The Daily Stoic - You Have To Earn THIS | Ryan Holiday Live In London

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

If you think you know what wisdom is, you probably don't. If you think you have wisdom, you almost certainly don't. 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work👉 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/🎙️ 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.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.ca slash Wondery. That's audible.ca.com. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. No interruptions. Just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of

exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to Daily Stoic. dot com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts,

audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope you're taking some time to reflect,

giving yourself some stillness before the busy work week starts up again. Back in November, I was doing that speaking tour in Europe and Canada. And London was the first stop in the tour. And I was still working on the wisdom book then. And so I was riffing on this idea of wisdom. What does it mean? How do you get it? Can we really define it?

Can we really be said to ever actually? have it. It's obviously what I've been thinking about now for the last six years, as I've been working on this Stoic Virtue series, all of which was leading up to this book, which is going to be out in exactly 30 days. Time flies, man. I feel like I've been talking about the book forever, but it's like actually here and upon us. It would mean a lot to me if you could pre-order it. It helps support authors. If you've gotten anything out of this podcast over the years, gotten maybe a flash or two of wisdom, maybe. It would mean a lot to me if you could pre-order it's how bookstores like mine decide how many copies to order. It's how publishers decide how

many copies to print. It determines whether you hit the bestseller list or not and many other things. So you can grab all that at daily stoic.com slash pre-order. But I wanted to bring you today some riffing on that, me talking in London about this idea of wisdom. Hopefully it'll prime you to check out the book when it's out. If you want some signed numbered first editions, you can grab that at the landing page. You can also listen to the music. that I listen to as I was writing the book. And you can also sign up to have dinner with me. And I do a philosopher dinner, which I am looking forward to. So I will get you all of that. If you just go to dailystoke.com slash wisdom, enjoy this deep dive into the ideas in the book.

When you're busy, when you work hard, when you push yourself, one of the things that's really important is recovery. And recovery is not just a rest. It's also what you put in your body. So you take advantage of that rest. So we get what it needs to recover. The creatine is one of the most essential nutrients for your body and brain to do that. It supports strength and power and recovery, even memory and mental sharpness. And now, thanks to Momentous, today's sponsor, is easier and more refreshing. Their new creatine lemon delivers the purest creatine on the planet in a naturally flavored lemonade-style powder. And like with all the momentous supplements, it follows the momentous standard. You know, Momentus is not just another

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and that is the virtue of wisdom. And I wish that I had a very clear and concise definition of wisdom for you. I just spent the last two years working on a book about it, and I hoped that by this point I would have it, but I don't. And I'm starting to think that maybe that's how it's supposed to go. If you think you know what wisdom is, you probably don't. And if you think you have wisdom, you almost certainly don't. There's something ineffable, inexplicable, there's something elusive about wisdom.

Obviously, it's intelligence and knowledge. It is understanding and experience. It is time on this planet. It's all of these things and more. When we speak of wisdom, when we speak of Gandhi's wisdom, we're not talking of his sharp legal mind. We're talking about something deeper and more profound. I think we can agree, though, that wisdom is not something you're born with, and it's not something that anyone can give you.

You can't get it from school. You can't get it from a book. You can't get it from a mentor. Not all of it anyway. You have to earn it. We can say that wisdom is ultimately the result of, work, a lot of work. There are no shortcuts. There are no hacks. Seneca tells us a story of a wealthy Roman who thinks that he discovers a shortcut, thinks that he discovers the perfect hack.

In those days, to be considered wise, you had to be well versed in the ancient poets and playwrights. So instead of spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours going over the texts, thinking about them, talking about them, writing about them, the man just acquires a group of very well-educated slaves, one who's a master of Homer, one who's a master of Sappho, one who's a master of Escalis and Sophocles and Euripides. And at his dinner parties, he has the slaves whisper in his ears, little things he can say.

Whenever people have questions, he runs and asks them. And he thinks he's getting away with it. He thinks he's figured out the perfect hack to wisdom. And so one of his friends comes up to him and says, have you ever thought of becoming a wrestler? And he says, become a wrestler, I'm an old man. And the friend says, that's no problem. Your slaves are young and fit.

The idea is that you're never going to get smart without doing the work. You're never going to be wise without doing the work. AI is not going to solve it for you. all my experience with AI has shown me that if you're not already pretty wise, this thing is going to eat you alive. It is a computer program designed to tell you what you want to hear. So if you're susceptible to hearing what you want to hear, it will fool you so fast and you won't even realize that you are being fooled.

AI, even to use it, it requires the ability to ask really, smart, well-written questions, which is itself no small skill, but to be able to separate fact and fiction, to be able to separate true and almost true, right, to get to the essence of things, to separate the wheat from the chap. These are all elements of wisdom, and there is no way to get that, Seneca says, without toil, without a lot of work. He says, no man, he says, I can assure you of this, no one ever became wise by chance. It's work. And it is the work of our lifetime. There's a story about Marcus Aurelius. He's well into his years. He's seen leaving his palace in Rome. A friend stops him and says, where are you going? And he says, I'm off to see

Sextus the philosopher. The friend says, why? And Marcus says, to learn that which I do not yet know, And the man's amazed, he says, you're one of the wisest people who ever lived, and here you are taking up your tablets and going to school. But we have to do that. We have to remain committed to learning and learning and learning because, as the physicist John Wheeler says, as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance. The more you study, the more you experience, the more you have been exposed to,

the more you find that you didn't even know, you didn't know. This was the secret to Socrates's wisdom. He is aware of his own ignorance. But that's not the end of it, right? He's not aware of his own ignorance and content to remain ignorant. He's aware of his own ignorance. And the Socratic method is him going around asking questions. He is trying to discover.

He is trying to learn. He is learning up until the last minute. of his life. So I can't tell you exactly what wisdom is, but I'm pretty confident that I can tell you how to get it, right? Seneca said we don't become wise by chance, right? We become wise by work and toil. And it's the same method that Marcus Aurelius was doing. It was the same method that people have been doing for thousands of years. It's reading. It's asking questions. It's mentorship, its experience, it's writing, it's attending lectures, and it's doing these things over and over and over again for all of our life. And I think this is important, right? Because

it's not that you become wise, it's that you can become wiser by doing this work. Aristotle was very clear that all of the virtues were better seen as verbs than nouns. They were things that you did as opposed to something that you were. How does one become a master woodworker or musician, he says? It's by working with wood and playing music. And the same was true for virtue. Generosity is not a thing you have or don't have. it is a thing you do regularly or you don't.

Courage and discipline and justice and wisdom are verbs and not nouns. They are actions, they are habits, they are practices. Stoicism is not a thing you have studied. It has to be a thing you are studying. It has to be an ongoing practice, material you are engaged with and continuing to engage with. Every day and night, Epictetus says you must keep thoughts like this at hand.

You have to write them and read them and talk to yourself and others about them. That's what this book is. That's what Meditations is. This is not a book for us. This is the accidental byproduct of Marcus Aurelius doing. what Epictetus was saying for himself. This is Marcus Aurelius sitting down and analyzing and digesting and chastising and admonishing and reminding himself of what was important of who he wanted to be. He was trying to fight, he said, to be the person that philosophy

tried to make him. And he was doing it on the page. He wasn't just trying to fight to be the person that philosophy outlined in its writing. He was trying to be the person that Antoninus, his adopted father, showed him it was possible to be. You know, Marcus Aurelius, is considered the philosopher king because he wrote this work of philosophy. But it's Antoninus who Marcus Reelius talks about at the end of meditations that seems to be the truer and the greater philosopher. And Marcus lists not what his father told him about, but what he saw his father do. He says he saw his compassion, his unwavering adherence to decisions, his indifference to superficial honors, hard work, and persistence, that he listened to anyone who could contribute to the public

good, his dogged determination to treat people as they deserved, a sense of when to push, and when back off. His altruism, his searching questions at meetings, a kind of single-mindedness, never content with first impressions or breaking off the discussion prematurely. His self-reliance, his cheerfulness, his advanced planning, his attention even to minor things, his restrictions on acclamations and attempts to flatter him, his stewardship of the treasury is willingness to take responsibility and blame. The way he handled material comforts that fortune had supplied him in advance without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage. If not, he didn't miss them. He says, no one ever called him glib or shameless or pedantic. They saw him for what he

was. A man tested by life, accomplished, unsuade, qualified to govern both himself and them. His respect for people who practice philosophy, his ability to feel at ease with people and to put them at ease, his willingness to yield the floor to experts, to support them energetically, that he didn't go off on tangents, that he had so few secrets, that he never exhibited rudeness or lost control of himself or turned violent, that no one ever saw him sweat, that everything was to be approached logically and with due consideration in a calm and orderly fashion, but decisively and with no loose ends. And then he says, you could have said of him, as they say of Socrates, that he knew how to

abstain and enjoy from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, self-control, the mark of a soul in readiness, indomitable. In a sense, what he sees in Antoninus is the four virtues embodied, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Embodied, meaning he made them real. He acted with them. He lived by them. He lived up to them, and he did it while holding ostensibly absolute power in his hands.

That's the example that Marcus Aurelius is trying to work. live up to, I think we, too, should be fighting to be the people that philosophy tried to make us, to meet the ups and downs of life with courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. And I don't know what the future holds. I think the one thing we can say for certain about it is that it is uncertain, but what we certainly will need more of and what we will need from all of you these virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. I'm by no means perfect at them. I fall short of them all the time.

My wife likes to tell me that one of us is a stoic and the other writes about stoicism, but I'm trying. I wouldn't say that I'm wise. I would say that I am wiser. I wouldn't say I'm never triggered or upset or never have opinions about things that I shouldn't, but I have fewer of them. It happens to me less often than it did before I encountered the Stoics. I'm not always out in front of things that I should be.

I'm not always as brave as I'd like to be, but I'm braver. That's the idea. It's more of the verb than the noun. That's the idea. And as I enter my second decade now of writing and talking about stoicism, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do what Marcus does when he sums up, I think stoicism quite perfectly. He says, concentrate on what you have to do, fix your eyes on it, remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Remind yourself what nature demands of people.

And then do it without hesitation. speak the truth as you see it but with kindness with humility and without hypocrisy so that's the idea that's what we mean when we say the obstacle is the way and as i wrap up here i guess i would like to leave you with one cheery thought which is that everyone in this room is going to die this is what the Stoics want us to never drift too far from remembering. You could leave life right now, Marksurelius writes in meditations, let that determine what you do and say and think. So hovering over all of this is our mortality, our fragility.

Death is the one prophecy that never fails. It's the one thing that's true for all of us. perhaps more urgent for some of us than others, but we don't know, you don't know where you fall on that actuary table. And in fact, Seneca says that our light sense of a life expectancy is kind of the problem. The one thing all fools have in common, the Stoics said, is that we're always delaying to start. We always think that we have more time.

We always think we can do it later, that we are arrogant enough to think that we for sure have a later. And we don't know. And in fact, our inclination to think of death as something in the future and usually the distant future is kind of the problem. Seneca says death isn't this thing that looms in the future that we are moving slowly towards. He says death is happening now.

says the time that passes belongs to death, we are dying every minute, we are dying every day. And we have to be conscious of how we spend that most precious of resources. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Thank you.