The Daily Stoic - BONUS: Toxic Masculinity, Cancel Culture & Politics

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

In this bonus episode, Ryan answers questions about handling other people’s opinions, toxic masculinity, keeping your ego in check, politics, and cancel culture. Have a question for Ryan? Bring it to one of his upcoming live shows!🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world. Hi, Ryan. I want to say that your book, Opsco's the Way, helped me finish my master's thesis. Oh, congratulations. Thank you for that. I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is like annoying you or whatever, but you can't. accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to kind of have peace with that

and not let it kind of take your own piece away? One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in meditations. Marksruis says, remember you always have the power to have no opinion. He says, things are not asking to be judged by you. Now imagine this is being said by a person whose opinion was literally law.

He had the life and death power over people. And here he is reminding himself to live and let live that he doesn't have to let things bother him. He doesn't have to try to change everything. He can just let some things be. And now this sounds like not much of a power. You always have the power to have no opinion. But how many people do we know that have no such power?

Right? I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. Elon Musk is an incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy person. But has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself? Not that I know of. It's a hard thing to do to just shut up, you know, to just focus on your stuff. that's what I try to do in my life as best as I can,

something I'm going through with my kids. I'll be like, oh, wait, I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not. You like it. I like that expression. You don't have to yuck someone else's yum. Like, you like it, so it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise.

And so having fewer opinions is something I'm trying to practice and will be forced to practice over the next few years, I suspect. Quick question. As a father of two young boys like yourself, I'd just be interested on your thoughts and insights particularly on the rise of what we call toxic masculinity, the likes of your Andrew Tates, Matt Walsh's, Ben Shapiro's, etc. And particularly their negative attitudes towards women and how you guide, let's say, your sons on the appropriate actions with the fair sex. Yeah, that's a great question. One of the reasons, I feel so strongly about this and why I talk about these things is I have two young boys and I also

just so frustrated with the way that people who have platforms and influence over young men have decided to deploy those platforms to use it to call out and inspire the worst in people. Look, if you want to use your platform to tell people to get active, to read great texts from history, to aspire to do things, to be ambitious, take care of yourself to make your bed. All that's awesome, right? And I think young men especially are desperate for that advice and desperately need positive outlets and role models because they're not enough of them out there. You know, being a young man is hard. Being any kind of person is hard, right? And when you look at the stats, young men are struggling. In the United States, two-thirds of college graduates are women. Just young men are struggling across the board. And I think

because of that struggle, it makes them a very ripe target for sort of reactionary figures to pander to them. And as all sort of cultures have struggled with over the years, to take those disaffected young men weaponize that disaffection to say it's this group's fault or it's this part of society's fault or to direct it at a common enemy, that's what like demagogues do and have always done. So I think that's why I feel so strongly about talking about some of this stuff and talking about it in a positive way because I feel like I'm one of the only. people that has a, not a mostly male audience, but has a male audience that hasn't gone in that direction. There's definitely a few exceptions. I think Rich Roll does an incredible job. There's a bunch

of people I like, but I think this space is failing young men particularly. I just find in the Stoics that I admire a strong social conscience. And that, to me, that strong social conscience has to also include equal treatment for all people, all genders, all orientations. And to really sincerely care about that as if it, as is important to you as your own equality and success to me, that's just part and parcel of being a decent human being. So I'm thinking that cancel culture is really awful. Sure. How can Stoics or Stoicism help reverse the negative effects of it? Look, they had cancel culture in ancient Rome. It was called exile, and it happened all the time. There's a whole generation of Stoics that were known as the Stoic opposition, and they were either

exiled or executed. This is how Seneca meets his end. The reason Epictetus is teaching philosophy in Greece is that there is a blanket ban on all philosophers in Rome around the time he gets his freedom. Look, public shaming, piling on to people, being very unforgiving, you know, making someone's worst moment, who they are as a person. Yes, that kind of cancel culture is not great. We need more of grace in this world. We're all imperfect. Seneca talks about this. He says, like, we're all fucked up and awful, and the only way we're going to survive is by being kind and patient with each other. That being said, I feel like cancel culture has become a rallying cry, largely of people who it would be wonderful if we could cancel and they went away. And so this idea of, you know,

like Russell Brand gets accused of a bunch of horrendous things and then becomes like a right-wing cancel culture warrior is very self-suffer. serving and transparently manipulative in my eyes. So there's something about where we're going as a society where we're like, oh, because polite society is horrified at what this person has done and rightfully so, I'm actually going to, instead of saying rightfully so and being like, I'm not going to be a fan of that person's work anymore, we decide to make them this kind of like anti-hero. I feel like it's created this toxic feedback loop where like the worst people get the most attention

and so I'm more worried about that than cancel culture. I'm reading your book now, Egos the Enemy, I read Obsticulars the Way, and I came across an interesting theme in it. As you were successful when you were younger, I wanted to ask you as someone that's quite relatively young, how do you iterate when something doesn't go your way and how do you keep yourself humbled despite having a lot of success at a younger stage?

Thank you for that. Yeah, I think I was always very cognizant of how lucky I was to have, some of the opportunities that I had early on. And my main goal was not fucking them up and not letting them go to my head. When I looked at other people that had started off strong or gotten similar to Lucky Breaks, what happened? It wasn't that someone came along and took it all away. It was that they alienated people or took it for granted, got complacent, like lost their

minds, you know? I understood the ego was this kind of toxic force that would make whatever I was trying to do harder. And I think that's true at any level of success you have, but it is particularly hard to bear in young people. If they're choosing between two people to give an opportunity to, the asshole is the one they're going to pass on first, you know? And so I was just thinking a lot about how do I not regress towards the mean? That's a mathematical proof for, you know, certainty that all things regress towards the mean. How do I not do that? How do I stay where I am? And to me, that was mostly about staying humble, staying clear-headed, doing the work. But yeah, you're going to make mistakes.

You're going to screw up. I did that a lot. But I wanted to make sure that I only made those mistakes once, that I didn't make the same mistake over and over and over again and need to make it bigger before I learned the lesson. And I wanted to make sure that when I did make a mistake, I took the feedback, not personally, but as information I could use to get better. How do you deal with people on the day-to-day who are on the far opposite spectrum and stand like believe in everything that you feel like is wrong with the world but they are actually decent people but they just believe in our sense wrong thing look i live in a small town in rural texas on a dirt road i have plenty of interactions with people that i disagree with on

lots of things not that i'm on the far left myself i have not that's why i live in rural texas i feel like i have pretty down the middle views it's just segment of society has gotten more and more extreme. I will say I don't buy the distinction or the benefit of the doubt that you can believe and advocate for horrible things that have horrible real effects on real human beings and then go, well, we just agree to disagree. That's what I mean. Like people go, why take a stand? You know, why embrace the divisiveness? Sure. Like, there's lots of totally normal policies on all sides of the spectrum based on real data that people can have lots of opinions about. I don't talk about politics ever in that sense. I don't talk about tax policy. I don't talk about educational policy. None of that.

But when it comes down at the most basic level to how we treat human beings and what the social contract obligates us to do and not do and what history tells us to be very wary of and to be very emphatic about nipping in the bud, that's the kind of politics that I feel obligated to talk about.