Daily Stoic Sundays: 10 of the Most Stoic Moments in History

In today's podcast, Ryan discusses 10 moments in history where the power of Stoicism became apparent, from Adm. James Stockdale's time in a North Vietnamese prison camp to Michael Jordan's Flu Game and beyond. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. What I wanted to put together for you guys today on this Sunday episode, something I'd been kicking around for a while. I'm just, but obviously, the philosophy is this robust nuanced idea, but I'm just, I'm in love with these badass moments from history where somebody says, "Nope, you're gonna have to go through me first." Where somebody rejects the tyranny of chance and fate, stands up for themselves, makes a difference, shows what they're made of. And I think, you know, sometimes that can get lost in the study of the beautiful words of the philosophy.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  So, we tend to focus on the Stoics, who were self-proclaimed Stoics, who wrote Stoic works. But I'm also interested in the people who never even heard a word of Stoicism, but managed to live and embody those ideas. As Epictetus said, "Don't talk about your philosophy, embody it." Marcus Aurelius, "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one." And so today's episode, we're gonna go through 10 moments from history, some ancient, some modern, some men, some women, some explicitly philosophical, some just intuitively badass. And we're gonna go through these moments, 10 awesome... Moments that I think illustrate what Stoicism is about, particularly that virtue of courage and endurance and sort of defiance. Nassim Taleb would define Stoicism as a stoic,

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  as someone who says, fuck you to fate. It's a little blunt, but I like the spirit of it. And there's certainly an element of that in each one of these 10 moments. So here we have it. I hope everyone's doing well. And what I really hope, the real intention of today's episode is that you walk away from these 10 entries, sort of inspired, fortified, ready to run through a wall next week, ready to apply some of this courage and justice that we talk about. There are some examples here. I think that's a profound sense of justice and duty, but that you will apply these ideas in your actual life as these men and women

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  happen to do it. So check it out. 10 moments of Stoic inspiration and defiance and courage from the historical record.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism has never been a philosophy for school. It's been a philosophy for life, courage, self-discipline, justice, wisdom. It's been about putting these ideas into action. Throw away your books, Marcus Aurelius said. Don't talk about what a good man is like, be one. Since ancient Rome, the Stoics have been doers. People like Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the Roman Empire, and Cato the Younger, who was a senator and a military commander, and Seneca, who was a lawyer and then advisor to the emperor. Marcus Aurelius said, "The most inspiring thing in the world is looking at the virtues embodied in the people around us." So let us look at some of the greatest, most inspiring moments of Stoicism in the real world and history, practiced by real philosophers, whether they knew that's what

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  they were doing or not. March 7, 1965, the height of the modern civil rights movement. A few days after a young African-American man was shot and killed trying to protect his mother during a peaceful protest in Selma, Alabama, a 25-year-old activist named John Lewis made a decision. He was going to attempt to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery to show the country that people of color wanted The voting rights they were being denied. In the shocking images from that day, Lewis is famously wearing a backpack. In this backpack, I had two books, he said. I thought we were going to be arrested and that we were going to jail. And so I wanted something to read in jail. I wanted to have something to eat. In that backpack, I had an apple and I had an orange.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Behind John Lewis assembled some 600 other demonstrators. Two by two, they marched through the city streets to the highest point of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were met by a sea of state troopers. One of the troopers spoke up. This is an unlawful march. It will not be allowed to continue. We'll give you three minutes to disperse. Lewis stopped the line for a moment to kneel and pray. And as he did, the same trooper ordered his men to advance. The troopers put on their gas masks and charged Lewis and his protesters. They beat them with nightsticks and bullwhips, trampled them with horses and hosed them with tear gas. I thought I was going to die, Lewis said. I thought it was the last nonviolent protest in me.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  The televised images of a trooper cracking Lewis's skull with a billy club outraged the nation. Eight days later, Lewis was still in the hospital when Lyndon B. Johnson presented the Voting Rights Acts to Congress. It was signed into law on August 6th. At an event commemorating the 55th anniversary of what became known as Bloody Sunday, Lewis told attendees to speak up, speak out, get in the way, get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America. To the Stoics, courage was everything. Courage in the face of the enemy, courage to risk yourself and your safety, courage to speak the truth, courage to stand alone, courage to try the difficult thing, even if it might not work, courage to go to jail if need be, courage to defend something on principle,

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  courage to do what's right, courage to get in the way, courage to get in good trouble. Number nine, Aaron Ralston. On April 26th, 2003, Aaron broke his own first rule. Before the mountaineer from Aspen, Colorado set out on what should have been an eight-hour, 13-mile hike in Utah's Blue John Canyon, he didn't tell anyone. And as he scrambled up a narrow section of the canyon, he dislodged an 800 pound boulder that fell and pinned his arm between it and the canyon wall. Being in one of Canyonland's national parks most remote sections, he knew that shouting for help was useless, so he got to work. For the first few days, he tried everything he could to move the boulder. He tried to chip away at it with his pocket knife, the kind you'd get for free if you

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  bought a flashlight, as he later described it. He tried creating a pulley system out of his climbing clips and ropes to lift the boulder. He tried to move it with his feet, but at no point was I ever even able to get that boulder to budge even microscopically, he said. By the fifth day, he came to peace, he said, with the knowledge I was going to die here, that this was my grave. Delirious from the lack of food, water, and sleep, Ralston had a dream of he and his future son. Instead of a will to live, Ralston said, he felt a will to love. All the desires, joys, and euphorias of a future life came rushing to me. Maybe this was how I handled the pain. I was so happy to be able to take action. It occurred to him that if he broke his bones, his blunted knife could cut through the limb.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  Using the tubing of his Camelback water bottle as a tourniquet, he cut off his arm and managed to scale a 65-foot cliff to escape the canyon. And his dream came true. His son was born in 2010, and less than two years after losing his arm, he became the first person to climb all 59 of Colorado's 14ers, mountain peaks with an elevation of at least 14,000 feet. You can't help but think of Epictetus having his leg twisted and shattered by his violent and depraved slave owner and then saying, lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. Number eight, Michael Jordan. June 11, 1997, Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz. The series is tied 2-2.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Michael Jordan did not sleep the night before. He was scheduled to have breakfast with Scottie Pippen and Ron Harper the morning of the game, but he was a no-show. He missed the pre-game shootaround, too. The team's trainer, Chip Schaefer, found Jordan in his room curled up in the fetal position and wrapped in blankets. The thermostat was as high as it could go. The greatest player in the world was violently ill. Was it food poisoning, altitude sickness, the flu? No one knew. For sure, but everyone who saw him thought the same thing. There's no way he's playing tonight. Except when Jordan arrived at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City shortly after 5:00 PM, he told his coach Phil Jackson he was ready to play. He started the game, but it was a sad sight. On the court, Jordan was often folded over, hands on his knees,

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  fighting for breath. On the sidelines, he was reclined with ice packs on his forehead, down in Gatorade. The Jazz were up 16 by the first quarter. But then, Jordan summoned something that the sports world still hasn't fully been able to articulate. But as Epictetus would say 2,000 years before, sickness is a problem for the body, not the mind, unless the mind decides that it is a problem. And Jordan decided it wasn't a problem. He exploded for 17 points in the second quarter, bringing the Bulls back down by four by halftime. He kept his team close throughout the second half and down by one with 46 seconds to play, and then he was fouled. "Look at the body language of Michael Jordan," Marv Albert, the announcer said. "You have the idea that he has difficulty just standing up. He made

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  the first, missed the second, but somehow got his own rebound and hit a three-pointer to give Chicago an 88-85 lead, which they would not lose." Jordan finished with 38 points, 15 of them in the fourth quarter. Two nights later, still not fully recovered, Jordan had 39 points to lead the Bulls to win the NBA title. Jazz coach Jerry Sloan later said Jordan should be remembered as the greatest player who ever played the game. Number 7, James Stockdale. On September 9, 1965, Admiral James Stockdale's A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in Vietnam. "Five years down here at least," Stockdale recounted, saying after ejecting from his plane, "I'm leaving the world of technology and entering

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  the world of Epictetus." The North Vietnamese used 13 prisons and prison camps. The one that Stockdale went to was famously the worst. It was a dark dungeon where captives were physically and mentally tortured to unimaginable extremes. It was the center of North Vietnam's propaganda exploitation and psychological warfare machine, where no limits were faced.

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  On getting the enemy to break down and confess war crimes. Stockdale was not the only high ranking prisoner. Victory then for the captors in the Hanoi Hilton, as Stockdale and his fellow inmates would come to call it, was getting Stockdale to break because he was its highest ranking prisoner. His captors kept him in the main torture room in the most isolated part of the prison. After a month straight of torture, they thought they had him. They thought he was broken and ready to be marched down to commit treason in front of television cameras. But before they could, they needed him to look presentable, so they took him out of the torture room to the bathroom where he was told to shower and shave. Left alone in the bathroom, Stockdale grabbed the razor he was given and sliced open his scalp.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  He was bandaged and thrown in a cell while his captors looked for something to cover the wounds, now even more determined to parade him in front of the cameras. Stockdale, realizing that he needed to further disfigure himself, took a wooden stool and bashed his face until he could barely see. Guards rushed in and debated with one another what to tell their commander. "You tell them," Stockdale interrupted, "that the captain will not be going downtown." The sheer bravery and strength, it's unreal. A living embodiment of what Epictetus said, "You may bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice." His captors deprived him, they tortured him, they beat him, they stripped him of his possessions, but they could not break him.

• 12:15Ryan Holiday?

  Number six, Cato the Younger. For George Washington and the entire revolutionary generation, Cato was liberty, a symbol to the resistance to tyranny. And for the Stoics, Cato was virtue, the ideal they aspired to. For Julius Caesar, the dictator who famously pardoned every opponent, Cato was infuriating, the only man he could never forgive. And Cato refused to break his commitment to justice and liberty and courage and virtue. He refused to roll over and let Caesar usurp the laws of the Republic. And after Caesar won the civil war and the Republic fell, he refused to live even a single day under the tyranny of Julius Caesar. After helping many of his friends free to safety and sharing in a final meal with those who remained, Cato retired.

• 13:00Ryan Holiday?

  ...to his bedroom where he read some pages of Plato, which told the story of Socrates choosing death over compromise. When he put the book down, he picked up his sword and said, "Now I am my own master," and he plunged the blade into his chest. The wound should have been mortal, but even steel could not kill Rome's iron man. Wry then, Cato fell, awakening his weeping and mourning friends. A doctor rushed in and attempted to sew the wound shut, but before he could finish stitching him up, Cato awoke and began to tear the wound apart. As Plato concluded, Cato couldn't beat fate, but he nevertheless gave it a hard contest. Cato had always fought and clung to life with superhuman tenacity, and especially

• 13:41Ryan Holiday?

  so as he died. He embodied those beautiful lines in the Dylan Thomas poem, "He did not go quietly into that good night. He raged, raged against the dying of the light. A stoic does not go quietly into that good night. A stoic fights tooth and nail for what is right. A stoic can't be broken. A stoic would die before they'd submit or compromise with evil." And thankfully, it's unlikely to come to that today for us, but that doesn't mean we can't take up Cato's spirit and fight in our own way.

• 14:12Ryan Holiday?

  Number five, Portia Cato. By all accounts, the daughter of Cato the Younger rivaled her father in steely determination and patriotism. And still more true, Plutarch wrote, is that Portia was deficient neither in prudence nor courage. Not long after the Republic fell and the brutal suicide of her beloved father, Portia had an intuition that her husband Brutus was planning something, although what she wasn't sure. Instead of demanding that he explain herself, Portia decided she would prove her trustworthiness to her husband and her fortitude to herself. Plutarch tells us that Portia took a small knife and stabbed herself in the thigh, and then waited to see how long she could stand and hide the

• 14:54Ryan Holiday?

  pain. Bleeding profusely and shaking in near delirium from the wound, when Brutus finally came home, Portia grabbed him and said, "I know that woman's nature is thought too weak to endure a secret, but good rearing and excellent companionship go far towards strengthening The character and it is my happy lot to be both the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus. Before this, I put less confidence in these advantages, but now I know I am superior even to pain. And so moved by what he witnessed, the fortitude and the strength and self composure, Brutus vowed not to keep any more secrets and told his wife of his plot to kill Julius Caesar, prayed that he would be worthy of her courage and knew that whatever happened, neither

• 15:37Ryan Holiday?

  he or she would break under the threat of torture. Number four, Agrippinus. We don't know when he was born. We don't know when he died. We don't know what he wrote, if he wrote anything, but we know from the accounts of others that Agrippinus, even amongst the bravest of his time stood out. Even in Nero's reign, when everyone was keeping their head down and compromising, Agrippinus refused to conform or tamp down his independent thinking. Why? Agrippinus asked. Why not be like the rest of us? We are told by Epictetus that Agrippinus was asked, why not be like the rest of us? Because then I would not be me, he said. We are told by Epictetus that Agrippinus was asked by a fellow philosopher whether

• 16:20Ryan Holiday?

  he should attend some banquet put on by the awful and tyrannical Nero. Agrippinus told the man he should go. But why? The man asked. You're not going. And that's when Agrippinus got him with another one of his famous barbs. Because you are thinking about it. For me, Agrippinus said, it's not even a question. Not long after Epictetus tells us, Agrippinus received awful news. He had been exiled by Nero effective immediately. Betraying neither anxiety nor fear about his fate, Agrippinus asked if they were confiscating his property. They weren't. Very well, he said, we shall take our lunch on the road. That's how a stoic responds. They shrug off the emotional weight even of the worst news. They have humor about it.

• 17:04Ryan Holiday?

  They focus on what they control and they let go of everything outside of it. And instead of falling on their knees and shaking their fist at the heavens, they shrug it off because isn't it time to get moving?

• 17:17Ryan Holiday?

  Number three, Jackie Robinson. "I'm looking for a ballplayer with the guts not to fight back," Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey told Jackie Robinson in 1945. "Any bit of retaliation," Rickey knew, "would end not only Robinson's career, but would set back their grand experiment of breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier for at least a generation. There would be hotel clerks refusing him a room, rude waiters, opponents shouting slurs. But even so, Robinson assured him, he was ready, he could take it." The manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman, put this to the test almost immediately. He was particularly brutal in a game, shouting obscene language at Robinson, to put it lightly.

• 17:59Ryan Holiday?

  But not only did Jackie not break his pact with Rickey, despite, as he later wrote, "wanting to grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash their teeth in with my black fist," he said, but a month later, he agreed to take a friendly photo with Chapman to help save the man's job. "The thought of touching, posing with such an asshole, even 60 years removed, almost turns the stomach." Robinson called it "one of the most difficult things he ever did, but he was willing to do it because it was part of a larger plan, because he had transcended even the anger and bitterness that he had every right to feel. Knowing what he wanted to do and needed to do in baseball, it was clear what he had to tolerate, and so he did it bravely and ferociously."

• 18:42Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius, who also brushed up against his fair share of terrible people, said that "asking to never encounter a shameless or awful person is to ask for the impossible." But, he said, as Robinson would later prove, "the best revenge is not to be like that." Number two, Theodore Roosevelt. It was over a century ago now that Theodore Roosevelt walked out of the Gilpatrick Hotel on his way to the Milwaukee auditorium to give a speech to a packed crowd as part of his independent campaign for president. As he approached the venue, a man rushed from the crowd and shot him in the chest at close range. The bullet, a .38 caliber shell, but was miraculously slowed by the eyeglasses case.

• 19:26Ryan Holiday?

  And the thick folded speech he had in his overcoat pocket. His staff tried to rush him to the hospital, but Roosevelt insisted he would still give the speech. He walked onstage, quieted the crowd and said, "I don't know whether you fully understood that I have just been shot, but it will take more than that to kill a bull moose." And then he talked extemporaneously for more than 90 minutes. When something goes wrong, a stoic isn't slowed down. They don't quit. They aren't cowed. They say to themselves, "It's gonna take a lot more than this to stop me." They don't just accept that it happened. They love what had happened and they use it as a stage for their greatness. Marcus Aurelius said that when things happened that we would have preferred didn't happen, there's basically two kinds of people.

• 20:11Ryan Holiday?

  One who sees the obstacle, the other who sees the opportunity. He loved the metaphor of fire. He wanted to be like the blazing fire that takes whatever you throw on it and consumes it and rises higher because of it. And like a bull moose, like a blazing fire, a stoic, the next time something goes wrong, say to yourself, "It's gonna take a lot more than this to stop me." Number one, the man himself, Marcus Aurelius. Marcus should have fled Rome. Most people of means did. No one would have faulted him if he did. Instead, he stayed and braved the deadliest pandemic of Rome's 900-year history. Even as he lost several young children, even as his fortune dwindled away, even as the

• 20:53Ryan Holiday?

  risk of infection heightened, he reassured people not only by his very presence, but through his actions. He took all the imperial ornaments to the forum and sold them for gold. One biographer tells us. Another said it wasn't just imperial possessions put under the hammer, but also his wife's silken, gold-embroidered robes and her jewels. "Even the house in which we live," Marcus said to the Senate, "is yours." He showed up for the people, assuring them that he did not value his safety more than his responsibility. He fought this pandemic armed with the crudest medicines and a crude understanding of science, but still did everything he could to help everyone he could, even as he mourned the deaths of his own young children and loved ones. He'd write some point during this plague that it wasn't-

• 21:36Ryan Holiday?

  Even a choice. I do the best I can with it, he said of his leadership position to what the community needs to be done, because whatever I do alone or with others can aim at one thing only, that which squares with the requirements. He said, "A pandemic can kill you, but it can only harm you if it ruins your character." And that's what Stoicism is about. His duty, what was required of him, was to serve the community and the people in it. It wasn't because it was emperor. He owed this duty because he was a citizen, he said, a citizen not just of Rome, but of the world. And so, he was the perfect embodiment of what Stoicism means to us today. Marcus Aurelius was not rattled. He didn't panic. He kept himself strong for others. He was resolute. He insisted on what was right, not

• 22:21Ryan Holiday?

  what was politically expedient. And that's what philosophy is about. It's about what you do that makes you who you are. So, "Waste no more time," Marcus said, "talking about what a good man is like. Be one. Because it isn't what you say that defines your character, it's what you do." Unlike the so-called pen and ink philosophers, as the type was derisively known even 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were concerned, as we've said, with how one lived. The choices you made, the causes you served, the principles you adhered to in the face of adversity that cared about what you did more than anything else. "You've wandered all over," Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in Meditations, "and finally realized you never found what you were after,

• 23:02Ryan Holiday?

  how to live, not in syllogisms, not in money or self-indulgence, nowhere. And if philosophy is anything, it's an answer to that question, how to live. It's what we're looking for." And these examples we've just gone over, the lives of these men and women, these beautiful moments of heroism and bravery and courage and ultimately Stoicism, that is what we should be inspired by. That is what we should emulate. And it is this and nothing else that earns one the title "Stoic Philosopher."

• 23:36Ryan Holiday?

  If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.