The Daily Stoic - Can You Do This Even Here? | It's In Your Self-Interest

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

With enough practice, Seneca said, he found he could think anywhere. He could find stillness and peace anywhere.📚 Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday 🎟️ 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/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Can you do this even here? It was one of the noisiest places in the noisiest city in the world. It was big enough that it would stun you even now. The baths of Diocletian in ancient Rome could accommodate more than 3,000 people at a time. People from all over the empire came there to Washington. off, to work out, to socialize, to primp and relax. Seneca found the noise of the baths intolerable.

He describes the sound of fat men being massage, people jumping in the water, obnoxious people in love with their own voices, vendors hawking their wares, even a thief being arrested outside. It was loud enough, she said, to make you hate your own ears. So you might think that in order to write, which he was desperately trying to do, he needed to run away from it all. Perhaps he headed out to his country estate or got up early or stayed up late to skip the noise in the crowds. On the contrary, Seneca sought those baths out precisely because they were noisy. With enough practice, he said, he found he could think anywhere. He could find stillness and peace anywhere.

And so can we. Stillness is not something we just have. It's not a product of environmental conditions being just right. If it is, we're going to be very vulnerable. No, stillness is something we cold. cultivate inside ourselves. Marcus Aurelius agreed. He said that he could retreat inside his own soul any time he wanted. He knew that serenity and tranquility were an interior state of being. By the way, I wrote a whole book about this. It's called Stillness is the Key, and it opens with

this scene from Seneca. I actually was just at the baths in Rome recently and standing outside those baths. It was just a fascinating glimpse into what Seneca was talking about. You grab your signed copy. Stillness is the key at Storward. Dailystoic.com. One of the things I think the internet has shown us is that you've got to directly connect with the people that you're trying to reach. You want as few intermediaries and as few sort of artificial blocks between you and what you're trying to do or what you're trying to say or who you're trying to reach as possible. Right. You want those one-on-one interactions. And I don't know if you've seen this app whatnot, but it's, it's a lot. It's a lot.

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Client experiences will vary. Wealthfront brokerage is not a bank, and the base API is as of January 30th, 2026, and subject to change. For more information, please see the episode description. It's in your self-interest. interest. This is an entry from The Daily Stoic. I realize I'm recording at my house. I ran upstairs and I grabbed a copy of the Daily Stoic off the shelf. I was looking for one. And I think I found a first edition because it doesn't say bestseller list on it. It doesn't say how many copies were sold.

And it's kind of got these yellowed pages. So pretty cool. This would have been the first edition that came out in 2016. Obviously, we've since printed millions of copies. It's in like 30 languages. is you can even grab a leather edition at store.dailystoic.com, but I'll get to the entry, I promise. Today's quote is from Seneca's moral letters. Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn't get drunk, not with words, but with the facts of its ugliness and offensiveness. It's most easy to prove that the so-called pleasures, when they go beyond proper measures, are but punishments. Is there a less effective technique to persuading people to do something? than yelling at them? Is there anything that turns people off more than abstract notions?

That's why the Stoics don't say, stop doing this, it's a sin. Instead, they say, don't do this because it will make you miserable. They don't say pleasure isn't pleasurable. They say endless pleasures become its own form of punishment. Their methods of persuasion hugh the line in the 48 laws of power appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude. If you find yourself trying to persuade someone to change or to do something differently, remember what an effective lever self-interest is. It's not that this or that is bad. It's that it's in their best interest to do it a different way and show them.

Don't moralize. And think about what would happen if you apply this line of thinking to your own behavior. I've sometimes said, like, the difference between stoicism and Christianity is the Christian argument is like, okay, don't do these sins, don't violate these 10 commandments, or you could go to hell. And I realize this is a simplification. Just bear with me. But the Stoic argument is, hey, if you do these things, and there's a similar probably list of things to do and not do, you will live in a kind of hell, right? The Stoics certainly would have saw people get ahead doing bad things, but they also would have seen how they pay for those, quote, unquote, successes, right?

that these were some of the most miserable people. Certainly this is what Epictetus realized is living in Nero's court. He goes, oh, man, these people weren't lucky. They're not getting away with anything. It's horrible to be them. I wouldn't want to be them at all. I'm obviously thinking about this now that I have kids. You know, when you forbid someone from doing something

or you just criticize something, what you're not doing is explaining the why. You're not demonstrating the why. And the Stoic argument is like, look, when you do something and you experience that bit of pleasure, you know, the pleasure passes quickly, but sometimes the shame or what you had to do to get it or the wrong you committed to get it, that endures. Meanwhile, the other side of the argument the Stokes would say is that when you do something hard or you resist or you push forward, that labor passes quickly. but the pride in it remains. The good lasts a little bit longer. You know, Stoics would have tried to point out,

yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's not fun to drink, but you've got to think about what you're going to feel like tomorrow. You got to think about the road you're going down. I was just talking to someone about this, the idea of justice. You know, you was talking about this, like, a bit of paperwork he had to fill out. And, you know, if you put one number, he had to pay a certain amount of tax. If you moved the number a little lower, was less tax. And we weren't just talking about whether that was the right thing to do or not

or whether you would get caught or not. But again, kind of person do you become kind of habit, are you building? This matters too. Maybe karma exists. Maybe you'll go to hell for it, but is it creating a kind of hell here, making you a hellish person, right? Are you actually getting away with it? Are you paying for it in another way? That's the question I want to leave with today. That's, to me, the Stoic argument, you know, that's what so struck me about the Stokes early is they're making a pretty self-interested case, a pretty logical case for these things. Because they saw it up close and personal. They know what happens when you go down that road. The choice of Hercules that I built the Four Virtues series around. It seems like the road of vice

is more fun than the road of virtue, but in the end, it isn't. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoke.com slash email.