Stoic Advice for the Problems We All Face

How should a Stoic deal with bullies? What do you do when someone you love drives you crazy? And how do you stick to your principles when it costs you money? Ryan answers some big questions in this episode. Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🇺🇸 USA:Portland, Oregon - June 8 San Francisco, California - June 11Minneapolis, Minnesota - August 18 Chicago, Illinois - August 19 Detroit, Michigan - August 20 🇳🇿 NEW ZEALAND:Auckland, New Zealand - October 13 🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA:Sydney, Australia - October 16 Melbourne, Australia - October 18 Brisbane, Australia - October 20Perth, Australia - October 21 👉 SPECIAL OFFER | Go to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 at checkout to get 20% off the Spring Forward Challenge! Challenge yourself to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. The Spring Forward Challenge starts March 20, 2026.🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in February, I was in San Diego doing a talk. It was lovely. I'm actually gonna be doing a bunch more talks. We just put up, I think, five dates in the US and then five dates in New Zealand and Australia. So if you want to come see me in Sydney, or in Perth, or in Detroit, or Portland, or San Francisco. There's a bunch of other dates on there. We've got five more US dates coming too as well. You can grab tickets for that over at DailyStoicLive.com. All the events have been selling out, so grab those tickets sooner rather than later. And come see me. The Q and A is my favorite part. And I hope to see you all there.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  Here's some questions that the folks in San Diego asked me.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  With everything that Marcus or Julius had going on, did he have friends?

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think so. I mean, he doesn't have a chapter in Meditations talking about his besties or anything. But the opening of the book is him thanking all these people that were in his life. It wasn't a solitary, lonesome life. I think he did have friends. I think he spent time with people. We have some of his letters that he writes to his rhetoric teacher, Fronto, who clearly becomes a lifelong friend. Did Marcus have the best time of all the Stoics? Probably not. I think Seneca had a better time. And letters of a Stoic is Seneca writing letters to his friend Lucilius. And they seem to have a real close relationship. So like, we can only guess. And there's certainly nothing in Stoicism that says you have to be a lone wolf

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  and love no one and be attached to nothing and never have fun. That, to me, is not what the philosophy is at all. But I think we could all probably use, especially if you're introverted or philosophically inclined, to sort of get up from our books more often than we do and go out and do things in the real world, which is something Marcus does talk about in Meditations. He's like, "Just put the books down, man, and get outside. Touch grass," as they say now. So I think that matters too.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  You mentioned justice, and it's starting with the individual. I think something that I'm doing right now is working on that. I'm currently reading the right thing right now. But that balance between knowing what's right internally and then seeing what's wrong and responding to that correctly.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  What are some actionable things that you can transfer from the internal to the external and kind of bring the community with you in identifying those things?

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  The interesting thing about business is that ultimately you're making decisions on a P and L, right? Is this good for business? Is this bad for business? Is it increased profit, decreased profit? Does this deliver a return for my investors? So there is this pressure that's being exerted on a business because if it doesn't make money, it ceases to be a business and eventually it goes out of business. So one of the things I've learned with the businesses I've built over the years, one of the most important practices you can develop is the ability, though, as profit-driven and capitalistic as you need to be, to build the muscle memory of overriding that impulse to do what you think is right.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  I remember I was the Director of Marketing at American Apparel for many years, which is a crazy, insane company. All the things that you heard about it are mostly true. But I remember someone was talking to Dove, the founder, one time and they were showing him, per this spreadsheet, how much cheaper it would be to move the factories to Guatemala or something. Putting aside the fact that it was called American Apparel and that probably wouldn't fly. He said, "I don't care that it will help me make more money." He said, "If all I cared about was making money," he says, "I'd just be a drug dealer. That's the best business there is." And so, for most of us, money is not the most important thing and yet we just sort

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  of default in our professional and business lives to just whatever is cheapest, whatever the best practice is per profit and loss. And I think developing the ability to go, "Hey, I don't care that it's cheaper there. I don't want to do that. That's not why I got into this." It's not a principle unless it costs you money. The first time you make a decision and your business is small and it costs you $1,000, that's like a hard pill to swallow and it's a lot. And then, you know, that also though, talking about discipline and courage, like you're building up the capacity to then make a $10,000 decision that's right, but expensive. And then $100,000 or a million.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  Or imagine, you know, some of these people that make decisions that theoretically could impact the bottom line by billions of dollars and they have to decide, you know, why did I do this? I do think it's interesting that some of the richest people in the world, the people that have what we would call fuck you money, don't seem to ever use it to actually say that. And then you sort of go, well, what's the point? Right? So I think it's a muscle you develop and you get better at it as you go. And I'm not perfect at it. The decisions I wish that I made earlier and then I try to tell myself, okay, with the decision I'm making now, I'm setting myself up for in the future to make a better one and a better one and a better one. So that hopefully when it does counter, when something really does matter that I have the chance to impact on. And that is the empowering and awesome thing about being a business owner and why the

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  Stoics didn't just, you know, stay with their books. It's a chance to make a difference. Not maybe for the whole world, but for your customers, for your supply chain, you know, for the people you interact with. You doing the right thing makes there be more right thing and justice in the world.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  I don't intend for this to be a divisive question, but it's really important that it's asked. In your opinion, what is the best album Metallica ever made?

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  That's a good question. You know, I'd probably say Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets. But I will say, and someone was wearing a 72 Seasons jacket I saw earlier, I would say I am so much happier living in a world where Metallica is making good albums again. That's the world that I want to live in.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Ryan, I just want to say thank you for being a light in the darkness, for using your platform to share some of the virtues that we talked about today. I try to do the same with my friends, with my family, my Republican friends, my MAGA

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  family members. And, but it's hard. It's hard to have like these conversations. I also don't know how much effort I should be putting into that. So I guess I wanted to get your take, like how important or how do we balance trying to influence people, but also knowing that, you know, like it's their life, it's their choice and it's they're gonna vote.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think Stoicism helps us in a lot of ways dealing with people that we disagree with, people who have think crazy things, people who think evil things. Obviously, that was just as common in the ancient world as it is today. And there's not one magical formula for how you handle it. But I mean, obviously, first and foremost, we go, we gotta focus on what we control. That's what Stoicism says. And we don't control what other people think. Maybe we can influence it a little bit this way or that way, but we just don't control other people. And what ultimately matters most is what we think, if we're living in accordance with our values, if we're doing it, not going around policing other people's views. That I think is first and foremost. Number two, it's remembering, as Socrates tells us, that nobody is wrong on purpose, right?

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Think about all the abhorrent or stupid things you believed earlier in your life, and I think we can all say that we have. You did not think that those were stupid and abhorrent beliefs, right? You thought they were right. And it wasn't until later on that you came to see the error of your ways or someone kindly and patiently instructed you otherwise, right? Three, I would say that we have to remember that saying nothing, just writing it off, is also in some ways tacitly endorsing and accepting the status quo, right? Like, yes, obviously, we can't go around trying to change everyone on all things. But if everyone thought that, if we never tried to convince anyone, if we never persuaded,

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  if we never tried to change things, well, the world would never get better or improve. So the Stoics were not resigned in that sense. They just understood that there were some limitations and they had, I think, some intellectual humility about it. And I think that's the last one. Marx realist was the most powerful man in the world. I imagine. He didn't get told he was wrong very often. And that's probably why, in meditations, he talks over and over again about how he wants to seek out criticism. He wants to hear opposing views. He wants to be challenged. Because how else can he learn? How else can he grow? And he says, you know, when people are correcting you, the decision to change your mind is a free choice that you get to make. There's no one forcing you. You get to make this choice, and you should make this choice.

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  And they're doing you a favor by helping you. So the other thing is to always try to put our own views up for scrutiny and evaluation, too. And then, yeah, I guess, fifth and finally, some things are simple and pretty straightforward. And I think our job as people in this moment in time is to call a spade a spade, to speak the truth as we see it, as Marx really said, and to not dance around what's, like, I think, obvious to anyone whose eyes are open. I think that we have to do also.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  I am a mental health counselor, and I work in an elementary school in these times.

• 9:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:52Speaker 05

  And so I would like to know, what practices do you think are most, translate well for younger children? And also, what do you think that educators should emphasize in these times?

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, I think about this with my kids. I don't want to shelter them, but I also don't want to rob them of their innocence. I don't want to make them cynical and disillusioned prematurely. And so there's a balance there. And I think it's hard to get it exactly right. But I think our job, I think that the purpose of myths and stories and history is to instruct and to teach. It's not propaganda, as some people seem to think it is. It's also not supposed to be fun and comfortable, either. If history doesn't make you uncomfortable, you're probably not reading history.

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  It should challenge you, it should shame you, it should open you up, it should make you consider things, it should make you a little uncomfortable. At the same time, it can also inspire you. I think so often, because history has been whitewashed and people have been left out, you know, some people want to throw out the whole sort of study as bankrupt, or they only want to study it, all the bad things that have happened and the evil things that have been done. And then what we lose in the process is all the people in that moment in time who didn't go along with it, who challenged it, who resisted, who were lights in that dark. And so I think our job, Alex Haley said this, the author of Roots and the autobiography of Malcolm X, he's Malcolm X's ghostwriter. He says, "The job of the writer is to find the good and praise it."

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's the job of adults, that's the job of society, is to find the good inside all of us in world and history and celebrate that so we can carry that tradition forward.

• 11:39Speaker 06

  I fucking hate bullies.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  Okay? Good.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  But then I open up meditations and there's Marcus Aurelius saying, "Kindness is invincible if it is sincere." So how do we reconcile that righteous anger, that desire to stop bullies from hurting innocent people, with this need to show kindness to them so that maybe we actually can destroy their hatred?

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. One of the people I talk a lot about in the Justice Book is Gandhi. Obviously Gandhi does this beautifully, which leads to the Civil Rights Movement, who does it even more beautifully. The idea that these sort of great activists and people who have changed the world, and that goes to what we're talking about, if you just accepted things, they would always stay the same. They sort of challenge the status quo, but they do it not from a place of anger, although they are outraged or aghast at the injustice. What they refrain from doing is hating because that hatred is corrosive and corrupting. And what they do instead is focus on the shared humanity, the connection.

• 12:51Ryan Holiday?

  They celebrate, you know, what Lincoln called our better angels. They point to those, they point to that. Like fundamentally, what Gandhi did is understand that...

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  What the British were doing was very misaligned with what the British believed and how they saw themselves. And the jujitsu of Gandhi was that he forced them to stare at it until eventually they had to change one or the other. And this is, of course, what they do in the civil rights movement, too. Martin Luther King Jr. and the other civil rights activists don't get enough credit for what astute manipulators and masters of media they were. And they were able to show over and over and over again what the South was like to the North, and then also what the South was like to the South. Not the South's lies to itself about what it was and what segregation was and who black people were, but what it actually was in practice, what it looked like.

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  We're turning fire hoses on children, right? We're beating up people who are trying to get a sandwich. And the power of that, the genius of that, without also becoming bitter and angry and cynical, I think that's the power of that. There's an amazing book by someone who's also written, interestingly, about Stoicism before. His name is Tom Ricks. He wrote this book called Waging a Good War. And he looks at the civil rights movement as a military campaign. He's a military historian. And he breaks down the civil rights movement as if it was a military campaign, which it effectively was. And people don't know what the Highlander School was. There was a school that almost all the civil rights leaders went to, from Rosa Parks

• 14:26Ryan Holiday?

  to John Lewis, where they literally trained them in nonviolence, like in provoking them and not responding, and beating them up and not responding. And they planned out these campaigns like clockwork. And then they worked to keep each other in line. So when they were angry, when they were getting disillusioned, when they were burning out, they sort of remembered what these principles were. And so, again, I think you have to study history, and you have to really study history. If your lesson from the civil rights movement is like, a bunch of people got together and went on these peaceful marches, and then the North or America magically changed its mind, like, you're just missing what actually happened. Martin Luther King Jr. would say persuasion matters, but coercion is more important.

• 15:08Ryan Holiday?

  He was forcing people over and over again to not just see things But forcing them into profound moral dilemmas where the hypocrisy of segregation and racism was exposed. So it requires an incredible amount of discipline, I guess is what I'm saying. And discipline and justice are inseparable from each other. There's a story about Martin Luther King, standing on a stage like this, and a man, a neo-Nazi, just runs up on stage and starts just beating the shit out of him. And he was talking to other civil rights leaders, and you could hear this gasp in the room. It was total silence. They said you could hear the sickening sound of fists on flesh.

• 15:49Ryan Holiday?

  But they were all, in that moment, as actual practitioners of the civil rights movement, curious in a way to see if Martin Luther King actually believed in nonviolence. Like, in that moment, in front of all of his peers, would he fight back or not? And they said, in this moment, he tenses up, and then, they said, he drops his hands like a baby, and he just allows this person to beat him until other people intervene and stop him. And then, after, as the man's being taken away, he says, you know, "Don't hurt him, don't hurt him, I want to talk to him." And then backstage, they talk for like 30 minutes, and he just tries to understand this person.

• 16:31Ryan Holiday?

  And so, again, we don't celebrate enough the sheer determination and will and self-mastery that went into that. We think it's just signs and marches, and it's so much more than that. And I think that's what, that's the lesson we have to be teaching children and also have to learn ourselves to get us through this moment in history that we're in right now.

• 16:52Speaker 07

  For me anyways, one of the things that I am constantly working on is the voice in my head and the things it's telling me.

• 16:59Ryan Holiday?

  Me too.

• 17:00Speaker 07

  And I'm just curious whether it's, you know, something about gratitude and trying to be, you know, happiness is a choice, I've read a lot about. And one of the areas I need to get much better at is the story I tell myself about somebody, especially a couple people in my life, when they're doing something, the story I tell myself is always kind of like the worst version of why they're doing it, versus maybe giving them the benefit of the doubt, it could be something better. And I'm just curious what disciplines or advice you might have for somebody who's trying to change the story that's in their head.

• 17:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, nothing tests us philosophically and spiritually quite like our family. Epictetus is talking about somebody who has a difficult brother, or a difficult sibling, and he says, you know, every situation involving this person has two handles. You can say, "Oh, they did this to hurt me on purpose," he says, "or you can remind yourself that this is your brother, and you come from the same family, you share the same blood, you had this childhood together." So it's saying that every situation has two handles, and you can choose the one where you take this thing personally, or you can choose the one where you think about connection, right? You can choose the one that emphasizes your differences or your similarities.

• 18:12Ryan Holiday?

  You can choose the one that grabs something, judges it, holds it up, doesn't let it go, or you can choose to do the opposite. Cato has a difficult brother, who is not so philosophical, but he loves him anyway. It reminds me of that Bruce Springsteen line in "Highway Patrolman," that sometimes when it's your brother, you look the other way. I think this idea that, hey, what they did, the consequences of it, that's real, I don't have a say in that, but I do decide what I tell myself about this. Do I tell myself this frustrating story I've been telling myself my whole life? That I didn't get this, or should have been this way, or I wish it was that way? Or do you say something about your family of origin, your parents, or you focus on what you did get?

• 18:55Ryan Holiday?

  Or how lucky you are that this or that happened? You know, the story we choose to tell ourselves about our lives, about what's happening, you know, it really matters. And it's the difference between dwelling and ruminating and being hurt, and, you know, it can be the difference between feeling grateful, and lucky, and appreciative, and alive. Come see me, DailyStoicLive.com.