The Daily Stoic - The Marcus Aurelius Quote Tom Junod Can’t Forget

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

One sentence from Marcus Aurelius made Tom Junod circle it three times, star it, and dog-ear the page. In this episode, Ryan talks with the acclaimed writer about reading Meditations for the first time, why Marcus still feels so modern, and the line he can’t stop thinking about.Tom Junod is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previously he was a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire. Grab signed copies of In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man by Tom Junod at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/Follow Tom on Instagram | @tom_junod📚 Grab your own copy of Meditations translated by Gregory Hayes | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations🎟️ 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/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. There's that expression, a writer's writer. Like, somebody who's writing is appreciated by people who appreciate the craft. Like, people who do it, they know that, look, anyone can enjoy this. But if you really know how. how stuff works, you appreciate it at a different level. There's certain comedians that are comedians, comedians, writers who are writers, writers, musicians, musicians, right? We joke about how Epictetus is your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher. That's kind of the vibe, right? And Marcus, you realize that Meditations are that. I mean, Meditations is a very popular philosophy book, but among people who are writers, you can appreciate it on a very different level. Tom Juneau is a writer's writer.

One of the great magazine writers of his generation. Millions of people have read his articles. Not everyone knows who he is, but the people who do know writing, though, he is one of the best all time. Always manages to get to the real story beneath the story, not just as an investigative reporter, which he's really good at,

but like on a human level. And then his sentences managed to express that. That's why his, the falling man, which is about that unidentified victim plunging from the World Trade Center is so deeply moving. That's why his piece on Mr. Rogers was so incredible. He has this new memoir called In the Days of My Youth. I was told what it means to be a man, which is this sort of reckoning with his father. Tom is a senior writer for ESPN.

He's won an Emmy. He's won a Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing. He's won two National Magazine Awards. He's won a James Beard Award. I mean, he's just as good as they come. So when he came on the pocket side, I really wanted to dive into meditation as he told me he'd been reading it. And I wanted to learn from a writer's writer about the sentences that stayed with him, why they stayed with him, what Marcus meant to him as a writer. So that's what we're going to dive into in today's episode.

It's just an incredible writer. Like when writers read his stuff, they're like, ooh, I wish I could do that. Which is actually one of the feelings I had when I read meditations for the first time. like, how is he doing that? And the idea that he's writing it to himself 2,000 years ago, it's just unbelievable. Anyways, I think I'll like this conversation. Do check out Tom's new book.

He signed copies of In the Days of My Youth. I was told what it means to be a man. And if you haven't read meditations yet, well, I don't know what you're doing. What do you listen to this podcast for? Go read meditations as well. We have the leather bound edition in the Daily Stokes store. Grab the Hayes Edition, which I wrote the forward to,

or really any edition. I think the Hayes Edition is the translator's translation of meditations. I think it's the most beautiful one. Let's get into it. Back to school starts now. Get long-lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Series 3 Intel Core so you can work from anywhere. And now starting at $699 with exclusive student pricing starting at $5.99. It's lightweight, portable, and packed with enough processing power to make multitasking a breeze. So say goodbye to distractions and hello to more free time. because you finished your work faster.

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which exacerbated another experience if you've ever been to Europe, just how bad the mattresses are there. So I was excited to be home because we've been gone for a while, but I was really excited to be home and sleep on my eight sleep pod. I missed it every night I was gone. It cools the mattress, cools my wife's side differently than my side. It doesn't matter how hot the room is. The bed is just perfect. Monitors your sleep rate. I was putting my son to bed last night, reading to them, and then I get a little alert on my phone that it was almost time for me to go to

bed, that the 8 sleep was doing its thing. Then I woke up this morning. It showed me my sleep score. It monitors your heart rate, your respiratory rate. You can see the difference that having a pod on your mattress makes and their autopilot feature even learns your sleep patterns. It adjust the temperatures, the elevation, the wake up time. Pod users report up to 32% improvement in sleep and up to 34% more deep sleep. You can use MyCode DailyStrecht. You can use MyCode Daily Stoic at 8Sleep.com slash Stoic for up to $350 off, and you get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it. I'm ready.

You got me totally ready because I went and I read this past week. I read the meditations. Oh, really? What did you think? I was really knocked out by it. Yeah. And I'm knocked out by it on a couple of different levels. Do you want to get into those levels?

Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. I have questions I want to ask you, but I want to hear this more. Well, so, you know, number one. you go, I had the same feeling reading Mark Cyrillius that I did, like, when I first read, when I first read Samuel Pepys, which is like, oh, my God, he's a dude. I mean, a glimpse into humanity through the century.

And so he lived a long, long time ago, but his concerns are not very different from our concerns. Yes. Okay. So that's one thing. There is that thing. A time travel element to it. A time travel element to it. You see yourself in there.

In a way that you don't see yourself, let's say, in the New Testament. Or certainly, or even in Aristotle. Right. You're just like, this is smart and I get it. But you seem like a person wearing a toga that I don't understand. Yeah, and he's talking and he's talking to you. Yes, yes. I mean, he's talking to himself.

The book is, I think, probably addressed to himself. Yes. But he's talking to you. Yes. And he's talking to you and he's making sense. And so here's my other, my, the other thing that I went towards. So he is talking about, he's talking about death and he's talking about death and he's talking about how to live as a human in the face of death in the years where Christianity is being

developed and coming up with a very, very different answer. So Aurelius is basically saying, okay, so death is simply a fact of life. And to accept that changes, changes everything. It's natural. And it's part of the natural, it's part of the natural world. It's no less natural than birth. And it's part of you. Yeah. Whereas you have Christianity on the other side saying, to me, what is the greatest philosophical mistake in the history of humanity, which is the wages of sin or death. Mm-hmm.

I think that is a mistake. And I think it's actually a deadly mistake that it's actually, and upon that deadly mistake is premised to me mankind's worst invention, it's worst idea, which is hell. Well, so I've said this before, like, because, yeah, Marx-Sraelis and Christianity at the same time, Jesus, Seneca, born the same year. Right. Both in provinces of the same empire. Yes. Both die the hands of the state. I've said, like, the Christian argument is like, don't sin or you will go to hell.

Right. And I think the stoic argument is, don't sin or you will live in hell. Like, it's a somewhat logical argument against excess and cruel. But when he says the best revenge is to not be like that, that's the argument about that. So that sentence of all the sentences in the book, that is, I've circled it three times, I have stars, I have the page dog ear to it. I mean, that is the sentence in the book that has stood out to me. It's going in, I keep like a chap book and stuff and that goes there.

And so I think that the book really gave me some hope. Yeah. I don't read philosophy that much. I read poetry a lot more than I read philosophy, but both poetry and philosophy give me difficulty in that they don't tell a story usually. Yeah. I mean, some poetry does, obviously, like, you know,

epic poetry and stuff, but philosophy doesn't tell a story. And so I have trouble with it. Yeah. But it really spoke to me in a way that was, you know, really powerful. And now I want to learn more about Seneca, for sure. for sure. I think Aristotle said both the philosopher and the poet are concerned with wonder. Yeah. And I think when you don't get that when you read ironically Aristotle or most of the other philosophers. Yeah. But when you read Marcus Aurelius, it doesn't feel like he's doing philosophy,

but he is. Yeah. Right? By talking about himself. It's much, it's similar to Montaigne where he's like, who am I? Why am I here? What's going on? What does this mean? How could I do it differently? That that has philosophy. It definitely does not feel like he's doing. philosophy. It feels like he's talking to you, and he feels in certain ways like a modern day advice writer, you know, a so-called self-help writer. Well, there's a French philosopher named Pierre Hadoe who wrote this book about Marxian meditation, and his argument is that that is doing philosophy. Writing notes to yourself about your temper, about your fear of death, about your anxiety, about obnoxious people, reminding herself of what you believe oftentimes right after

you've just acted in contrary to that belief. That's philosophy, not philosophical discourses where you attempt to explain the universe or to teach. Or to get at something right or wrong. Yes. Yes. That meditations is philosophy for Marcus Aurelius, and it's accidental byproduct is that you and I can read it 2,000 years later.

Right. And so I was really happy to read it because I'm trying to figure out, like, what's my next book to write? I mean, I'm not saying that I'm going to do my own meditations. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that it basically broadened possibilities for me. And that was a really great gift. So I appreciate that to you. As a great writer, I would be curious what you thought of it as a text.

Like put the philosophical contents aside. How did you take it stylistically? I thought it was really, really well done. And astoundingly modern. Yeah. Especially given that it wasn't for an audience. Right. Astoundingly.

And I think perhaps it's because it wasn't for an audience that it still stands up all these years. He's not on a stage. Yeah. And I got to say that, you know, reading Marcus Aurelius over the last week has given me sort of like a new kind of self-talk. It's given me a language. in which to address these things. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not bullshit in, though. Well, in Marcus's life, he has, he loses his father very young.

And then he comes under the sway of a monster, Hadrian, who's like, although a very capable emperor, a killer, like a, not exactly a sadist, but what a person who you would expect would be attracted to absolute power. And so he kind of has this, well, I don't want to be like him. And if you notice, he almost never appears in meditation. He's not in the list of acknowledgments. That's start the book, right? Yeah.

Yeah. But the dominant entity in the acknowledgements is not his mother who he clearly loved. It's this stepfather, Antoninus, who you might have predicted they'd be at odds with each other because they're not related and they're jockeing for power and they're in this forced, arranged kind of marriage. I mean, in the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. And that could come from that passage of Mark Serraeus talking about Antoninus. And you just see like, oh, if you get lucky enough to come in the orbit of an incredible person and you decide to listen, it can really heal a lot of wounds and get your compass dialed in. So it's a pretty remarkable relationship they have.

And I think that Fred Rogers was definitely that for me. Interesting that, you know, you say the title because, you know, a lot of people, you know, know that it comes from the first line of the first song of the first Slud's Evan album. However, the people who don't know that tend to think it's from antiquity. Yeah. They think, oh my God, is that Homer? Yeah, it seems like it could be. Yeah. And, you know, you feel that a lot of times when you read the ancients, like they are on a stage. And the fact that he's sitting either in his bedroom or in a camp tent or whatever doing this is, I think,

what lends it, its immediacy. And so that's the thing that I liked about it, stylistically, was that there is a certain immediacy to it. Yeah, it's, I mean, you get that advice about, like, you know, just be really raw and vulnerable and specific, and that creates the general, and you don't really believe it. And then this guy writes something for nobody. Right. And it somehow reaches millions of people for 20 centuries. It's kind of like the proof. I thought about that, did you read the Joan Didian book that came out the notes to John? I have not read the whole thing. I read the excerpts that came out. I have the book, but I haven't read.

By the way, this is, this was her table. Didn't I tell you this? No. Yeah, this is the table. She could have written some of those notes like at this table. Wow. But the chairs too. Dang.

When I read that, I was like, oh, she can't write a bad sentence. Like she was writing for her husband. Like, she was writing notes from therapy for her husband. And if that text had gotten discovered 200 years from now and someone wrongly in interpreted it as an epistolary novel, they would have been like, this is great. You know what I mean? Sure. It's somehow, it's like she's so good at what she does that even when she's jotting notes down from a therapy session to her husband, it's good.

And I felt like here's Mark's realist writing reminders to himself. His to-do list is an enduring work of philosophy. It was pretty incredible.