There’s No One Stupider Than An Angry Person | Ask Daily Stoic

There’s even a famous old saying: Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make angry.🎟️ Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 San Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 Phoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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?

  There's no one stupider than an angry person. They are brilliant, they're educated, they know better. So what explains why smart people do stupid things? One reason, as Seneca tells us, is anger, because anger makes us stupid. It blinds us, makes us impulsive and rash, consumes us with grievances, it warps our sense of reality and our desire for revenge or catharsis. We do things that make absolutely no sense. Imagine, Seneca writes, returning a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog. Yet, isn't this exactly what we do when we are upset or hurt? There's even a famous old saying,

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make angry." It is here that Stoicism must intervene. We have to pause and reflect. We have to ask ourselves, is this really going to make things better? Is this really a good idea? We need to balance out our emotions with some self-awareness and perspective. We have to check them with discipline. Because life is difficult enough, our problems are vexing enough, that we will need all our wits about us, cannot afford to be stupid, we cannot risk destroying ourselves.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of my favorite things about giving talks is that, not just that I get to meet people who are actually trying to apply Stoicism in the real world, or meet people who have never even heard of Stoicism and they're just out there living their lives and I get to connect with them and learn from them and understand their experiences. I mean, that's why I'm excited to go to Seattle here in December. You can grab tickets for that, by the way, at DailyStoicLive.com. And then I'll be in Phoenix and San Diego sometime in February. Grab the tickets at the same spot. But I get to travel places that I have

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  never been. Back in May, I went to Mexico City. I've been to Mexico many times. I've been all over Mexico. I mean, I grew up in California. I live in Texas. So it's always within reach. But for some reason, I'd never been to Mexico City. I wasn't there for very long. I flew in the night before, got to have dinner in my hotel, take a couple of walks, you know, go for a nice run in the morning and then go to this event space and then go home. So I didn't get to see a ton of it, although I did see this cool park named after Abraham Lincoln, where I spent a good chunk of time. So that was lovely. Actually, it was interesting because I was just finishing the Lincoln chapter from Wisdom Takes Work. And I go, this is kind of what Tolstoy was talking about. And he's in the North Caucasus Mountains and these people are asking him about Abraham Lincoln. I

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  mean, here I am in Mexico and they've got a park named after him. That's, that's the greatness of the man. I sort of brought it all home. I actually recorded a little video about it. But anyways, I gave this talk at an event called the National Advisory Council. But while I was there, a journalist interviewed me. His name is Juan Pablo DeLeo. And he's a journalist. He's the director at Politico Mexico. And He interviewed me for a TV spot. And then I did my talk onstage. And then we wrapped it up by him asking me some more questions in front of the audience. So I wanted to bring you a chunk of that sort of Q and A that we did at the end of the talk. He did a great job moderating. And I was fascinated to learn about the political situation in Mexico,

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  which I don't know that much about. It was fascinating for me to get to talk to someone about their world and what they're worried about. And as it happens, everyone's worried about what's happening in their country. This is a sort of shared experience. It turns down the volume on what you think is happening here. So I thought that was a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. And I hope to see you in Seattle and Phoenix and San Diego. Coming up very shortly, you can grab those tickets at DailyStoicLive.com. The Seattle event is almost sold out. So if you want to grab tickets, just go to DailyStoicLive.com. That's the one in December. I'm going to be in the other places in February. So that's at DailyStoicLive.com.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Ryan, what's your perspective on vulnerability in leadership, both from a Stoic and human standpoint?

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I do think there is something about Stoicism. People take it to be invulnerability, remoteness, aluceness. I don't think that that's who the Stoics were historically. I mean, we have multiple stories of Marcus Verdi's crime. The Stoics made great works of art. The Stoics had families. They had hobbies. They loved life. So this idea of repression, stuffing things down, that's not what Stoicism is about. And I don't think that's what great leaders do. Are leaders a calming presence when everyone else is freaking out? Yeah, of course, that's a big part of it. But that doesn't mean we're just pretending that everything is always okay. To me, that's what leads to burnout.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  That's what leads to psychological issues. I try to work on, I have two young boys. I try to work on, hey, what are we feeling? Why are we feeling it? Let's go through it. Let's work on it. Let's not make unconscious decisions in--

• 6:21Speaker 03

  You know, uh, in the actions of those feelings that we have, but let's, uh, let's make sure we process and understand them. So we're not, you know, sort of blindly just in this way of our passions, as the ancients could say.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  The next question is, for entrepreneurs working in environments marked by violence, corruption, and the lack of justice, as in the case in many parts of Mexico, how can spoilt philosophy provide guidance and a sense of urgency when personal and economic freedoms are under pressure?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, none of this is new. Rome was obviously a powerful empire, but it was filled with corruption and violence and dysfunction. And the stoics were known as sort of honest brokers inside that, good people inside that. And then they also courageously dealt with it and tried not to be corrupted by it themselves. There's a story of my favorite stoics, there's a man named Rutilius Rufus. And he's sent as a governor of one of the provinces of the Roman Empire, uh, in Asia Minor. And he, unlike many of the governors sent as part of this empire, um, he decides not to move the province. He decides not to use it as a personal piggy bank.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  So this Rufus says, you know, "I'm here to govern these people, to, to, to provide competent governance, and, uh, this is not a, uh, a way for me to get rich." So you can imagine, that's a deviation from the standard way to do business. He creates some enemies. That's the problem with being honest in a corrupt system, is that you inherently indict and cause problems for those who are corrupt. So, uh, in a painful bit of irony, the sort of ruling elites bring Rutilius Rufus up on corruption charges for not being corrupt. It's their fastest way of getting rid of him. So he's brought up in this sort of show trial, uh, all this false evidence is brought against him.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  He's convicted and sent, uh, the sentence, uh, mercifully is not death, it's exile. And they say, "We'll give you one bit, small bit of mercy, which is, we'll let you choose where you're going to be sent into exile." And Rufus thinks about it and he says, "Okay, I'd like to go back to Asia Minor." Where he's sent, so he's sent back to the province that he was supposedly corrupt in, but in fact had not been. And, um... There he is met with open arms and lives and serves honorably for the rest of his life. And to me, it's this idea that we don't control how other people do things. We don't control the brokenness of the system, but we do decide whether that system breaks us.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Right? We do decide whether we succumb to it. Now, I don't mean to be glib about this, I understand that some cases are issues of life and death, but it was an issue of life and death for Lucilius Grupus. The Stoics are known, a group of them is known as the Stoic Opposition. They are constantly challenging, they're perpetual form in the side of emperors like Nero and Domitian. They are constantly exiled and sent away for this. But they tried to say, "Hey, look, I'm not gonna think about the consequences. I'm gonna think about whether this is the way I think to do it or not." And this is what makes them great. And eventually, it does lead to changes and improvements.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  And of course, here we are, all these thousands of years, talking about their examples. So, to me, the challenge of our time is to not be changed by the challenges of our time. To stick to the principles, the values, the conscience that we all have. And to not let the, as I say, not let the assholes turn you into an asshole.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Very well said. How do we foster resilience and progress in those who are product of our context and slaves of our history?

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Well, we're all a product of our circumstances. We're all a slave to our history. As Stoics would say, the character is fate. But they did believe that we could shape our character, and that philosophy was the way to do that. Our mentors are a way to do that. That our reading, our learning, our study of history is a way to do that. That we shape our character. And they did believe that, you know, character wasn't character, values, philosophy, virtue, all these things. Excellence wasn't this thing that you had or didn't have. But it was a thing that you made, right? It was a thing that you are. And so, if we think of virtue, for instance, as a verb and not a noun. That we go, "Okay, if we want to become better, we have to do better things.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  If we want someone who works for us to get better, to be more resilient, to grow, to change." Well, we do that by helping them do that thing. Again, it's not a DNA sequence that you got at birth or it didn't. It's stances and resilience, virtue, these are things that we cultivate in the choices that we make, in the things that we study, and then in the actions that we take.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Another question, in places like Mexico, where governments limit personal ambition and try to make everyone the same, often at the cost of individual growth and success, often, stories that help people stay true to themselves and find the courage to push back and rise above that mindset.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  The primary virtue of Stoic philosophy that was born, if I had a tattoo on my wrist here, it's courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Courage, I think, being the virtue that the others descend from or are impossible to doubt. I think wrongly, you tend to think of courage as, you know, challenging corruption, charging onto the battlefield, rushing into a burning building. Those are all forms of physical courage, for sure. But the moral courage to be yourself, to go for what you want to go for, to put yourself out there, to try and do your best, is unfortunately one of the rarer forms of courage. One of my favorite Stoics is this guy named Agrippas. He lives in the time of Nero. You can imagine that we have an unstable,

• 12:29Speaker 03

  vain, and paranoid emperor standing out as a risky proposition. So this creates quite a bit of conformity and silence in Rome. But Agrippas has none of it. He refuses to see the emperor, he speaks his mind, he's eccentric and unique. And a friend comes to him and says, "Why are you doing this? Don't you realize it's gonna get you in trouble?" And he says, "Look, I get it. Most people are comfortable conforming, but I'm not." He says, "In a tunic, or in a garment, there's all the threads that make it the color that it is." And then he says, "There's the accent color." So he says, "In a white tunic, I am the red thread

• 13:14Speaker 03

  that stands out and makes the garment beautiful." And I think we have to understand as individuals that we're all totally unique, that we have unique DNA, you need circumstances, you need experiences, you need skills. And strength is one of the craziest things in the world, that we sort of mute those colors to be more like everyone else. So the courage to stand out, to be yourself, to live as you want to live, to go for what you want to go for, I think is the most essential form of courage that there is.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  We have one last question. I'll leave you some of them, I'll deal with anxiety, harsh feedback, and unclear outcomes. In your experience, how has scorism helped you stay centered and resilient during times of serious doubts or very tough uncertainty?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Well, scorism has a lot to teach us about all these things. So in anxiety, what is at the root of anxiety? We start to say the root of anxiety is focusing on things that you don't control, right? And so Marx Lewis in meditation, one of the famous passages, he says, "You know, anxiety isn't this thing that I hope to escape. It has to be a thing that I'm going to discard, because I'm the source of the anxiety." You notice, all the things that make you anxious, they all have one thing in common, and that's you. You are the source of the anxiety. The airport is not what's making you anxious. The economy is not making you anxious. Your children are not. Your children's safety is not what's making you anxious. It's your feelings, your projections, your worries that are causing that.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  And so the decision to focus on what you control, accept a certain powerlessness, and then to say, "The parts of it I control, I'm going to do well, and that's where my energy is going to go," as opposed to just like, unloading it off the problem. Taking feedback. You can imagine, a lot of people had a lot of strong thoughts about the Emperor from the meditation Marx Lewis talks about how criticism makes you better, that he wanted to hear from people who didn't like what he was doing, or who knew better than he did. Because it saves him from making mistakes. And you can see, I think, a distinction between good leaders and bad leaders. Good leaders solicit feedback, bad leaders run from feedback.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  There's actually a story I tell in my new book, because I was in, I was looking at the Lincoln statue in the park this morning. The Crossroads is a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. And I tell a story in the book about Martin Luther King Jr. He had, one of his most trusted aides was, you know, sort of had the assigned role of being the devil's advocate in his meetings. And at one meeting, a guy is tired and distracted and he decides not to do it. He's just not really paying attention. And afterwards Martin Luther King pulls him aside and he says, "Hey, I need you to speak up at the meetings because," he says, "everyone here is certifiably insane." He says, "We're all crazy.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  We need a voice of reason to prevent ourselves from doing extra crazy things." He says, "I'm willing to give my life for this cause, but I'm not going to throw it away over some bit of foolishness." So even in a sort of a radical, courageous, ambitious organization like Martin Luther King's, he has people whose job it is to be a dose of reality. And he's actively seeking out that criticism and he's noticing when he's not getting it. And the way we have to understand criticism, like it feels unfortunate, it feels unpleasant, but like when my enemy is making, or my opponent, my competition,

• 16:55Speaker 03

  when they are making a mistake or when they are being correct, I don't correct them. That's actually one of the fundamental laws of strategy, which is never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake, right? And so when someone is criticizing you, when someone is giving you feedback, they are by definition not your enemy, your friend. They wouldn't be helping you. They wouldn't be giving you this information if they weren't trying to make you better. And so you have to actively seek out criticism and feedback. It's just a part of getting better. And so stoicism is, to me, the ability to say, "I don't like hearing that, doesn't feel fun hearing that, but I'm going to integrate it into my understanding here because my goal is to get better.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  My goal is not to remain the same. And I appreciate you giving me what I need, which is more information."

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Well, I'm happy. Thank you very much. And you'll have to be a good listener.

• 18:00Ryan 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.