The Moment Ryan’s Italy Trip Went Sideways

Ryan thought running 50 kilometers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI through Rome would be the hard part of the family trip to Italy but he was wrong. In today’s episode, he shares how the rest of the trip went completely off the rails and what happened after his family got home that made every travel disaster along the way seem small. 👉 The Stoic 50k video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI is out now! Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LNSVXbsaI 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail -- Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. -- Wealthfront’s high-yield cash account: https://www.wealthfront.com/stoic This experience may not be representative of other Wealthfront clients, and there is no guarantee of future performance or success. Experiences will vary. Ryan Holiday, who’s a client of Wealthfront, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for paid testimonials in his podcast, creating a conflict of interest. More details available via the referral link. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new clients) when you direct deposit $1,000 a month, plus open, fund, and maintain an investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms apply. Full details at wealthfront.com/promo-terms. The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. References to the APY for the Wealthfront Cash Account, including any APY increase, are to the APY paid by insured depository institutions that participate in our cash sweep program (the "Program Banks”). Wealthfront Brokerage does not pay interest. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY. Instant and same-day withdrawals use the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network or FedNow service. Transfers may be limited by your receiving institution, daily caps, or participating entities. New Cash Account deposits have a 2–4 day hold before transfer. Wealthfront does not charge fees for these services, but receiving institutions may impose an RTP or FedNow Fee. Processing times may vary.. Fees & Eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features. Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Securities investments are not bank deposits, bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. 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.

• 0:00Ryan 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. This is the second part of the trip to Rome. I was telling you guys earlier about the trip, some of the Stoic lessons along the way. And it got much longer than I thought. So I decided to split it up into two episodes. Hopefully I've captured attention. The tour of Pompeii was incredible. We had this hilarious tour guide. He kept referring to my kids. He called little king, little king, little king. Come here, let me show you this. And he would, he referred to them as little kings, which is something we've been doing ever since. The crazy thing was he was showing us the crosswalks. Like, so all the streets drain in Pompeii. There's these sort of gutters and then the water goes into the street.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it rains real hard, drains into the street. And the crosswalks were raised. And you're just stepping across these stones that people have walked on, were walking on one day. And they still work. He showed us a video, it had poured the day before. It still works. It was just, you know, just incredible. You think about all these different things. You think life is so new. You're like, oh, the nice houses are at the top of the hill. The nice houses banned street traffic. And you think, life has always been this way. It always will be this way. People are doing the exact same thing. I, I thought of that a couple of weeks later. I was doing Bill Maher in LA and I went for a run in Beverly Hills, where they'd put me up in a hotel.

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  And I thought, oh, they'd banned traffic from some of these streets. These are the big quiet houses on the hill. This is the same thing. And yet we all get evened out when the volcano comes and changes everything. The other thing, he shows us this sort of these casts of these bodies. And, you know, for, for many years, they thought, and I just read an article about this. They thought that the bodies were this family. But they DNA tested and they found out actually there were three or four unrelated strangers, a kid, a woman, a man, whatever. And you realize, oh, these were people thrown together in the source of a tragedy. Like, it's sweet and moving and beautiful. And one family is family tragedy, dying together, protecting each other.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  But it's equally beautiful if they're strangers, right? They come together as strangers in this moment of existential terror and fear and comfort each other. And then memento mori, like it could happen to any of us. You walk into this one building and you're like, they painted this mural here to make the house look bigger. And it just struck me like, oh yeah. Today we're like, let's throw an accent wall on here. Let's put this furniture here. The way we maneuver to make a small thing look bigger. There's just something powerful about the way Pompeii reveals exactly what the Stoics talked about, how little changes, how much people are the same, the silly trifles that we stress about,

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  the, the peacocking and pretenses where we try to show off our ultimate precariousness and susceptibility to the whims of fate and fortune. It's all there. As well as the ingenuity, hey, this is how they kept food cold. This is how they kept food warm. This is how they handled drainage. This is how they kept cool in the summer despite the heat. This is how they pioneered entertainment and pleasure and fight all. It's all there and it always has been and always will be. We went on to Sorrento. We stayed at this lovely place in Sorrento. And you could see Pompeii behind us, like across the Bay of Naples.

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  And I was like, does Marx real talk about Pompeii at all in meditations? I started going back and then I realized, nobody does talk about the age of Vespasian. And I made this connection between one of my favorite passages in meditations and the eruption of Vesuvius. I was standing in our hotel, Bay of Naples, Vesuvius behind me. And I recorded this.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  It's one of the most famous expressions in the ancient world. You've almost certainly heard it. Fortes fortuna tua. Fortune favors the bold. You might think that that's about dashing and daring, that it's about going after that thing that you want. It's about putting yourself out there. It's about conquest and achievement and accomplishment. But actually, the most famous version of that expression happened right here in the Bay of Naples. And it puts a totally different spin on it. In the year 79 AD, that exploded. That is Mount Vesuvius throwing plumes of smoke and ash into the air.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Everyone that could run away did, except for one guy. His name is Pliny the Elder. He was the commander of the Roman navy. And his first impulse was curiosity. He was an amateur scientist. He wanted to see a volcanic eruption up close. But then someone brought urgent news that, that his best friend Pompeius was trapped there. So he rushed to the scene. And, and when he got there, he found the shoreline is blocked by debris. This, the sea is going crazy. The men told him he had to turn back. And this is when he utters those famous words. Fortes fortuna tua. Pompeius, Pete. Fortune favors the bold. Head for Pompeius.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  For him, it wasn't just about a few seconds of courage. It was about a few seconds of courage in favor of what? In favor of rescuing his friend, being of service to others. And then this is the other wrinkle. Fortune favors the bold. It does not guarantee success. Pliny dies there attempting to rescue his friend. But his legacy is assured and his example towers down to us 2,000 years later.

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  So maybe the second day we were in Sorrento, we're in this little market, we're walking, my kids are tired and grouchy. And on my run, as I said, one of the things I do is I go for these long runs. I passed like a Belgian frites place, like a french fry place. And my kids are still mad at me because when we went to Amsterdam, I saw one and I brought them it. I was surprising them, we were only in Amsterdam for a couple of hours on that tour that I did. And I brought them and they put the ketchup on the french fries. And they don't like doing it that way. They like to dip it in separate. And they're like, you ruined the fries. You put, this is, you know.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  I did not know how much I would be yelled at having kids, especially when I try to do nice things. But that's either here or there. I saw this Belgian frites place. So I was like, hey, guys, we have to go to dinner, but I'll take you to this fry place first, my some french fries, and then we'll walk over to where we're going to dinner. So you get the french fries, they're so excited. Of course, they eat 10% of them. So they have these french fries. And I'm like, hey, can I throw these away? We're going to a restaurant. They also have french fries at the restaurant. Let's just throw these away. No, no, we have to keep them. So we sit down at this restaurant in the little square and we put it on an empty chair at our table. And they're there. And then a waiter like bumps into him and a couple of the fries fall on the ground. And then, you know, like pigeons start landing on them. Lots of pigeons, right?

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  The manager of the restaurant starts yelling at me. He comes over and he starts yelling at me. He's like, you can't feed the pigeons. You know, the police are going to come. They're going to find you. You can't feed the pigeons. And I'm like, I'm trying to explain, like, I'm not feeding the pigeons. The french fries fell on the ground. And by the way, we weren't the person, the people that put them on the ground. I understand what you're saying. I'm not going to feed the pigeons, but. And he keeps yelling, he's like yelling at me. And finally, I'm like, hey, you're not hearing me. I have to like cut this person off. Then he realizes, oh, okay. I think he thought he told me not to feed the pigeons and then I kept feeding the pigeon. I don't know, it was a misunderstanding, right?

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  He thought I was doing some, some rude American tourist thing, which I don't blame him for assuming, but I wasn't doing it and I wouldn't do that. And we were just talking past each other, language barrier. He has a busy, stressful job. Got it, right? But it was sort of full circle. Well, a couple of things. I mean, one, it's weird being yelled at when you're in a toll. It takes you to a weird, small place. Two, it's weird being yelled at in front of your kids. They don't totally understand that the world can work that way. They're just sort of like, what's happening? And then three, it brought us full circle to them being yelled at at the airport. And, you know, it was a little good opportunity to be like, hey, look, you saw what I ultimately had to do.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  There was a misunderstanding and I had to interrupt the misunderstanding, but I'm not taking it personally. I'm not getting upset, but like, you don't have to sit there and let someone abuse you. You can stand up for yourself. You can speak up to be heard. But other, other than that, Sorrento was, was lovely. We had a great time, swam a couple of miles in the ocean in front of our hotel. I liked that. And then we took a boat out to Capri. That's where the trip went a bit sideways, I would say. So in the middle of the night, before we're supposed to go on this boat trip to Capri, which we decided to sort of splurge on Samantha's like, you know what? I've always wanted to go, could we rent like a boat? She's like, I don't want to go with other people. Can we just rent a boat? And I was like, you know what? Let's do it.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  We actually had some friends that rented a boat and drove it themselves. And that seemed, well, considering that Stoicism started from a shipwreck, that was not a risk I was willing to take. Actually, I texted him while we were on the boat and I was like, you did this by yourself? Are you insane? Anyways, we splurged, we rented this boat. They picked us up and we were planning on renting this boat. We're supposed to meet him in the harbor. And I just woke up in the middle of the night, just like awful food poisoning, just crazy, which I, I guess handled alone in the, in the bathroom of the hotel while my family slept peacefully in the other room. And it was definitely not pretty or fun to then get on a boat the next morning. My, both my kids seemed fine.

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  I thought maybe I was the only one that got it. And then my youngest son was also hit by it. And Samantha took our youngest, who was real hard. We got off the boat at Capri. And we're like, we just need to sit down in a restaurant. We're sitting down and eating and she takes my youngest to the bathroom. And he just, he literally passes out on the floor of the bathroom. Like, not like faints, but just like falls asleep. She texts me, she's like, I'm on the floor of a public restroom. Is asleep in my arms. And I was like, well, let me know if you need me to come get you. And that's where she spent quite some time, people pounding on the door and stuff. Sometimes this apparently just unlock new levels of, of hell, right? Like things you didn't even know you could be subjected to, but were.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  And then my, my oldest son wanted to go on this funicular. We took the funicular up the, uh, the top of the mountain. I've been on a lot of funiculars in my life, more than you would have thought. Not a good chunk of all of them in the world, but probably more than most people. So have my kids. So we did that. That was fun. Samantha on a beach chair, my son, she just laid there and I took him up to the top. Oh, it was this beautiful thing. And then, you know, we both rallied, got, spent some time in the water. It was actually incredible and beautiful, although they, they take you into these grottos, these incredible grottos. And we go to go in the first one, we're like, they're going to back the boat into this thing. Are you, are you out of your mind? And, uh, as they start to do it, all of a sudden he just like guns at the other direction and leaves.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  I go, and I look up and the Italian coast guard is right there. And they were telling us that, you know, when there's no coast guard, the, the boats get pretty aggressive and, and do some impressive steering. But as soon as the coast guard gets within eyesight, they, they're not allowed to do it. So they, they got out of there. So that was whatever. So as we made it back in one piece from the, from the boat trip, and then the next day, we went to the island of Ischia, which we'd heard was cooler than Capri. And we were planning, we'd run the kids real hard, lots of walking, lots of travel, lots of tours, lots of educational stuff. And we're like, you know what? This part of the trip is going to be the relaxing part.

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  And when we were in Greece that summer, we found this hotel that had this like amazing kids club near Sunio, Sunian, where the temple of Poseidon is. And it had been amazing. They loved it. They loved honestly, like getting away from us, right? One of the funny things about going on vacation is you're basically going on vacation without childcare. So it's just you watching your kids all the time and they want a break from you and you want a break from them. My kids were excited about this. And so we booked what was the only supposedly kid friendly hotel on Ischia. And I'm not going to say what it is. Uh, if I was recording this closer to, I would be telling you exactly what it is. But I will not. And we were really excited. The kids were so excited.

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  And we pull out to the hotel and you know, when you pull up into a hotel and you're like, you're immediately getting that disparity between, which sometimes you see online, there's like the hotel photos and the TripAdvisor photos. Almost immediately we were getting that feeling, but like it had looked good in the TripAdvisor photos. And, um, check in, it takes kind of a long time, you know, they, they take your passports. He's like, I need to go through these. I'll come, I'll bring them back up to you in a little bit. Just kind of, again, a first clue, I guess. And we walk up, first off, they hand you a regular key, bad sign. And then we walk up and you're just feeling this like dread feeling in your stomach. Like this is not, this is not what I was hoping for. Maybe it's still awesome, but it's not what I was hoping for. And we get into the room.

• 14:04Ryan Holiday?

  I've stayed on some military bases, like they have like hotels on military bases. They're usually like holiday inns, but as bare bones as a holiday in could possibly be not really run by a holiday in. They're like motel level accommodations. And this made that look five star. Like it was, it was not nice. And the room had bunk beds in it. We told our kids, we'd, we'd heard that and our kids were excited. They're like, we gotta stay in bunk beds. This is so awesome. I'm looking at my wife, she's looking at me and we're making this eye contact like we're obviously not staying here, right? Like maybe one night and then we're going to find something else, right? And so I'm literally getting out my phone to take a picture of it, to send to my assistant to be like, hey, can you please see if there's anything?

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  We don't really like this. It's not what we were hoping for. And as I am taking this picture and I have like it half captured, cause you know, like when you hit the, you hit a button and it, it takes that like burst of photos. So I have like a slideshow of the bunk beds. My youngest son is climbing up to the top of the bunk bed. And then we get a stepbrother situation, you know, like where the top bed collapses. It literally collapses and it falls. The ladder was supposedly supposed to support it in some way that like slid out and it fell. And then he fell off and I caught him, but the ladder knocked over my oldest son. They both get sort of cut and bruised by this.

• 15:35Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm just like, oh my God, what just hap- are you serious? You know, it's like in Step Brothers, like there's blood everywhere. That's actually my son later, when he was fine, he was like, I should have said, there's blood everywhere. Cause they've seen that clip. Anyways, I made sure they're okay. I run downstairs and I go to the guy. I was like, the bed just collapsed. He runs upstairs. We're like consoling my son, fiddling with the bed. And then he just goes, okay, all fixed. And then he walks out. I'm literally stunned by this. And so we go downstairs, gather our thoughts, search, confirm there is another hotel that we can stay in, pack up our stuff, go back to the lobby and go, hey, there's no reception on this island either, apparently. Go, hey, we need you to call us a cab. We're, we're going to go.

• 16:20Ryan Holiday?

  I go, where are you going? And I go, to stay at another hotel. And they go, what? And I go, do you not remember the bed just collapsed on my son? The bunk bed collapsed. And he goes, again? And you know, sometimes when you're talking with someone and you're just like, we live on different planets. I'm not going to be able to convince you. I just said, I'm sorry, once was enough. One bed collapses enough. I, I was like, I can't trust any of the facilities here. I can't trust the pool. I can't trust the kids club. There's a trampoline. I am not going to stay in a hotel where it collapses on my son. We gotta go. And they go, okay, well, we're going to need you to settle up. And I go, settle up? We haven't stayed here yet.

• 17:00Ryan Holiday?

  Needless to say, if you're at a hotel where they do not clock that a bed collapsing and hurting two children in the process is like a real bad screw up. And they should be real happy to do whatever they can for you to leave happily. You could probably guess how this went. They tried to charge us a bunch of money. They tried to tell us we weren't allowed to leave. They refused to call the cab. Oh, it was just, it was just madness. I finally was like, look, here, just take my credit card, charge me whatever you need to charge me and let me leave. You know, knowing you're going to be able to handle it with the credit card company after. And then, you know, shockingly, their credit card processor was down.

• 17:44Ryan Holiday?

  And I was like, okay, but this isn't my problem. Like I have children that need to eat. We need to leave. And, um, when I tried to leave, they threatened to call the police. And my wife comes in and goes, you're keeping us here against our will. And your threat is that you're going to call the police on us. Why don't you try that and see how that goes? We finally ended up making the charge go through and left the cab drivers totally bewildered by what's happening. Uh, my son, as we're standing there, he leans on a light pole. And then that collapses, like literally a street lamp fell over, like one of their street lamps.

• 18:24Ryan Holiday?

  I go, boys, this place is a dump. Don't touch anything. Who knows what's going to happen? And anyways, we found an amazing hotel up the street. Like the night and day of this was so incredible. Actually, I'm going to say the name of this hotel. QC Spa Roma.

• 18:45Ryan Holiday?

  It was amazing. We loved these people. They were so sweet. They had a room for us immediately. They were incredible. When we were checking out, somehow clearly like news of this had gotten out on the island, I guess. We were planning not saying anything until we left or whatever, but the, as we're checking out, the guy goes, sir, can I ask you something? Can you tell me what happened at your previous hotel? And I told him, he's like, oh my God. But anyways, this hotel was amazing. We had a great time. We swam the ocean. We went to this great thermal baths. Okay. But a little more drama. At the thermal baths, my son keeps complaining. My son had had like a stuffy nose at one point in the trip. He's complaining, like he's all congested.

• 19:26Ryan Holiday?

  And it's hitting him like really hard. And my wife's like massaging his face and it seems to make a difference. He takes a decongestion, he's all better. We think nothing of it. He had, you know, maybe he had a little sinus infection he was getting over. Think nothing of it. Goes away. Fly home a couple of days later. I'll come back to that. Just wait for a second. But then on our last day in Ischia, we're supposed to get picked up. Uh, we come back from these thermal baths, change, get ready. We're supposed to be picked up by a driver who's going to take us to a ferry. The ferry is going to take us to this other hotel near the Rome airport, which is like the last day of the trip. And then we're going to fly home. And we get back to the hotel and there's no driver. We don't know where it is. We can't call anyone. He's not picking up.

• 20:11Ryan Holiday?

  Finally, he comes and we go, where were you? We were supposed to leave. And he was like, I've been here for 30 minutes. It's like, you haven't been here for 30 minutes. That doesn't make any sense. There'd been some miscommunication, whatever. We're driving, we drive down there. It was supposed to be like at the ferry, like right below the hotel, like a four minute drive. Instead, he drives like 20 minutes. Apparently, we'd been put on a different ferry. Like, you book the ferry with the driver and then they take you, they have your tickets. Anyways, this is the package we've done. The driver's like going to a different place. So it had changed, they'd moved up the ferry time, apparently. And so he'd been there early and we hadn't been there because the ferry wasn't till later. Anyways, he's mad, he's pissed, but there's a language barrier and we're frustrated, crazy.

• 20:54Ryan Holiday?

  Then we finally get there and there's all this traffic and we just go like, okay, well, just let us get out. We'll walk the rest of the way and get on the ferry. And he's like, no, you're not getting out of the car. No, don't get out of the car. And we're like, oh, my God, what is happening? Are we going to get murdered by this ferry driver who's pissed at us? We don't have tickets, what are we supposed to do? He's not letting us get out of the car. It's actually legitimately scary. Not as scary as a time my wife and I woke up having fallen asleep in an Uber in Thailand. It had supposed to be like a 10 minute Uber drive. And we woke up an hour later, having fallen asleep. The Uber driver had just decided to keep driving till we woke up. Instead of waking us up and going, you're here, he just ran the till the whole time.

• 21:38Ryan Holiday?

  First, we were scared, then we were pissed, right? To go to what I was talking about at the beginning, how first you're like, please don't let me die. Then as soon as you're like, oh, I'm not going to die. You're like, well, I don't want to be ripped off. And then we realized that we were ripped off, but when you did the exchange rate, it was like 12 American dollars. And we're like, you know what? It's a great price to pay. Anyways, not quite that scary, but it's getting scary. Finally, he's like yelling at these police officers who are directing traffic. We pull up to the ferry and instead of letting us out, he just drives onto the ferry. And we go, oh, that's what it was. It had changed and now we were having the same driver from the hotel to the ferry, drives onto the ferry. Then when we get to Naples, he's going to drive us to Rome. So that was crazy.

• 22:23Ryan Holiday?

  We ended up patching things up, left him a nice big tip. Thank you for not murdering us, sir, and for being so confused. And then we pulled up at this delightful hotel that was also a thermal bath, even though we just spent all day at one. And so my sons and I, my wife went into the room and crashed. And we had just an absolutely amazing sort of Roman spa experience, which was the reward for a long trip. And I just thought of the baths that Marcus Rilis talks about in Meditations, that Seneca talks about in Meditations, washing off the dust of earthly life. The Romans were big bath people, as you know, and this was a kind of a throwback to that experience.

• 23:07Ryan Holiday?

  And we just went from, you know, different thermal pool to different thermal pool. My kids just had this amazing time. They looked so incredibly cute in these enormous robes. And it was just an absolutely fantastic end to the trip. And then got up early. I went on a long run along the Tiber River that morning before we caught our plane back to the United States, flew home, made it relatively unscathed, or so we thought. We're home for a day. And then, you know, you're adjusting the thing, the kids are tired. My youngest son seems like he's sick again, he's just kind of lethargic. And then his eye starts swelling up.

• 23:51Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, did he just get back to get bit by something in Texas? I'd written into ChatGPT while we were in Rome that my son is really screaming about this sinus thing. And they say, you know, he's probably a sinus infection, it's just congestion, probably. As long as there's no swelling in the eye, you don't have to be worried about it. So there wasn't any swelling in the eye, so I wasn't worried about it. But that like weird like, hey, look out for this thing kind of stuck in our heads. So that night, as his eyes started to swell up a little bit to see a pink eye, to get bit by something, we're kind of keeping an eye on it. My wife says, you know, if, if I check on him in the middle of the night and it's swollen, or he wakes up in the morning and it's swollen, I don't know what we should do. And she's like, I'm going to make a doctor's appointment just in case. I go, great.

• 24:35Ryan Holiday?

  We wake up in the morning and it is super swollen. And she takes him to the doctor who immediately says, take him to Dell Children's Emergency Room, which she does. And they admit him immediately. It is orbital cellulitis. There's two versions of it. There's one like behind the eye and one in the front of the eye. The one in the front of the eye is bad, but not real bad. The one behind the eye is as bad as it can get. Like, a fine line between catching it and treating it with antibiotics and like you need to have brain surgery because you have a lesion behind your eye that could kill you. And that's where it was. And that's what he had. And he spent three days in the hospital at Dell Children's,

• 25:20Ryan Holiday?

  touch and go for the first part of it, hooked up to an IV, antibiotics. All of a sudden, your little kid is hooked up to tubes and you don't know what to do. You know, all Marcus Rilis's stuff about, you know, you try to stay present. He says that your child is sick, but not that they might die of it. And you think about somebody who buries half their children, having to write that note to himself about staying present, not catastrophizing, and at the same time, taking whatever they're going through very seriously. I asked ChatGPT this, I was like, you know, what would have happened if he had this 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 1,000 years ago?

• 26:03Ryan Holiday?

  Only relatively recently would, would the prognosis of this been good, right? Only with the advent of serious antibiotics could they treat this thing and not just pray that the infection takes care of itself and doesn't spread. And the people at Dell Children's were incredible. You know, I've had Michael Dell on the podcast and I messaged him and his wife and just said like, what you've built here is incredible. You want to know something else really touching? There was an Xbox in the room. In fact, there was an Xbox in, in every room. So actually, as soon as my son was on the mend, he had an amazing time. But the Xboxes are in every room because a kid who was there asked for his make a wish, not to get something for himself, not to go somewhere for just him or his family,

• 26:47Ryan Holiday?

  but he requested Xboxes go in every room in the hospital. And you think about how touching and moving that is, how sweet and pure and selfless kids can be. And then you think about the conditions that put that kid in that position. Or you walk out in the lobby, my wife stayed each night. I took care of my other son, would come in during the day. Grandparents were lifesavers, but you know, you pass a sign for a kid's four year old birthday party in the lobby directing, you know, people to some common room. You know, some parents are here probably with their cancer stricken child or God knows what else, you know? Here long enough, they're celebrating birthday parties in the hospital.

• 27:30Ryan Holiday?

  And how lucky you are, how helpless you are. Talk about helplessness. The night I'm leaving, I go downstairs, I go through what I think, I was like, oh, I'll just take the stairs. I go through these stairs, it leads to this locked courtyard that I'm trapped in and can't come back into the hospital. And I have to knock on some window and these kids that are there semi-permanently, they see me. It's like the most exciting thing that's ever happened to them. I see they have to press the button on their thing to let a nurse to come get me. Oh, that was humiliating. But it was a hell of an experience, a capstone on the trip, to say the least, a turn we weren't expecting, which is, I think ultimately the stoic lesson. And in one day, you're on vacation, you're having fun.

• 28:13Ryan Holiday?

  And then the next day, you're in the hospital, hoping that your kid doesn't have a lesion on their brain. And you caught this thing earlier. I mean, to me, that's one lesson, it's just like, listen to your kids. When your kids tell you something wrong, sure, sometimes they're whining, but you're always going to wish you took it more seriously than you did. And you're going to wish you were present with them when you had them. You're going to wish that you had the time with them while you did have the time with them. You always want to have more time with them. And that's what you're going to be wishing for desperately one day. But you do have them right now. And that's what the trip was for us. It was wonderful, it was stressful, it was crazy. We packed probably too much in, weather didn't cooperate, this infection didn't cooperate.

• 28:56Ryan Holiday?

  But otherwise, it was, it was a great experience. And then right back into the craziness shortly thereafter. And I think the craziest thing about the whole ordeal was like, after three, four days of antibiotics, they discharge him, he's home, he has one full day at home. And then we go, he's signed up for summer camp the next day, can he go? And they were like, yeah, absolutely, he should be totally fine. And I think that was, for us, the hardest part was the reentry. Not from the trip, but reentry from trip to crisis to real life where they were like, you never have to think about this again. It was a freak occurrence. It happens a certain minuscule percentage of the time, it won't happen again. So go about your life, count yourself lucky.

• 29:41Ryan Holiday?

  Which is kind of, again, that Marcus Rilis idea, he goes, think of yourself as dead. Okay, now you've come back to life, how do you live it properly? That's what we're trying to do. It's easy to relapse, it's easy to get back off track, but we're trying to stay on track, counting our very lucky stars. Not just to have had this privileged, wonderful trip, but to still be here, to still be a family, to have had the ability to not have to sweat about the medical bills because we have insurance. And even if we didn't have insurance, we could have paid for it, to be, have access to a great hospital, to have been treated so well by these great doctors. We're just incredibly fortunate all the way around. That I could take the time off work to be with my kid, that I didn't have to,

• 30:27Ryan Holiday?

  not just to go on the vacation, but to drop everything because he's in the hospital, right? All this is stroke of very good fortune that we're lucky to have. And that's what I'm thinking about.