The Moment Ryan’s Italy Trip Went Sideways
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What stoic lessons did Ryan learn during the Pompeii tour?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is the second part of the trip to Rome. I was telling you guys earlier about the trip, some of the stoic lessons along the way. And uh, it got much longer than I thought, so I decided to split it up into two episodes. Uh, hopefully, I've kept your attention. Uh, the tour of Pompeii was incredible. We had this hilarious tour guide, he kept referring to the top of the top. Referring to my kids, he'd go, little king, little king, little king, come here, let me show you this. And he would he refer to them as little kings, which is something we've been doing ever since.
The crazy thing was he was showing us the crosswalks. Like so all the streets drain in Pompeii. There's these sort of gutters, and then the water goes into the street. You know, it rains real hard, drains into the street, and the crosswalks were raised. And you're just stepping across these stones that people have walked on, were walking on one day, and they still work. He showed us a video, it had poured the day before. It still works. It was just, you know, just incredible. You think about all these different things. You you think life is so new. You're like, oh, the nice houses are at the top of the hill. The nice houses banned street traffic. And you think, life has always been this way. It always will be this way.
People are doing the exact same thing. I I thought of that a couple weeks later. I was doing Bill Maher in LA and I went for a run in Beverly Hills where they'd put me up in a hotel and I thought, oh, they banned traffic from some of these streets. These are the big quiet houses on the hill. This is the same thing. And yet we all get evened out when the volcano comes and changes everything. The other thing, um, he shows us this sort of these cast of these bodies. And uh, you know, for for many years they thought and I just read an article about this, they thought that the bodies were this family, but they DNA tested and they found out actually there were three or four unrelated strangers, a kid, uh a woman, a man, whatever, and you realize, oh, these were people thrown together in the source of a tragedy.
Like It's sweet and moving and beautiful in one family in this family tragedy dying together, protecting each other. But it's equally beautiful if they're strangers, right? They come together as strangers in this moment of existential terror and fear and comfort each other and then memento muri, like it could happen to any of us. You walk into this one building and you're like, they painted this mural here to make Make the house look better. And it just struck me like Oh yeah, today we're like, let's throw an accent wall on here. Let's put this furniture here. The way we maneuver to make a small thing look bigger. There's just something powerful about the way Pompey reveals exactly what the Stoics talked about: how little changes, how much people are the same, the silly trifles that we stress about, the the peacocking and pretenses where we try to show off.
our ultimate precariousness and susceptibility to the whims of fate and fortune. It's all There was As well as the ingenuity, hey, this is how they kept food cold, this is how they kept food warm. This is how they handled drainage, this is how they kept cool in the summer despite the heat. This is how they pioneered entertainment and pleasure, invite all it's all there and it always has been and always will be. We went on to Sorrento. We stayed at this lovely place in Sorrento. And you could see Pompeii behind us, like across the Bay of Naples. And I was like, does Marx really talk about Pompeii at all in meditations? I was sort of going back and then I realized nobody does talk about the age of Vespasian.
And um I made this connection between one of my favorite passages in meditations and the eruption of Vesuvius. I was standing in our hotel, the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius behind me, and I I've recorded this.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What stoic lessons did Ryan learn during the Pompeii tour?
0:00–5:08
2
How did the discovery about the Pompeii burial site change Ryan’s perspective on tragedy?
5:08–9:05
3
Why did the family’s hotel bunk‑bed collapse and how did they handle the fallout?
9:05–12:55
4
What went wrong with the boat trip to Capri and how did the driver’s mistake affect the family?
12:55–16:32
5
How did the ferry mix‑up and driver conflict turn a simple transfer into a nightmare?
16:32–20:49
6
What caused the youngest son’s eye infection and how was orbital cellulitis treated?
20:49–23:52
7
How did the family cope with the hospital stay and what unexpected kindness did they encounter?
23:52–28:29
8
What final stoic reflections did Ryan share about returning home after the crisis?
28:29–32:46
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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