Why EVERY Generation Rediscovers Stoicism | Mark Manson & Ryan Holiday

Every crisis creates the same instinct in people: go back to the wisdom that has outlasted everything else. In today’s episode, Ryan and Mark Manson dive into why Stoicism keeps coming back during moments of crisis, why world leaders and big thinkers have leaned on it for centuries, and what its modern resurgence gets right and wrong. Check out Ryan’s FULL episode on Solved with Mark Manson on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-comprehensive-guide-to-stoicism-ft-ryan-holiday/id1247526593?i=1000731991731, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4KtSk56of42vdtg5EM2TT2, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvEg37B4DU4 Grab Mark’s books: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-f-ck-a-counterintuitive-approach-to-living-a-good-life?_pos=1&_sid=ce4bc5009&_ss=r, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k Journal https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-f-ck-journal?_pos=2&_sid=ce4bc5009&_ss=r, and Everything Is F***ked: A Book About Hope https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/everything-is-f-cked-a-book-about-hope?_pos=4&_sid=ce4bc5009&_ss=r, at The Painted Porch Follow Mark on YouTube, and check out more of his work at https://markmanson.net/ 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's weird to think I remember the first podcast that I ever listened to. I remember I would download them in college when I would work out at the gym. This was back in 2005. And then the medium kind of went away for a while. And then for my first handful of books, whenever you do press, you'd be like, two-minute radio interview, or a three-minute television spot, or an interview with a reporter for a newspaper. But podcasting has kind of changed everything. It's been interesting to watch podcasts get bigger and bigger and bigger and longer and longer and longer. That evolution occurred to me when I was down in LA over Labor Day weekend to do a podcast with Mark Manson.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  He has this new podcast called Solved, where they sort of do these deep dives into these topics. We recorded for three hours. We really dove into Stoicism, the Four Virtues, talked a little bit about the new book Wisdom Takes Work, but really just like, if someone wanted an introduction into Stoicism, this could be a good place to start. And I just remember going like, three hours? This is crazy. Just to think about how the medium has evolved. I don't know, it was just striking to me. Towards the end of the episode, we talked about Stoicism and modern psychology and how it's persisted through history. I asked Mark if I could grab a chunk of that to run here. You can listen to the whole thing. I thought it was great. You can listen to Mark's many episodes on the Daily Stoic Podcast, of course. If you haven't read his books, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Everything

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  This fuckt, a book about hope, you absolutely should. We carry them at the painted porch. They are classics for a reason. Do listen to his new podcast, Solved, which is great. You can follow his work. He has an email list that is a monster for a reason. You can find that at markmanson.net. And I really appreciate giving kick stuff around with Mark. I think you will like this little segment. And since it's Sunday, I won't waste your time. Let's just get into it. And I'll link to the full episode below.

• 2:48Mark Manson?

  So coming out of the ancient world, Stoicism persists throughout history. It's a, it's a philosophy and a school of thought that seems to sit with the elites throughout Western culture.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  It's like a secret weapon.

• 3:03Mark Manson?

  Yes. And it's, I'm, first of all, if you look at the Enlightenment philosophers, a few of them talk about it explicitly. I know Nietzsche wrote very fondly of the Stoics, but it's, you, you actually find out if you read their biographies that they were very much into Stoicism. And it was very inspiring for them. And it's similar with a lot of world leaders, a lot of very famous figures throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. So like, talk to me just about the, the legacy and influence through, through Western culture. Like, why did this, why did, of all the philosophies and all the schools of thought, like, why did Stoicism persist, especially among kind of the upper echelon of?

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  I wonder if a lot of it is like exactly why Ristic gives it to Marcus Aurelius in his early twenties. It's like, if you have like, a promising, talented person, you're grooming for success, greatness, power.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know, they have a lot of the things they need, but they need this as like a governor. And so I wonder how much of it is like, It's like this kind of like open secret, like, okay, but have you read this?

• 4:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  And that, like, the Stoics are not the thing that anyone is specializing in. It's not the sexy, or the exciting, or the groundbreaking field. And a lot of it is kind of intuitively obvious. But there's something inspiring and beautiful and, like, affirmative about it. And it's just always been there as this, like, person to person, passing this along, kind of a thing.

• 4:35Mark Manson?

  It's almost like history's self-help.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:37Mark Manson?

  Like, it's the sort of thing, like, the same way people don't, or at least when we were growing up, right? Like, nobody broadcasts that they were reading Tony Robbins. But like, if you got one-on-one in a quiet room, they'd be like, hey, man.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Mark Manson?

  You gotta check out this Tony Robbins guy.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Mark Manson?

  Like, it was completely life-changing. It seems like Stoicism was that, you know, for centuries.

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  And Seneca was more familiar than the other Stoics for a long time because his epigrams were often how you learned Latin. So you learn Cicero and Seneca as you were learning languages. And obviously, that sort of fell away. But you tend to see Stoicism resurgent in turbulent times. So Enlightenment thinkers, the, you know, the founding fathers. There's a segment of it in the American Civil War. You know, it's, it's, I think it says, it's fitting that it's popular now, too. It's like, when the world feels like it's out of control, people are like, oh, I gotta get better at controlling myself.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what's the smartest stuff ever written on that topic? It's from Greece and Rome.

• 5:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  It also survived because it got co-opted into so many other philosophers, like Christianity being the prominent one. I was kind of teasing earlier when I brought up Epictetus and his kind of... Upending the moral order, Christianity did that in a big way.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  And I didn't really realize the influence that Stoicism had on those like Thomas Aquinas, for example. So how did it, I guess, those early Christian years where Christianity was starting to take off, the Roman Empire is falling.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  What happens there?

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  So Paul studies Stoicism in Tarsus as Saul of Tarsus. And then famously, when he goes to Athens, he stops at the Sto apo kilait, meets with the philosophers there, and they walk him up through the Agora to the hill next to the Acropolis where he gives one of his most famous lectures. And so this was all kind of swirling about. I mean, Seneca's brother is in the Bible. He's a judge who lets Paul go. There's a series of fake letters between Seneca and St. Peter. So even in the early days, they were like engaging and interacting with each other less contentiously than we might imagine. And then I think, obviously, a lot of the ideas from the ancient world make their way through the Bible.

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  Then obviously, we have the Dark Ages where we turn away from classical wisdom.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  But the Renaissance is kind of the rediscovery of these ideas. And I think with the printing press, suddenly, you didn't, still elite-ish, but like, regular people are getting some of these books in their native languages for the first time. And that's also the reemergence of this idea.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  You see it all throughout, though. I mean, you've mentioned Shakespeare several times already, too, and Hamlet.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Right? The most famous line, "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it."

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  You've mentioned some of the founding fathers of the United States. The play Cato was played before Valley Forge.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Right? The Battle of Valley Forge. George Washington was a Stoic.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. This play, Cato, is like, I've said this joke so many times, but I think it's true. It was the Hamilton of his day.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, it's the play that everyone knows, and it's like... Like in the way that a 15 year old might not have actually paid attention in, you know, US history, but they got the gist of what happened in the revolution from the play. They might not have read the Stoics, but they knew Stoic wisdom from this play. The famous, the famous line in the play, Cato, says that we have to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophy. And this is one of Washington's favorite lines that he says like over and over again in letters.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the, the play was written in the 1700s too. It wasn't like a throwback or anything like that.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, it's new.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  During this Renaissance period, yeah, that it was, that was brought on, yeah. But I mean, you go all the way through, like, I just found all these like little examples of where Stoicism just pops up, but it rarely gets acknowledged. And I don't know if it was like what you were talking about, people were just like, well, that's just what it was. It seems to just be like, just this foundation of Western thought.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  That has persisted and just, it gets absorbed into everything, like Christianity, like a lot of, like the founding fathers, the Serenity Prayer, we get to that, that's very, very Stoic.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  What I love about this Serenity Prayer is like, if you just gave it to someone, you're like, what year was this written? You know, they'd be like, I don't know, the 1300s? Or like, is that, did Jesus say that? And you're like, no, no, no, some guy wrote it on a train in the 50s. But it's obviously the, the synthesis of the accumulation of all this wisdom distilled down into its, it's Stoicism, Christianity, and Buddhism, like all mixed into one.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  What was then the, you know, even go into the, that book by James Stockdale, the Vietnam...

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  So Stockdale, he, the Navy sends him to Stanford to get a graduate degree. And he is introduced to Stoic philosophy, that the professor gives him a copy of Epictetus. So he reads it and he kind of goes down this Stoic rabbit hole. And then he's shot down like, I don't know, two years later. But his copy of Epictetus is on, is like with his stuff, like it gets mailed back to his family because it was on the aircraft carrier that he took off from. And supposedly as he's parachuting down into what he knows is going to be imprisonment, possibly death, and he says, I am... I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, oh, these ideas that were theoretical, like now shit's about to get real. And you know, Epictetus is tortured by his slave, his master, he's like, he breaks his leg and he never fully regains the use of it. The same thing happens to Stockdale in this prison. So it's, it's one of the, when we talk about like the resilience layer of Stoicism, that's Epictetus, and then it's Stockdale who's like, oh, no, no, this wasn't just true 2,000 years ago. It's now.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it even comes, you want to get into the psychology part of it too?

• 11:02Mark Manson?

  Sure, I mean, you really see it show up, you know, it was highly influential on Aaron Beck. It's interesting, like Epictetus has this, this three-part little framework, I believe. It's a desire, action, and ascent.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:16Mark Manson?

  And they all work in cohorts and it's, you could almost copy and paste that in the CBT as the, you know, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, and how each one is an entry point to the other two. So if you want to, you can't, you can't single out any single one and only master that. You have to continually adapt to all three and work with all three simultaneously. And so it's, there's also a lot of stuff, I mean, they used to call it narrative therapy, which you actually, I forget the name of the journaling process that they studied, but it's like you literally, I mean, it could have come straight out of Seneca.

• 11:58Mark Manson?

  It's basically you, you write down your worst thoughts and experiences, and then you go back and reread it and do a reappraisal of the meaning of it. And it's like, there's all sorts of positive therapeutic outcomes that come from that. So it is. I mean, whether intentional or not, like whether the psychologists kind of came across the same truths independently, or if they were reading tons of Epictetus and Seneca in college.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's probably both.

• 12:30Mark Manson?

  There's a shocking amount of overlap.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  They do credit them, like Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, who did R E B T, Rational Motive Behavioral Therapy, they do credit the Stoics with a lot of that, it was kind of after the fact. One of the interesting things, I think Beck and Ellis both came up with their frameworks, which are very similar, around the same time, the 50s and 60s. And it was during, so you had behaviorism, which was proving to be a little bit difficult in a lot of areas, you know, could everything just be boiled down to incentives? And then you had psychoanalysis, kind of the other side, everything's unconscious. What Beck and Ellis realized was that these people were not, it wasn't, they were psychoanalysts, they were psychoanalysts, so the unconscious played a big role. What they realized was, these people weren't unconscious of their motives and desires, they were very conscious of it.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  They just didn't know what to do with the interpretations that they were giving it to, which was very, very stoic, which is what they realized. So it was, I don't know how much of it was after the fact, they write later about, yes, this was very much, these aren't new ideas, they're very stoic. But it was just interesting how that kept popping back up again. When you had to have, when there was a kind of rubber hits the road moment, like this shit has to work, and then the Stoicism comes back in to save the day.

• 13:46Ryan Holiday?

  I think there's something about psychology and therapy that's akin to the role that philosophy played in the ancient world. Today, we think it's like, people go like, oh, I studied philosophy, or I was a philosophy major, as if it's this like one-time thing. And then, then you just go about your normal life, you're like, good, you got it. In the same way that like, I learned my multiplication tables. And, and that's not what it was supposed to be. And when you hear about like the Socratic circle, or these dinners that Cato would have, it was like, Philosophy was this thing you were engaged in constantly. Like, people would go and see Socrates and talk to him about their problems and, you know, shoot, shoot things, shoot the shit and get ideas and whatever. Philosophy was this ongoing thing, in more similar to what a therapist's role is in

• 14:31Ryan Holiday?

  someone's life.

• 14:32Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  In that you're like, I call this person or I go to this person's office once a week or once every other week.

• 14:37Mark Manson?

  Or a support group, right?

• 14:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Ryan Holiday?

  I think 12-step groups are very similar to the Stoic process of like, hey, are you sure that that assumption is true? Because like, what about this, this, and this? And like, here are some aphorisms or ideas that you can maybe try to replace that thought pattern with, and then here's a network of like-minded people who are all engaged in the same, like, they're porch guys.

• 15:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 15:05Mark Manson?

  Totally. And we're, and we're gonna meet twice a week.

• 15:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Mark Manson?

  To, to remind ourselves to do this stuff.

• 15:25Mark Manson?

  As I sit here thinking about it, I, I feel like you could probably, if you took the Stoics, Aristotle, and say Buddhism, that probably covers 80 or 90% of psychology of like, of like shit that actually works.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. You even look at like, uh, post-traumatic growth theory. It's very much, uh, Tedeschi and Calhoun, they, they very much credit the Stoics with it, but then nobody acknowledges it after that.

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  The only thing that's missing is like, the mental illness side of things.

• 15:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  Like, it's hopeful but a bit naive in the Stoics of just like, you control your mind, get to rationality, but, and it's like, okay, but what if you were horribly abused? Or, you know, like, how do you, what if you, you know, something happened, you got a head injury? Well, like, there's something missing there. Like, I think the part, the 10, the 10 to 15% you're missing is for like, the edge cases that are just like where...

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but it works up until a point.

• 16:25Mark Manson?

  I personally feel that Stoicism is best when it is kind of, in psychology, it's called cognitive reappraisal, where it's basically like, you take the narratives and the shit that your brain, your mind is saying to you, and then you like, take a step back and you reevaluate.

• 16:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:42Mark Manson?

  You say like, what if that wasn't true? What if it was this way? What if we invert that? What if we pretend I'm the other person? I feel like Stoicism is like, the goat at that.

• 16:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:53Mark Manson?

  Where I feel, where I feel it lacking at times is on the, more of the emotional side. It's, I don't, I don't subscribe to the common criticism that it's, you know, Stoicism is just telling you to be feelingless, emotionless, robotic. And to be fair, I don't think anything in the ancient world really addresses this super well. When you are consumed frequently by anger, or when you are so sad you can't get out of bed, like, how do you work with that?

• 17:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, how do you, what is the process or procedure? And I really don't think we got anything like, consistently replicable that could like, address that probably until modern times.

• 17:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I would also say, there, if, if your primary concern is like, not being exiled, not being murdered, how do you deal with your, you know, infant mortality is 30%?

• 17:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 17:53Mark Manson?

  There's a war every other year.

• 17:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know, you're, you're primarily gonna be thinking about like, freeing yourself from anxiety, and worry, and anger, and dread, and whatever. You're not like, okay, well, where do I find meaning? Where do I find purpose? Where do I find happiness? And, and sure, I think they do, they do have a definition of happiness, and it's not, you know, I make a lot of money, and I'm, I look great, or whatever. But, but like, that's why I think it's so striking, you read Marx's realist, and you read Seneca, and you're like, which one would you rather be?

• 18:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Marx's realist is more impressive as a figure, but it doesn't seem like he's having a great time.

• 18:33Mark Manson?

  No, he seems miserable, I mean, to be fair, Seneca.

• 18:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Mark Manson?

  You know, it's not exactly a rosy picture either, but, yeah, it's, it's-

• 18:44Ryan Holiday?

  I think we've made, like, we've made a lot of advancements.

• 18:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Ryan Holiday?

  In just our assumptions, like, uh, there's just different. I just think about like how interesting it is that's like not until Gandhi that we were like, oh, you don't have to like kill and murder someone that you disagree with. There's like other ways of producing political change. You know, like, like nonviolence is literally an in, not passive, nonviolent resistance is an invention.

• 19:11Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 19:12Ryan Holiday?

  That happens in the 19th century.

• 19:14Mark Manson?

  Well, to be fair, Jesus invented it, but we immediately killed him.

• 19:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Mark Manson?

  And we had to relearn it.

• 19:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 19:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure.

• 19:23Mark Manson?

  1900 years later.

• 19:25Ryan Holiday?

  But it's also, Jesus isn't proposing it as a political strategy.

• 19:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Ryan Holiday?

  He's proposing it as a mode of personal behavior.

• 19:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 19:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And, and so it's just like the idea of what a good life is was circumscribed. You know, like, like it never occurs to Marx to realize that he doesn't have to be the emperor.

• 19:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, like he hates it.

• 19:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  And it's not conceivable to him that he would do anything other than this thing he was chosen for, right? And like, I think we've made some developments as a society about like what your obligations are.

• 20:00Mark Manson?

  To come back to the parallel between him and Washington.

• 20:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Mark Manson?

  Washington fucking hated being president.

• 20:05Ryan Holiday?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:05Mark Manson?

  He was miserable, he spent the entire time wanting to go back to Mount Burton. And so to his credit.

• 20:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Mark Manson?

  He stepped down.

• 20:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 20:13Mark Manson?

  You know, and it's, it says something about his character.

• 20:15Ryan Holiday?

  It's ironic that a philosophy that was popular with elites kind of becomes like to every man.

• 20:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Ryan Holiday?

  For modern day elites to properly mythologize and institutionalize. So yeah, you have like these college kids reading Plato, when really they should be reading Marcus Aurelius. And then the grad students should be reading Plato, you know, like.

• 20:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Ryan Holiday?

  Like, which one is actually going to help you in your life? Like, I think, I think it's so interesting, like, to go back to the founders, we spend a lot of time thinking about, like, who inspired them from like a legal basis.

• 20:49Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 20:50Ryan Holiday?

  Which is like interesting, but again, if you're 17, what do you do with this? Information is much more these classical ideas and these myths and these like I didn't know who Cincinnatus was until I was probably in my mid twenties. I mean, I'd obviously heard of Cincinnati. Right. But I never heard like, but that's a story that for hundreds of years, thousands of years, everyone heard when they were growing up like, here's this guy, he's named dictator. And then he defeats Rome's enemies and then he retires to his farm. That's such a beautiful, inspiring story and it's what it's foundational to America. But like, we don't learn about that and and maybe you learn about Washington resigning as a commission. You do learn about resigning after two terms.

• 21:34Ryan Holiday?

  You don't learn the classical basis for it. So we've just been skipping that this was kind of the, it's like the Stoics, you know, that expression, like your favorite rapper's favorite rapper. Yeah. The Stoics were your favorite person's favorite philosophy. Yeah. But like, you kind of don't get back that far. And so people have been missing that this is the piece. And like, I think that's, if there's any reason my works and my writing has succeeded, I think it's because it kind of broke the floodgates of that a little bit. Hmm. And it kind of took this thing that people of all different types have already known about or been using. And then they're like, oh yeah, this is, this is the, an entry point into this thing. It's actually, because it is hard, you go, well, what is the best entry point into the Stoics? Is it Marcus Aurelius? Is it Epictetus? Is it Seneca?

• 22:20Ryan Holiday?

  The answer is like, kind of all of the above. So Sure. Much credit to my book agent who suggested an idea of the Daily Stoic. He was like, you know, there's not actually like one book that is the greatest hits of the Stoics. Yeah. And I was like, is that true? And it's like, yeah, it's true. And so that's where the Daily Stoic came from.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  I was just saying, could it be all of that? And

• 22:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  That the Stoics uncovered something so fundamental to human nature that we kind of ended up taking it for granted and just kept rediscovering it. Like if you take, for example, REBT with Albert Ellis and he's got this ABC model. You have this, the A is sometimes called adversity as an action event than the behavior, than the consequence. And he says, you know, like the, the human free will exists between the action and the behavior.

• 23:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Very Stoic idea.

• 23:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Also incredibly obvious when you think about it.

• 23:07Ryan Holiday?

  Right. There's something about it. It's like, oh yeah, I think my grandma told me that.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:11Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And, and so. What I like about is you're like, no, no, no, no, this actually isn't some cliche that you saw written on the wall of a gym. Like this, somebody made this up for the first time and we know who it was. Like I was giving a talk to the Pittsburgh Pirates at spring training a couple of years ago and they had on the wall, it's not events that upset us, it's our opinion about events. And I'm like, you don't even realize that like, that's from the Stoics. Like you think I'm here to talk about Stoicism, but you already know it.

• 23:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and that, that's like, that's Stoicism all day.

• 23:48Mark Manson?

  So let's, let's back up. Let's talk about earlier in your career, you used to write about marketing.

• 23:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Mark Manson?

  And at the time, it's one of these funny things that you look back on. At the time, you decided to take a huge risk, exhibit some courage.

• 24:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:02Mark Manson?

  Uh, and write about this, I guess what you thought at the time was an obscure philosophy by writing Obstacles the Way in 2013. And then it, it did kind of blow up. So I'm, I'm curious, why do you think it's taken off the way it has in, in the social media age? Like what is it about this era that suddenly has everybody?

• 24:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Mark Manson?

  Calling themselves a Stoic, following Stoics, reading about Stoics?

• 24:25Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know. I mean, I probably says something about how dysfunctional and weird things are. I think it says something about the tools that allow, you know, the repopularization of something in a way that can appeal to like, like my books have sold really well, but I've, I've reached many, many, many millions more people on social media and the email and the podcasts and whatever, right? Because way more people consume those things than books. So I think it did allow this idea to break outside of just sort of people who read books about philosophy, right? Or even just people who read self-help books. So that was a big part of it.

• 25:08Ryan Holiday?

  But I think, you know, I, I was mentored and taught by Robert Greene and what Robert Greene is so great at is taking ancient ideas and then illustrating them with sometimes ancient stories, sometimes modern stories, sometimes literature, sometimes words. But he's like, let me, instead of let me just tell you this idea, let me show you this idea, what it looks like. It may be a story that you are familiar with or a person you're familiar with, but you didn't, you don't, you didn't actually fully understand what this would look like. And I think what I have been able to do is take the ideas from the Stoics. And illustrate them in a way that people go, oh, I get it now. And then I can give this to my 16 year old son, or I can give this to this person who's struggling at work, or a person who just found out they have cancer.

• 25:53Ryan Holiday?

  Like, like, and then I think also, what I've tried to do is I'm not writing about Stoicism generally. I'm always writing about a very specific thing that Stoicism can help you with. The Obstacle is the Way is about dealing with problems. Ego is the enemy is about like, you know, obviously dealing with ego. And then Stillness is like, how do you find peace in a noisy world? I'm not, I'm taking all the things a Stoic said, plus a lot of other people, and aiming it at a thing that there is a latent and perennial interest in getting better at.

• 26:27Mark Manson?

  And how do you feel? It's been interesting watching this philosophy blow up over the last 10 years. And I feel like we're now in an age where it's become so popularized. And there's so many, there's now, we were talking over lunch, there's so many social media accounts now that are these faceless channels that are knockoffs and in many cases, like, posting absolutely terrible advice and calling it Stoic advice. It's funny, there's like almost, there's a term I've seen thrown around a little bit of broics.

• 27:03Ryan Holiday?

  Broicism.

• 27:04Mark Manson?

  Broicism, like it's Stoicism, it's almost been co-opted by some internet sub communities that are.

• 27:12Ryan Holiday?

  It's been co-opted, and that's a problem. I mean, look, I, I also get it. Like, why at 19, reading Meditations? What lit me up? Was it the fact that he talks about doing good for the common good like 80 times? You know? Was it like his meditations on mortality and wrestling with our fear of death? Like, no, that's not like, I'm like, wake up early, work harder, push yourself.

• 27:40Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be a bitch, you know, like, you know, like, so, so like, I understand that that's the end, that's if you're a young dude, or if you're any person in a sort of competitive environment of any kind, there's a lot of that the Stoics teach you, and I'm like, if that's what brings you in the door, welcome, you know, I don't, I think there's also been kind of an elitism backlash to it, that I don't like either, like, I'd rather you be in the ballpark of Stoicism than go in the opposite direction. At the same time, I think if your interpretation of Stoicism is that it'll help you be a better sociopath, you're getting it totally wrong.

• 28:22Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's, that's, that's certainly not what the Four Virtues are about.

• 28:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Ryan Holiday?

  And that's certainly not what virtue is about. So, you know, you take the good with the bad. In the early days of something, you're just desperate for anyone to hear about it and take it seriously, and then you're fortunate enough to get in a position where it's like bigger than you thought, or there's a backlash to what you, I, I said this at this conference about Stoicism like, almost 10 years ago now, and people still like throw it in my face, but I think it's more or less correct, like, if you took every person in the world who knew about Stoicism, and then you stack them against the people that are familiar with the ideas in Buddhism, or even just, let's just say, Eastern thought generally, you're talking about meditation and such, it's like, not even close.

• 29:10Ryan Holiday?

  Like, Stoicism is a fraction of how big it could be, and I don't mean that from like, a business standpoint, I just mean that like, it can be really easy to be like, everyone's talking about this, it's popular, and it's like, the vast majority of people think the word stoic means has no emotions, and be a robot, and they'll, they've taken it no further than that, and they, if they know the name Marcus Aurelius, it is from the movie Gladiator and nothing else.

• 29:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and, and so, I'm, I'm much more of the minds of like, we should bring as many people in as possible, because even if you get only a few of the teachings, that's better than nothing.

• 29:49Mark Manson?

  And even if there's a temporary backlash, or some bad actors, or whatever, like, this stuff is clearly timeless.

• 29:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:57Mark Manson?

  It's been around for over 2,000 years.

• 30:01Mark Manson?

  It will likely outlast all of us.

• 30:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, look, the Stoics were arguing about what Stoicism was.

• 30:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Uh, like you had Seneca and Thrasia, and there are different definitions of it. So I think that's fine, too. Uh, but yeah, like, if you ask AI what Stoicism is, it's like this shredded Greek statue, you know, like, decapitating his enemy with a sword or something.

• 30:22Mark Manson?

  And feeling nothing about it.

• 30:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, exactly. And I just, that's, that's, to me, what I, what I think about being that person who was attracted to this sort of muscular, masculine, uh, productivity Stoicism at nineteen. And then because I stayed with it, it, it works on you as you're working with it. And I think it's, it's, it's hard to actually read the Stoics at any length and not be like, these were thoughtful, fundamentally decent people, and it's not about whatever these other people are saying about. What, you know, it's the opposite of Andrew Tate or whatever.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  How would you update anything in Stoicism for, for today's?

• 31:07Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I would love to hear them talk. First off, I would love to know what they would have said about the breakthroughs that we've had medically, uh, you know, neurologically. Yeah, like, what would they say about this? And I, I, it's only a dead philosophy because they're dead, you know, like, it's not like, it's this and nothing else. It's not the word of God. You can add to it. And, you know, Seneca quotes a lot from Epicurus because he read widely. So I don't think it's a problem to update it. I would love to know, yeah, this line between acceptance and agency. And where is it? Because like, it's true, there's some things that are up to us and some things that are not. And then there's a lot in the middle.

• 31:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, you know, this as a writer, like, you put out, like, obviously, you control the book, and you don't control whether people like it or not. But you... Kind of control the marketing.

• 32:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, like, so there's a lot of gray area between and like, I think most people need the black and white thing first, then once you've grasped the black and white thing, like, what do you do in the middle?

• 32:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:14Mark Manson?

  Which Stoic philosopher would have the most Instagram followers?

• 32:18Ryan Holiday?

  Ooh, well, you know, Mark.

• 32:19Mark Manson?

  Let's get, let's get into the hard hitting questions.

• 32:22Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus really says, is the most famous and powerful. So, you know, maybe he's, he's got the official Roman Empire account.

• 32:29Mark Manson?

  I wonder what.

• 32:30Ryan Holiday?

  It goes with the office.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  I bet he actually does.

• 32:32Mark Manson?

  I wonder, I wonder what color checkmark that would be.

• 32:36Ryan Holiday?

  But Seneca's the better writer.

• 32:38Mark Manson?

  He is the better writer.

• 32:38Ryan Holiday?

  And so would, you know, have been very popular with his other works.

• 32:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Mark Manson?

  All right. I'm glad we got to the bottom of that.

• 32:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:50Mark Manson?

  Any parting thoughts for, for people listening who this is, this podcast is their first exposure to Stoicism, what, what would you recommend?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah, we, we usually do an 80 20. So maybe give us like the 80 20, if that's even a thing.

• 33:03Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah, we should do an 80 20 of Stoicism. Like, what, yeah, what's the 20% of Stoicism that, that will give you?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  You don't new to it.

• 33:10Ryan Holiday?

  You don't control what happens. You control how you respond to what happens. That's right. So the Stoics believe that everything that happens, including obstacles, including adversity, is this opportunity. It's this opportunity for you to practice virtue, right? There, there isn't a situation that you can think of that doesn't allow you to respond with courage, self-command, justice, or wisdom. And in fact, it's like, the worse the situation, the more.

• 33:39Mark Manson?

  The more opportunity.

• 33:40Ryan Holiday?

  The more opportunity, the virtue. So like, when I wrote the obstacles away, I think a lot of people, and I, I think I was, that's where I was when I was 24, 25, is like, hey, how does this help you professionally? Right? Like, how, and, and it's true. There's a, a chance to, to do that, right? That's what great entrepreneurs and creatives do. But what they're really saying is that like, this is a chance for you as a person to get better or worse. What is it going to be? Because it's, it's unfair to be like, well, you know, Amor Fati, you have cancer, you know, that's not what, but they're saying. It fucking sucks that you have cancer. It fucking sucks that someone just stole all your money. It fucking sucks that you lost an election. Whatever it is.

• 34:20Ryan Holiday?

  And now, what are you going to make of this with whatever is feasible or possible next? Which could be 24 more hours on this planet? Or it could be 50 years of exile? What are you gonna do with it? Uh, that's what Stoicism is. The more trying the situation, the more impressive the virtue can be.

• 34:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Ryan Holiday?

  Um, but if you're asking me like where I would go next, I mean, I would pick up meditations. Like, I would pick up Seneca. Uh, I'd probably start with those two. I'd do Epictetus last. And I would make them your companions. Again, it's not a thing, "Oh, I flipped through it, I got it." It's like, no, no, it's a thing you come to. And you come back to. And my relationship with Stoicism has changed. The words are the same, but what I take out of it and who I am bringing to it, that's what's changing. And that's, that's the, that's what great texts do, is they bring you something new every time.

• 35:22Mark Manson?

  Nice. Ryan Holiday, thank you so much, dude.

• 35:25Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for having me.

• 35:26Mark Manson?

  Uh, we made it, we made it to the end.

• 35:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, this is awesome.

• 35:31Mark Manson?

  Cut.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Cut.