Do This (It’s Good For Your Sanity) | A Garden Is Not For Show

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Do this. It's good for your sanity. Not many of the emperors fared well. something about power, something about wealth, something about temptation that, in the end, seemed to get to all of them.

What was it? Well, certainly it's not good for anyone to be subjected to so much pressure, such sycophancy, such abnormality and isolation. And perhaps it was the latter that weighed on them the most. They lived behind palace walls and vacationed far away from average Romans. Their food was brought to them, tested for poison first.

We talked recently about how the Emperor would have rarely gotten to take walks like a normal person, with the exception of the Emperor's shortcut, a hidden three hundred yard passageway of zigzagging ramps from the palace down to the forum, separated from the streets of Rome. Indeed, if Marcus wanted to take a walk safely, he would have had to do it around the emperor's private track on Palantine Hill, which for all its luxury was basically a prison yard for his personal use. Of course they went crazy. Meanwhile, we subject ourselves to a version of this voluntarily. We spend all our time in our house or at the office, in between in the safe cocoon of our car.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (6 minutes, 1,081 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.