Can You Build a Castle? | Ask DS

You could build castles out of the bricks they threw at Cato. But Cato didn’t need to build castles with those bricks because he had something better - an inner citadel. Ask DS:Looking at Cato’s life, does he stick to his plan of justice too much sometimes? If Ryan could ask Marcus Aurelius one question, what would it be? What are Ryan's tips or tricks to know if you’re hitting the golden mean? Why is justice a common thread between Friedrich Nietzsche’s work and the Stoics?🎙️ Listen to Will Guidara interview Ryan Holiday | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & WonderyGet your own Four Virtues Pendant to wear so you can feel its weight and stick to your principles in every situation, no matter the proverbial bricks thrown your way: https://store.dailystoic.com/📕 Right Thing, Right Now | https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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 FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Can you build a castle? Oh, Cato might be a folk hero now, but at the time, at the time, they hated him. The expression, "We can't all be Catos," was not meant kindly. It was dripping with disdain. The fact that there were no statues of him in Rome was not an oversight. This was a man who was forcibly driven from the Forum on multiple occasions, a man they sent into exile, a man not unfamiliar with jeering mobs or death threats. To paraphrase the song, "You could build castles out of the bricks," they threw at Cato. And they threw at him for what? For doing his job? For not being corrupt? For sticking to his principles? For protecting Rome's old ways? But the funny thing is, Cato didn't need to build castles with those bricks because he had something better. Stoicism gave Cato an inner citadel,

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  a sense of purpose and confidence and strength for which no amount of external criticism, pressure, or violence could touch. As Marcus Aurelius, no stranger to criticism himself, would write in Meditations, "They'd kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses." That somehow cuts off your mind from clearness and sanity and self-control and justice? The answer for Cato was no. No, it doesn't. Marcus Rilis did his best to supply the same answer. And that's what he was trying to remind himself of in the pages of Meditations. So we must strive to do the same, no matter how many bricks or curses or tempting offers they throw at us. Nothing should cut us off from the Four Virtues. Nothing about it should touch our inner citadel.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  And that's the idea of the Four Virtues, which I'm, of course, in the middle of this series about, Courage, Discipline, Justice, and Wisdom. I've got the Four Virtues tattooed on my wrist here, but we have a cool coin version of it in the Daily Stoic store. That's what I'm holding now. There's a ring version of it, too. You can check it out at store.dailystoic.com.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've been joking lately that on the Thursday episodes, I answer your questions, but not really your questions, just random people's questions. In this case, you actually could have asked me a question because I was at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square for the launch of Right Thing Right Now. Will Gaderet was the host, but then we kicked it to an audience Q and A. And all the people that were nice enough to show up were able to ask questions. And that's what I wanted to bring you today. This is me answering those questions. I will say the mic wasn't amazing for the audience. So the first question was someone was asking me about Cato.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  You know, was Cato too rigid, too self-righteous, too firm in his sense of justice sometimes? And was that a personality flaw? Cato being this person of immense rectitude and principle, but this ultimately makes him somewhat ineffectual, if not ultimately problematic politician, because politics is about compromise. And he struggled. To strike that balance between doing what was right, no matter the cost, and solving problems partially, which might have, you know, allowed them to solve them more fully.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  But he sort of, there's an argument that he brings about the collapse of the republic by his intangents as much as Caesar brings it about by his ambition. Seneca is a fascinating example. No one writes more beautifully about the theme of justice than Seneca. And yet, no one worked as closely with an evil person as Seneca, being the advisor to Nero. But you're talking about the timeliness of all this stuff. It's such a, you know, depending on what side of the bed I wake up on, I go, Seneca was the worst, Seneca's the best. You know, Seneca probably told himself he was the adult in the room and he was saving things from being worse. And then other people said he was complicit and an enabler.

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  And people are having to make, politicians and leaders and, you know, officials in this country right now are having to make very similar decisions and trade-offs. And we can see where they fall short and where they struggle. And these are not easy decisions.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  You're almost saying the same thing about Jimmy Carter and Gass, right?

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  There's an argument that Jimmy Carter should have been more pragmatic and was, was ultimately the job of a politician is to be re-elected. And he failed in that regard. But, then I was talking to someone about this this morning, Jimmy Carter, it's my guy.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  You only have, you have, the argument he would make is, you have the presidency now. You don't re-elect, just because you put things off to get re-elected does not mean you get re-elected. So you have, again, this is the debate people are having right now. You have the presidency now. What can you do with it now? And the, by and large, the things he did with it then were good things and in some cases, things very ahead of their time that we came to understand later were prescient. So, you have it now. You have the opportunity to do the right thing now. Your pragmism says, "Oh, but if I do it later, I can do more good later." Or is that just, Seneca, you know, Seneca says, "If I leave, someone worse will replace me."

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, but he's doing bad shit now, will be there. So these are complicated moral questions, for sure. And I think the Stoics provide us the opportunity to turn these questions over and then try to get lessons that we apply on daily lives now.

• 6:28Ryan Holiday?

  Somebody asked me if I could ask Marcus Aurelius a question, what would that be? If I could ask Marcus Aurelius one question. I mean, I think you'd have to ask Marcus Aurelius, "Bro, what's up with commas?"

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  You're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna leave the empire to your unstable, you know, deranged son.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  That, that, that would be one, I think that's, that's one of the big, that's one of the big questions of Marcus Aurelius. You have this wonderful person, you know, this wonderful thinker, this wise, just, virtuous person. And then his son, his successor, is so abhorrent and unsuccessful. And what gives? You know, is this a, is this a struggling to put things into practice? Was he actually a not good father, which would be a, you know, a mark against all the other wonderful things that he did? Was it a court of history? Was, I'm endlessly fascinated with that.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  It was funny, we were just talking to Gary Vee about the, you know, "Meet Me in the Middle" and how the virtues are the midpoint between two vices. Someone was asking me about, you know, some tips and tricks for hitting the golden mean. So for people who don't know, the golden mean is this idea from Aristotle that most virtues rest between two vices. So you have recklessness and you have cowardice. Courage is actually in the middle. You know, you have wastefulness and...

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Stinginess and generosity in the middle. And so this idea of virtues being a midpoint, I think is really interesting. This idea of moderation and any of the things taken to an extreme can become vice. And Kato is probably a great example of this. This sort of unbendingness works on the paper, but what about sticky, complex situations involving other, other human beings? And, and I, I think maybe that's where we could, we will be gonna ask ourselves is like, is this taking into account reality? You know, the, the fact that human beings are imperfect, the fact that we have imperfect or incomplete information.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that's, that's kind of the question is like, am I, am I being, practical is maybe the wrong word because practical and expediency are often excuses for not doing the right thing. But how, how do we think about this in terms of, of the real world where it's going to land? It's tough. The, the goal of me is very simple, but then finding what that is, is a process of dialing in and, and maybe giving yourself some grace. Sometimes you're gonna be a little too far this way, sometimes you're gonna be a little too far this way, but that your life is a process of kind of tuning this dial to maybe do what you're trying to do.

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then somebody was asking about Nietzsche and his connection to the Stoics, which I'm by no means an expert on and probably could know more, but I thought it was an interesting question. I think it's the fundamental question of, of being a person. How should one be? What should one do? How should one treat others? And we've got a lot of different answers to that question. And some, for some of us, you know, God says X, Y, or Z is sufficient.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Answer to that question. And then for others of us, it's we go, but why? What about this? What about this? And so what I like about the Stoics is that they try to get to the answer to that question somewhat logically. And, you know, they're saying, you know, not, hey, if you're a bad person, you'll go to hell. They're saying, hey, if you're a bad person, your life will be in kind of hell. And they have, they have ample evidence of that. You know, they're looking at these powerful Romans and Greeks and kings and, you know, wealthy business people who can do whatever they want, and they do whatever they want. And it seems wonderful. And it also is up close, they realize it's quite terrible. So I think we're just, this is the thing that everything pivots around, you know,

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  that our sense of justice, our sense of right and wrong.

• 10:47Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to listen to me and Will chatting, I'll link to that in today's show notes. Thanks to everyone that came out. Thanks to everyone that bought Right Thing Right Now. And actually, someone sent me a picture of a table at the Union Square Barnes & Noble where they had some of the extra books that I signed. So there might still be some there. And I will talk to you tomorrow.

• 11:12Ryan 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.