Happiness Is Wisdom. Wisdom Is Happiness. | Ask Daily Stoic

Elon Musk is smart. Yet would anyone describe Elon Musk as happy? 📖Wisdom Takes Work https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here:https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎟️ Come seeRyan Holiday LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830976292379?aff=oddtdtcreatorSan Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1527497619499?aff=oddtdtcreatorPhoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830981698549?aff=oddtdtcreator 👉 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  Happiness is wisdom. Wisdom is happiness. It was a rough life: plagues and pain, pandemics and personal loss, stress and temptation. Marcus Aurelius, for all his privilege, did not have it easy. Yet, we ought to imagine him happy. Why? Because he tried to be. All the Stoics did. Not happy in the sense that they smiled all the time or were always having a good time, but happy in the sense that they were fulfilled, that they experienced stillness and contentment, gratitude and acceptance. "Convince yourself that it's all a gift from the gods," he writes in Meditations as a kind of definition of Stoic happiness and wisdom,

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  "that things are good and always will be." "The primary indication of a well-ordered mind," Seneca said, "is man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company." Let us contrast this with another powerful person. Elon Musk is smart, he is rich, incredibly so, with a net worth of around $500 billion. He's achieved success few would ever imagine, and in multiple industries too. But would anyone describe Elon Musk as happy? He would not, as I detail in length in the middle section of the new book Wisdom Takes Work, which came out day before yesterday, and you can still order signed first editions for a few more days. Thanks to everyone that supported the book.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  It has meant so much to me. It was just a Barnes and Noble signing, hundreds of them in New York City. Your orders are going out here every single day. Again, I really appreciate the support. But back to that message. Elon has described his life as difficult and excruciating. He once compared running a company to chewing glass and staring into the abyss. Inside his mind, he said, is a storm and not a happy one. "I can remember even in happy moments when I was a kid," Elon once said. "It just feels like there's a rage of forces in my mind constantly." "Being in a big, empty house and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there," he once told a reporter, "and no one on the pillow next to you."

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  Fuck, how do you make yourself happy in a situation like that? Here is a man who can solve every imaginable technical problem, but can't seem to fix his own life, who even unbelievable achievements have not helped. Here is a man who has all the money in the world, and yet can't buy the most valuable thing in the world with it. There are a lot of smart people out there. But if they're so smart, why aren't they happy? Life is too short to be miserable. If wisdom doesn't bring you happiness, what good is it? If it doesn't help you live in your own life, spend time in your own company, what use is it? And certainly, we can say if your success doesn't bring you happiness and contentment,

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  or at least some sense of self-worth, what is it worth? Wisdom is happiness. Happiness is a form of wisdom. But happiness, like wisdom, is not an accident. It takes work, lots of it. The work that the Stoics did, the work you have to do. Wow, you still can't. And I'm really proud of this new book. I'm happy with it however it does. I'm happy with it because I know I did my best. And I said what I wanted to say. And I think I said something worth hearing. So I do hope you hear it. You can grab it as an audiobook, as an ebook. And as I said, signed at first editions at dailystoic.com/wisdom. You can still grab all the different bonuses. I appreciate the support, everyone.

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  I think you're really going to like the book. And I can't wait to hear from all of you about it. Dailystoic.com/wisdom. Still come to the dinner where we're going to talk about the book. You can get signed pages from the manuscript, including the page where I worked out this very idea, which forms one of the chapters, actually, in part three. And a bunch of other awesome stuff, including some bonus chapters. Dailystoic.com/wisdom. Enjoy.

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was telling you back in December, I did this talk in Miami. It was a Q and A outside, about as beautiful backdrop as you can imagine. Lovely conversation. Well, it was actually my third trip to Florida in like three days. Actually, let me pull up, just to give you a sense of my life. So on Thursday, I was in and out of Miami. I flew out at seven, flew home at six. And then I was home for one day. My wife had a trip. And then on Saturday, I was on a 7:00 AM flight to Miami and a 6:15 flight home.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  And then, less than one week later, I was on an 8:00 AM flight to Orlando and a 8:00 PM flight home from Orlando. So that was three trips to Florida in less than seven days. But that- Is the life of me or of a speaker. And it was lovely to get to go to Florida in December and go for a nice runs on the beach. Well, not in Orlando, that was a run around a Marriott hotel complex. But I had two lovely runs in Miami along the water. As I said, I got to answer some questions outside, under the sun, talking wellness. Debbie Brown, the podcaster, was wonderful at moderating and asking the questions of her own. Let's talk some Stoicism.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  These men are grappling with all the things that we are grappling with in this very second, which is really the juggle of light and dark. You know, it's the, it's the juggling of doing some of that inner shadow work or some of those harder things, or sometimes simply having to bear witness to what's happening and not look away. And it's that searching for that deeper thing of why am I here? And how can I make this better for myself or make this experience feel more or less X, Y, and Z?

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and it's Stoic women too. Obviously, you know, philosophy and history is largely male. That's who wrote the books. That's who could, you know, could afford to do these things. That's who got permission to do these things. But one of the Stoic teachers, his name was Musonius Rufus. He has this fascinating lecture that survives to us. And he's talking about this question that people were asking at the time. He says, should women be taught philosophy? And his answer is, of course. He says, virtue doesn't know gender, just like stillness doesn't know gender. We all have different things that rile us up or get us worried. We all have different concerns and, you know, different things we're working on. But these fundamental ideas stay the same.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  And just because the names of so many of the Stoic females or the wise women of history don't survive, this doesn't mean they didn't exist. Of course they did. And you might even argue they were more philosophical because they didn't need to, you know, publish books and put their names on them and get all the credit, right? There's something, there's something-

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Or they might have been destroyed, like much of women's adding to the world over time. You know, we're always left out of history.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. And so one of the famous Stoics is Cato. Cato's daughter, Portia Cato, is held up in antiquity as one of the sort of great Stoic women. She's married to Brutus, who assassinates Julius Caesar. And so all the Stoics were in the mix, you know? It's not just a male thing. I think sometimes people today think, particularly because it's popular online, I think people think like Stoicism is just for dudes. And it's very much not. It's been lovely to see the day of Stoicism. It's probably 50/50 because we're all just trying to make our way in the world, trying to deal with noise, trying to deal with temptations, trying to deal with our emotions. We're all dealing with the same set of things. I think Stoic philosophy is, as I said, a tool in that toolkit.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And just to speak for women, we come out the womb Stoic. You know, it's like there are so many ways that we are constantly moving through the world with a quiet courage and, you know, just in a deep ability to be present with some of the harsh realities of being here and making it beautiful and raising families and bringing joy. So, yeah.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, my wife likes a joke that one of us writes about Stoicism and then the other is a Stoic, so.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Oh, perfect. So something that you've mentioned here and really implied, but also mentioned so much in your work is that obstacles can be opportunities in disguise. How can we reframe those personal wellness challenges that we're having, like the burnout or the self doubt that happens? How can we really use those to catalyze into opportunities for growth?

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  The idea for the Stoics is that every situation is an opportunity. It's not necessarily an opportunity to make more money or build your business or whatever, right? There's stuff that happens in life that is awful and hard and constraining and removes options, right? Like, not everything is a chance to get healthier also, right? Like, you could find out you have cancer. You could find out any number of things, right? And so the idea for the Stoics is that everything was an opportunity for you to practice virtue. Everything was an opportunity for you to act with courage or discipline or justice or wisdom. So there might be no benefits to this situation for you, but there could be benefits for other people, right?

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  You could learn something that you're able to communicate from this experience. So what the Stoics are saying is that as you face things in life, big or small, good or bad, you're supposed to go, well, what is this an opportunity for me to do? And what am I being asked of in this situation? That's, that's the idea. There's one reading of Stoicism where it's like, hey, this is what makes you more productive or more resilient or more successful. And the Stoics were, you know, tough, resilient, successful people. But at a deeper level, the idea is that it's, it's always an opportunity for you to be great, like to, to do great things,

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  if not for yourself, for other people in the world.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  For those that wrestle with ego, how do we get ego out of it?

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  Certainly no one here, obviously. Definitely not me.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Never.

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. No, it's funny, uh, cause I wrote this book, Ego is the Enemy. And, and, um, it's always interesting to hear from people who have strong opinions about the book, who have not read it. And then you're like, that's ego. You know, that's the definition of what I'm talking about. But no, ego's there in, in all of us. And I rarely find it to be a positive thing. And, and I don't mean this in the Freudian sense. I just mean like, you're never like, you know, would really bring this team together if we all had bigger egos, right? Ego is a thing that gets in the way between us connecting, between us seeing what's really there, between us enjoying the success we have, right? Cause there's that sort of insatiability to ego

• 12:10Ryan Holiday?

  or that almost destructive chaos seeking part of ego, the thing that makes hard things harder, that makes, you know, it seeks out conflict and problems and chaos. So, so to me, ego is this thing that gets between us and, and what we're supposed to do, who we're supposed to be, what we're, what we're trying to do.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  How does someone look at that and, and kind of make that flexible and do something with it?

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm always, you know, you have strong opinions about things. Somebody sends you an email, you know, you get news about something, working on something. And I often find that my first reaction. You know, you could have the emotional reaction and then there's often the sort of an ego reaction of like, who are they to say this to me? Or how dare, you know, that, that part, that sort of wounded inner child part of yourself that's there to protect you, but is often too protective and shields you from what you need to hear or need to see. And so that's one of, one of the questions I'm always asking myself is like, am I doing this out of ego?

• 13:15Ryan Holiday?

  Am I, am I angry about this feedback that I got because it's not true? Or am I actually angry because I know it is true and I don't want it to be true? Right? Or am I insisting on this thing or trying to get this thing? It is, are my motives here self-serving or are they selfless? Right? And, and so I just find that ego is bad fuel. It's bad. It, it screws with your compass. And I'm not saying egotistical people are never successful. Of course they are. But what's really interesting, when you meet successful people, really successful people, the inner circle, the people around them, they know, they see where ego is making it harder for this person.

• 14:00Ryan Holiday?

  They, they have to do a lot of work, you know, trying to artfully get around it. They, they know how that person could have done more or done better or could have done it on the first try instead of the 30th try, you know? In recovery, they, they talk about ego as an acronym. It stands for edging God out, which is an interesting way to think about it. Even if you don't think about it in a spiritual context, it's, what it's really doing is, you know, making you God. And, and so the idea of, of focusing on someone or something bigger than yourself to me is, again, just one of these ways we kind of push ego away. And it's a, it's a constant process. You don't read a book and then never have ego again. You don't have some, you know, humbling failure and never have ego again.

• 14:45Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I'm sure psychedelics can be interesting and examining these things, but doesn't magically make it go away forever. It's work.

• 14:58Ryan Holiday?

  Just to let you know, I'm going to be doing three more live dates in the coming months. I'd love to see you in Seattle, Washington on December 3rd, San Diego on February 5th, and Phoenix, Arizona on February 27th. The Talk in Austin sold out. My tour last year sold out. So grab these tickets while you can. I did a wonderful talk back in Seattle with Robert Greene, which was one of my favorites. So I'm going to be there. You can ask me questions and I'll be talking Stoicism and the ideas in the new book. Just go to DailyStoicLive.com.

• 15:40Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.