It’s Not a Principle If It Doesn’t Cost You

Most people think they’d never sell out. Until there’s a number attached. In this episode, Ryan explores real-world examples that reveal what happens when that moment actually comes.🎥 VIDEO EPISODE | Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arBy_Ep4FmE🎙️ 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/✉️ 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?

  It's easy to say you have values. It's easy to pay lip service to values. Problem is when those values cost you something. In fact, there's an expression, "It's not a principle unless it costs you money." Okay, so imagine having a principle you care so deeply about that you're willing to forego $17 million.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Imagine having a principle more dear to you than $17 million. And that principle, loyalty, gratitude, to stick to it in a notorious, cutthroat business when you know almost certainly that that loyalty and gratitude won't be returned. Like, imagine turning down that kind of money, $17 million. And not $17 million in today's money, but $17 million 25 years ago, when in professional sports, that was an incredibly large contract. John Amachi was an NBA player, and he turned down that money from the Los Angeles Lakers to stay with the Orlando Magic. Why would somebody do something like that?

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I wanted to ask him, and here's what he told me.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So I played with the Orlando Magic for a year. I did, I think, to most people's ideas surprisingly well, and started and ended up with the interest of 17 teams. I had a home in Scottsdale at the time. That's where I stayed in the offseason because it was just far away from where I played. And I was getting these jerseys with my name on the back sent from various teams. I think I've still got the one from the Knicks, and I've got one from somewhere else. And so this is incredibly flattering, feels great. But I also remembered a year, almost exactly a year before, I had been calling teams myself, begging them to allow me to come to their summer league team.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  You just wanted a shot?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Just, "Will you let me come to your summer league team?" I remember, I never got to an executive of any consequence, but I was just talking to random people in the front offices, people that my agent had names for. And numbers four. Some were polite, few were warm. Yeah. Most were immensely transactional and slightly confused by perhaps the audacity on one hand, but also on the kind of, if we don't know you. Yeah. You're no good. Right. Was definitely the implication. Yeah. So what was the name again? Yeah, we don't know you. You definitely no good. If you were good, we'd know you. Yeah, we wouldn't be calling. Right. We'd be calling you. We'd be calling you, right? And I remembered that in contrast, and Doc gave me an opportunity

• 2:50Speaker 01

  that I took full advantage of. And I was fully aware that I was working for a business and a business that would have no problem ejecting me the next year. But my mother told me a long time ago that you can't be a part-time person of principle. In the context of me, you can't be a part-time man of principle. And I say certain things are important. And it's not about loyalty, because I don't really believe in it as a, as a thing. This feels a bit quid pro quo, but this was about me and what I thought was the thing that was most resonant with who I am. And the thing that was most resonant was saying, I'm going to take a ridiculously small, in the context of the other opportunity, amount of money to stay with the team and more importantly, stay with the coach

• 3:32Speaker 01

  that had given me the opportunity in the first place, because that felt resonant with who I am. It felt like that was aligned with my principles. And I knew that there was a good chance that their front office at the earliest opportunity, whether it was Tim Duncan or some other bloke, would come along and kick me out of the team so far and so fast. Yeah. Right? I knew that was a possibility. I did it anyway. And it really wasn't about anybody else than just me. I knew it was a bad idea financially, and I knew that. How bad of an idea? Oh, it's incredibly bad idea. Anybody listening, if you're, if you're offered seventeen million dollars, you should take that money, unless it's for murder. To your offered seventeen million dollars to change.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  To change your organization, right? Yeah, yeah, you should probably do that, especially if you're, the figure that you were getting paid before was like two hundred and eighty-six thousand. Yeah. You should probably go. Yeah. I would advise that for other people. I also work with people in the most vulnerable moments who come to me because they're usually recommended and they'll say, you know, I don't know how I can, if I can trust you and how, how much is your word worth? Sure. And there's very few people who can say, well, around seventeen million dollars is a starting point, right? And so for me, it works really well because being centered around my principles is one of the reasons that people find me as. Polarizing as I know I am as a human being, in the context of my work,

• 4:53Speaker 01

  people find me grounded and easy to trust.

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  And of course, it's not just about turning down large amounts of money that's offered to you. It's about your relationship with money. There's a great story about Marcus Aurelius during one of the worst crises that Rome ever faced. This terrible plague, a plague known as the Antonine Plague, had swept through the empire. Soldiers had brought it back from the eastern front. A famine had led to mass migration and overcrowding in the empire's cities, and people were dying everywhere. Bodies were piling up in the streets. The economy was in freefall. Morale was collapsing. Fear was everywhere. And the epicenter of that was Rome itself, where Marcus Aurelius was the emperor. Now, he had it pretty good, although we're all equal in the face of a pandemic. You know, he lives in a palace.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  He had incredible wealth. He had the best doctors. He could have fled and quarantined himself. He could have insulated himself from the suffering that everyone else was experiencing. He also could have insulated himself from the economic pain. He could have tackled Rome's financial problems in a variety of ways. He could have declared war on another country and plundered their resources. He could have utilized a tool that his tyrannical predecessors had, prescriptions, where he seized the possessions of Rome's wealthiest citizens. Marcus Aurelius does the opposite. He doesn't flee Rome, but he does hold on the lawn of the Imperial Palace a sale. He begins selling off his possessions.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  For two months in front of the emperor's residence, he holds a public auction. They sell jewels and gold, ornate furniture, priceless works of art. All of it is sold off because the empire needed the money to get through the crisis. But I also think Marcus wanted to make something very clear, that he wasn't living some cushy, comfortable life while everyone else was suffering. But he wasn't going to protect himself while everyone else was in pain. It was the opposite of let Them eat cake. He didn't need the luxury. He didn't need the finery and he wanted to make a public statement about that. And this is unfortunately rare, not just in ancient leadership, but but even today. You know, you see this where CEOs are taking enormous bonuses

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  as they're laying people off, flying by private jet while the rest of the company is tightening their belt. It's not just unethical, it's the definition of bad leadership. There are some exceptions, right? Every once in a while, you'll see the CEO reduce their salary, take it down to a dollar or nothing, or you'll hear about an athlete who restructures their contract so the team can afford better players. And it sends a powerful message, right? It says, I'm in this with you, that there's things more important to me than my own bottom line. But what I think is really interesting is that Marcus Aurelius doesn't invent this mindset. He learns it. He learns it by example from his predecessor, from the man who raised him to rule, Antoninus Pius. Antoninus was

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  a Roman senator who the Emperor Hadrian had adopted on the condition that he in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian was trying to create a succession plan that could train good emperors. But suddenly, Antoninus, who had previously been an elected leader, has absolute power, essentially unlimited wealth. The Emperor of Rome controls the treasury of an empire of tens of millions of people, millions of square miles, rich kingdoms and colonies that have to pay tribute. But one of the first things that Antoninus does was create something called the Res Privata, which was a small office whose job it was to manage his personal finances and to keep them

• 8:36Ryan Holiday?

  completely separate from the imperial treasury. Unlike other emperors, unlike other rulers, Antoninus wants to make it clear that the empire's money isn't his money. There's actually a story about his wife criticizing him for being too frugal in their household. And she says, why is the Emperor of Rome pinching pennies? He looked at her and he said, we may have gained the empire, but we lost even what we had before. Meaning even that his personal wealth wasn't really theirs anymore. That it all effectively

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  Belonged to the people and that as the leader, he had to live frugally and responsibly and moderately. And that now that he was emperor, he had an obligation, a duty to live moderately and modestly and responsibly. And he does, as far as we know, Antoninus lives this philosophy. He gives money to the poor. He cancels debts. When he lended money, he did so far below market interest rates. And during famine in his reign, he pays out of his own pocket to distribute food to the people. We're also told that while he's emperor, unlike Hadrian, who traveled far and wide across Rome's empire, Antoninus chooses not to travel because he was aware,

• 9:51Ryan Holiday?

  not just of what it costs for the emperor and his entourage to travel, but what it costs to host the emperor and his entourage. He's saying that the higher your position is in life, the less your life is about you, which is exactly the lesson that Marcus Aurelius carries with him and lives out when he auctions off his possessions. He says that he learned something else from Antoninus. I don't want you to think that Antoninus lived a miserable, miserly life. Antoninus still lived quite well. As Marcus Aurelius said, "He admired the way that Antoninus handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them.

• 10:34Ryan Holiday?

  If not, he did not miss them." And he says, "You could have said of him, as they say of Socrates, that he knew how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, and self-control in both areas, the mark of a soul in readiness, indomitable."

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus enjoyed their position and their money while they had it. But because they weren't addicted to it, they were also able to go without it and to give it away when they needed to. And this is, I think, something that the Stoics believe, that the higher your position, the more careful you have to be about the example that you're You're setting because people are watching. You're a role model. I don't know if you know who Audie Murphy is, but he's one of the greatest Americans to ever live, the most decorated soldier in American history. By his 21st birthday, Audie Murphy, who served in World War II, had fought in nine campaigns. He'd been wounded grievously three times and earned 33 medals for valor, including the ultimate medal of valor, the Medal of Honor. He gets three Purple Hearts.

• 11:44Ryan Holiday?

  He gets every combat decoration that the Army offers. Famously, he holds off 250 German soldiers and their tanks. He orders his men to fall back. And then he himself climbs into this burning tank destroyer and uses this machine gun to hold off the Nazis for over an hour, single-handedly kills 50 German soldiers, refusing to give an inch of ground, holding the woods until reinforcements could come and relieve his men. If you haven't read his memoir, To Helenvak, it's absolutely incredible. But what does this have to do with what we're talking about in this episode? Okay, so as a result of these exploits, he actually becomes world famous. And then he goes on and becomes an actor and a musician. All of those deeds of valor and bravery and courage were incredibly impressive.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  But there's something else he mentions in To Helenvak that actually stuck out to me as something, in some ways, even a little more rare. Because of his fame and his reputation, especially with men, he gets an offer to appear in a bunch of ads and endorsements for cigarette companies. And he turns them down in the late 60s, when everybody was smoking and when the link between smoking and cancer was not nearly as well-known and scandalous as it would appear. He just thought kids shouldn't be smoking. It wasn't a thing he wanted to endorse. And he turned down lots of money, money that he could have used, money that perhaps he needed, but he just didn't feel it was right. And that is another form of courage, like the courage to charge into battle

• 13:11Ryan Holiday?

  and hold off enemy troops with a machine gun. That's what we would call physical courage. But there's an immense amount of moral courage in the decision to turn down money, to decide what you are and aren't willing to represent. He turns down large amounts of money from cigarette and alcohol. Companies. What he didn't want were headlines like "War Hero Drinks Booze." He said, "I just couldn't do that to the kids." So he had the courage and the strength and the perseverance, and then also the ethics and the discipline to say no, which is a really hard thing to do.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  Stories like Antoninus, or Marcus Aurelius, or even Audie Murphy, though, it can feel like they're from another age, another era, like a different world. Maybe even inaccessible because nobody's coming to you asking if you want to endorse some product. But the test of what John Amachi faced, or what Audie Murphy faced, or what Marcus Aurelius faced, is not that different than the temptation or the opportunities that many more people face in their day-to-day life. Like, what are you willing to do and not do? Where do you draw those lines? In fact, anyone who has an audience on social media or a podcast is going to be facing some of these same dilemmas. I think about this with Daily Stoic. I think about it with Daily Dad.

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  We actually have a really long list of advertisers we will accept and won't accept. I don't accept gambling endorsements. I don't accept CBD or weed endorsements. Anything that feels like a scam to me, I turn down. Actually, just a couple of months ago, someone sent us an email asking if we would do a brand of Stoic supplements. I don't have a problem with supplements. I actually take a bunch of them myself. I take many of the ones we run ads for here on this podcast. But I just don't know anything about that business, and I didn't want to just slap my name on something. And I turned it down. And the person wrote back to say I was passing on a seven-figure opportunity. But it was examples like Audie Murphy, and John, and Marcus Aurelius that helped me be confident and clear that that was the right decision. There's actually someone else that inspired me,

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  someone whose work I started reading almost two decades ago. When I was a teenager, there was this really popular website. It was called "The Best Page in the Universe." It was written by this guy named Maddox. And Maddox is hilarious and over-the-top and ridiculous. It's sort of buffoonish caricature comedian type. It's hilarious. A lot of this stuff holds up really well. And is really funny. I remember him talking once about how he didn't accept ads on his website at all. And he didn't do that because he felt like those ads and those advertisers, even though it was just slapping code on a website, would put a subtle pressure on him to write differently or to write more, to do things to his website like, you know, where they'll, they'll take one article and break it up into five pages. So you have to click more times.

• 16:02Ryan Holiday?

  He just didn't want to do any of that. When Maddox was in Austin a few months ago, I had him out and I interviewed him here in the Daily Stoic Podcast studio. And I asked him about that very decision. And I asked him to estimate how much money he thought it cost him to not run those ads and how that decision feels to him in retrospect. What do you brought up not writing for the audience? Obviously, I read all your stuff back in the day and it was hilarious. I remember you never had ads on your website and you had an article about why you didn't. And I just remember being struck by like, here's a person doing something out of principle that's not in their financial best interest.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's a kind of controversial thing. I've left a lot of money on the table over the years, a lot.

• 16:45Ryan Holiday?

  You have any idea how much, you think? Have you ever, have you ever done the math?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, easily, easily between one and three million, I think is, is the, is what I estimated just in, if I had just monetized a few pages during my peak. My website was, and it's still getting a decent amount of traffic, but it was consistently getting, the front page was consistently getting something like 25 million impressions, just in the front page. Most, most big websites and enterprises, they count total page views. If I count them by total page views, it was in the billions, like consistently. And if I had just thrown like one ad in there.

• 17:23Ryan Holiday?

  For people to know, especially then, it's just a little bit of code from Google or whatever. You would put it there and then they would serve ads in that spot. So you wouldn't have had to endorse anything. You wouldn't have had to talk about anything. You wouldn't have had to have a sales staff, just a little bit of code.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:39Ryan Holiday?

  Millions of dollars.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Right, but it changes your motivation now because that's why, really, I was thinking about why news is so, generally so bad.

• 17:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  And I'm generally a pretty big fan of NPR in spite of their, you know, somewhat left of center biases.

• 17:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  They exist, sure, of course, but they're not so bad as like Fox News or CNN or MSNBC or some of these other highly partisan news sources. I tend to like these sources when they're a little bit closer to the center, like AP and Reuters and NPR. And I was thinking about the difference in their business model. When you have a business model that requires people to tune in as quickly as possible, you're only going to cover the salacious, you're only going to cover the scandals, you're going to get people angry. Can you believe this soundbite that went viral and, oh my God, and people, that's the business model of Twitter and Facebook and many social media platforms. It's outrage, outrage, outrage. And to use a term you coined, outrage porn.

• 18:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  And when you have to get people onto your, you have to get eyeballs onto your platform, the quickest and easiest way to do that is get people angry.

• 18:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  So if you're constantly doing that to make a living, then you can't ever have an honest discussion about anything that isn't going to make people angry necessarily, unless it's going to be some other path.

• 18:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's an inherent conflict of interest. I just, I remember I wrote about this in Trust Me, I'm Like. It's like, okay, let's say that you get some information and it's, you're not sure if it's true or not. In a sort of ad-driven model, you write about it, you get ads. Then it turns out it's wrong, so you have to write that you got it wrong. Now you get ads again, and then there's like controversy about how you got it wrong. Then you get ads again. It's this conflict of interest where you're almost incentivized to sort of not really think things through, to not be comprehensive, to not be complete, to not settle the issue, to not get it right. You're just incentivized to make as much slop or sensationalism or outrage or controversy as possible.

• 19:39Ryan Holiday?

  And this is true not just at the organizational level, but it's true at the individual writer level. At the end of the day, your boss is like, how many views did you get? You just kind of opted out of that from the beginning.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and people told me for years, like, well, you can just, you know, don't be, don't be persuaded by the ads, or don't be, uh, don't let them change your content. I'm like, well, saying that is like saying, don't be scared, or be scared, you know, or, or be happy.

• 20:04Ryan Holiday?

  The bias is there, whether you like it or not.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:11Ryan Holiday?

  Look, I don't want you to think that money is evil. That's actually a misunderstanding of it. Christians believe that the love of money was the root of all evil. Because it blinds you, it makes you a slave. Because it's that love, it's that irrational obsession with, that can make you slavish and do evil or shameful things. And I think fundamentally, this is what the Stoics knew. So what they tried to do was create a kind of independence or indifference to money, so that when there was an ethical decision, when stuff was on the line, they weren't led in the wrong direction. There's actually a story I tell in Discipline is Destiny that I think goes along these lines. It's a story about Cato the Elder, not Cato the Younger, the Stoic philosopher,

• 20:56Ryan Holiday?

  who's actually the great, great grandson of Cato the Elder, who was, unlike Antoninus, actually notoriously cheap. This is what I say in the Avoid the Superfluous chapter of Discipline is Destiny. "Cato the Elder never wore a garment that cost more than a few dollars. He drank the same wine as his slaves, slavery is bad, with whom he worked regularly alongside in the fields. He bought his food in the public markets, he rejected the expensive trappings of high society. Nothing is cheap, he said, if it is superfluous. If he didn't need it, he didn't buy it. If he didn't care about it, he didn't care if everyone else cared about it. But the point of this frugality was not deprivation, it was independence. Cato lived in a modest home inspired by one of his heroes, Manias Curius.

• 21:41Ryan Holiday?

  At the height of that great conqueror's powers, some men were sent to bribe him. But instead of arriving at some enormous mansion, they arrived at a small, modest home and found him in his kitchen boiling turnips. In an instant, these men..." Then knew that their mission was futile. A man satisfied with so little could never be tempted. Basically, when we desire more than we need, when our desires are insatiable, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we overextend ourselves, when we chase, we are not self-sufficient. And this is why Cato declined expensive gifts, why he did his political work for no pay, why he traveled with a small staff and kept things simple. A Spartan king was once asked what the Spartans got from their Spartan habits.

• 22:24Ryan Holiday?

  "Freedom is what we reap from this way of life," he told them. I think that's the core of all the stories that we talked about today. Getting to a place where you are free enough to do the right thing, where you are free enough to say no, where you are free enough, follow your conscience. That's what discipline is about. And in a way, all the four Stoic virtues come together here, right? We have courage, we have discipline, we have justice, and we have wisdom.

• 22:55Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not opposed to making money. I'm not opposed to advertising either. I agree with Seneca when he said, "Philosophy doesn't condemn anyone to poverty." He just thought it was important, and he did not always live up to this. He just thought it was important that our hands stay clean. He said, "As long as the money is not stained in blood." So I don't have a problem with advertisers. I don't have a problem with incentives. I just want to make sure that I'm not participating in things that are actually wrong and I don't want to be a part of. I haven't always lived up to that. I've fallen short of it. I've taken on clients that I regret. I've worked on projects that, in retrospect, I wish that I hadn't. We've even had advertisers, or sponsors, or partners, that when we found out more about them, we said, "Oh, we're not going to work with them anymore.

• 23:40Ryan Holiday?

  We don't like that." But the point is, you have to be thinking about this, and you have to know where you're going to draw the line. And ideally, the more successful you get, the more you have, the more comfortable you are, the better you're getting at drawing that line. Because you can't use the excuse that you need it the way that perhaps you could if you were coming from nothing, right? There's a certain amount of privilege in some of this as well, which is why I try not to judge people who make different decisions. But I do want to celebrate people who make decisions that should inspire us to make better decisions with our own businesses.