Ryan Holiday (3:52)

The best lessons are taught through stories. That's how humans have learned for thousands and thousands of years. There's a reason Jesus spoke in parables. There's a reason that the ancient Greeks had a whole genre of stories called creas. What the translator of Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hayes would say exemplary stories followed by a memorable utterance. My name is Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of best selling books that basically follow this formula. And for years on social media we've been telling these stories on Daily Stoic and Daily Dad. They've reached millions and millions of people. And what we're going to highlight today are some of our best, most viral stories that can teach you or your kids or anyone watching some of the most powerful and important lessons you can learn in life. My all time favorite Marcus Aureli story comes at the depth of the Antonine plague. It's ravaged Rome. That's not even the only crisis that happens in his reign. There's a flood, there's a coup, there's an invasion. He's just like besieged on all sides. Rome's treasury is depleted. Things look very bleak. It's not clear even that the empire can continue. And so what does Marcus Aurelius do? He leads a two month sale of the palace furnishings. He sells his robes and his jewels. His wife sells their furniture. They sell down the palace furnishings to raise money. The idea being that that the leader takes the hit first, that the leader eats last, as the expression goes. Like Marcus could have made this somebody else's problem. He could have denied that there was a problem. He could have kicked the can down the road. Instead he stepped up and he did the hard thing. And he did the hard thing as a bit of demonstrative leadership. And to me that's what I love about Stoicism. It's an interior philosophy, but it's designed to shape your Actions in the real world where the stakes are really high. Marx, Aurelius wasn't a philosopher. He was a leader who happened to be a philosopher. There's a great story about Thomas Edison. He's America's most successful inventor, he's towards the end of his life, he's a millionaire many times over, and he's having dinner with his family and a man rushes in and says, the factory is on fire. You have to come quick. Edison gets there and it is. His life's work is up in flames and there's no chance this fire is going out. But he finds his son. His son is standing there, shell shocked, and Edison grabs him and he says, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again. And I just. I love that story so much because instead of crying, instead of weeping, instead of blaming, he's just taking this brief moment to enjoy the surreal, almost terribleness of his fate. He's finding something good in it. The Stoics have this idea of amor fati, which Nietzsche perfectly encapsulates when he says, you don't just be bear what is necessary, you love it. That's what amor fati means. It's a love of fate. And that's what Edison does. He tells a reporter, look, I've been through stuff like this before. It prevents a man from being bored and he throws his life into rebuilding. After this, he takes a loan from Henry Ford and he's back up and running within six weeks and then within six months. So the idea is, stuff is going to happen and it can break your heart, it can break your spirit, or you can say, go get your mother and all her friends will never see a fight like this again. And you can love it and embrace it and turn it into the greatest thing that ever happened to you. Two thousand years ago, a young man named Zeno visits the oracle at Delphi. He asked for advice. What should I do? What's the secret to life? And the oracle tells him, you will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead. And it's not until many years later, when Zeno is in a bookstore and he hears the bookseller reading aloud a passage from Socrates, that it hits him. Reading is having conversations with the dead. Even now, we call reading the classic texts, including the ideas of Zeno and all the other Stoics. We call this the great conversation because we're talking with people who are no longer with us. Socrates was dead when Zeno heard that bookseller bringing his ideas to Life. Zeno is long dead, and I'm talking to you about him right now. We will become wise when we begin to have conversations with the dead, when we read and listen to the voices of the past. In October of 1962, John F. Kennedy wakes up in the White House, and he's briefed by the CIA. The Russians have set up a series of ballistic nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba. And Kennedy has every reason to be upset, not just because this is dangerous. The world is now on the brink of nuclear war. But he had specifically talked to Khrushchev about this very plan and been assured that it was not going to happen. This was a provocation. Had it been taken as one, though, the world could have ended like that in a nuclear holocaust. Almost every single one of Kennedy's advisors told him the only option on the table was bombing Cuba. Those were the conservative ones. The aggressive one said he had to bomb Cuba and East Berlin and Russia. This was a provocation, and provocation must be met with response. And Kennedy has the discipline, the perspective to step back and say, hey, what are they going to do after we do that? He says, I think you guys are wrong, but I'm worried you're so wrong that no one's going to be around to say, I told you so. And so, in what became known as the thirteen days, Kennedy does what leaders are supposed to do. He's very firm. This cannot be allowed to stand. But his eye is always on de escalation. Escalation. He is constantly finding ways to give his opponent a way out. The Romans called this the golden road. You want to pave a golden road behind your enemy to allow them to retreat. Eventually, Khrushchev partly comes to his senses. He backs out. Kennedy has back channeled a plan to remove some American missiles from Turkey that he had already known to be obsolete. He gives them something to trade for. This is what diplomacy and compromise is about. And he backs the world off from the brink of catastrophe and disaster. So my favorite thing about Epictetus is he's born a slave, and he finds himself a slave in the court of Nero. So here you have this guy. He has no power, no freedom amidst incredible wealth, power, and opulence. But he comes to realize, watching how people act in Nero's court, that these supposedly free people aren't nearly as free as he thinks. He watches a man suck up to Nero's cobbler like he's. He's brown nosing the guy who makes Nero's shoes because he wants to, to get In Nero's favor. One man comes to Nero and says, I'm down to my last million dollars. And then Nero says, oh, my God, how can you bear it, right? Epic Teacher just realizes, although he's been deprived of his physical freedom, he's actually less of a slave than all of these people who are slave to their ambition, slave to power, slave to impressing other people, a slave to appearances, a slave to urges or mistresses. And so Epictetus realizes that freedom comes from the inside. Yes, people can bind us up in chains, he says, but they can't remove our power of choice. That can't change our ability to make our decisions, to set our own priorities. That's what stoicism is actually about. And that's why the philosophy is popular, not just with Epictetus a slave, but Marcus Aurelius, who's an emperor. Later, in that same court.

Toyota Trucks Advertiser (11:11)

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Ryan Holiday (11:41)

Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastow County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on.

Ryan Holiday (11:52)

Thought, this isn't going to work.

Ryan Holiday (11:53)

Stopped, parked it walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck.

Ryan Holiday (11:59)

What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma.

Ryan Holiday (12:02)

And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids, who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure Detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity.

Ryan Holiday (12:57)

But it's helpful if you can handle.

Ryan Holiday (12:59)

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Ryan Holiday (13:18)

People don't know this, but John F. Kennedy very nearly lost the 1960 presidential election. In fact, he won by only about half a percentage point. And in the end it came down to about 30, 35,000 votes. So what happened? Martin Luther King was arrested right before the election on trumped up charges and sentenced to four months on a prison chain gang. And his wife was actually very worried that he would be lynched or murdered in prison. And so she called both the Nixon campaign and the Kennedy campaign. Nixon, who was actually friends with Martin Luther King, decided not to get involved. He didn't want to piss off southern voters. John F. Kennedy called the judge, called Coretta Scott King and his brother also worked to get Martin Luther King released. And Martin Luther King would say after that he was stunned by this because Nixon had been his friend. And he said, I always regarded Nixon as a moral coward after that. And it was the news of this that rallied the black community to vote for John F. Kennedy in the election and won it. It's really just a few seconds of courage that win Kennedy the election and lose Nixon the election. And I talk about this in courage's calling. You know, we think bravery is the spirit big thing, but it's really a very small thing. It's immediate thing. It was a call to Martin Luther King's wife, it was a call to a judge. It was the decision to get involved, to ignore the reservations. Marcus really says just that, you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. You do the right thing and you trust that doing the right thing will pay off. You also trust in your ability to survive, even if people don't appreciate that you did the right thing. And courage is always better than cowardice. There's a pretty amazing story about Marcus Aurelius. Pretty late in life he's seen leaving his palace in Rome and he's carrying these tablets and a friend says, where are you going? He says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher, to learn that which I do not yet know. The friend marvels. He says, here's the most powerful man in the world, even as an old age, picking up his books and going to school. I think that's, that's in effect what Marcus is. He remains a student. It's his notebook, it's his exercise book, it's his workbook he's doing work on himself even as an old man. And the fruits of that come down to us. It's just so wonderful to think of Marcus even as an old man. Maybe some of the lines in here he learned from Sextus, the philosopher. He thanks sexist philosopher in book one, the Debts and Lessons chapter.

Guest or Interviewee (15:34)

So the idea.

Ryan Holiday (15:35)

Idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student. There's an amazing story about the actor George Clooney. He spends much of his early career struggling to get jobs. He goes into auditions, and they never work out. Then he has this breakthrough. He realizes they are not the solution to his problem, but he is the solution to their problem. They are holding this audition because they need actors. They cannot start the movie or the play or the TV show without the right actor. So he flips his attitude about it and he starts to see himself as the solution to their problem as opposed to the desperate person hoping that they will do him a favor. And this is such a key, stoic exercise. Our perception is everything, right? Seneca says, we dye events with our own color. We decide how we're going to look at it. We decide the perspective we're going to bring to it. Are we going to bring desperation or are we going to bring confidence? Are we going to see ourselves as coming from a position of weakness or from a position of strength? That's on you. You decide that you control the attitude, the approach, the energy that you bring to a situation, and that will make you much more successful in those situations. That there's a. There's a story that I tell in one of my books about Joseph heller, who wrote Catch 22, and Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote Slaughterhouse Five. And they're at this party of this billionaire. Kurt Vonnegut is teasing Joseph Heller, and he says, you know, how does it feel to know that the guy whose house we're in, some billionaire or whatever, made more money this week than your book will make in its lifetime? And he says, well, I have something that that guy doesn't have. And he says, what could that possibly be? And he says, I know what enough is. Well, I love that story because it's not, you know, after Joseph heller writes catch 22, he doesn't stop writing books. That's not the end of it. I think it's a difference between doing something from a place of needing to prove something or needing to, like, be something, and from a place of fullness where you're just, like, happy with who you are and you actually enjoy the work itself. Dude, I'm going to tell that story forever, That book, the Greek Way. Robert F. Kennedy, when he's running for president, somebody gives him a copy of that book. It blows his mind. He hadn't been familiar with the Greek myths. When Martin Luther King Jr. Is shot, he has to give this impromptu speech in Indianapolis. The crowd is just hearing the news at the same time he's hearing the news and it's on the verge of this riot. And he gets up there and he gives this famous speech where he quotes Aeschylus from memory, which he had not read himself. He had gotten from the Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. Basically there are riots all over the country that night, but not in inner city Indianapolis, because in this moment he draws on this line from Aeschylus about how our suffering teaches us and this is how we discover truth. And there's just something so beautiful about, you know, this terrible moment of history. Drawing on this multi century old bit of wisdom. The first thing to understand about Marcus is that he lived through a plague. You know, people sort of vaguely understood that the Antonine plague happens in Marcus Aurelius time. That's why it's called the Antonine Plague. And Marcus Aurelius mentions it obliquely a few times in meditation. But I think it's only going through the COVID 19 pandemic over the last couple of years that helps one understand the way that an event like that would have shaped Marcus. One of my favorite quotes from Marcus, he says there are two types of plagues. There's the one that destroys your life and the one that destroys your character. Understanding that Marcus would have seen all the kinds of extreme and callous and strange behavior that people you know and love may have exhibited over the last couple years during this pandemic, that helps us understand what he's talking about and that the quote holds true. There are people who maybe they didn't get Covid, but they caught something much worse. Or they did get Covid and they live through it, thank God, but they're carrying with them the effects of something much worse. Conspiratorial thinking, cruelty, indifference to other people. But Marcus's life is shaped by the plague. It's also an opportunity, a crisis for him to respond to as a leader. Actually, one of the things he learns from his stepfather, Antoninus, was to listen to experts. And this is why Marcus puts Galen, the great metaphor mind of his time, in charge of the pandemic response. But also the exercise of memento mori for this dose. The idea that life is short, that you could go at any moment, this is something Marcus would have experienced firsthand. He witnessed death all around him, constantly. Millions of Romans died in this horrendous plague. And ultimately, we think even Marcus Aurelius died of it. And his last words are a reminder to his friends who were crying over his deathbed, not to think of him, the singular individual, but all of the people who died of the plague and all of the people who would eventually die, including potentially his friends themselves.

Guest or Interviewee (20:33)

Edith Eger, your audience probably know who she is. Edith. When she was 16 years old, growing up in Eastern Europe, she was going for a date with her boyfriend. That night she was trying to think about what dress is she gonna wear. And her family get a knock on the door. Her sister, her and her two parents get put on a train to Auschwitz. Within two hours of of getting there, both of her parents are murdered. An hour or two later, she, as a 16 year old girl, gets asked to dance for the senior prison guards. There's many things from that conversation that have never left me. Ryan. She said. The final thing my mother said to me, Edith, nobody can ever take from you the contents that you put inside your own mind. And then she says, when I was dancing in Auschwitz, I wasn't in Auschwitz. In my mind, I was in Budapest Opera House. And a beautiful dress on, the orchestra was playing, the crowd were cheering. Then she tells me, I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners, they weren't free in their mind. I was. She said to me, rongen, I have lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison is the prison you create inside your own mind.

Ryan Holiday (21:37)

Well, there's a story about Epictetus. So Epictetus has this. A little shrine in his house to the gods. And he has this golden or silver lamp. He's, you know, in bed and he hears someone rustling. Someone has broken into his house. He makes his way down the hallway and a thief has broken in and is in the process of stealing the lamp. And he sees him running away with a lamp. And Epictetus says, I'm a fool. You can only lose what you have. Tomorrow I will go and buy an earthenware lamp. And his point was that he had this thing that he didn't want stolen because it was valuable. The problem was him, not the thief. So he buys a cheaper lamp the next day. It's kind of a Diogenes, the Cynic kind of thing, like have fewer possessions and you're less vulnerable to fortune or misfortune. A philosopher goes to the house of a stoic named Agrippinas. And he says, hey, I've been asked to attend this party that Nero said going on. We all know Nero is awful and corrupt and evil. I'm wondering whether I should go or not. I'm thinking about it, you know, should I go? And Agrippina says, yes, you should go. And the guy says, why you're not going? And he says, yeah, but I didn't even think about going. His point is, Agrippinus wasn't do I want to?

Ryan Holiday (22:52)

Do I not?

Ryan Holiday (22:52)

He wouldn't even consider doing something like that. That would be so compromising or corruptive. This sort of hell yes or hell no rule. He's saying this for effect a tad. But the idea is we should be really clear about what we are willing to do and what we aren't willing to do. The things we accept and the things we don't accept. We should have a clear sense of our moral compass, also our priorities. So we're not hemming and hawing, we're not having to ask for advice, we're not even thinking about it. It's a hard pass or it's an enthusiasm. Enthusiastic, yes. There's this amazing story about Ulysses S. Grant goes to West Point as a young man. He's this promising young military officer. He serves honorably in the Mexican American War. But then something goes wrong. Maybe it's the drink, maybe it's he hates the army. He basically ends up working for his dad, selling firewood by the side of the road. This is a big fall from West Point to south, selling firewood by the.

Ryan Holiday (23:51)

Side of the road.

Ryan Holiday (23:52)

And one of his old friends from West Point comes by one day, who's still in the army, moving his way up through the ranks, and he's ashamed to see his friend doing this. And he says, good God, Grant, what are you doing? And Ulysses S. Grant just looks at him and he says, I'm solving the problem of poverty. Meaning that Grant doesn't care that he's doing a so called menial job or that it's a humiliating occupation. All he cares about is that he's providing for his family, he's doing a good job, and he doesn't think that this says anything about him as a person. He knows that doesn't say anything about him as a person. It's crazy to think that just a few years later Grant would be the head of an enormous army and a few years after that he'd be the President of the United States. But for the stoic, there's this idea that comes from Marcus Aurelius. He says to accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference, Meaning you don't let the lowly position change who you are, and you don't let the high position change who you are either. None of it goes to your head, you know, none of it says anything about you as a person, because you know who you are as a person, and that's what really matters. One of the things that was really.

Toyota Trucks Advertiser (24:56)

Fascinating was the value that he placed on forgiveness.

Ryan Holiday (24:59)

He famously is betrayed by his best friend. He thinks Marcus is sick and near death. And so this guy named Avidius Cassius goes like, I'm the emperor now. But Marcus wasn't dead. And so it puts him in this horrible position of, like, obviously you can't allow this, but he doesn't want to fight a war over. And he basically says this is the final chapter in the obstacles away, the idea that, like, even this is an opportunity. And he says, like, I want to show history how civil strife can be dealt with. He tries to give Cassius a chance to come to his senses. Eventually, he has to take the Roman army out in battle. And then he weeps when someone kills Cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of forgiving him, of, like, giving him clemency. And he orders the Senate, he says, do not execute a single person for this. He says, do not let my name be stained in blood. Seneca was famous for practicing poverty. He would wear his worst clothes, eat simple foods, starve himself a little bit. He really likes slummit for a day or two to supposedly as often as once a month. Now, why was he doing this? On one hand, it was to toughen himself up, but really it was a psychological exercise. He wanted to, as a wealthy, successful person who had a lot, he wanted to familiarize himself with losing all of it. He wanted to be able to stare poverty in the face and say, is this what you were so afraid of? Because that's what can happen in life. The things we possess become the new status quo. And then we're worried and anxious that we're going to lose them. And so the thought exercise of going, okay, what would it actually be like to not have them? There's a Zen story about a cup. And the Zen master is saying to himself over and over again, the cup is already broken. The cup is already broken. So he doesn't become so attached to it that he fears losing it and thus doesn't actually enjoy it while he has it because he's so petrified of something. Happening to it. And this is the sort of relentless anxiety that a lot of successful people have. You'd think they'd be comfortable and feel awesome and feel like they have enough, but in fact, they're just petrified of losing it. Seneca says slavery lives beneath marble and gold inside the palace that looks so wonderful and appealing on the outside. It's actually a lot of anxiety and stress. So he's trying to familiarize himself with losing it so it would lose its power over him. How does something like this, a shot shipwreck in the Mediterranean, turn out not just to be not a disaster, but the best thing that ever happened? Zeno, a Phoenician merchant, actually loses a ship like this 2500 years ago. He washes up totally penniless in Athens. But instead of seeing it as a disaster, instead of seeing it as something ruinous, he sees it as the best thing that ever happened to him. He's walking through the Athenian agora. He hears someone reading the works of Socrates. He decides to chase that lead down. He finds a philosophy teacher, and he becomes a philosopher. He would say thank you to fate for driving him thus to philosophy, and he would joke that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck. In fact, all of humanity made a great fortune as a result of this disaster, because Zeno would go on to found the school of Stoicism, which is still in use more than 20 centuries later. And the fundamental tenet of Stoic philosophy is that it's not what happens to us that counts. It's how we respond to what happens. And so Zeno, in responding well to his shipwreck into his disaster, he turns the worst thing that ever happened to him into the best thing that ever happened. There's this moment where Martin Luther King is on stage, and this neo Nazi, like, walks on stage and starts just, like, beating him. And so Martin Luther King, like, physically, physically punching him in the face. Like, they. Like, I think Rosa Parks would go. You could hear the flesh on flesh. Like, it's dead silent in this auditorium. And they're watching Martin Luther King get the shit kicked out of him. He goes like this, you know, he puts his fist up to the way, like, a human has evolved to protect themselves and also fight, like, in the way that chimps fight. Like, this is how we fight, right? And one of the observers is talking about how there was this moment where they watched Martin Luther King do that and then drop his hands. Training teaches you to do the things that you don't normally or naturally do. And in his case, he trained himself to do, like, the least human of all things, which was like, drop your guard. Yeah, drop your guard. And then so the guy keeps hitting him. Eventually, people separate them. They both are taken backstage as they.

Ryan Holiday (29:28)

Wait for the authority.

Ryan Holiday (29:30)

And then Martin Luther King just talks to this guy for like 10 minutes and he. The first words out of his mouth are, don't hurt him, don't hurt him. And so, like, beyond whatever spiritual plane a person has to get to do that, I was struck by. That's like the training of a boxer, but the opposite, right? You know, like you're trained to do the thing. And then in this moment, when you would have every understandable reason to abandon the training for your own basic preservation and dislike of being punched in the face, he passes the test. Like, what a statement against non violence it would have been had a fight broken out on this stage. Purely just to detangle. I have written a couple of books over the years. If you would like a signed copy of every single one of my books, well, we're giving them away. We're doing a little contest. First prize gets a signed copy of every book I have written. Second prize gets all four books in the Stoic Virtue series. I'm also going to give away a bunch of the Daily Stoic medallions. All you got to do is enter your email below. You can also get bonus entries if you subscribe to the Daily Stoke podcast or follow us on YouTube or social media. We'll select the winners on December 1st. So if you want to enter this contest, you get a signed copy of all my books or. Or all the books in the Stoic Virtue series. Click the link below. Every day, a million people all over the world start their day with the Daily Stoic email. It's a free email designed to give you one actionable, practical bit of timeless stoic wisdom to help you start your day off right. You can sign up right now, totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's Never any Spanish dailystoic.comemail or click the link at the bottom of this video. I'll send you a summary and an action guide based on what you just watched. Plus, sign you up for that email. We'd love to have you and I'll see you soon.

Toyota Trucks Customer or Spokesperson (31:44)

My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned around town. It's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for off road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer. From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks. They're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com Trucks Adventure Detours that's toyota.com Trucks Adventure-Detours the world is.

Toyota Trucks Advertiser (32:41)

Full of tours, but you don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places in between the detours, where each adventure pulls you toward the next. And wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota trucks.