Who To Be Friends With?

Ryan talks about the relationships that you should have. For a limited time, the ebook edition of Courage Is Calling by Ryan Holiday is only $1.99! We have no idea how long the discount will last, so grab your copy now! Or if you prefer hardcover, you can get those over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get signed copies! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, crazy news. It sort of caught me by surprise, but Courage is Calling as an ebook is just $1.99 right now in the US. Anywhere you get your ebooks, it's my first book in this Four Virtues series that I'm working on. I'm actually just sending in the sequel, which is on Temperance to the publisher now. But in the meantime, you can get Courage is Calling, the first book in my Four Virtues series, for $1.99. That's as cheap as it'll ever be. If you were looking to try it, you wanted to give it as a gift, now is the time to do that. You can get it anywhere your ebooks are sold, or you can just check out the show notes and grab a link to it and pick it up. And I hope you do.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Who to be friends with? Of the Stoics, Seneca seems like the one who had the most fun. He's the one that it's easiest to picture spending time with friends or mingling at a dinner party. In fact, he was known for his legendary parties with hundreds of guests. Whereas almost all of Marcus's writings is private and solitary, and epictetes comes to us in the form of lecture notes from his students, a sizable chunk of what survives of Seneca are the letters he wrote to his friend Lucilius. From all this, we can gather that Seneca was social and had a large circle of friends and acquaintances whom he spent a lot of time with. It begs the question, how did he choose these friends?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  And who were they? We don't know much about Lucilius, for example, except that he was the governor of Sicily and possibly also a writer, nor do we know much about who the guests at Seneca's parties were. But we can hope and expect that Seneca's many friendships adhered to the rule he put down to Lucilius in one of those famous letters. "Associate with those who will make a better man of you, welcome those whom you yourself can improve." That's what friendship is about, a process of mutual improvement, benefit, and enjoyment. We become like the people we spend the most time with. So we should

• 2:33Speaker 01

  choose wisely, and we should choose widely, because life is too short to live lonely, even for a stoic.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.