Now You Know Better, Do This | Ask Daily Stoic

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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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  We look back on things that we clearly messed up. We were too preoccupied, we were too harsh, we were wrong, we didn't know. And because we messed up, we feel guilty. We regret what could have been, we're mad at ourselves, we wallow in pity or shame. Dr. Edith Egger, the Holocaust survivor, cut through all of this with her graceful bluntness on the Daily Stoic Podcast. She's been on twice, both episodes are must-listens. As she said,

• 1:21Speaker 01

  If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  "That is the end of that," she said. "And so it must be for us. Give yourself the gift of the present moment," Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations. "Seize this second chance. Don't waste it on guilt, because, as Dr. Egger said, guilt is about the past. The past is the one thing we cannot change. All we can do is do better now. We can take the feeling we have now, be it shame, or regret, or the heavy price of consequences, and use it as evidence as to why we must make the right choice today. All we can do is do things differently going forward."

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, you know, we do the Q and As. And I was recently down in Palm Springs, had a delightful run up the top of the mountain there. Well, it was lovely to me. My wife thought I was insane. She was like, you know, this is a form of self harm. She's like, it's like 105 out. What are you doing? And I said, it doesn't matter how hot it is, I'm going to feel better after I do it than if I don't do it. And then the next day I gave a talk, the kids splashed around in the pool. And actually, I think they went up to the tram to the top of the mountain while I gave my talk. I gave a talk on the connection between

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  liberty and Stoicism, the founders all being steeped in the classical ideas of liberty and freedom, but also the classical ideas of virtue and honor and restraint. And my argument is you can't have one without the other. So you can be as libertarian as you want, but just because someone can do something doesn't mean they should do it. So that was my argument. That's not really exactly what I'm going to talk about here. After the talk, we did a little Q and A where we talked, because these are people who are ideologically motivated, who have ideas, who have, in some cases, ancient ideas that they want to popularize and bring to a wider audience. And so I got asked a lot of questions. The moderator was named Daniel Richards. He asked me a lot of questions about how I've managed to

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  do that with Stoicism, how I made Stoicism popular and accessible to people. So some of the Q and A is going to be pertaining to that. But I thought it was interesting. I hope you like it. And thanks to the folks at Freedom Fest for having me out. And thank you, as always, for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  So I want to talk about story for a moment, because I feel like so much of the time, folks in the, you know, in this movement, we're doing classical liberal work, libertarianism, objectivism for me. And we've gotten really good at the logos part, at the argument.

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Right. And making the logical arguments and Trying to win that way, but maybe not so good on the storytelling pathos.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Part of it, which is, which is interesting to me because for me personally, like Ayn Rand started by writing novels.

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  You know, for popular fiction, that's was her, her goal. And that is how her philosophy has mostly spread. So what advice do you have for people on the storytelling front when they're trying to spread serious ideas?

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  I, I mean, it's all about story. One of the most basic writing rules is you show, don't tell. And what I found is, so I went and I read all the Stoics and their, their arguments are incredible. They're actually remarkably accessible and straightforward. You know, people ask me, you know, I want to introduce my teenager to the Stoics. What should I read? I say, read Seneca, read Marcus Aurelius. People have been doing this for hundreds of years. I mean, this is, you used to learn Latin as you were learning philosophy, you were learning philosophy as you were learning Latin. Like we still baby people when it comes to books these days. But I, I found the Stoics were as good as you can get as far as philosophy. This is not inscrutable, you know, contradictory, you know, nonsense. Even the names are much easier to pronounce than some of the other schools of philosophy.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  But when I would read writers on the Stoics, there was a lot of, well, they said this and then they said this, which means that it was just a lot of talking about the talking. And I just found that never to be as interesting as the originals. Or when I would read something like Robert Greene, where he is demonstrating what that law looks like. Like the, the 48 laws of power is such a great example of, of doing this well. Robert Greene sort of distills down all of human history and power and politics and war into like 48 laws, right? And then he begins each chapter with an observance of the law, like a story of someone proving this being true. And then he illustrates it with a transgression of the law.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  Someone violating the law and experiencing the consequences. And then he analyzes it and summarizes it in a symbol. It's a beautifully laid out book. It's a compelling book. It's also a master argument in and of itself of this idea that you show, you don't tell. He's not doing this like academic paper, business case study nonsense. He is, he is taking a riveting tale from history that maybe you know about. You recognize that name. You've heard of this person or yeah, you're a history buff. And then he's showing you what this looks like. And so you remember the law, but mostly you remember it because you saw it performed for you in a compelling story.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, for me, the storytelling component is so important because as you, as you said earlier, it allows people to put themselves into those snakes.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  They can envision what their lives would be like if they did X, Y, and Z.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  And that's why the stories can't be all dead white guys, right? Or all dead white American guys or European guy. And Robert taught me this. It was one of the things he was like, look, you have to have an immense amount of diversity in your examples, not for equity purposes, but, but for the purposes of making something that, that resonates across the spectrum of society. So that's people of all different lifestyles, experiences, impoverished, successful. It can't all be like prosperity gospel stuff either. It has to be, some of it has to be dark, some of it has to be sad, some of it has to be scary. You know, the idea is you want it to, a businessman can see it, a soccer mom can see it, a, a

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  person in another country with no familiarity of American politics can still work on it. And, and so, you know, it's just so easy to be like, this is what we all think. This is what we're all interested in. This is what we're all going through. And you don't realize you're, you're only talking to like a fraction of the people that could potentially be interested in. By the way, you're, you're telling those other people, this is not for you.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, equally important to think that perspective, too. So I've mentioned logos and pathos. My background is in classical rhetoric. So we're heading over to ethos.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Now, how important do you think it is? You know, you don't write a lot about yourself, but I do. How important do you think it is that you embody the philosophy that you're talking about? And maybe speak about your role as, I'll use the word influencer.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. One of the reasons I don't put myself in the books is that I don't want it to come off as if I have mastered these things and I am lecturing you on how it goes. Because I struggle with all of these things. In fact, why I'm interested in studying the philosophy and talking about it and writing about it is that I'm trying to heal myself first. And so I don't want to come off as a teacher or something like that. I am struggling with it myself. And so I am holding up examples of people who I think have lived up to not the entirety of the philosophy, but the specific thing I'm talking about in this moment. So I'm telling that story to myself, right? But of course, you have to try to live these ideas and I do.

• 9:11Ryan Holiday?

  And I, again, that's why I'm saying that I feel like I fall short because I feel like we're all works in progress. But yeah, what certainly isn't going to work is you go, hey, Ryan Ollie has popularized Stoicism, it's done well. I'm going to pick Epicureanism and I'm going to do the same thing because that's, no one else has done that. Like if it's about like, well, what's a lucrative niche that I could talk about and how can I popularize it? You're just probably not going to have the energy you need to get over it. Like you do genuinely have to be infatuated with the thing and thinking about it. And so there does need, there does come that sort of earnest connection. I think the audience can sniff it if you're not.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  And then, yeah, I do, I do feel compelled to try to use the platform and to use my...

• 10:00Ryan Holiday?

  You know, influence, if you want to say that's what an influence is, to sort of put the stuff in practice. Like, audience capture is a very real thing. And you can definitely get a sense of what the audience wants to hear, and what spreads the best and does the best. And you have to be aware of that, because that's how you grow the tent. That's how you bring people in. But like, I've been doing this series now on the cardinal virtues for six years. And I knew courage was going to be pretty straight down the middle. I knew discipline would sell the best. I knew wisdom was going to be fun and have a big market. And I talked to my publisher upfront. I was like, the Justice book is going to be the worst selling book, because people don't have a preconception, even within the philosophy of what that is. And it's going to upset some people. And it's going to be, you know,

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  it's going to be more of an uphill battle. But that was the book I decided to care the most about. Because I do think, you know, without that virtue, the other virtues become, I would say, worthless. You know, courage in pursuit of something shameful is hardly an impressive virtue. And then wisdom is what tells you what the right amount of things is, or, you know, how much to commit and all that. So they're all interrelated. But I do think there is a tendency in a world where you have so much data and information to let that dictate what you want to do. But you have to have a strong internal compass, both creatively and, I think, ethically, that is able to override that.

• 11:30Ryan 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.