If Money Could Talk, What Would It Say? | What Would the Stoics Tell Us Today?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Daily Stoic – "If Money Could Talk, What Would It Say? | What Would the Stoics Tell Us Today?"
Date: July 28, 2026
Host: Ryan Holiday | Backyard Ventures
Guests: Stephen Hanselman, Daily Stoic Team

---

Overview

This episode focuses on two major topics through the lens of Stoic philosophy: the nature and value of money, and how ancient Stoic wisdom might address the challenges of modern life. Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman discuss what lessons Stoicism offers about wealth, responsibility, emotional regulation, and personal reflection amid today’s fast-paced, distraction-filled world.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. If Money Could Talk (00:00–02:11)

• Historical Perspective:
  Ryan Holiday opens by reflecting on the journey of ancient coins, especially those bearing Marcus Aurelius' image, as a symbol for how money travels and is valued across time and culture.

• Stoic Reflection on Money:
  Holiday personifies money to underscore Stoic views:

  “Although people chase me, I don’t matter like they think I do. I have not helped anyone live forever… The things I have helped to buy never brought people as much pleasure as they thought. And losing me never brought people most of the dangers they feared.”
  (Ryan Holiday, 00:38)

• Core Stoic Principle:
  Money is a tool, not a measure of life. It can reflect cost, but not value. The enduring Stoic question:

  “Do we own our money or does our money own us?”
  (Ryan Holiday, 01:40)

---

2. Stoicism and Modern Distraction (04:56–07:30)

• Information Overload:
  The team discusses how the ancient Stoics, if they saw today’s world, would be amazed and horrified by our endless stream of information and lack of reflective time.

• Quote:

  “The ancients would be, I think, both amazed and appalled by the sheer amount of information that comes at us, the sheer amount of noise, the speed at which things are happening… I think they would wonder how we ever have any time for reflection, for contemplation, for long-term planning, for checking in with our values, for holding ourselves accountable.”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 05:27)

• Timelessness of Change:
  The Stoics lived with rapid change too—Marcus Aurelius felt his own era was the ‘cutting edge’, just as we do today.

  “You’re frightened of change, but what could exist without it?”
  (Quoting Marcus Aurelius, paraphrased by Stephen Hanselman, 06:27)

---

3. The Practice of Stoicism: Reflection & Journaling (07:31–11:55)

• Responding with Virtue:
  In every situation—good or bad—Stoicism teaches us to respond with the four virtues: courage, self-discipline, justice, and wisdom.

  “We don’t control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens.”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 07:24)

• Journaling as Stoic Practice:
  Marcus Aurelius wrote ‘Meditations’ for himself, not for others—a practice of using journaling for self-examination and improvement.

  • Notable Quote:

    “Journaling is dumping your thoughts out on the page instead of on other people. It’s creating a little bit of space, a little bit of perspective, so you can see things as they are, not as they feel in the initial moment…”
    (Stephen Hanselman, 09:47)

• Emotion and Stoicism:
  Contrary to popular belief, Stoicism is not about suppressing feelings, but about thoughtful response:

  “It’s not that the Stoics have no emotions... it’s that the Stoic thinks about it before they respond. And the Stoic tries not to do something out of anger.”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 10:37)

---

4. Power and Emotional Control in Leadership (11:55–13:38)

• Historical Anecdote:
  Hanselman shares the story of Emperor Hadrian blinding a secretary in anger—a cautionary tale of power, regret, and the irreversible consequences of rash action.

  “You just can’t afford to be angry. You don’t have the luxury of spouting off, of making impulsive emotional decisions, because there are consequences for other people…”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 12:29)

• Practical Stoic Advice:
  The core practice: Pause and reflect (Latin: pausa et reflecte).
  Ask: How will I feel about this later? What are the consequences for others?

  “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t [feel emotion]. But you don’t have to act on it.”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 13:37)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Money’s Real Value:

  “Money isn’t evil. It can do real good. But it is a tool, not a measure of life... Empires fall, fortunes disappear, their faces stamped on silver fade into history. What remains is the question: do we own our money or does our money own us?”
  (Ryan Holiday, 01:15–01:40)

• On Modern Life:

  “One of the themes that the Stoics talk about more than basically anything else is change. Just how fast things are moving, how nothing is stable.”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 06:17–06:27)

• On Reflection vs. Reaction:

  “The Stoic tries not to do something out of anger... Journaling, I think, is one of those steps.”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 10:33–10:45)

• On Leadership and Responsibility:

  “It’s all the more important when you are important, is that you just can’t afford to be angry…”
  (Stephen Hanselman, 12:20–12:29)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–02:11 – If Money Could Talk: Stoic views on wealth and the nature of currency
• 04:56–07:30 – Stoic perspectives on modern distraction, change, and values
• 07:31–11:55 – Practice of daily self-reflection: journaling, emotional regulation, and virtue
• 11:55–13:38 – Emotional self-control in power and leadership; the story of Hadrian

---

Episode Takeaways

• Money is a tool, not a life measure. Stoicism reminds us to use it wisely, not be used by it.
• Modern life’s pace and distractions aren’t new, but the need for reflection and value alignment is perennial.
• Daily practices like journaling help cultivate Stoic response: pause, reflect, and act according to virtue.
• Leadership—of self or others—requires maturity, responsibility, and control over emotional impulses.

---

This episode challenges listeners to rethink their relationship with wealth and attention in daily life, drawing from the timeless wisdom of the Stoics and offering actionable methods—such as journaling and strategic reflection—to build a more thoughtful, resilient life.

Transcript

[Ryan 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. If money could talk, what would it say? Just as it does today. In the ancient world, currency got around. Coins with Marcus Aurelius face on them have been found in Eastern Europe and Egypt and London, thousands of miles from Rome. Even today, you can buy them online, have them shipped thousands of miles further, thousands of years after they were made. What do you think that money, or indeed any currency, modern or ancient, would say if it could talk? Certainly it has seen a lot, seen the best and the worst of people, been used for transactions of all kinds. If money could talk, the Stoics imagine it would probably say something like, although people chase me, I don't matter like they think I do. I have not helped anyone live forever, and nobody, even the people who insisted I be buried with them was able to take me with them when they died. The things I have helped to buy never brought people as much pleasure as they thought. And losing me never brought people most of the dangers they feared. I have never been able to give anyone class or decency, and often the people who had the most of me had the least of these things. Of course, the Stoics have been saying this exact thing about money for thousands of years, and generations have always found it hard to listen. Money isn't evil. It can do real good. But it is a tool, not a measure of life. It can tell you what something costs, but not what it's worth. And maybe that's the lesson. Those old coins are still carrying. Empires fall, fortunes disappear, their faces stamped on silver fade into history. What remains is the question, do we own our money or does our money own us? And that's one of the questions we talk about in the Wealthy Stoic, which is a Daily Stoic Guide, challenge, course,

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

class, whatever you want to call it,

[Ryan Holiday]

about what the Stoics teach about money, how to make money, but more importantly, how to think about it, how to integrate it into your life, how to use it, not be used by it. If you join us in Daily Stoic

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

Life, you get this course and all

[Stephen Hanselman]

our courses for free.

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

Or you can just sign up for the course@daily stoic.com Wealthy. This year is going to be the 10 year anniversary, not just of the Daily stoic book, but Dailystoic.com, the email, the podcast, all that stuff. And I don't think we would be standing here 10 years later if it weren't for Shopify. Shopify has been the backend of so many of the things we've done, from the New Year, New youw Challenges, to the Medallions, to posters. Even right now, you're gonna buy a signed book from me. You're gonna be checking out through [e-mail] or if you're buying something from DailyDad there, or if you come to the Painted Porch. We even use Shopify at point of sale in the store. And if you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to make that happen. You've got everything you need selling, and Shopify handles the setup and the checkout, and you can focus on growing the business. And they've got all the tools to help you with what you need. Which is why Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to small businesses just getting started like Daily Stoic was not that long ago. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com stoic that's shopify.com stoic to start your free trial. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I don't think stoicism is about being

[Ryan Holiday]

emotionless, but it is about thinking about

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

those strong emotions we have, questioning them, getting to the bottom of them, asking if they're healthy or productive or not, asking if they're based on anything real or not. And these are all questions I've been

[Ryan Holiday]

over with my therapists over the years. I said plural because I've switched at

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

different times in my life based on

[Ryan Holiday]

where I lived, what I need. One thing that's been consistent, though, is

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

I always do remote therapy. I want to find the best person, which means I don't really care where they live. Also, I don't wanna drive across town. I don't wanna wait in traffic. I don't wanna do any of that. That's where today's sponsor comes in. If you've been considering therapy, check out today's sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes finding a therapist super easy. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you. You can switch at any time. And with over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, and they serve more than 6 million people globally. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Dailystoepod that's better Dailystoicpod.

So it's 2026, we're living in a wi fi, fast food, short attention span, age. You know, if the Stoics or the truly greats could come back into our time, what do you think they would, they would feel like a mandate to say to us like, you've missed this about life. You miss this about what it means to be a human. What would they speak to us?

[Stephen Hanselman]

I mean, it is kind of insane if you think that, you know, 2,000 years ago, the most powerful man in the world, he oversees an empire of millions of square miles, 20, 30 million human beings, is responsible for all of it. He would look at what's coming at us through our phones and be like, how do you keep track of all of it? Right? Like, like the, the ancients would be, I think, both amazed and appalled by the sheer amount of information that comes at us, the sheer amount of noise, the speed at which things are happening. And, and so I think they probably wonder how we ever have any time for reflection, for contemplation, for long term planning, for checking in with our values, for, you know, holding ourselves accountable. So I think the reason that Marx Realius's meditations is work of philosophy has endured for almost 20 centuries is because that really powerful, busy person was taking the time at morning, at night to converse with himself, to, to put himself up for review. And I think they would wonder why we don't do enough of that. I think that would be one thing. And then at the same time, as modern and new and as sort of fast paced as everything seems, like one of the themes that the Stoics talk about more than basically anything else is, is change. Just how fast things are moving, how nothing is stable. One of my favorite lines in meditation is Marx Realis is you're frightened of change, but what could exist without it? And, and you know, he didn't think that he lived in antiquity and neither did Socrates or Julius Caesar. They lived in what was then the cutting edge future, right? The most advanced time in human history. And so on the one hand I think they would be surprised and disappointed at some things and on the other they'd probably, they'd go, hey, I know what you're dealing with. Because it was like that back then too. Things are always being disrupted, things are always feeling like they're falling apart. People are always annoying and frustrating and weird and you know, we just have so little control of what's happening around us. And what Stoicism is as a philosophy is really how do we respond to that? Well, that's kind of my definition that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. But the Stoics, the key there is that we can respond to anything and everything with.

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

With virtue.

[Stephen Hanselman]

Right. With excellence. And so for the Stoics, that virtue. Like, what do they mean when they say, oh, you can turn this obstacle or this, you know, incredible abundance that you're dealing with good or bad situations or this chance for virtue. By virtue, they mean these sort of four key Stoic concepts. Courage, self discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the idea was that whether what's in front of you is an obnoxious person or the most successful deal of your life or global events, or, you know, just, you know, you come down with a cold or you get a diagnosis from your doctor, the. The idea for the Stoics is, what is this going to draw from you? How are you going to respond well to this? How are you going to do your duty, your responsibility here? And. And so instead of going, oh, things aren't the way that I like them to be, I don't like this. The Stoic is saying, it is what it is, and it's a chance for me to do X, Y, or Z. Easy. Easy to say, hard to do as. As I think we. We all can attest.

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

Right.

[Stephen Hanselman]

Like, knowing that, hey, what matters here is what I tell myself about the situation. What matters is the choices that I'm making in response to the situation. We know that, and then stuff happens and we complain or we whine or we try to find out who's responsible, or we spend a lot of time wishing it was otherwise. You know, we know how we should respond. Stoicism as a practice is trying to get a little bit closer to that day by day.

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

So, yeah, Marcus was emperor of Rome, which, at his peak, at the height of his power. Yes. And so you're saying he would in the morning. And we're all busy, too, but I imagine that's pretty busy and a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight. Yes. You're saying he would in the morning and evening. Yes. Take time. Yeah.

[Stephen Hanselman]

Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, one of the most remarkable works of. Of philosophy, wasn't intended for you and me. It was intended for him. It's the most powerful man in the world trying to talk to himself about, why did you lose your temper yesterday? Why are you worried about what other people think? Hey, are. Are you doing your duty? Are you fulfilling your responsibilities here? Are you the kind of person that you want to be, that, you know, you can be? And it's this conversation that he's having with himself. That book, it survives to us as a. As a. A byproduct, but it was intended for his own benefit. And so, you know, journaling is great. Like journaling is a practice I think everyone in this room should do. Your children and your grandchildren in the future might get some benefit out of it, but it's mostly for you. It's dumping your thoughts out on the page instead of on other people. It's creating a little bit of space, a little bit of perspective, so you can see things as they are, not as they feel in the initial moment when you're caught up or frustrated or scared or anxious or whatever, the emotion that we have. It's not that the stoics have no emotions. That's what people think that lowercase stoic means. Like, oh, that person's very stoic. I never know what they're thinking or feeling. It's not that a stoic has no emotions like that. A stoic would never be pissed off or angry because someone stole from them or hurt them or did something. It's that the stoic thinks about it before they respond. And the stoic tries not to do something out of anger. And journaling, I think, is one of those steps, right? It's like you wake up, you're pissed off, and you sit down and you go, why am I so angry about this? What am I planning on doing? Is this going to make things better or worse? Is this the person that I want to be? And we can tell that Marx Rose is doing this in Meditations. One of the best passages, he talks about revenge and seemingly talks about revenge a lot. And he's saying, you know, look, the best revenge. And he could have been speaking about one of his most trusted generals who had betrayed him. And we know this happened in real life, but he's saying, you know, the best revenge is to not be like your enemy, right? And so he's trying to catch himself so he has power. He could do whatever he wants. But he's saying, hey, I don't want to be like this person. I want to be like the person that I want to be. And so for the stoics, the idea is to try to fight, to be this person that you know you're capable of being, that you are in your best moments. But sometimes you let yourself off the hook in your worst moments. And it's about that struggle between those two extremes.

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

So when you have the stimulus or the frustration or that issue, the person cuts you off or Hit you with a shopping part. If someone cuts off Marcus, what would he do?

[Stephen Hanselman]

Well, you know, the emperor, he could put them to death, you know, he could do whatever he wanted. There's a story about the Emperor Hadrian, who's Marx Ruius's predecessor. He's dictating something to a secretary and the man screws up. Hadrian gets upset. He grabs the stylus. The Romans wrote, usually on these waxen tablets, and they etched it into the stylus. And he grabs the stylus and he plunges it into the man's eye and immediately blinds him. It's horrible and bloody and violent and he feels bad after. So I guess he's not a total psychopath. He feels bad after and he tries to apologize. And he says to the man, you know, I'm the emperor, I tell me whatever you want, it's yours. And the man says, well, I'd like my eye back. And so what, what Marcus is dealing with, and I think this is important for anyone who's in any position of responsibility or leadership. Obviously, this thing matters to everyone, but it's all the more important when you are important, is that you just can't afford to be angry. You don't have the luxury of spouting off, of making impulsive emotional decisions, because there are consequences for other people because of the imbalances, because of the people who are dependent on you. So for Marcus, really is what he's trying to, I think, do what stoicism really is this. The Latin phrase would be pausa et reflecte. Pause and reflect. Like, ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this later? How is this decision going to age? What are the consequences for other people going to be here? And so it's. Again, you can feel. You can feel it.

[Daily Stoic Team Member / Host]

And it'd be.

[Stephen Hanselman]

You wouldn't be human if you didn't. But you don't have to act on it.