This Is Your Ticket to Freedom | What Ryan Holiday Told Shawn Ryan to Read Next

We may not control what happens to us, what other people decide, or what circumstances take away. But we can still choose what we believe, how we respond, and who we become. 💡 We designed ourHow To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) http://dailystoic.com/ecourse as a personal field guide —part book club, part masterclass, part daily practice. It’s designed to help you not just read the words of Epictetus, but live them—to turn his timeless wisdom into real change in your own life and the lives of those around you. And if you get the guide before August 26th, you’ll receive a private invitation to an exclusive LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday, where he’ll go deep on all things Epictetus, Stoicism, and how to apply these ideas right now, in today’s world. Head todailystoic.com/epictetuscourse http://dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today! 👉 GetHow To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) http://dailystoic.com/ecourse & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life |dailystoic.com/life https://dailystoic.com/life/ Watch the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2-pzzfUJc of Ryan recommending books to Shawn Ryan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr2-pzzfUJc Check out Ryan's full appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show | Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/ma/podcast/321-ryan-holiday-the-stoic-survival-guide/id1492492083?i=1000776575063, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4TfsFUGAYOAOwR9bsP8Yo9, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqLrc1JWi_o 📚 You can grab a copy of each book Ryan recommended to Shawn Ryan https://www.thepaintedporch.com/at The Painted Porch https://www.thepaintedporch.com/: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ ✉️ Sign up for Ryan’s free monthly reading list newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/ 🎟️ 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 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?

  This is your ticket to freedom. In 1962, as this Navy fighter pilot prepared to leave graduate school and return to duty, his philosophy professor handed him a worn, thin volume. "I think you'll be interested in this," Philip Rhinelander, the dean of philosophy at Stanford, told Commander James Stockdale. "That night, Stockdale opened the Incoridion, a short handbook containing the teachings of the formerly enslaved Stoic philosopher Epictetus. At first, Stockdale struggled to understand these writings from the first century AD. What could this possibly teach a fighter pilot?" he thought, but he kept reading. He carried the book with him.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  He kept it at his bedside table aboard the USS Ticonderoga as it steamed across the Pacific less than a year later. He read and reread the teachings of Epictetus. He committed many of its passages to memory, and slowly, the lessons began to take hold. "Life is not fair. Circumstances are not ours to command. What remains is the power to choose how we meet them." Epictetus, Rhinelander had told him, "saw the world as a kind of buzzsaw, and that his teachings were a means by which a man could live with himself, resist being ground down." "I began to realize," Stockdale said,

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  "that for me, Epictetus offered that ticket to freedom." On September 9, 1965, Stockdale's plane was shot down over North Vietnam. He ejected, landed in a village, and was badly beaten. His leg was severely broken. He lost control of his body, his surroundings, his status, and his physical freedom. In a matter of minutes, the commander had become a prisoner. He would remain in the Hanoi Hilton for the next seven and a half years, tortured, held in solitary confinement, and repeatedly denied even the most basic control of his life. Yet he continued to lead his fellow American prisoners,

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  organizing their resistance and helping them preserve their dignity against their captors. In the buzzsaw of life, he turned to Epictetus, and it saved his life and changed the lives of the men he led. Most of us will never experience slavery, and few will ever face the danger of becoming prisoners of war. But we will face adversity. We will encounter people who have power over our careers, our circumstances, even our physical freedom. We will lose things we value. We will be treated unfairly. We will find ourselves in situations we did not choose and cannot immediately escape.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yet there is one thing that remains always in our control: our will. This is why the teachings of Epictetus mattered to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who first encountered them through a copy shared by his teacher. This is why they mattered to a fighter pilot facing war nearly 2,000 years later, and why they still matter to us today. We may not control what happens to us, what other people decide, or what circumstances take away, but we can still choose what we believe, how we respond, and who we become. And if you haven't read Epictetus yet, I don't blame you. He can be intimidating. It can be difficult to get into.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  I was actually turned on to Epictetus first, before Marcus Aurelius, but I looked at it and I said, "I don't think this is for me." So we've been thinking a lot about that here at Daily Stoic. We put together what we've been calling Epictetus Month. We're spending all month doing a deep dive into Epictetus, and we built this sort of guide module course thing. Basically, if you grab a copy of Epictetus from the painted porch, we'll throw in this digital guide. There's all this other awesome stuff. You work through it at your own pace. We break down all the big lessons. We don't all have a Rhinelander to walk us through Epictetus, but this is close enough, right? And we're going to be doing a Q and A about Epictetus towards the end of the month. All that jazz, I think it's going to be awesome. I'd love to have you join us.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  You've got to sign up by August 26. I'll throw the link in today's show notes, or you can just go to dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse. Or if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get this one and all the other courses for free. As I said, this is Epictetus Month. I want to see you in the Q and A on the 27th. So sign up by the 26th, dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  My wife and I have a bookstore outside Austin. And so my favorite thing is when I'm going to meet someone or someone comes in, like what books would I feel like? That's what gets me excited. I brought you a good edition of Marcus Aurelius. I don't know which one you have. This is my favorite translation. So I think what's cool about this is like, here you have the private thoughts of the most powerful person in the world, and almost certainly not intended for publication. Like, he might be mortified that we're holding this right now. So, you know, most books are written for the audience, right? But this is a book for the author. Like, that it's a book is the byproduct of the philosophical process, which is like, he has a temper. He has anxiety.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  He has a shitty job with people he can't trust and an empire that's coming apart. And he has health problems. He has marital problems. He has a plague. There's floods. It's a series of endless wars. And what he's doing is sitting down and writing to himself, trying to get back to center, right? Interesting. And it just wasn't burned upon his death, or it wasn't destroyed when he died. It doesn't read like a typical book. I mean, it's 12 books. Each passage is numbered, but it's really almost like journal or diary entries, because that's what Stoicism is, is like this.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  You know how you're trying to be, and then you're here. There's a great line in Meditations where he's saying, like, "Fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you." And that's what he's doing, right? It's like, we all know the ideal, like what our best self is, and then we're dysregulated, or we're tired, or we're hungry, or somebody's being really awful and annoying, and we're struggling to be, to get from the lower self to the higher self. Gotcha. Right? And that's what this is. So I got this, and then this one will hopefully... Like, Meditations should be... Thank you. It should be a book that you... Like, most books you read, right? Meditation should be a book that you are reading. Like, it should sit on the nightstand,

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  and you pick it up, and you read it throughout your life, because it was written throughout someone's life. But the idea is that you don't know what passage you're going to need until you're flipping through the book and it jumps out at you. That's the idea of Meditations. Roger that. Thank you. All right, I got a bunch more. I won't take so much time, but I know you got... I know you've got young kids. Do you know Steve Rinella? Yeah. Meat Eater? This is, I think, this is... He wrote an amazing book about hunting called The American Buffalo, which is like one of my favorite books. He gets a buffalo tag in Alaska, and he goes to hunt the American bison, and it's all about that. That's my favorite Steve Rinella book, but as a parent, this is outside kids in an inside world. I think that's what every parent is struggling with right now,

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  because screens are so addictive, and video games are so exciting. And we're all glued to our devices, right? I mean, people are probably listening to this, almost certainly listening to this on a device right now. But the point is, you want to raise outdoor kids, right? Kids, he says, "You want to raise kids that don't say ew a lot, because they're good being outside, getting dirty, doing nonsense." I love that book. I think it's amazing. Do you spend a lot of time outdoors with your kids? Yeah, we live on a ranch in Texas. I saw that. So we're pretty outdoorsy, but you know, it's a constant fight. It's like, they love it when they're out there, but they hate the process of getting out there. Really? Do you know what it's like? Like, it's like, when we... We were, yesterday, we went on a hike.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  They did not want to get out of the car. They did not want to go on it. And then as soon as we were in it, they loved it, right? And that's like, I think the struggle is the starting. You know what I mean? Yeah. All right, so we got that. Oh, this is another interesting parenting one. This is about Churchill and his son. So Churchill has a horrible father and horrible mother, basically neglect him, but he becomes a great man. And he tries to do better with his son, but he doesn't do a great job. I think that's another thing that keeps us up at night as parents. It's like, if you're successful, how do you not raise spoiled, entitled kid? You don't, they have comforts and security and love that maybe we didn't get, but how do you make sure that that works to their advantage, not that they're to their disadvantage, right?

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  And so I thought it's a, it's a really interesting sort of, because it looks at three generations, right? It looks at Churchill and his father, and then obviously Churchill, and then Churchill and his son. It's a great book. I thought you might like that one. Have you read any Stockdale? No, I haven't. All right. So this is Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot. So Stockdale goes to the Naval Academy in 43, graduates, becomes a pilot, and it's not until he spends 20 years as a pilot, it's not until the Navy sends him to Stanford, where he gets a graduate degree, that he's introduced to Stoic philosophy. On his last day at Stanford, his philosophy professor goes, hey, I think you might like this book.

• 10:19Ryan Holiday?

  He gives him a copy of Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher. And he does two more deployments there before he gets shot down. Every night in his bunk on the Ticonderoga and then the Constellation, and a little bit on the, on the Ariscony, he's reading Stoic philosophy. So when he gets shot down in 65, he says, he famously says to himself, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. And it's in the Hanoi Hilton that he basically takes Stoic philosophy as a, which was a sort of a theoretical thing, and he applies it in this, what he calls the laboratory of human behavior. Holy shit. Did you get to meet him? I see. I never got to meet him. He died, yeah, I think he died in 2008 or six? What does it say?

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  He died in 2006 at the age of 81. Yeah, no, I know, I met his children and met a lot of people that have met him, but just, I mean, one of the greatest Americans ever. Man. Incredible book, you'll love that. I was just, I'm, I'm doing, I'm actually doing a book on Stockdale right now, and this is, do you ever read The Right Stuff, the Tom Wolfe book? No. Oh, you would like that, too. So that's about test pilots who become the first astronauts. So it's about John Glenn and Chuck Yeager, really good. But this is, this is about, there's a little Stockdale in there, too. This is like about carrier pilots in Vietnam. Not enough people know about this book, it's incredible. It's called Over the Beach. It was Stockdale's favorite book about, about the air war in Vietnam, and then the guys that get shot down.

• 11:49Ryan Holiday?

  So I just read that, I think you would like that. If you don't read a lot, I think you would like that book. Perfect. And then the last one, you ever read any Hunter S. Thompson? Yes. Okay, so Hunter S. Thompson, we think of as the badass, wild man, crazy guy. You think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book about drugs and alcohol, which it is, but it's, the subtitle of that book is, is about the American dream. Because he's also one of our most astute sort of cultural and political writers. And so this is Freak Kingdom, and it's about Hunter S. Thompson as a political thinker and critic, because he covers Nixon, he covers Carter, he covers like every presidential candidate between, you know, sort of the, the late

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  60s and then his death. And I don't know, I got this sense, I think it would line up with where, because you're kind of like a man without a party. You're politically engaged, you have, but you're not like Democrat, Republican. I think you'd like that book. It's, what he's primarily is anti-fascist, not like Antifa, but anti-fascist, like doesn't like fascism, doesn't like people telling him what to do, doesn't like liars, doesn't like hypocrites, doesn't like corruption, and. I'm much happier than this guy. I think you're gonna like it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Really appreciate that. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years, and you can sign up at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.