The Marcus Aurelius Quote Tom Junod Can’t Forget

One sentence from Marcus Aurelius made Tom Junod circle it three times, star it, and dog-ear the page. In this episode, Ryan talks with the acclaimed writer about reading Meditations https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations for the first time, why Marcus still feels so modern, and the line he can’t stop thinking about. Tom Junod https://www.instagram.com/tom_junod/?hl=en is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previously he was a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire. Grab signed copies of In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man by Tom Junod https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/in-the-days-of-my-youth-i-was-told-what-it-means-to-be-a-man-a-memoir-copy?_pos=2&_sid=49735af81&_ss=r at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/in-the-days-of-my-youth-i-was-told-what-it-means-to-be-a-man-a-memoir-copy?_pos=2&_sid=49735af81&_ss=r Follow Tom on Instagram | @tom_junod https://www.instagram.com/tom_junod/?hl=en 📚 Grab your own copy of Meditations translated by Gregory Hayes https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations 🎟️ 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/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ 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 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. There's that expression, a writer's writer, like, somebody whose writing is appreciated by people who appreciate the craft. Like, people who do it, they know that, look, anyone can enjoy this, but if you really know how stuff works, you appreciate it at a different level. There's certain comedians that are comedians, comedians, writers who are writers, writers, musicians who are musicians, musicians, right? We joke about how Epictetus is your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher. That's kind of the vibe, right? And Marcus Aurelius and Meditations are that. I mean, Meditations is a very popular philosophy book, but among people who are writers, you can appreciate it on a very different level.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  Tom Junod is a writer's writer, one of the great magazine writers of his generation. Millions of people have read his articles. Not everyone knows who he is, but the people who do know writing know he is one of the best all time. Always manages to get to like the real story beneath the story, not just as an investigative reporter, which he's really good at, but like on a human level. And then his sentences manage to express that. That's why his The Falling Man, which is about that unidentified victim plunging from the World Trade Center, is so deeply moving. That's why his piece on Mr. Rogers was so incredible. He has this new memoir called In the Days of My Youth,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, which is this sort of reckoning with his father. Tom is a senior writer for ESPN. He's won an Emmy. He's won a Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing. He's won two National Magazine Awards. He's won a James Beard Award. I mean, he's just as good as they come. So when he came on the podcast, I really wanted to dive into Meditations. He told me he'd been reading it. And I wanted to learn from a writer's writer about the sentences that stayed with him, why they stayed with him, what Marcus meant to him as a writer. So that's what we're going to dive into in today's episode. He's just an incredible writer. Like, when writers read his stuff, they're like, oof, I wish I could do that.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Which is actually one of the feelings I had when I read Meditations for the first time. How is he doing that? And the idea that he's writing it to himself 2,000 years ago, it's just unbelievable. Anyways, I think you'll like this conversation. Do check out Tom's new book. He signed copies of In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. And if you haven't read Meditations yet, well, I don't know what you're doing. What are you listening to this podcast for? Go read Meditations as well. We have the leather bound edition in the Daily Stoic store. Grab the Hayes edition, which I wrote the foreword to, or really any edition. I think the Hayes edition is the translator's translation of Meditations. I think it's the most beautiful one. Let's get into it.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  I'm ready. You got me totally ready because I went and I read this past week, I read the Meditations.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, really? What'd you think?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I was really knocked out by it.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  And I'm knocked out by it on a couple of, on a couple of different levels. Do you want to get into those?

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  Tell me.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Do you want to get into those levels?

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  I have questions I want to ask you, but I want to hear this more.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Well, so, you know, number one, you go, I had the same feeling reading Marcus Aurelius that I did like when I first read, when I first read Samuel Pepys, which is like, oh, my God, he's a dude.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, yeah, a glimpse into the humanity through the century.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  And so he lived a long, long time ago, but his concerns are not very different from our concerns.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's one thing. There is that, there is that thing.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  A time travel element.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  A time travel element to it. You see yourself in there in a way that you don't see yourself, let's say, in the New Testament.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  Or certainly, or even in Aristotle. Like, you're just like, this is smart and I get it, but you seem like a person wearing a toga that I don't understand.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  And he's talking, and he's talking to you.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I mean, he's talking to himself. The book is, I think, probably addressed to himself.

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  But he's talking to you.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And he's talking to you and he, and he's making sense. And so here's my other, my, the other thing that I went towards. So he is talking about, he's talking about death, and he's talking about how to live as a human in the face of death in, in the years where Christianity is being developed and coming up with a very, very different answer. So Aurelius is basically saying, okay, so, so death is simply a fact of life. And, and to accept that changes, changes everything. It's natural.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  And, and it's, it's part of the natural, it's part of the natural world.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's no less natural than birth.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  And it's part of you.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Whereas you have Christianity on the other side saying, to me, what is the greatest philosophical mistake in the history of humanity? Which is the wages of sin or death. I think that is a mistake. And I think it's, it's actually a deadly mistake that it's actually, and upon that deadly mistake is premised, to me, mankind's worst invention, its worst idea, which is hell.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so I've said this before, like, because, yeah, Marcus Aurelius and Christianity, same time, Jesus, Seneca, born the same year.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Both in provinces of the same empire.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  Both die the hands of the state. I've, I've said like, the, the Christian argument is like, don't sin or you will go to hell.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:41Ryan Holiday?

  And I think the Stoic argument is, don't sin or you will live in hell. Like, it's a, it's a somewhat logical argument against excess and cruel. Like, when he says the best revenge is to not be like that.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's the argument about. That sentence of all the sentences in the book, that is, I've circled it three times. I have stars, I have the page dog ear to it. I mean, that is the sentence.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  In, in, in the book that, that has stood out to me. It's going in, I keep like a chapbook and stuff, and that goes there. And so I think that the book really gave me some hope. I don't read philosophy that much.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I read poetry a lot more than I read philosophy, but both poetry and philosophy give me difficulty in that they don't tell a story usually.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Some, I mean, some poetry does, actually, you know, obviously, like, you know, epic poetry and stuff. But philosophy doesn't tell a story. And so I have trouble with it.

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  But Aurelius spoke to me in a way that was, you know, really powerful. And now I want to learn more about Seneca, for sure.

• 6:51Ryan Holiday?

  I think Aristotle said, both the philosopher and the poet are concerned with wonder.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  And I, I think when you, you don't get that when you read ironically Aristotle or most of the other philosophers.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  But when you read Marcus Aurelius, it doesn't feel like he's doing philosophy.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  But he is.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Right? By talking about himself, it's much, it's similar to Montaigne where he's like, who am I? Why am I here? What's going on? What does this mean? How could I do it differently? That, that has philosophy.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  It definitely does not feel like he's doing philosophy. It feels like he's talking to you. And he feels in certain ways like a modern day advice writer, you know, a so-called self-help writer.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there, there's a French philosopher named Pierre Hidot, who wrote this book about Marcus Aurelius and meditation, said his argument is that that is doing philosophy. Writing notes to yourself about your temper, about your fear of death, about your anxiety, about obnoxious people, reminding yourself of what you believe, oftentimes right after you've just acted in contrary to that belief.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  That's philosophy, not philosophical discourses where you attempt to explain the universe.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Or to get at something right or wrong.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. That's, that Meditations is, is philosophy for Marcus Aurelius, and it's accidental byproduct is that you and I can read it 2,000 years later.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Right. And so I was really happy to read it because I'm trying to figure out, like, what's my next book to write? I mean, I'm not saying that I'm going to like do my own meditations. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that it basically broadened possibilities for me. And that was a really great gift. So I appreciate that to you.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  As a great writer, I would be curious what you thought of it as a text. Like, put, put the philosophical contents aside. How did you take it stylistically?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I thought, I thought it was, it was really, really well done and astoundingly modern.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Especially given that it wasn't for an audience.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Right, astoundingly. And I think perhaps it's because it wasn't for an audience that it, it still stands up.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  All these years. He's, he's not, he's not on a stage.

• 9:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  And I got to say that, that, you know, reading Marcus Aurelius over the last week has given me sort of like a, a new kind of self-talk. It's given me, it's given me a language in which to address these things. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not bullshitting you on that.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, in Marcus's life, he has, he loses his father very young. And then he comes under the sway of a monster, Hadrian, who's like, although a very capable emperor, a killer, like, not exactly a sadist, but what, a person who you would expect would be attracted to absolute power. And so he kind of has this, well, I don't want to be like him. And if you notice, he, he almost never appears in Meditations. He's not in the list of acknowledgements.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  That start the book, right?

• 9:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. But, but the dominant entity in the acknowledgements is not his mother, who he clearly loved. It's this stepfather, Antoninus, who, who you might have predicted they'd be at odds with each other because they're not related and they're jockeying for power and they're in this forced, arranged kind of marriage. I mean, in the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. That could come from that passage of Marcus Aurelius talking about Antoninus. And you just see like, oh, if you get lucky enough to come in the orbit of an incredible person and you decide to listen, it can really heal a lot of wounds and get your compass dialed in. So it's a pretty remarkable relationship they have.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And I think that, I think that Fred Rogers was, was definitely that.

• 10:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  For me. Interesting that, you know, you say the title because, you know, a lot of people, you know, know that it comes from the first line of the first song of the first Let's Have an Album. However, the people who don't know that tend to think it's from, from antiquity.

• 10:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  They, they think, oh, my God, is that, is that Homer?

• 10:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it seems, it seems like it could be.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, you feel that a lot of times when you read the ancients, like, they are, they are on a stage. And the fact that he's sitting either in his bedroom or in a camp tent or whatever, doing this is, I think, what lends it its immediacy. And, and so that's the thing that I liked about it stylistically, was that there is a certain immediacy to it.

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, you, you get that advice about like, you know, just be really raw and vulnerable and, and specific, and that creates the general, and you don't really believe it. And then this guy writes something for nobody.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  And it somehow reaches millions of people for, for 20 centuries. It's kind of like the proof. I thought about that. Did you read the Joan Didion book that came out, The Notes to John?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I have not read the whole thing. I read the, I read the excerpts that came out. I have the book, but I haven't, I haven't read.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  By the way, this is, this was her table. Didn't I tell you this?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, this is the table. She, she could have written some of those notes like at this table.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  Um, but, um, the chairs too.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Dang.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  When I read that, I was like, oh, she can't write a bad sentence. Like, like she was writing for her husband, like she was writing notes from therapy for her husband. And if that text had gotten discovered 200 years from now and someone wrongly interpreted it as an epistolary novel, they would have been like, this is great.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  You know what I mean?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:18Ryan Holiday?

  It somehow, it's like, she's so good at what she does that even when she's jotting notes down from a therapy session to her husband, it's good. And I felt like, here's Marcus Aurelius writing reminders to himself. His to-do list is an enduring work of philosophy. It was pretty incredible.