It’s Not Only Always Been Like This, It’s Always Been Worse | Trust But Verify

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It's not only always been like this, it's always been worse. It's not new, okay? Ancient Greece had earthquakes and horrible storms and natural disasters. People suffered, people were killed, people stole the money intended to help those people.

Ancient Rome had tyrants and bullies, it had pointless cruelty and systemic injustices. For centuries people have fought over minuscule differences, their governments have been dysfunctional, their traditions seem like they were falling apart. Stuff was changing, stuff was stressful, stuff sucked. It's not only always been like this, it's probably always been worse. You can look out at the news in despair about things, or you can zoom out and see progress.

You can focus on bad people and miss that the bad people today are almost certainly better than the bad people back then. Even the people you disagree with and dislike politically are not selling their enemies into slavery, sending children to work in mines or doing science experiments on minorities. Things that were not only common in Zeno and Marx Aurelius's time, but common enough not that long ago. You live in a time of abundance and medicine and knowledge and opportunity, things that the Stoics could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. So yes, see what is broken.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (8 minutes, 1,301 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.