Ezra Klein on Virtue, Self-Critique, and His Take on Stoicism

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. One of the things the Stoics understood is that a society doesn't fall apart all at once. It happens slowly. There's a good and a a bad lesson in there, right?

Like it's that Julius Caesar doesn't magically overthrow the Roman Republic. There had been signs. There had been decay, there had been compromises, also a failure to compromise, of of which I I have not spared Cato some of the criticism, right? There's a great book, uh, The Storm Before the Storm that I've raved about.

But each of these choices and decisions is bringing a society, a government, a civilization closer to an inevitable collapse in failure. And people's failure to step in and do something about it is sealing their fate. On the other hand, I I sometimes point out to people when they're like, are we Rome? I go, Marcus Aurelius is one of the last of the good Roman emperors, right?

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