The Daily Stoic - There’s No One Stupider Than An Angry Person | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

There’s even a famous old saying: Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make angry.🎟️ Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 San Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 Phoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 👉 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/📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.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 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, visitdailystoic.com. brilliant, they're educated, they know better. So what explains why smart people do stupid things? One reason, as Seneca tells us, is anger. Because anger makes us stupid. It blinds us, makes us

impulsive and rash, consumes us with grievances. It warps our sense of reality. And our desire for revenge or catharsis, we do things that make absolutely no sense. Imagine, Seneca writes, returning a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog. Yet isn't this exactly what? what we do when we are upset or hurt? There's even a famous old saying, whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make angry. It is here that stoicism must intervene. We have to pause and reflect. We have to ask ourselves, is this really going to make things better? Is this really a good idea? We need to balance out our emotions with some self-awareness and perspective. We have to check them with discipline. Because life is difficult enough, our problems are

vexing enough that we will need all our wits about us, cannot afford to be stupid. We cannot risk destroying ourselves. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I've talked here before. We've made whole videos about it. Therapy has been incredibly helpful to me. It's given me emotional awareness. It's helped me process my feelings. It's helped me deal with stuff as a parent, as a spouse, and just a person in a crazy, busy, noisy, sometimes demoralizing world. And my therapy practice is part and parcel of my stoic practice, right? Analyzing and putting your feelings, your impressions, your views, values to the test. That's what therapy allows you to do. And there's a reason I use online therapy because it's

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and listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit to help you get your job, the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash daily stoic. Just go to indeed.com slash daily stoic right now to support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash daily stoic terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode.

of the Daily Stoic podcast. One of my favorite things about giving talks is that not just that I get to meet people who are actually trying to apply stoicism in the real world, or meet people who have never even heard of stoicism and they're just out there living their lives, and I get to connect with them and learn from them and understand their experiences.

I mean, that's why I am excited to go to Seattle here in December. You can grab tickets for that, by the way, at Dailystoicolive.com, and then I'll be in Phoenix and San Diego. Diego sometime in February, grab the tickets at the same spot. But I get to travel places that I have never been. Back in May, I went to Mexico City. I've been to Mexico many times. I've been all over Mexico. I mean, I grew up in California. I live in Texas. So it's always within reach. But for some reason, I never been to Mexico City. I wasn't there for very long. I flew in the night before.

I got to have dinner in my hotel, take a couple walks, you know, go for a nice run in the morning, and then go to this event space and then go home. So I didn't get to see a ton of it, although I did see this cool park named after Abraham Lincoln where I spent a good chunk of time. So that was lovely. Actually, it was interesting because I was just finishing the Lincoln chapter from Wisdom Takes Work.

And I go, this is kind of what Tolstoy was talking about. And he's in the North Caucus Mountains. And these people are asking him about Abraham Lincoln. I mean, here I am in Mexico, and they've got a park named after him. that's that's the greatness of the man i sort of brought it all home i actually recorded a little video about it but anyways i gave this talk at an event called the national advisory council but while i was there a journalist interviewed me his name is juan pablo de leo and he's a journalist

he's the director at politico me uh he interviewed me uh for a tv spot and then i did my talk on stage and then we wrapped it up by him asking me some more questions in front of the audience so I wanted to bring you a chunk of that sort of Q&A that we did at the end of the talk. He did a great job moderating, and I was fascinated to learn about the political situation in Mexico, which I don't know that much about. It was fascinating for me to get to talk to someone about their world and what they're worried about. And as it happens, everyone's worried about what's happening in their country. This is a sort of shared experience.

It turns down the volume on what you think is happening here. So I thought that was a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. And I hope to see you in Seattle and Phoenix and San Diego coming up very shortly. You can grab those tickets at DailyStoicLive.com. The Seattle event is almost sold out. So if you want to grab tickets, just go to DailyStockLive.com. That's the one in December. I'm going to be in the other places in February.

So that's at DailyStockLive.com. Ryan, what's your perspective on vulnerability, leadership, both from the exploit, human standpoint. Yeah, I do think there is something about Stoicism, people take it to me in invulnerability, you know, remoteness, aluteness. I don't think that that's who the Stoics were historically. I mean, we have multiple stories of Marcus Rueh is crying, the Stoics made great works of art, the Stoics have families, they have hobbies, they love life. So this idea of repression, stuffing things down, that's not what Stoises is in. is about and I don't think that's what great leaders do. Are our leaders a calming presence

when everyone else is freaking out? Yeah, of course, that's a big part of it. But that doesn't mean we're just pretending that everything is always okay. To me, that's what leads to burnout. That's what leads to psychological issues. I try to work on us. I have two young boys. I try to work on, hey, what are we feeling? Why are we feeling it? Let's go through it. Let's work on it. Let's not make unconscious decisions in, you know, in the action to those feelings that we have, but let's make sure we process and understand them so we're not, you know, sort of blindly just in this way of our passions that we should accept. The next question is, for entrepreneurs working in the environment marked by violence,

corruption, and the lack of justice, as in the case in many parts of Mexico, How can sport philosophy provide guidance and a sense of urgency when personal and economic freedoms are under pressure? Unfortunately, none of this is new. Rome was obviously a powerful empire, but it was filled with corruption and violence and dysfunction. And this stoics were known as sort of honest brokers inside that, with people inside that. And then they also courageously dealt with it and tried not to be corrupted by it. himself there's a story one of my favorites goes is a man named Tilius Rufus and he's a governor of one of the provinces of the Roman Empire in Asia Minor and he unlike many of the governors sent as part of this empire he decides not to move the province he decides not to use

it as a personal piggy bank so this Rufus says you know I'm here to govern these people to provide competent governance, and this is not a way for me to get rich. So you can imagine that's a deviation from the standard way to do business and create some entities. That's the problem with being honest in a corrupt system is that you inherently indict

and cause problems for those who are corrupt. So in a painful bit of irony, the sort of ruling elites bring Routelius Rufus up on corruption charges for not being corrupt. It's their fastest way of getting rid of him. So he was brought up in this sort of show trial. All this false evidence is brought against him. He was convicted and sent.

The sentence mercifully is not dead, it's exile. And they say, we'll give you one bit, small bit of mercy, which is we'll let you choose where you're going to be sent into exile. And Rufus thinks about it, and he says, I'd like to go back to Asia Minor. So he sent back to the province that he was supposedly corrupt him but in fact had not been. And there he is met with open arms and lives

and serves honorably for the rest of his life. And to me it's this idea that, look, we don't control how other people do things. We don't control the brokenness of the system, but we do decide whether that system breaks us, right? You do decide whether we succumb to it. Now, I don't mean to be good about this. I understand these are some cases are issues of life and death,

but it was an issue of life and death for Richelius Grucus. The Stoics are known, a group of them as known as the Stoic opposition. They are constantly challenging and perpetual form from the side of Emperor's Life Bureau and mission. They are constantly exiled and sent away for this. But they tried to say, hey, look,

I'm not going to think about the consequences. I'm going to think about whether this is the late thing to be made more than that. And this is what makes them great. And eventually, it does lead to changes and improvements. And of course, here we are all these thousands of years talking about their example. So to me, the challenge of our time

is to not be changed by the challenges of our time. To stick to the principles, the values, the conscience that we all have, and to think not let the, as I say, they did not let the assholes turn into an asshole. Very well said. How do we foster resilience and progress in those who are caught up of their context and slaves of their history? Well, we're all a product of our circumstances.

We're all a slave to our history, so it would say the character is faith. But they did believe that we could shape our character, and that philosophy was a way to do that. Our mentors are our way to do that. That our reading, our learning, our studying history is a way to do that. that, that we shape our character. And it didn't believe that character wasn't, character values, philosophy, virtue, all these things. Excellence wasn't this thing that you had or didn't have.

But it was a thing that you made. It was a thing that you are. And so if you think of virtue, for instance, as a verb and not a noun, that we go, OK, if we want to become better, we have to do better things. If we want someone who works for us to get better, to be more resilient to grow out of achievement. We do that by helping them do that thing.

Again, it's not a DNA sequence that you got at birth or it didn't. It stoicism, resilience, virtue, these are things that we cultivate in the choices that we make, and the things that we study, and then in the actions that we take. Another question. In places like Mexico or governments

limit personal ambition and try to make everyone the same, often at the cost of individual growth and success, How can this voice is them to have people stay true to themselves and find the courage to push back and rise above that mind? The primary virtue of Star Philosophy, it was poor, that I can touch you on my list here. It's courage, discipline, justice, and the courage of it being the virtue that the others descend from or are impossible to battle. I think wrongly we tend to think of courage as, you know, challenging corruption, charging onto the battlefield, rushing into a burning building. Those are all forms of physical courage, for sure.

But the moral courage to be yourself, to go for what you want to go for, to put yourself out there, to try and do your best, is unfortunately one of the rare forms of courage. One of my favorite stoics is this guy named Equipidus. He lives in the time of hero. You can imagine that when you have an unstable, vain, and paranoid emperor

standing out is a risky proposition. So this creates quite a bit of conformity and silence involved. But a grip of this has none of it. He refuses to see the emperor, he speaks his mind. He's eccentric and unique. And a friend comes with him and says, why are you doing this? They realize it's going to get you in trouble.

And he says, look, I get. Most people are comfortable conforms. He says, but I'm not. He says, in a tunic, we're in a garden. tunic or in a garment. There's all the threads that make it the color that it is and then he says there's the accent color. So he says in a white tunic I am the red thread that stands out and makes the garment beautiful. And I think we have to understand as individuals that we're all totally unique that we have unique DNA, unique circumstances, you need experiences, unique skills,

and strikes me as one of the craziest things in the world that we sort of mute those colors to be more like everyone else. So the courage to stand out to be yourself to live as you want to live to go for what you want to go for, I think is the most essential form of courage of there is. We have one last questions. Leave yourself in a deal with anxiety, harsh feedback, and of clear outcomes. In your experience, how has sportsism help you stay center and resolutely during times of serious doubts for very tough uncertainty? Well, Stoicism has a lot to teach us about all these things. I mean, anxiety, what is at the root of anxiety? The root of anxiety is focusing on things

that you don't control, right? And so Mark Shria said meditation, one of the famous passages, he said, you know, anxiety isn't this thing that I hope to escape. It has to be a thing that I'm going to discard, because I'm the source of the anxiety. You notice all the things that make you anxious, they all have one thing in common.

And that's you. You are the source of the anxiety. The airport is not what's making you anxious, the economy is not making you anxious. Your children are not, and your children's safety is not what's making you anxious. It's your feelings, your projections, your worries that are causing that. And so the decision to focus on what you control, accept a certain powerlessness, and then to say, the parts of it I control, I'm going to do well, and that's where my energy is going to go as opposed to just unloading about the problem.

Taking feedback. You can imagine a lot of people had a lot of strong thoughts about the emperor of Rome. The mediation of ours talks about how criticism makes you better, that he wanted to hear from people who didn't like what he was doing, or who knew better than he did. Because it saves him for making mistakes. And you can see, as a distinction between good leaders

or bad leaders, good leaders solicit feedback. Bad leaders run from feedback. It's actually a story I tell in my new book. because I was in, I was looking at the Lincoln Statue in the park this morning. The cross from him is a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. And I told a story in the book about Martin Luther King Jr. He had, one of his most trusted aides, was, you know, sort of had the assigned role of being the devil's advocate in the meetings.

And at one meeting, the guy's tired and distracted, and he decides not to do it, he's just not really paying attention. And afterwards, Martin Luther King pulls him aside, and he says, and he says, hey, I need you to speak up at the meetings because he says, everyone here is certifiably insane. He says, we're all crazy. We need a voice of reason to prevent ourselves from doing extra crazy things.

He says, I'm willing to give my life for this cause, but I'm not going to throw it away over some bit of foolishness. So even in a sort of a radical, courageous, ambitious organization like Martin Luther King, he has people whose job it is to be a dose of reality. And he's actively seeking out that criticism and he's noticing when he's not getting it.

And the way we have to understand criticism, like it feels unfortunate, it feels unpleasant. But like, when my enemy is making, or my opponents, my competition, when they are making a mistake or when they are incorrect, I don't correct them. That's actually one of the fundamental laws of strategy, which is never interrupt your enemy when you're making a mistake, right?

And so when someone is criticizing you, when someone is giving you feedback, they are by definition not your enemy, your friend. They wouldn't be helping you. They wouldn't be giving you this information if they weren't trying to make you better. And so you have to actively seek out criticism in feedback. It's just a part of getting better. And so stoicism is, to me, the ability to say, I don't like hearing that, doesn't feel fun hearing that,

but I'm integrated into my understanding there because my goal is to get better. My goal is not to remain the same. And I appreciate you giving me what I need, which is more information. Well, I'm holiday. Thank you very much. Thank you all for having that. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily Stoog 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 an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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