from infection it wasn't that people didn't live
as long yes like uh
there's lots of old people in Rome it's just like getting getting to over like
if you made it to 40
maybe you can make it to 80 right but like chances are you weren't going to
make it to 20.
yeah that's makes sense i mean they're all sword fighting and shit it's that's
also true i mean
just imagine you could cut your hand and die of an infection yeah real and
obviously they're
shitting in the streets and this fucking horrible even rich people don't have
toilets yeah like they
know nothing um so that's one of the sort of not rationalizations but if you're
like how does it go
so wrong that this great man leaves the empire to his son yeah well he does
have a male heir that's a
problem uh unlike all his predecessors but it's it's that every one of the sons
that he wanted
to succeed him died oh and that there there's some speculation that marcus's
plan so this is the other
crazy thing about marcus if i'm nerding out you can no please go so uh marcus
um has a stepbrother
through this crazy adoption process he has a stepbrother and so that he inherits
through hadrian it's a
complicated thing but let's he has a stepbrother and so like we know what kings
do to their rivals like
you have to kill them right the first emperor of rome octavian he's julius caesar's
nephew um julius
caesar has a half son with cleopatra um or he has a half brother or whatever he
has a has a son with
cleopatra a son out of wedlock um and uh octavian has two stoic teachers who
instruct him to murder
his rival which he promptly does uh or have murdered so the precedent was like
you can't have too many
caesars like you can't have more than one yeah uh viable heir um and marcus
when he he's antoninus's
favorite antoninus preps him he ascends to the throne the first thing marcus
does is he names his
brother lucius ferris co-emperor which is not only never happened basically
before orsons it is a nod to
how the republic was the republic of rome before it becomes a monarchy is led
by two consuls like two
elected presidents who serve together as a check against power so marcus by
naming he can't put it
back to a republic which is the plot of gladiator um he can name himself a co-emperor
and the i the
thinking is that's what he was planning to do with his sons but they all died
so in the movie joaquin
phoenix kind of kills the dad it kills the dad because marcus doesn't know in
in the movie not in real
life marcus aurelius knows his son cannot be king but in real life he passes it
to him so and how did
marcus aurelius die of the plague oh wow so that's the other crazy thing again
timeless marcus was
writing in what we now call the antonine plague like they named it after him um
but it's like a global
pandemic it starts in the east it overwhelms rome five ten million people die
they have no way of
stopping it uh so marcus leads through all of that and then the the suspicion
is that he catches it at
the end uh realizes he has it has to send his son away so he doesn't give it to
his son sets in motion
like a series of advisors who should lead his son uh and then his son promptly
like gets rid of all of
them and goes bad so how does a man like that who's so introspective and so
thoughtful particularly for
the times how does a man like that have a son that's such a piece of shit i don't
know i don't
know i mean one argument is he's a psychopath and there's sort of nothing you
can do like there's no
blame whatsoever the other argument the more likely one is like most great men
and we're talking about
history so it's mostly great men but again queen elizabeth has crappy kids uh
most great men are
shitty fathers gandhi was a bad father uh winston churchill was not a good
father why is that i think
they're busy

Ryan Holiday of Daily Stoic on the Fascinating Life of Marcus Aurelius

I knew I knew I didn't want to be a person who's just like taking a
percentage of what other people do I wanted to make stuff like I wanted to
actually produce and create things so I knew I wanted to be a writer and when I
first read the Stoics I was just like shit this is it like when I read
meditations for the first time I was 19 I was sitting in my college apartment
and I was just like not only have I never read anything like this I've never
even heard of anything like this because you have the most powerful man in the
world writing notes to himself that he never thinks are going to be published
like pretty much every other book ever written was like a writer writing to an
audience yeah and meditations is was never intended to be published he'd
probably be mortified that we even have it and so it was just a kind of
philosophy
and a way of thinking that I hadn't heard in any school you know in any class
from any adult in my life and I was like I want to tell people about this
Marcus Aurelius one of the more interesting things about this stuff that
he writes is how relevant it is today like when when you read it you wouldn't
imagine that this is being written by a man like how many years ago was that
eight
nineteen hundred two thousand years ago he's writing in like the mid 150s 160s
ad
it's very relevant like the way he writes the the it's the language is
incredibly familiar it's the same you know it's one of the things about you
know
we would always make fun of the way people talked a long time ago you know
wherefore thou there's a way of talking that we don't communicate like today
but
when Marcus Aurelius writes and you like you read meditations it seems very
current
well it does depend on the translation right because like if you are reading
and
people do this is I'll recommend Marcus Aurelius and they'll just like get what's
free on the internet or whatever if you're reading a translation from the
1850s or the 1600s it's going to be in Shakespearean English because
interesting
right because they're translating it into their part yeah and so the the right
translation is key do you remember which one you read I don't I like that there's
a
Gregory Hayes translation for the modern library which I think is the most like
lyrical and beautiful of all of them that's the one that I randomly bought on
Amazon and had no idea that it was gonna be the one that would hit me so with
the original ones in Latin so this is what's crazy about Marcus so Marcus lives
in Rome the Romans speak Latin but the philosophical language at that time was
Greek so Marcus was writing to himself in Greek so it gives it like when you
read
those passages or you listen to them and you're just like that is one of the
most beautiful things I've ever heard like there's this one passage where he's
like that he talks about like this a stock of grain bending low under its own
weight the way all of you know falls to the ground he talks about the way that
when you put bread in the oven it breaks open on top and we don't know why that
happens it's just this like beautiful inadvertent act of nature he's just like
writing like a poet like a great writer and again he's writing in his non-native
tongue to himself never expecting anyone would see it how fucking talent it'd
be
like finding out that's like a comedian is like funny in their diary you're
just
like wow you're just naturally that you're not turning it on or off right it's
just like intuitively part of you hmm yeah but I think your point about how it
feels timeless that actually does feel like a thing I've heard comedians say
which
is that like the specific is universal I don't think he was trying to talk to
the
audience I think he was trying he was so unflinchingly honest with himself that
he
was touching something universally human and that's why because like we should
not be
able to relate to his experience at all right I mean he's literally there is
literally a cult of the
emperor that worshiped the emperor and their spouse as living deities and he
controlled the largest army
in the world he had unlimited wealth he could kill or murder or torture or
exile anyone he wanted
um people cheered him as he walked in the streets there's no way we should be
able to be like
this passage was talking about struggling to get out of bed in the morning and
you want to huddle
under the warm covers like how how because I guess people are people no matter
where you get in life
people are people and not everyone gives in to the temptations of being in that
position
and in his case I think it made him more more apt to reflect upon his thoughts
and find the source
of why he believed what he believed and why he thought what he thought yeah he
says in in meditations
he says be careful not to be caesarified don't be dyed purple because the
emperor wore a purple cloak
and purple purple if now we're just like the color purple to get purple it was
this complicated process
of different merchants actually the founder of stoicism was a merchant in tyrian
purple but like
these slaves would smash up sea slugs or sea snails dry them on rocks and this
dust would eventually become
like the source of purple so and he's like don't be stained purple so he was
acting like when he becomes
emperor he's like this will change you if you're not careful and you have to
actively work to make
sure that doesn't happen so he was aware of that that was that was the
character in gladiator right
he what wasn't that Marcus Aurelius was it based on him roughly loosely well it's
a it's I think one of the
great movies of all time but great movie he Peter O'Toole yes he's the one that
Joaquin Phoenix's
character kills at the beginning um and then a lot of the sort of things that
uh Maximus says are
sort of very stoic inspired the irony of that movie uh is that Joaquin Phoenix
probably underplays
how bad Marcus Aurelius his son was in real life really he really did get
killed by a gladiator
he was a psychopath uh
uh immediately destroys all of Marcus's work it's one of the tragedies of
Marcus that he has a like a POS son
uh I've always wondered like how that that that seemed like it's Joffrey from
game of thrones like that is a very common thing yeah why why is that like
like it's an archetype it is uh there's another great eastern emperor uh Cyrus
the great and he has a
shitty son too um you know it doesn't look like Queen Elizabeth's kids are that
great uh but I what's
interesting about Marcus is like it's weird that he's such this great man and
then most people know
nothing about him but like Marcus's father was not emperor so there's there's
what they call the five
good emperors so there's basically in all of Roman history there's like five
good emperors and they
happen in a row and they happen in a row because each one does not have a male
heir so they don't have
sons so in the Roman tradition it was much more common to if you didn't have a
son you would adopt a son
um and so the emperor Hadrian is old probably gay does not have any children
and he adopts uh he he sees
something in Marcus that they're very Marcus is young but he sort of starts
mentoring this boy
uh they actually go like hunting together like he sees something special in
this kid Marcus's nickname
was for Christmas or the truthful one um but he's like just a kid and Hadrian
realizes it's too young
to name him emperor so he selects a man named Antoninus Pius who's the like the
great politician of the time
and makes him emperor on condition that he adopt Marcus Aurelius so Marcus and
then the thinking was Antoninus
Pius would live for like five years and then Marcus would be king and in fact
he lives for like 19 years
so Marcus has like a 20-year apprenticeship in being the emperor under a man
who like could have killed him
who could have been corrupted by power but is this incredible example and that's
why at the beginning
of meditations Marcus has like a two-page thank you letter to Antoninus his
adopted stepfather
oh wow it's fucking crazy and his son what was the the deal with the wife uh
Marcus's wife yes
so Marcus's wife Faustina is I guess it would be Faustina is Antoninus's
daughter
so they're not related but that's they marry the family together Marcus loves
her uh they're married
a very long time uh there are rumors that she's unfaithful but as far as we
know Marcus pays you know
no attention to this does not believe them um but the tragedy of their marriage
is Marcus loses like
seven children before they reach adulthood
oh wow can you imagine that well that was very common back then though wasn't
it
seven's a lot though it is a lot but isn't that that's uh one of the reasons
why
the um general age that people lived to was so low back then people think that
people died
your age of expected death it wasn't that it's just like you you died in childbirth
you died you know
when you were young you died from infection it wasn't that people didn't live
as long yes like uh
there's lots of old people in Rome it's just like getting getting to over like
if you made it to 40
maybe you can make it to 80 right but like chances are you weren't going to
make it to 20.
yeah that's makes sense i mean they're all sword fighting and shit it's that's
also true i mean
just imagine you could cut your hand and die of an infection yeah real and
obviously they're
shitting in the streets and this fucking horrible even rich people don't have
toilets yeah like they
know nothing um so that's one of the sort of not rationalizations but if you're
like how does it go
so wrong that this great man leaves the empire to his son yeah well he does
have a male heir that's a
problem uh unlike all his predecessors but it's it's that every one of the sons
that he wanted
to succeed him died oh and that there there's some speculation that marcus's
plan so this is the other
crazy thing about marcus if i'm nerding out you can no please go so uh marcus
um has a stepbrother
through this crazy adoption process he has a stepbrother and so that he inherits
through hadrian it's a
complicated thing but let's he has a stepbrother and so like we know what kings
do to their rivals like
you have to kill them right the first emperor of rome octavian he's julius caesar's
nephew um julius
caesar has a half son with cleopatra um or he has a half brother or whatever he
has a has a son with
cleopatra a son out of wedlock um and uh octavian has two stoic teachers who
instruct him to murder
his rival which he promptly does uh or have murdered so the precedent was like
you can't have too many
caesars like you can't have more than one yeah uh viable heir um and marcus
when he he's antoninus's
favorite antoninus preps him he ascends to the throne the first thing marcus
does is he names his
brother lucius ferris co-emperor which is not only never happened basically
before orsons it is a nod to
how the republic was the republic of rome before it becomes a monarchy is led
by two consuls like two
elected presidents who serve together as a check against power so marcus by
naming he can't put it
back to a republic which is the plot of gladiator um he can name himself a co-emperor
and the i the
thinking is that's what he was planning to do with his sons but they all died
so in the movie joaquin
phoenix kind of kills the dad it kills the dad because marcus doesn't know in
in the movie not in real
life marcus aurelius knows his son cannot be king but in real life he passes it
to him so and how did
marcus aurelius die of the plague oh wow so that's the other crazy thing again
timeless marcus was
writing in what we now call the antonine plague like they named it after him um
but it's like a global
pandemic it starts in the east it overwhelms rome five ten million people die
they have no way of
stopping it uh so marcus leads through all of that and then the the suspicion
is that he catches it at
the end uh realizes he has it has to send his son away so he doesn't give it to
his son sets in motion
like a ser