How To Have a Great Empire? | Ask Daily Stoic

📕 The Girl Who Would Be Free is an all-ages fable written by the bestselling author Ryan Holiday and illustrated by the prolific illustrator Victor Juhasz. The 148-page book, produced entirely by Daily Stoic and printed here in the United States, is OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE online at dailystoic.com/girl or at The Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas.😡 The Stoics have some of the smartest and most applicable insights about getting your anger contained. For a high level introduction to some of those insights, check out this article: Anger Management: 8 Strategies Backed By Two Thousand Years of Practice. Or if you really want to get serious about conquering your anger, sign up for our course: Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger. 11 days of challenges, exercises, video lessons, and bonus tools based on Stoic philosophy and aimed at helping you deal with your anger in a constructive manner. Learn more here!✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  How to have a great empire?

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  Think of the Roman emperor. They had enormous power. They controlled immense territories. They commanded large armies. They had endless fortunes. Yet one cannot read about an emperor like Nero and not be struck at how powerless he seemed to be, not in the political, but in the personal sense. As Seneca notes, Nero and his peers were slaves to ambition, to attention, to pleasure, to whims and impulses. Epictetus, working in that same palace as Seneca in Nero's palace, noticed the same thing. He realized that the free men of Nero's court were actually less free than he was. Epictetus might have been in chains, his name literally meaning acquired one, but he was less a slave of ambition

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  or lust or fame than the people who owned him or ruled over him. And earning his freedom was far easier than breaking free from those temptations would be for the wealthier and powerful then and now. In The Girl Who Would Be Free, Epictetus's father advises his young child to stop trying to control the whole world and instead conquer the empire between our ears. That is, get a hold of our mind, our desires, our aversions, our fears, our passions, our emotions. This line echoes a line from another Stoic slave uttered in real life and not in a fable. Would you have a great empire? Publius Cirrus says, "Rule over yourself." And that's what the journey of Stoicism is about.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  That's what we're trying to rule, not other people, not armies, not territories, but ourselves first. And if we can do that, we'll not only wield a great power that few possess, but we'll actually make ourselves worthy of having power over others too. And today is a really exciting day because today we are officially launching, putting out into the world, releasing The Girl Who Would Be Free, my fable built around the life of Epictetus, the young, formative childhood that makes Epictetus Epictetus, and what we and our own children can learn from that journey. It's like my book, The Boy Who Would Be King, it's Stoicism in fable form, based on a true story, but of course it takes some liberties because what I want to do is make this accessible

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  and memorable for our kids, for ourselves, for someone who might be on the fence about these Stoic ideas. That's what I built the book around. I collaborated with my friend Victor Uhas, who I'm having on the podcast again soon. Today is the day this awesome book, produced here by Daily Stoic, printed here in the US, is officially available everywhere books are sold. But you can get some awesome bonuses, including the ebook and audiobook for free, if you go to dailystoic.com/free. I hope you check it out. We've got signed copies at the Painted Porch also. Enjoy the book, can't wait for you to read it. Thanks to everyone for your support.

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  Our first question today is, how do you balance the tension between being a good informed citizen and not paying attention to the news? I have an obligation to make decisions as part of our polis, that means city in Greek, but I don't want to spend a ton of time watching the news. I also don't want to ignore the news. So I think the Stoics would agree, you absolutely have an obligation to be an informed citizen. I think where they might push back is whether watching the news is the best way to be an informed citizen. And here's an easy way to maybe determine that it's not. Did they have the news 200, sorry, 2,000 years ago? No, they didn't. They read books, they had conversations, they observed things firsthand.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  So I think what the media has done a really great job of is convince us that consuming the news is the best or only way to be an informed person. I would actually argue the people who watch the most news are the least informed. They know the most trivia, they know the most breaking information, but do they know the big picture? And the example I use in some of my talks is like, if you worked in the State Department right now or in the armed forces and you were trying to wrap your head around this conflict the United States is in China, are you more informed, you know, watching tweets or reading intelligence reports? Or would you do well, as many people in the State Department are doing, to go read

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  a history of the Peloponnesian War, which is about the sort of trouble of the, you know, ascendant Athens and the dominant Sparta? And this is a sort of a timeless battle. They actually now call this the Thucydides trap. And another example, when General James Mattis, who is a sort of practicing, you know, fan of the Stoics, is sent to the Middle East, the first thing he does is go read the campaigns of Alexander, because that's, not that much has changed, right? When the conflict with North Korea started to bubble up while he was Secretary of Defense, he reread this kind of war, Fehrenbeck's, you know, fascinating.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sort of timeless book about the Korean War. And you learn often more from history, from studying human psychology than you do from breaking news. So I think you're absolutely right to want to be informed. I would just argue that books, conversations, studying human nature is a better way to become informed. And look, watch the debates if you don't know who you're going to vote for. If you know who you're going to vote for, watching the debates is just entertainment, probably bad entertainment at that. So that's my attitude. Look, I subscribe to the New York Times. I just try not to read it every day and I try not to, you know, obsessively scroll on Twitter as well. All right. So what non Stoic books have changed your philosophy and the principles you base your life on? I'll give you a couple.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  Man's Search for Meaning, I got this from my aunt when I was in high school. Apparently my grandmother had loved it and she sent me even her copy. Actually, no, I guess, yeah, I got this in June 2005. I think this is one of the greatest books ever written by a human being. Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, The Concept of the Resistance, which holds us back from accomplishing what we want to do, our sort of fears and worries and laziness. Super influential to me as a writer. Thich Nhat Hanh, not a Stoic, he's a Buddhist, but his books have been super influential to me. Sorry, I realize a lot of you are listening, so I'm showing this to the camera and they're not understanding. Thich Nhat Hanh's Taming the Tiger Within is one I would definitely recommend. Also, his book on healing the inner child is very good.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  And then probably no one's writing has influenced, no living writers, writing has influenced me more than Robert Greene's The Forty Eight Laws of Power, his book Mastery, his book Thirty Three Strategies of War. I'm not saying I base my life on the Forty Eight Laws of Power in the sense that I'm always observing the laws, I'm always crushing my enemy totally or taking credit and letting others do the work. What I am always aware of is how these laws are operating in the background, if not for me, then for other people. Being aware of this sort of timeless levers of power, the flaws and tendencies of human nature is deeply important to anyone trying to do anything in the world. So I strongly recommend reading Robert Greene's works.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  How would you respond to a bully as a stoic? It's a great question. I think it's complicated. On the one hand, Marcus Aurelius says, you know, the best revenge is to not be like that. And so he might, you know, ask you to think about what's actually going on. This is hard to do when you're seven, right? But what's going on in that bully's life? Why are they the way that they are? Is it actually fun to be them? Even though they are hurting you, is it actually because it's coming from a place of of great pain and weakness and misery for them? So I think he would say this to get you to realize that reacting, lashing out is probably not going to make the situation better. And it allows you to put it in some perspective.

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  The other thing Marcus Aurelius talks about, he talks about, he's like, his metaphor is boxing. This is your, so you're in the ring and someone is cheating and gouging and butting me with your head. He says, what do you do, right? You don't cry about it. You don't, you know, complain to the referee. You take note of it. You adjust your strategies accordingly. So you, you probably don't spar with this person anymore, right? You know, you, you, you don't set yourself up to be abused by someone. But at the same time, you're, you're not so thrown off by it. The reality is the world is going to have bullies. People suck. People do mean things. They don't always know that that's what they're doing. As I was saying, a lot of times it can come from pain and weakness.

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  But I would say that where I think the stoic would take action most clearly is if they saw someone bullying someone else. So I think the idea of that those two stoic virtues of, of courage and justice, I think a stoic would be willing to step in. And there is a story in Cato's life. There was some game where older kids were playing a game with younger kids and they locked this kid in like a cage or a room or something. And the, the story is that Cato sort of jumps in, lets the kid go and he stops the game and he says, you know, we're not going to do this. So I think where the stoic would draw the clear line, they might be willing to endure or tolerate or not complain about bullying directed at them. But what they would not tolerate, where they would step in, where they believe they

• 10:35Ryan Holiday?

  could make a difference, would be protecting someone else from bullying. So maybe that's a, that's a way to think about it. All right, guys, this has been another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. Thanks for listening. Remember, please send in your questions, [email protected]. I love the more specific questions. So someone was asking, like, how would you respond to a bully? I'd love to know, like, some specifics. What's going on? These things aren't just generalities. What I love about Epictetus is that most of it is him answering questions to his students, but it's clear that there's lots of, sort of, context there. Like, he really is asking specifics about what's going on. So send over as many specific questions as you want.

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  This is your chance to get free advice from me and us at Daily Stoic. So fire those questions at us, [email protected], and we'll see you next week with more answers and more questions. Thanks.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It will take time and effort. It won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper, The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger. You can just go to dailystoic.com/anger.