The Daily Stoic - Do You Know The Favorite Of Your Favorite? | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

It’s rather sad—almost sacriligeous—that more people don’t know who shaped Marcus’s philosophical worldview. 💡 We designed our How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) 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 July 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 to dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today!👉 Get How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStstoic.com. Do you know the favorite of your favorite? Marcus Aurelius is far and away the most famous of the Stoics.

And this was true in the ancient world and it's true today. His statues dotted the houses of Romans across the enormous span of the empire. It was put up in temples for display and honor, just as today he is tattooed on biceps and backs. His wisdom was popular then and today his meditations remains a best seller, 1800 years after his death. He is not just many people's favorite philosopher, he is, in many cases, the only philosopher they have even heard of.

So it's rather sad, you could say a sacrilege, that more people do not know who shaped Marcus Aurelius' philosophical worldview. Just as today sometimes we lament the fact that more people don't know your favorite rapper's favorite rapper, not enough people know their favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher. That is to say, not enough people know Epictetus, the Greek slave whose philosophical teachings were what made Marcus Aurelius into that philosopher king. So who was he?

Who was Epictetus, your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher? Well, he was born a slave in 55 AD in what is now modern day Turkey. His very name in Greek just means acquired one. From nearly the moment of his birth, his life was not his own. He was sold to a powerful member of Nero's court, and he endured brutality and cruelty. His leg was broken by punishment or sadistic amusement, we don't know, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. And somehow, despite this, his tenacity, his perspective,

his sheer self-sufficiency would make Epictetus, not just in his life, not just to the emperors he directly influenced, but in history and for all time, one of the ultimate symbols of the ability of human beings to find true freedom in the darkest of circumstances. Which is why we're spending the whole month of July trying to give Epictetus the attention he deserved. Doing a deep dive into his life, his lessons,

and the legacy of this incredible teacher. So if you wanna know more about your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher, if you wanna do a deep dive into Epictetus, the way that Marcus Aurelius did, well, we'd love to have you join us in this course guide thing we're doing. It's hard for me to describe it exactly,

but we're just calling it How to Read Epictetus. It's going to be a practical companion where you can do a deep dive into his books. You can have some discussions with our fellow Daily Stoke members, thousands of Stokes all over the world. On July 26, we're going to do a live Q&A about it, sort of a group reading discussion,

which I'm really excited about it. Plus we have discounted copies of the Penguin Classics edition of Epictetus, which you can bundle with the course. That and more at dailystoic.com slash epictetus course. I'd love to see in there, you got to sign up before July 26th. I'm really excited to do this with you.

We're going to have a bunch more Epictetus stuff the coming weeks, but I wanted to tell you in there. You've got to sign up before July 26th. I'm really excited to do this with you. We're going to have a bunch more Epictetus stuff the coming weeks, but I wanted to tell you about it. And I wanted to remind you, if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life and you haven't yet, you can get this course and all the courses for free dailystoiclife.com. I hope to see you in there and I hope you join us as we explore the fascinating life of Epictetus. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in February, I was in Salt Lake City. I was doing this talk for this group called YPO.

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daily stoic right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com slash Who would you say is the best example of a modern day stoic and why? Ooh, that's a good question. I try to, one of the things I try to do in my books is talk about people who are dead. So I don't get myself in trouble. And so they don't disappoint me. But I do think General Mattis, who I talked about is a hero of mine, spends 40 years in the Marines.

He's Secretary of Defense, sort of a lifelong student of the Stokes, but also sort of known as a man of honor. He resigns on principle during the first administration. I've just always seen him as a person of character and leadership who does sort of hard and difficult things, isn't interested in attention, isn't interested in, you know, settling scores or making points,

but is always sort of selflessly served to this country. I think we need to do a better job celebrating examples like that, because one of the problems with our sort of culture is it's almost like the more shameless you are, the more you want attention, there's an infinite amount you can get. And so we often end up sort of constantly discussing

and hearing the most from the people we should be focused on the least. Yes. He has a great book called Call Sign Chaos that we sell in the bookstore because people love it. It's one of the great all-time military memoirs. I know you're big on parenting. Do you have a few guardrails,

words of wisdom, suggestions, raising kids to have courage to take risks, but not stupid ones. Well, one of the things about risks is you sort of do have to take some stupid risks to get a sense of, you know, sort of where the lines are. I don't know, how you teach risk taking so much as you model it. Growing up, I don't think any of my parents' friends had anything other than a day job. Most of them worked for the government. So the idea of working for yourself, putting yourself out there, being your own boss,

that was unthinkable to me. So the idea of working for yourself, putting yourself out there, being your own boss, that was like unthinkable to me. And it wasn't until I started to meet people and went away to college, I met people who were writers or professors or had these other professions and you go, oh, this is just a job like any other thing. And so I think one of the things we can do as parents

is sort of open our kids' minds to these different possibilities, ideally even outside of our own. So they get comfortable, they understand that is just a thing that people do and that it's possible. And that if you understand it and you're familiar with it, it's not so scary. So I'm trying to talk to them, for instance, like when they like a YouTuber or whatever, I go, you understand this person is an entrepreneur.

Like, they have, this is a business. This isn't just, they like playing video games. They do, but they manage to professionalize it and build the thing. And let's talk about how, so I'm just trying to sort of show them, you know, hey, this is how, if you're interested in something, this is how you kind of take it to that next level.

How do you know when to validate an obstacle is hard and when to change your perception and push against it? Do you ever acknowledge that something is hard or is changing perception and taking action the first thought? I mean, I don't think you minimize an obstacle when you're in the middle of it. I like to go into things going,

hey, this is gonna be tough. This is gonna challenge me. But that's what I'm looking forward to. Like when I start a book, I don't hey, this is going to be tough. This is going to challenge me. But that's what I'm looking forward to. Like when I start a book, I don't go, this is going to be fun. This is going to go great. Never going to, like, I actually do the opposite. The Stoics talk about actually meditating. They have this exercise called premeditation meluorum,

which is a sort of a premeditation on the difficulty. So they want to think about how it's going to be hard, how it's going to challenge us, where it could go wrong. Not cause they're gonna shy away from it, but because they wanna have their eyes open and that being naive or being delusional is a good way to get yourself in over your head or to be shocked by something.

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised that it is less hard than I thought than unpleasantly surprised that it's harder than I thought. So I kind of try to be real honest. Like I think people think, oh, that's pessimistic. No, I'm still intending to do it. To me, the optimism is like, it's hard and I'm doing it anyway, not, oh, it's going to go exactly the way that I want it to go. Like even when I did sit down when my wife and I were opening this bookstore, we thought we didn't imagine exactly a global pandemic and a supply chain logistics. We didn't imagine any of that. But like, you know, you plan to have more runway than you need. You understand

you're going into something you've never done before. You do want to think about how it's going to be hard. How do we balance a life of trying to improve ourselves, be disciplined and practicing virtues with giving ourselves grace and acceptance and loving ourselves without constant self-criticism? I don't know if I necessarily see the contradiction there. Stoicism to me is a philosophy about pushing yourself and challenging yourself, sure, but it's not whipping yourself, you know,

it's not beating the crap out of yourself. There's a quote from Seneca. Seneca, most of his writing comes to us in his letters. He's writing these letters to his friend Lucilius. And he's saying to Lucilius, you know, you asked me how do I know that I'm making progress in my pursuit of the philosophy? And he says, I know it because I've become

a better friend to myself. And I think what he means is like a friend supports you and believes in you, but they also call you out and they hold you accountable. Friendship isn't just cheerleading. It's more than that, good friendship anyway. And there's an honesty to it and a connection to it and a belief in it.

That's what he's talking about. And so if that's what the philosophy is doing for you, it's supporting you and, but also challenging you, I think you're doing it right. If it's just making you feel inadequate or not enough, then you're doing something other than what the Stoics want you to do. Stoics is about focusing on what's in your control.

It's about holding yourself to these standards and then also understanding that they are ideals and that we are inevitably going to fall short of them. What matters is, what do we do after we fall short of them? Do we make excuses or do we sort of pick ourselves up and try to learn from it and get better and grow and learn from each thing? Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast.

I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years We've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word tell people about it and this isn't to sell anything I just wanted to say thank you