It Says Everything About You | 97th Floor Q&A

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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. Well, 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. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Says everything about you. We don't know what Antoninus said to the customs officer in Tusculum, but we know that it was something that stuck with Marcus Aurelius. Can we guess that it was something kind, something patient, something decent? From Antoninus, we should expect nothing less. Why else would Marcus have noted it in Meditations as an example of something he admired? It wouldn't have been Antoninus losing his temper at someone, acting like some Karen who had been wronged. No, it was probably something more like the story we know about Cato, who was traveling ahead of his baggage train, and was received rudely by the town who did not recognize the powerful dignitary in front of them. Cato shrugged this slight off and went about his business, and when the town's mayor came

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  later to apologize, Cato smiled and reminded him to treat strangers better. "Not all of your visitors will be Catos," he said. In Right Thing Right Now, which is the new book, which is coming out very, very soon, again, I'd love for you to preorder it, there's a story I really liked about the famed lawyer Clarence Darrow. He and his son had gotten terrible service in the dining car of a railroad that Darrow had once represented. "Will you report the man to the Chicago and Northwestern when you get back?" his son asked about the waiter. No, no, his father said, brushing off the slight. Never hurt a man who is working for his living. How we treat the little guy says a lot about us.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  How we treat the gate agent at the airline, how we treat the customer service representative, how we treat the waiter and the barista. It says a lot about us, even when, perhaps especially when they aren't treating us well. Can we control our emotions? Can we contain our frustration? Can we remember that they are almost certainly having a hard time too? That no amount of yelling at someone making an hourly wage will make a plane appear or fix a stupid corporate policy. We all have bad days, which means that other people have bad days too. We should strive to be patient. We should strive to understand. We should try to be Cato's and Antoninus's and Darrows.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  Try to be the bigger person, be worthy of wealth and responsibility and power. We are not better than anyone, but we can try to be the bigger person. That's what justice is after all. It's about how we treat others and the standards we hold ourselves to, even if no one is watching, even if this call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes. And this idea of lowercase justice being just as valuable as any kind of legal justice is a theme in the new book, Right Thing Right Now: Good Characters, Good Values, and Good Deeds. It's coming out on the 11th. Got a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses if you haven't checked it out yet. And I appreciate everyone who's written in to the Daily Stoic Customer Service about

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  ordering the book because it hasn't always been smooth. We've been ironing out some kinks. I really appreciate the support, their packaging, and getting ready to send out the books here very, very soon. And I can't wait to hear what you think. You can get all those preorder bonuses at dailystoic.com/justice. And you can get signed numbered first editions, which I believe we are almost out of. So try to grab those. And if you miss out, don't get too angry with Ashley, who does our customer service. Anyways, appreciate all of you and we'll talk soon.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. According to my phone, in August of 2019, I went to Park City, Utah. And as I was driving to the airport, I was FaceTiming with my family, telling them I was on my way home, passing through some neighborhood. Let me see if Google Maps can tell me exactly where it was. It was on Sidewinder Drive in Park City, Utah. I'm passing through this suburban neighborhood and there's a mama moose and a baby moose just eating the grass in someone's yard. It was one of the coolest experiences I've ever had. My kids freaked out. I just rolled down the window and held out the phone. None of this has really anything to do with today's episode, except for the fact that I went

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  back to Utah in October of 2022, and I gave another talk in Park City, Utah, to a digital marketing agency called 97th Floor. It was an awesome conversation. They do this mastermind event there every year, and they asked me some questions at the end, some Stoic questions, and that's what I am bringing you today. I won't tease the questions because this is what we do every Thursday on the podcast. I answer some Stoic questions. I thought these ones were good, and I'll throw that to you now. I did not see a moose on the way home. I was pretty disappointed about that. Maybe it'll happen again sometime. I'll probably never see a moose in the flesh again. No, no, actually, that's not true, because when I was in Jackson Hole last summer,

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  again, weirdly, on the way to the airport, we hadn't seen one the entire trip. And then on the way to the airport, we also saw one. So maybe that's the secret. You got to see them on the way to the airport. Frankly, I didn't even know there were moose in Utah. I guess I should have known that, but it was pretty damn cool. Nothing to do with today's episode, but here are some answers to your Stoic questions.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so we're gonna enter into the Q&A portion.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  So, one thing I'm interested in is your journey as a professional. You started, you worked at a belief in marketing before American Apparel.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  You did a lot in American Apparel. And then, you know, that journey from those days into learning and practicing stoicism, writing about stoicism. I'm interested to know, what would you today tell yourself from then as a marketing professional? And I'm interested to also know, like, how has stoicism, the study of it, the practice of it, changed you as a professional? Because you're still in marketing.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  In many capacities. And, you know, as a parent. So, yeah, we'll kick that off with that question, and then we'll get into the topics.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're all in marketing, right? Whether we know it or not. And one of the things, I built a marketing company, I've worked with all sorts of awesome brands and authors and folk figures over the years. But, as I started to think about, like, what marketing is, and working with our clients, like, you're selling them a service that's ostensibly worth a lot, and you're paying for it. And so, I got really interested in, like, if I'm good at this, I should be doing it on things that I own, right? That I, I control. So, opening a bookstore is part of this. I started a publishing company.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  I started David Stow, which is a sort of daily email, and I have a bunch of other, I sort of projects or businesses that I go. And the idea was, if I'm gonna spend all this time marketing something, I really wanted to, first off, I think the most aggravating part of being in the market is, is like, you give the client all sorts of awesome advice or awesome ideas, and then they don't do any of them. I wanted, like, actual control over what I was doing. And then, I wanted, like, real skin in the game. I wanted to be, have, participate in the upside of what I was doing. So, it's not that I'm not in marketing anymore, although I don't work with any clients, I just have tried. Try to take a lot of those skills towards the things that I control.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And I think you're seeing this, particularly with influencers now realizing like, okay, do I want to do an advertisement for this app or this service or whatever? Or should I be making my own products? And you know, we're seeing these sort of billion dollar brands come from these influencers. They're realizing, I have an audience, I know how to get people talking about things. Instead of doing that for a fee, I'm going to actually own the underlying product. And I think that's really the exciting opportunity for marketers is that as the cost of making stuff or starting companies goes down, as things go more and more direct to consumer, if you have the ability to like sell things, to get people excited about

• 9:02Speaker 02

  new things, to watch things, like you have the most valuable toolkit that there is. And you should be trying to, if not always, at least some of the time, have real skin in the game, whether you're investing in those companies, or co-founding those companies, or you're starting your own brands, or building your own platform. So that the journey for me was sort of towards that. And then, you know, obviously, every author is a marketer and you're selling intellectual property that you created. And I spent a lot of time, you know, on my books, obviously, but then, as I've spent a lot of time giving people to read those books. And I think sometimes people think they're too good for that, like authors, I just write and then people like when they like them. I mean, books have covers to be judged on, said covers, and if nobody reads what you wrote, is it really that great?

• 9:46Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I spent a lot of time on that. And obviously, philosophy is something I try to apply in my actual life as a, you know, as a person, but that's sort of been my evolution as a marketer. So we have a lot of emergencies, or a lot of people say that they have a lot of emergencies that pop up every day, right? Yeah. Everybody's talking about, I gotta go put out a fire. Yeah. That seems to be a very common conversation. So knowing that not everything is an emergency, how do we determine on our own what is and isn't an emergency? Because there are legit emergencies, right? Sure. No, no, there definitely are. I would say, I have found very few emergencies that actually involve me needing to wake up in the middle of the night,

• 10:30Speaker 02

  right, which is the reason people say, oh, that's why I sleep with my phone next to my bed, or whatever, right? So I try to create space and boundaries, and that's sort of how I think about the device stuff. And there certainly are emergencies. I think the stoic argument would be, what emergency is ever solved by freaking out, right? It's like, I think we hear emergency, and our first reaction is like, panic, which never makes the emergency better. And that's what Chris Hadfield was talking about, that, look, there's a number of things you're gonna do in response to this that could move the ball forward, and then there's gonna be the stuff that might be emotionally cathartic, or, you know, distracting, or, you know, any number of other things,

• 11:14Speaker 02

  but they're not, they're not, the emergency's still gonna be there. The consequences of that emergency are still gonna be there. So, you know, if you're tackling that thing in front of you, that crisis, calmly, quickly, you know, firmly, I think you're treating the emergency with respect. If you're, you know, running around like, you know, the house is on fire, you're probably not actually doing anything about it, set fire. You know, people have trained, whether they're in crisis PR or you're, you know, a firefighter running into a burning building, like, because you've done this thing a lot of times, because you know that there is a way through and out, you actually are able to kind of be that calming presence in the room, be able to go, guys, we can handle all of this stuff later.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  What we need to do now is decide, are we putting out X statement or Y statement, right? Are we going to, you know, sales are down 30%? We can't make it through another quarter with those kind of numbers. What is the marketing plan to pull us out of this? Or how are we stopping bleeding? So I think people who have exposed themselves to stressful situations over and over again should be in a position to handle those real emergencies better. And the Stoics would say, again, about something like COVID, like, we all just lived through this enormous historical moment that challenged and stressed us out in so many ways.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  But it should give us some perspective or sense of sort of confidence in our ability to be like, I can get through difficult things. You have been tested. So I do think the more you deal with stressful, difficult emergencies, the better you are at distinguishing between real emergency and not real emergency. And then like, hey, what are the first steps to hopefully resolving this thing?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Where did the origin of your interest in Stoicism come from? Was it family, a friend? You're taking this to a really fascinating level of understanding the history, its application to life. I'm super interested in the origin for you.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Yes, someone just gave me a book recommendation. I was at a conference and someone said, you should read Epictetus. And I went and I bought Epictetus, Marketing Realism, on Amazon. And it sort of blew my mind. The irony is, actually, if you read Meditations of the Book of an Emperor written 2,000 years ago, at the beginning of it, it's sort of thanking all the people who changed his life. And he thanks this guy, Risticus, who was one of his teachers, for giving him a copy of Epictetus. And so this process of being changed by a book recommendation is like, one of the oldest things that has ever existed.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  I think you could do well as a reader to just ask people what books have changed their lives and then read those books. The problem is, like, we know what a lot of those books are. And then we're like, I'm busy here, so I don't want to read the newest insert book. So yeah, it was just really just, I asked a question, I got an answer, and I followed up on that answer, and it totally changed the course of my life.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  That actually ties in well to my question. So we're marketers and creatives and a lot of us have a lot of ideas. And so I'm curious, what is the way that you narrow down when you are multi-passionate or have lots of ideas? How do you narrow down to your next big thing?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is the ultimate question. I think if you're someone who has lots of ideas, there's lots of things you could do. It's the question of sort of what should you do? For me, one of the tests I like is like, what would happen if I didn't do it? So first off, like personally, how would I feel? So when I write a book, it's almost always because I felt I couldn't not write that book. Right? And if I'm like, oh, you know, it would be cool to do a book about this, like that's not enough because it's really hard. Right? And so if you're doing it because it's going to be fun, if you think about it because it would be good for the business, or you know, any of those reasons, those are like not usually enough to get you through. Paul Graham calls it the trough of despair.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  You know, you have to really want to do it. But then the other, the other version of that test for me is like, if I didn't do it, would someone else do it? And if the answer is yes, then it's like maybe not the right thing. So I like to do the things that only I could do. And so again, when we're talking about like going to the uniqueness, you know, like I have a lot of ideas for like funny meme accounts on the internet, but like someone's probably going to do that. And you know, it's not, you know what I mean? Like if someone else is going to fill that, that space, then you know, is that what you should be spending the limited life that you have? But if, you know, it's not going to be done, maybe you should do it.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  And the idea of like each of us is born with completely unique DNA, completely unique moment in time, circumstances, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, et cetera.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  You have a monopoly intrinsically as a human being. The problem is, we often go like, "What are other people doing?" Or like, "What's trending right now? What's succeeding right now?" And as a result of that, we are going... It's safe, but we're going towards the competition. And I think you actually go the other way. So it's like, if I didn't do it, it wouldn't get done. Means like, you're probably going to be the only one doing that thing. And so, yeah, I try to go towards that.