It’s Mostly Froth And Bubble | Ask Daily Stoic

Silly worries and petty rivalries. People arguing for no reason. People trying to accumulate more than they could ever need. This is what we do, isn’t it? 🎟️ 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 📖Wisdom Takes Work https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work by Ryan Holiday is out! Grab a copy here:https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 👉 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  It's mostly froth and bubble. Awards and advertisements, celebrity scandals and local gossip, silly worries and petty rivalries, people arguing for no reason, people trying to accumulate more than they could ever need. This is what we do, isn't it? What we've always done? In one of the more cynical passages of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius describes life in Rome as "a pointless bustling of processions: operas, herds of sheep and cattle, military exercises, a bone flung to pet poodles, a little food in the fish tank, the miserable servitude of ants, the scampering of frightened mice, puppets jerked on strings." We fight over things.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  We entertain ourselves with trivialities. We miss the point. We waste this thing called existence, led by our perceptions, our insecurities, our fears. Stoicism is supposed to be a dash of clarity. It's a hard dose of perspective. It's what Marcus was doing in that passage, contemptuously dismissing so much of what people take for granted, trying, as he said later in Meditations, "to strip things of the legend that encrust them." Too much of life is froth and bubble. Too much of it is servitude and stupidity, being jerked around like a puppet.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  You are better than that. Time is too short for that. Wake up. Stop it. Show up. Be the person philosophy tried to make you. See what it tried to show you.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Weirdly, I'd never been to Vermont before until September. I landed, I think, in Boston and I drove up to Burlington. It was lovely. Had a great run there. I went and I saw the world's tallest filing cabinet, which I will say, something that was disappointing. I'm just saying, if you had to guess how tall the world's tallest filing cabinet was, just a bunch of filing cabinets stacked together, I'd hope it'd be more than like 10. I think it was like eight, but I would, I would have guessed it'd be like 30. And now my kids are bursting in. What are you doing, boy? Are you guys playing hide and seek? Okay, he's not in here. I will tell you if he hides in here. Shut the door. I'm recording something, okay?

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, yeah. Buddy, you didn't shut the door. Shut the door.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  So that's what I'm dealing with. I just picked the kids up from school and they are running around before we go to jujitsu. In any case, had a lovely time in Vermont. Much colder there then in September than it is now in Texas. I think it was like 85 today. What does this have to do with today's episode? I was doing a talk in Vermont to this group called Exit Five, which is a membership community place for B2B marketers to get together. So lovely chat. I didn't talk about Stoicism so much as I talked about how I was able to take a obscure school of ancient philosophy and, and build it into something, which was always lovely to talk about. I was talking about more or less the ideas in Perennial Seller. In any case, afterwards, I got to answer some questions, a lot of which were about Stoicism. So I'm going to bring you that for today's Q and A.

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  In related news, I'm going to be in Seattle on December 3rd, giving a talk much more about Stoicism, but you can ask me questions about anything you want there in the Q and A. Or at the VIP, I think there's a few tickets left to that. And then I will be in San Diego and Phoenix in February. You can grab tickets to all of those before they sell out at dailystoiclive.com. Thanks to Dave, the founder and CEO of Exit 5. He was a big David Stokes fan. He said he gifted it to many people, including friends and family, which is very cool to hear. And I appreciate him inviting me. Got another child interruption. What's up, buddy? Are you locking the door? That's smart. I will tell him I haven't seen you. So I'm going to get to this game of hide and seek. In the meantime, I hope to see you in Seattle, Phoenix, and San Diego.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  Dailystoiclive.com. Enjoy this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I used to be a high school teacher and I had a really big responsibility to school in the South Side of Chicago to get kids to believe in themselves. I'm going to get emotional talking about this. I decided to do a crowdsourced, Donors Choose, a class incentive obstacles away from them.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  I cold emailed you. You funded like 200 bucks today and then tweeted it and it was funded in like three minutes.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Well, here's something I've been thinking about. I want to keep it related to marketing because otherwise I'm going to ask about conspiracy, which is one of my favorite books.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  But Trust Me, I'm Lying was the first book I read of yours. I still think it holds true quite a bit.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  Unfortunately, yes.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  What do you see? What the intersection between conspiracy and conspiracy you pose, like what if we use this for good?

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  What about Trust Me, I'm Lying? Is there parts of that that you still see we can use for good today in marketing?

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so I wrote a book, my first book, as I was saying, this came out in 2011. It's basically about sort of how the media system and marketing can be manipulated and how sort of the, the things that we find out about, like what's going on behind the curtain? Why do we hear about some things and not other things? Eventually, my argument is a sort of a knife fight for attention, attention being this, this scarce resource in, in this world. And, and that there are a lot of forces and a lot of sort of bad actors involved in that system. And, and that. My, my argument was like, you gotta figure out how this system works. Because the fact that you have a, a cool cause, or even a great product,

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  is not sufficient to break through, uh, when you're up against these, you know, sort of better funded, uh, or, or better organized, you know, sort of groups and, and interests. So I, I think, you know, how do you, how do you actually break through? What are you willing to do to break through? To me, that's kind of the lesson of that book. And I, I think we're, we're watching, you know, too many people just presume that because their heart's in the right place, or presume because, you know, most reasonable people would agree with what they're saying, that that message is gonna get out, and that's not how it works. It, it, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's much more complicated than that. And I do think you gotta take the kind of figure out how the, how the system works.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  Um, particularly if, if you have something that's like actually worth seeing and hearing about. And I think, you know, in a world of, of AI, it's only gonna be more difficult, just because there's, you know, endless amounts of slop that you're competing with.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Hey, Ryan.

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Thanks for coming out.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  After you're done writing your first draft, I imagine you go through the editing process.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Uh, how do you know when the editing is, is done? How do you know when it's done?

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  He's, he's a writer, by the way.

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Lovely.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, yeah, i- i- in perennial seller, I, I sort of split it, uh, there's like, I feel like there's four phases. There's sort of writing, and there's editing, and refining, and crafting, and then there's the marketing, and then there's the kind of this other stuff we're talking about as far as platform, uh, all, all this stuff that sort of comes about towards the end. Um, I think the editing phase is probably the most important in many ways. Um, you know, the book that I have coming out in, in, uh, October, you know, I had to cut 20,000 words out of it. Um, and it, it, the- That was the hardest and most visible of the edits. But I just finished the audiobook and I was, you know, much to the chagrin of my publisher,

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  even editing as I was doing it because now I'm having to read it out loud in a studio by myself. And there's just stuff that on the page seemed fine. But, but, you know, I just, oh, I said this word three times on the same page. And when I was editing it in Microsoft Word, you know, nine months ago, those words weren't on the same page, just because the layouts compressed and moved stuff around. So I think editing is this ongoing thing. And as I said, I just had this weird experience doing the 10-year anniversary. I'm going to do a 15-year anniversary of Trust Me, I'm Lying. There's still stuff I'm adding and changing as it, as it goes. So it's not that it never stops, but I do think in a world where, you know,

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  I could edit the ebook tomorrow. If there's something I want to change, I'm going to keep changing it. But, but to me, you do your draft, as they say, like the first draft is just for you. And then, once you finish, now you have to start to take a bunch of other considerations into consideration. Everything from like, what am I legally allowed to say here? To, you know, who am I really trying to get this to land with? And all of that is the, you know, a painful but necessary part of the process.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Well, then your list of books, right now, like the one question comes to my mind is, what is your ideation process? Like, how do you write such great stories that keep your audience engaged without being a one broken record?

• 10:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, look, I started as a research assistant. I was a research assistant for this writer named Robert Greene. And his books are primarily story-based. And I do think stories, parables, anecdotes, this is how, how we, how we learn. This is what stays with us. So what I tend to, to always be looking for stories. And I have a whole method that I sort of read, synthesize, record, process stories. And then, as I'm writing a book, I'm sort of moving and plugging around. I showed you my note cards. I do all that. But, but I usually have like the ide- Idea for what I want to say, like the the argument. And then what I'm looking for are stories that that illustrate that idea. So, you know, the the writing rule is is you always show, don't tell.

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  And so I'm I'm not saying, you know, here's a logical proof for why this is true. I'm saying, let me show you what this looks like in practice. Let me show you someone violating the idea or observing the idea. Or, you know, proving it in some way. That's that's that's kind of how I think about it. But that stories, not not just directing stories made for compelling reading. But then what I like about being sort of story base is then it's very translatable to all these other mediums. So I might write a five thousand word story in a book. And then that that story can be condensed down into a thirty second TikTok. It can be a thirty minute YouTube video. It could be a five minute section in an hour talk.

• 11:44Ryan Holiday?

  And so the the things are modular and I kind of move them around.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  I'm curious about your distribution. You talk about how much content you distribute and how that works in the team. But also the dad, curious about the like motivation behind Daily Dad.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I I'm a big believer in the the sort of page a day format, uh, which I didn't really know that much about before I wrote the Day to Story. But I I've gotten so much out of sort of having the surface, like one idea, one thing to think about each day. So Day to Story came out in twenty sixteen. Daily Dad came out, I think, two years ago. It's just stories that sort of illustrate the the lessons that I think we all want to embody as parents. Uh, and so I, but but I think about it as like, am I going to get better for doing the project? That's one of my sort of things. So so the Daily Dad book is also a Daily Dad email that goes out every day. It's dailydad.com. Uh, and the process of like, hey, what's a, what's something to meditate on? What's something to think about? That's kind of how that that is. And yeah, there's a, there's a team.

• 12:41Ryan Holiday?

  I I write all the stuff, but then people are just like, I don't do the Spanish translation of my books. Someone helps me translate that into, you know, okay, here's, as I said, here's the TikTok version of this. And here's the YouTube version of this and the Instagram version of this, the tweet version of this. So how do you take? The sort of core idea is what I'm saying and then find ways to reach people in all the different mediums that they're consuming content and like me, when I want to learn about something, I read a book. That's that's my medium, but that's not the dominant cultural medium these days. And so I think I spend a lot of time trying to take what I do and make it work for wherever there's people. And then the idea is that sort of funnels back ultimately to the books, which is where I spend most of my effort.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  You kind of have funnelled in on the distribution side, but to zoom in a little bit more on your process for sourcing ideas, like all the places for books and conversations you're doing, whatever, and then your daily practice for maintaining that ability to do it for 15 plus years.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  Daily cadence, being unbelievably prolific. What does that look like when I should sit down to write or do the thing?

• 13:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so I'm reading widely and I tend to find the best stuff when I'm not looking for it. So, you know, I find stuff in novels, I find stuff in weird history books. I'm just reading where my interests take me, but I'm, it's like I'm kind of using the confirmation bias to my advantage. Like, oh, that connects here. Oh, that's related to this. Oh, that I was just thinking about something in this story that I'm reading, this three sentence anecdote in a history book happens to maybe illustrate that idea. Now I need to go dive deeper into that and find out, you know, is it actually an illustration of what I'm talking about or just a coincidence? And so, yeah, I kind of read widely and then I, yeah, I'm just always doing it. I obviously have the advantage that it's my job to read

• 14:35Ryan Holiday?

  and find stories, but I really love doing it. It's what I would be doing, it's what I was doing when I had my marketing career is that I love to read, I love history, I love learning out about stuff and, and I try to find, you know, just stuff that I haven't heard of. So that, that sort of curiosity is driving you and yeah, you never know what you're gonna end up finding. But you, you need to have a process, like I think the reason I tend to read physical books instead of ebooks and audiobooks, although I don't begrudge anyone that consumes any medium they like, is that I don't want it to just go into some Black hole somewhere. For me, it's the process of taking the notes and recording it and transferring it that allows me to develop the recall that I need to actually be able to use it at some time. I don't think Evernote exists anymore.

• 15:20Ryan Holiday?

  People will be like, "I have that in Evernote somewhere." And it's like, "Okay." But you don't actually have it. So for me, it's that process of finding, recording, and then applying is really where it's about.

• 15:36Ryan 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.