The Daily Stoic - Why Do It Alone? | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

The way to understand and comprehend anything important is by doing the work. By going to the source. By returning over and over again, bringing new experiences, new questions, new contexts. 🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations.Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th!Get all our Meditations offering and learn more at our official Meditations Collection at dailystoic.com/meditations today. 🎙️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. 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 DailyStoic.com. Why do it alone? You could read the book on your own. You could wing it. You could hope to figure it out by yourself. You could do your best to just get the gist of it. Or you could do what the author himself recommends. Marcus Aurelius, the author of Meditations, once said that he was taught to never be satisfied just getting the gist of things.

Mastery of reading and writing requires a master, he writes, and he knew this from experience. Sometime around the year 141 AD, Marcus was introduced to the philosophy that would change his life by his teacher, Rusticus. The remembrances of Epictetus, as Marcus would refer most gratefully to the book that Rusticus gave him, that which he supplied me out of his own library. We can imagine the underlinings in Rusticus' copy that would have called Marcus's attention to particularly important passages. We can imagine the marginalia

that would have provided context and insights. We can imagine the discussions the two of them would have had as Marcus was familiarizing himself with the teachings of Epictetus. Indeed, in meditations, Marcus would write about going straight to the seat of intelligence. And by that, he meant asking questions, hearing from experts, really wrestling

with wisdom as it was meant to be wrestled with. And this is, of course, the way to understand and comprehend anything important by doing the work, by going to the source, by returning over and over again, bringing new experiences, new questions, new contexts, refusing to settle for first impressions, remaining unsatisfied, ever curious. And for the past decade here at Daily Stoke, and certainly in my life going on almost 20 years, we've been engaging with meditations day in and day out, trying to understand its wisdom so that we can apply it in all of our lives. And we spent hundreds and thousands of hours with this book. And I spent just as many hours hunting down papers and analysis from scholars and historians

and translators and biographers, many of which I've gotten to interview along the way as well. It's been the work of my lifetime to explore the depths of meditations, making sense of what this great man wrote down and what those writings can do for us. And I think I found that Marcus is right. It requires the help of a master.

And that's what we've tried to put together in how to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, this guide we made. So it's kind of a book club, but for a singly great book. It's trying to be what all those historians and scholars and translators have been for me over the years, but all in one place, crafted together, organized really well, and to help you make sense

of this amazing book. And actually on April 26th, we're gonna be doing a deep dive discussion of the book together for everyone who buys the guide. So I'm excited about that. I think the best edition of Meditations is the Gregory Hayes translation, which I just wrote a new forward to.

You can grab a hardcover or a paperback edition of that in the Daily Stoic store. And we've got our Leatherbound edition as well. So I'll link to all of that. Or you can just go DailyStoic.com slash meditations to get after it. And if you haven't read meditations, man, I don't know what you are doing with your life, but now is the time. Enjoy. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, I answer your questions. Well, not your questions, but I answer questions.

I told you back in November, I was doing a speaking tour of Europe and Canada. London was the first stop in that tour at the Troxy. Today's episode is some questions from that episode. I got to talk quite a bit about one of my heroes. I sort of fall in love with people when I am writing books. Like that's what fascinates me.

I want to understand them. I want to explore them. I want to include their story. Queen Elizabeth II was someone I sort of fell in love with. I had to read a lot of books. Actually ended up emailing previous guest of the podcast, Andrew Roberts, if he had any good recommendations and he recommended these Robert Hardman books. I probably read two, 3,000 pages about the queen and that shaped the, you know, part two of Discipline is Destiny. So I got to talk about that quite a bit in London.

Some folks asked me some questions about her as well. But anyways, let's just get into that. Here are some questions from London. Hello. Good evening. Good evening. Before I start, I just want to say thank you. Your work is a constant source

of daily wisdom and inspiration. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. My question is, you talk about in your latest book about developing a North Star. And I wondered what yours was. I have, I think it's probably maybe not exactly the right answer, but I have a couple, right?

I think you have a professional North Star, then you have a personal North Star. So I think for me, when I think about North Stars, I'm thinking I want to be a great husband, I want to be a great father, and I want to be a great writer, I want to be a great human being slash citizen. So I think about these things in tension with each other, but certainly in a balance with each other.

And so my North Star is one of those. Does that make sense? So it's not, I think for sometimes, if you have a singular cause that you're all in on, that's your North Star. For me, I have a sort of a collection of interests that I'm aiming towards and that's kind of how I think about it. I don't want to be so focused or so dedicated to one that it comes at the expense of the

others and I think about them in tension with each other, which I think all sort of our commitments ultimately are. Hi. Thanks as well for your work. I think a lot of us have probably introduced your work through Tim Ferriss, and it seems like you guys bounce off each other quite well in terms of how you perceive the world.

And I just wondered if you maybe had an interesting story of your time with Tim that would be nice to share. So I met Tim in 2007 in Austin, Texas, where I now live. We were both at South by Southwest. I was still in college. And I remember that was the South by Southwest that Twitter launched at. And so they had rented, they had all these TVs

all over the Austin Convention Center that they were showing in real time, the tweets that people were sending. And I remember thinking, that's a horrible idea. Tim invested in Twitter, so he made a better call in the short term. I would say I was probably right in that it is horrible in the long term for pretty much everyone involved.

So we met there, and then we were friends for many years. And then I was in, we were both speaking at another conference in Amsterdam, maybe 2012 or 2013, and we were sitting down, and Tim asked me what I was working on, and I said I was working on a book about stoic philosophy. He was very excited about it, and he said, I'm starting an audiobook publishing company,

can I publish it? And he bought the rights to it from my publisher, and that is, in some some ways why you're all here because it blew up my book in a way that I don't think would have happened otherwise. What was funny about it is at that time, audiobooks were so new that the publishers were basically giving the rights away.

They saw it as this, you know, they would sell them for a few thousand dollars. And if it ended up making money, it was great, but most of them didn't. And so Tim once again was just like very clear about where things were going and he tends to get in on things early. So I tend now, like if I see something

and I don't think it's a good idea, I ask Tim if he thinks it's a good idea and I just defer to him. Hi Ryan. Hi. You talk about Harry Truman. He seems like a remarkable man. Yes.

I can't get past the whole OKing the dropping of two nuclear bombs. It's a little thing to get over. It's complicated, I guess. I think it's interesting. We tell ourselves different stories about things. And I think one of the stories we tell ourselves post the Second World War

is that the Nazis were horrendous and unbeatable, and the Japanese were not on par, which they of course were. And the idea that the war was nearly over, that they would have surrendered anyway, I don't, from my reading of it, I don't find to be as my reading of it, I don't find to be

as clear as maybe it seems in retrospect. So like one of the things I talk about in the book that I think is an interesting illustration of this. So the ship that is carrying the pieces of the atomic bomb, after it delivers all the pieces to be assembled, it's heading through the Pacific and it gets sunk by a Japanese submarine and a thousand men die because they're eaten by sharks as they float in the water after the shipwreck. So the idea that the war was just like on the fritz and the atomic bomb was extra is, I think,

a strange story we tell ourselves after because we don't want the necessity of the atomic bombs to be a reality, which they may have been. I think the interesting thing about Harry Truman and the dropping of the bomb is that he finds out about it so late in the process. I quote in the book one of the one of his advisors says that he didn't have a choice so much as, he didn't have a choice to use it, he had a choice to not use it.

Which as we see with presidential power is the whole game. Like the decision when you entrust in one singular person, an incredible amount, an incomprehensible amount of power, it becomes very hard for them not to use it. There's one social scientist or game theory who suggested that to prevent the use of nuclear weapons in the future, the code should take a person,

they should cut them open and put the nuclear codes inside that person's chest cavity and then sew them up. And so when a president of any country wants to use nuclear weapons in the future, they have to personally kill that person and open their chest cavity to get the codes. The point is that when you disconnect human beings from such an immense amount of destruction and damage,

it becomes just a decision like, hey, would I rather do this or would I rather do that? And that is the horrendousness of nuclear weapons. So I don't have a good answer for you. I don't think what I'm trying to highlight about Harry Truman in the chapters in Right Thing Right Now is how you have what seems like an ordinary human being thrust into a series of interesting and ultimately enormous decisions

and he has to find some kind of internal code to guide him through this. Is that tested, does he fail in the use of nuclear weapons? I think that, I guess, is ultimately a subjective decision but I think as far as human beings who have occupied the Oval Office, top two I think as far as human beings who have occupied the Oval Office, top two or three as far as like decent human beings, that is the tragic thing about power is how rare the people that find themselves in it are decent.

And there's some paradox in it, like some of the best American presidents were presidents who did not want to be president. They sort of found their way accidentally. There may be something in the seeking of it, which is to bring this back to stoicism. Mark Surreles isn't born to be emperor, does not seem to actually want to be emperor. He finds himself sort of thrust there by circumstances, and that may be why he wasn't, you know, for grading these things on a scale, not as bad as all of the others. Hello. Hi. for grading these things on a scale, not as bad as all of the others. Hello. Hi.

So your research assistant, Billy, has written about how the two of you have struggled to recruit another team member who has the same level of taste and artistic discernment. What would you suggest is a good way to develop artistic taste? Oh, wow. Well, yes, Billy is awesome.

He has a great newsletter that he sends out every Sunday. I think it's called the 6 at 6. Yeah, his name's Billy Oppenheimer. Yeah, he's been working with me for many years. He's wonderful. I don't know. I talk all the time about knowing that he's not gonna be able to stick around forever

and how I'm gonna replace him. And I know Robert Greene has said the same thing about me. all the time about knowing that he's not gonna be able to stick around forever and how I'm gonna replace him. And I know Robert Greene has said the same thing about me. It's a rare thing that you can find a good apprentice or assistant in any domain. But research assistants are really hard because they're trying to find material that you can use. Not material that's good.

They're trying to find things that specifically connect with you. And they're trying to find things that specifically connect with you. And they're trying to replicate your unique taste and sensibility. So I think developing taste, period, is tough. But then to be able to identify and develop taste, like, for someone else is its own thing. You have to be a fan of the person. You have to really be able

to understand why they do what they do or what motivates them. I think that's a hard part. I'll give you something though. I remember many years ago there was an interview by Ira Glass who's an NPR host on the show called This American Life. He says there's something called a taste talent gap. The taste talent gap for people who don't know is this idea that actually the taste part is easier, but the ability to make good on that taste is the hard part. And as you develop, as you get to where you wanna go,

you know what you like, that's why you got into this. You know what's good, but it's actually finding or making that stuff that's hard. Billy was not who he is now when he started working for me. So part of it is you got to find someone who's got good taste, who seems sane, who works hard, who you can depend on. These are all really important parts. And then you have to develop them. So when I'm looking for someone to replace him or to replace any assistant, what you have to do, and this is something I have to think about when I'm starting a book too, is you can't compare the end product

with the beginning product of something else. You can't compare an end stage with a beginning stage, and I have to try to remember what he or the book I'm working on was like at the beginning or at this stage, and not try to compare it against a finished product. 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 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. daily stoic and thanks for listening. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. We bet you didn't know our new trains panoramic windows are ideal for contemplating whether texting them back so soon was the best decision. Get on board. Via Rail. Love the way.