Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ You Are What You Won't Do For Money About this episode If your money is stained in blood, you are not free. You really don't know who you are until you know what you won't do for money.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.
0:42 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope you're having a great morning. On a morning not unlike this one, a couple of months ago, I got this email. Now, it was a sales pitch, so I take it with a grain of salt. But according to what the person was claiming, whose name I will leave off and company I will leave off, I have a seven-figure opportunity sitting in front of me. And I'm an idiot if I don't see that or take advantage of it. Basically, all I would have to do would be to partner with this supplement maker,
1:25 Ryan Holiday? and we could make a line of supplements with the Daily Stoic brand. The supplements they were saying could be about calm and clarity and resilience. And they said the brand could easily make several million dollars. And they mentioned a handful of people who have done very similar plays. And unlike the stuff we do at Daily Stoic, I wouldn't have to do the procurement or the production or the design or the fulfillment. Basically, it's just a licensing and a platform play. Now, there's only one problem here. Which is that I just don't want to do it. It doesn't interest me like at all. And it's not that I'm like opposed to supplements or vitamins. I took some this morning.
2:10 Ryan Holiday? We've advertised a bunch of them here on Daily Stoic and The Daily Dad over the years. If you listened to my State of the Show episode, I talk about how I think about which advertisers we take on. And there's a bunch of things I won't do. I won't do gambling. I won't do CBT stuff. I don't do things that are obviously scams, but I don't think there's anything wrong with supplements. And like I said, I not only take some, I think that they work. And I don't think there's anything wrong with making money or being in business. In fact, when I had Robert Rosenkrantz on the podcast, he talked about Stoicism and capitalism. And he said, I'm a Stoic capitalist because I write books and sell them to people.
2:52 Ryan Holiday? And you know, Seneca talked about this 2,000 years ago. He says, no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. He said, the philosopher shall have considerable wealth, but it will not be pried from any man's hands. It will not be stained by anyone's blood. Now, Seneca doesn't really live up to this himself. I mean, he makes a lot of money while he works for Nero, but I like the sentiment, right? Like it's fine to make money as long as you're making money honestly and not exploitatively and that you're not hurting anyone in the process. There's a lot of things we don't do for Daily Stoic. I don't really do T-shirts. I don't do stickers. I don't do like a lot of the things where people just
3:34 Ryan Holiday? slap their name on something and sell it, usually through some third-party company. Don't really sell hats. It doesn't feel right. More importantly, it doesn't get me excited. It's not like why I built the Daily Stoic or what I think the platform should be for. And so as long as I'm in charge, which is, I don't really see any reason why I wouldn't be, having taken on outside investors.
4:00 Ryan Holiday? I don't have a boss, not going anywhere as long as I'm around and I'm in charge. That's not how I want to use the platform. But as I said, I do remain a capitalist and even a proud one in some ways. I've built businesses, I've invested in businesses. We make and sell a lot of things at Daily Stoke, but I like those things. I believe in them. The first thing we ever made with Daily Stoke, the Memento Mori coin, I have one right here. I thought it would be cool to have a Memento Mori thing to carry around. And I looked at what I saw online and I didn't like any of them. I thought they were cheap and I made my own. We work with Wendell's, this company that has been in business since
4:45 Ryan Holiday? the 1880s. They actually invented the idea of a challenge coin for Alcoholics Anonymous. So that's how I think about what we make, right? I want to do things that address a real need. And the fact that they work commercially is extra. And by the way, that is the good part about capitalism that sometimes people sort of flippantly dismiss. Like, if you don't like the stuff we make, if you don't like anything that anyone makes, you have a magical power here. Just like you have the power to have no opinion, as Marx really says, you have the opinion to not buy stuff, right? I see people go, nobody needs this. I would sort of agree. Nobody needs most things. But if you want it, if you'd like
5:27 Ryan Holiday? to have it, if you think it would add value to you, well, that's what a voluntary exchange of goods and services is about. Now, look, I do understand there's some privilege in my attitude. I do think that is one of the benefits of living somewhat within your means is you have the ability to make these choices. But I'm not saying any of this to judge people in different financial circumstances. But this is the message of
5:51 Ryan Holiday? Today's episode, I have come to believe that we are defined by the things that we don't do for money. Like, do you know who Audie Murphy is? We carry his book in the painted portrait, one of the great American memoirs. He was the most decorated soldier in American history. Before he'd turned 21, he'd fought in nine or 10 campaigns. He was wounded multiple times. He received 33 medals for valor, including the Medal of Honor, three Purple Hearts, and every other Army Combat decoration. Again, in one battle, he was up against something like 250 German soldiers in six tanks. He orders the men
6:31 Ryan Holiday? to fall back, and he alone climbs into this burning tank destroyer and uses its machine guns to hold off the Nazis for over an hour, kills 50 of them, doesn't give an inch of ground, and he holds the woods until the reinforcements came. And so after the war, because of his fame and notoriety, becomes an actor and a musician. But I was so impressed by something that comes sort of at the end of the memoir. In 1968, he talks about how he turns down huge amounts of money to appear in a series of alcohol and cigarette companies. He says, "How would it look? War hero drinks booze." Says, "I couldn't do that to the kids."
7:26 Ryan Holiday? In Right Thing Right Now, I talked about Harry Truman and how he works his way up through the corrupt Kansas City political machine without being corrupted. Says, "In this long career, I had certain rules I followed, win, lose, or draw. I refused to handle any political money in any way whatever. I engaged in no private interest, whatever, that could be helped by local, state, or national governments. I refused presents and hotels and trips which were paid for by private parties. He wouldn't make speeches for money or even expenses." He says, "I lived on the salary I was legally entitled to and considered that I was employed by the taxpayers." And the people of my country, state, and nation.
8:11 Ryan Holiday? And actually, in his post-presidency years, very different than the practice today, he was nearly broke when he left office. In fact, the reason we have a presidential pension is that people were concerned about a broke former president. And yet, for Truman, being bankrupt was preferable to compromising his principles. I told a story, actually, when I was in stage recently. This is also in writing right now, but I told this story when I gave a talk to a group of entrepreneurs in Hawaii. They asked me to speak about values. And let me play that for you. In 1935, the choreographer Martha Graham is approached by an Olympic committee from Berlin.
8:57 Ryan Holiday? They want her to put on a performance, the upcoming 1936 Olympics. And Martha considers it. She is basically dead broke. It is a huge commission. It is literally the world's stage. She turns it down. She says, "Over half of my company is Jewish. What would they think? I can't in good conscience possibly perform for you." They threatened her, as so often happens when you challenge authority. They said, "If you don't come, everyone will know about it, and that will be a bad thing for you." And so you have both the carrot and the stick. And Martha thinks about it and then famously replies, "If I don't come, everyone will
9:40 Ryan Holiday? know why I didn't, and that will be a bad thing for you."
9:50 Ryan Holiday? I was thinking afterwards at the applause at Graham's line. Graham didn't experience this as an applause line. She couldn't live on gratitude or respect, especially coming decades later. This must have been an incredibly hard choice. It must have been a scary choice. But it was the right thing to do as a person. And yet, it doesn't change the fact that she would have had financial obligations as a businesswoman with dancers to support. And I think every entrepreneur, every parent certainly knows that choice. You have your views, and then you have payroll to meet. You have kids to feed. You have investors to satisfy. You have your ego to fill. There's a scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby approaches the young Nick Carraway,
10:35 Ryan Holiday? the cousin of Daisy Buchanan, the love of his life, and Gatsby's trying to win back Daisy, so he first wants to win over Carraway. And he tells Nick, "You know, I carry on a little business on the side. I know you don't make very much," he says, "so maybe this would interest you." He says, "It won't take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money." It's also rather confidential. And it's only later that Nick, understanding more clearly that Gatsby was a gangster, a bootlegger, that he says, he realizes, "Under different circumstances, that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life." Gatsby was trying to draw him in, trying to hook him on the lifestyle. Now, I haven't always been good at this.
11:18 Ryan Holiday? I've gotten myself into some fixes that might have gone badly for me. I remember one time Dove Charney tried to buy me a car. And I remember thinking, "Oh, there's an ulterior motive here. Just in, I'll accept my salary, but I don't want extra stuff on the side. I know that nothing comes for free." I also sometimes look back on clients and people that I worked for in my twenties, including Dove, sometimes even people much later than in my twenties, when I should have known better. And I feel the urge to take a shower. I suspect, growing up, I heard my parents talk more about financial success than about integrity or ethics.
11:58 Ryan Holiday? And it took time for me to develop the character and confidence to be able to say no, to say no to things that gave me the ick or that seemed iffy. Actually, when I had Maddox on the podcast, we talked about this exactly. I was very struck by the choice he made. Actually, let me play that for you here, too.
12:20 Speaker 01 Where I've turned down millions of dollars. Similarly, there's, there's people who tap me on the shoulder like, hey, can you help grow our channel? I'm like, I can, but I won't. Cause I take a look at it and I'm like,
12:31 Ryan Holiday? I don't want this to be seen by more people.
12:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't want, I have principles and I'm at odds sometimes with, you know, some collaborators and people I work with, because they're like, well, it's money. I'm like, yeah, it's not, I don't wanna, I don't wanna put this out in the world. It doesn't need a bigger platform and I know I could make them much bigger and I don't want to do that.
12:46 Ryan Holiday? And, you know, I wrestle with this still. I turned down a talk last year from an organization I thought was a scam. I weighed whether I should cancel one recently with someone whose politics I found abhorrent. I think my reading and my study of Stoic philosophy has helped me get better at it. And maybe it's because my inclination is sometimes to make money that I find it impressive when people turn it down, especially when they really need it, or especially when it's a lot of money. And right thing right now, I also talked about Rory McIlroy and how he turns down hundreds of millions of easy money because he believed that the live golf league was bad for the game. He said something, this came right after a Daily Stoic email that I know he got.
13:28 Ryan Holiday? He said, "The decisions you make in your life purely for money don't usually end up going the right way." And do you know what his reward for all that was though? His game took a major hit from the distraction and the PGA tour hung him out to dry. But that, that can sometimes just be how it goes. You know what they called Truman when he was elected to the Senate? When they weren't calling him a hick, they called him the senator from Pendergrass, implying that he was owned by the political boss. He'd forgone millions of dollars of bribes and deals and he still gets a reputation for being corrupt. But he turns to Marcus realist in meditations, you know, where Marcus really talks about
14:10 Ryan Holiday? how you can earn a bad reputation by doing good deeds. That is what he turns to precisely in that moment, experiencing the same phenomenon 2000 years later. I think I've made some expensive decisions in my career about what I will and won't do, as well as some expensive decisions about how we do what we do. We have another episode about this, and I've talked about it a few times, like the decision to work with people who use environmentally friendly products, raw materials, or pay fair wages, or manufacture domestically. That's not cheap. That comes out of my pocket. That comes out of the profit
14:53 Ryan Holiday? margins of the things that we do. And still, though, people will sometimes call us, you know, dollar science stoicism, or people will call me a grifter, or even the choices that I make about what ads we run. Like, we still get complaints about the ads, period. That's just how it goes, though. And that is what Marcus really was talking about. You do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because you want the third thing after that, the recognition, the appreciation. You don't want people to go, "Oh, you're such a wonderful person. Thank you for all you do." That's not why you do it. And in fact, you not only might not get that, you might see other people do the wrong thing and get not the heat that you would have gotten, or get recognition even though they
15:35 Ryan Holiday? don't deserve it, right? Someone probably will do a stoic supplement. They might even make a bunch of money from it. Someone might listen to this episode where I'm saying, "Don't do that. It's a dumb idea." Do the idea, and that's life, right? But that person won't be me. I don't think you can call it a principle. There's a great expression about this, unless it has cost you something: money, access, friends, followers, convenience, an opportunity to get ahead. I don't think you're rich unless your hands are clean. I don't think you're rich if your money came stained in blood.
16:13 Ryan Holiday? You're not free if you can't say no. And you really don't know who you are till you know what you won't do for money. That is today's episode. Thank you for listening. And I mean that. Thank you for listening because that's partly why I'm in the position to say no to some of these things. I mean, I'd say no anyway, but I am privileged to be able to have this platform. I have a little note card right here next to my desk. It says, am I being a good steward of Stoicism? Am I being a good steward of your time? Your faith in me? Your interest in me? Your interest in Stoicism was something that someone was nice enough to recommend to me. And that's why I'm in this position.
16:56 Ryan Holiday? And I feel obligated to pay that forward and treat it right and treat it with respect. So I'm trying to live up to that. I'm not always going to be perfect. I'm definitely going to make mistakes. I hope I don't let you down. I hope I haven't let you down. I'm doing my best and, uh, you know, keep keeping me honest. I appreciate it and try to stay honest and good. Keep your hands clean and not stained in blood yourself and focus on what you can say no to. Cause you are what you won't do for money.
17:24 Ryan Holiday? Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us. And it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.
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