Only The Wise Are Free | A Little Knowledge Is Dangerous

Most people are enslaved and controlled and directed by their ignorance. Their impulses. Their temper. Their desires and delusions.📚 The Four Stoic Virtues: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage, are timeless keys to living your best life. The Daily Stoic is releasing a limited collector’s edition set of all four books signed and numbered, with a title page identifying these books as part of the only printing of this series. PLUS we're including one of the notecards Ryan used while writing the series. Pre-order the Limited Edition Stoic Virtues Series Today! | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Only the wise are free. Epictetus was born into slavery. This would have been a profoundly painful experience that left many scars and many disadvantages. His 30 years in bondage left him with a limp for the rest of his life, courtesy of a sadistic owner who tortured him. In Rome at that time, many people believed that only free people were capable of being educated. But the indisputable truth that Epictetus saw every day in the moral disorder and dysfunction of Nero's court, where his master served as a high-profile secretary, was that it was, in fact, the opposite.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  "Only the educated," he said, "were free." And this is something that Seneca points out about the same period in Rome, how profoundly unfree many of the richest and most powerful people are. And this is true 20-odd centuries later. Most people are enslaved and controlled and directed by their ignorance, their impulses, their temper, their desires, and delusions. What Epictetus came to understand is that wisdom is freedom.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  From the things that have enslaved and controlled and directed people for all time, from ignorance, from stupid opinions, from immature emotions and childish impulses, from desires and delusions, from bitterness and frustration and resentment. That's the point of wisdom, he said, to argue less, to rage less, to be upset less, to enjoy, Epictetus said, a smooth flow of life. But the Stoics also believed that wisdom is something we have to work for, not something that we're given. It didn't matter then if you were a slave like Epictetus or raised as royalty like Marcus Aurelius, wisdom was something you had to earn. And how did you earn it? Through hard work, through reading and thinking and reflecting, through mentors and teachers,

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  through painful trial and error, through opening yourself to experiences and knowledge outside of your comfort zone. And look, if you want to get serious about that work, well, boy, I have a book for you. That's with the new book Wisdom Takes Work, which I have here on my table. I am looking out over the Mediterranean Sea, not far from the temple of Poseidon. I have a copy of Wisdom Takes Work with me, and I'm really excited to share it with you. It's out in 100 days from today. But if you preorder it now, and you can, by the way, order all four books in the series, signed, numbered, these special editions. We sold out last time on Courage is Calling, we sold out on Discipline is Destiny, we

• 3:37Ryan Holiday?

  sold out on Right Thing Right Now. I will definitely sell out on Wisdom Takes Work, but I'm just really excited for you to read this book. As I said, it's full of hard-won insights from wise people, like all the books, Stoic ideas illustrated by stories from history, and it's mostly about what we can learn from them, what they can teach us. And If you want to preorder it, I would love for you to support the book. As I said, they almost certainly will sell out. You can grab them right now at dailystoic.com/preorder. As I said, I think if you preorder all four, you can get a signed page of the original manuscript. We're going to do a live Q and A. If you order a bunch of books, you can even have dinner with me and a bunch of Stoics across from the Painted Porch. I was just visiting the actual Painted Porch here in Athens.

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  We can go to the Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas. We'll have dinner together. It's a bunch of awesome stuff, and all that is only available if you preorder the book. It helps authors. Basically, more than anything you can do to support a writer is preorder that book. So if you can preorder it now at dailystoic.com/wisdom, it would mean a lot to me. And I hope you're enjoying Epictetus Month. We'll get right back at it.

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  "A little knowledge is dangerous," this is the July 14th entry in The Daily Stoic. "Every great power is dangerous for the beginner," Epictetus says in Discourses 3:13. "You must therefore wield them as you are able, but in harmony with nature." Great teachers are usually hardest on their most promising students. When teachers see potential, they want it to be fully realized. But great teachers are also aware that natural ability and quick comprehension can be quite dangerous to the student if left alone. Early promise can lead to overconfidence and create bad habits. Those who pick things up quickly are notorious for skipping the basic lessons and ignoring the fundamentals.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Don't get carried away. Take it slowly. Train with humility. In Lies of the Stoics, I talk about Musonius Rufus quite a bit. Musonius Rufus being Epictetus's teacher. He was called the Roman Socrates for what a great writer and thinker he was. But he was also a very difficult teacher. I take it from the anecdotes we have from Epictetus. I'm just pulling up this little page. We're told, for instance, that when- Musonius Rufus spoke, he expected rapt attention from his students if they were reacting or clapping or cheering for the audience. He's like, you're not getting it. I'm not blowing your mind enough. He was just a strict teacher. And then we're told this, this story about

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus making a mistake. And he tries to blow it off to Musonius. He says, hey, it's not like I burned down the capital. Musonius Rufus says, who says you didn't, right? The point being, I think Musonius realized, as, as Zeno said, that conceit is the impediment to knowledge. Epictetus would say it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. I think what they were taking from Musonius is a kind of key intellectual humility that when you start to get arrogant, when you start to think you've graduated, that you've arrived, this is precisely when you cease to learn and stop improving. When I sign ego is the enemy,

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  I often sort of riffing on Epictetus, I say, always stay a student. Because when we stay a student of philosophy of a great master, it humbles us, keeps us quiet. Whenever I'm around Robert Greene, I get this same sense. Robert's very kind and patient and would never sort of humiliate or, or rebuke. But he has a way of catching you if you're lazy or imprecise in your language or the assumptions that you're making. And it is a good experience because it keeps me, you know, keeps me in the right headspace. And I think that's important as you learn. Maybe you're familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect. The problem with being stupid is

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  that you're often not aware of just how stupid you are. Maybe the converse of that is the problem with being smart is that people, smart people often are aware of how smart they are. Or they think they're smarter than they are, and this is a problem. So I don't know. I guess today's message is to leave you with a little intellectual humility. Don't think that you've arrived. Understand that knowledge is power, and it's a power that has to be taken responsibly, has to be taken humbly, has to be part of a lifelong and ongoing pursuit. You do not arrive. You do not graduate. You never do. This is the famous story about Marx's realist leaving the palace. So a man asked him where he's going. He says, "I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know." Focus on that.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  Focus on what you do not yet know. It's like in the way that a gun, you always act like a gun is loaded. That keeps you safe and honest with it. You never point it at something that you don't intend to kill and/or destroy. And the same thing goes with knowledge, right? Treat it as something that is always insufficient. It's always a little bit dangerous. Point it towards what you have yet to learn and focus on that. And it keeps you honest, keeps you safe, keeps you smart. And that's today's message.

• 9:07Ryan 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.