The Daily Stoic

People say they love learning. And sure, they pick up books and go to museums and watch documentaries, and yes, they sat through their college courses. But this is only superficial evidence of a true student. There’s a joke from Churchill where he said that yeah, he likes learning, but he hates being taught. Most of us are like that: We like learning when it’s easy, when it doesn’t challenge us. We like it when it comes neatly packaged in a book or in a YouTube video. But everything else? We ignore that. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today’s episode of the Daily Stoic podcast Ryan speaks with Whitney Cummings, comedian, actress, writer, producer, director, entrepreneur, and host of the hit podcast “Good for You". In part 2 of 2 they discuss having no sense of what life is because you’re not living one, discipline is really important in the beginning but it’s important to know when to update, Rerouting addictive behavior and her latest uncensored stand-up special "MOUTHY" on Only Fans TV (OFTV). IG, X, and Tiktok: @WhitneyCummings To follow her on OnlyFans @Whitney ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Unfortunately, it’s been happening for a long time: People doing horrible things to each other. Marcus Aurelius was betrayed. Seneca was exiled on trumped-up charges. There were Stoics who were cheated on. There were Stoics who were persecuted. Stoics who were tortured. How did they get over it? Did they get even? Get justice? The great Dr. Edith Eger (whose books we highly recommend and has been on The Daily Stoic Podcast twice) endured the Holocaust at Auschwitz. She was a victim of one of the most heinous crimes in human history. How did she get over it? Did she get even? Get justice? ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We got together with family. We reminded ourselves what was important. We enjoyed the bounties of the Earth. Perhaps when we took the rolls out of the oven we noted, as Marcus Aurelius did in Meditations, the way the bread cracks open on top, a nod to nature’s inadvertence. We gave thanks. And then the next day, what did millions of people do? They rushed out to get a deal on a flat-screen television or crowded into department stores to take advantage of Black Friday deals. Then today, they sat down at their computer or on their phones to spend even more money for Cyber Monday. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In today’s audiobook reading, Ryan talks with 150 Local Business Leaders and Marketing Directors who are Twins Brand Partners about Challenges we face, Overcoming adversity in leadership roles and work life balance. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today’s episode of the Daily Stoic podcast Ryan speaks with Whitney Cummings, comedian, actress, writer, producer, director, entrepreneur, and host of the hit podcast “Good for You". In part 1 of 2 they discuss having no sense of what life is because you’re not living one, discipline is really important in the beginning but it’s important to know when to update, Rerouting addictive behavior and her latest uncensored stand-up special "MOUTHY" on Only Fans TV (OFTV). IG, X, and Tiktok: @WhitneyCummings To follow her on OnlyFans @Whitney ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marcus Aurelius would have recognized the feeling you feel right now. So would Seneca and Cato and many of the other Stoics. The Romans, like Americans, loved a good feast. They loved wine. They loved breaking bread with family. We know this because their writings abound with descriptions of overflowing tables and dinners that went long into the night. But you know what doesn’t appear in their writings very often, just as it does not occur to us often enough? How some people don’t know this feeling at all. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It doesn’t seem that way of course. The economy is a mess, the government is dysfunctional, the virus is still there, screwing up plans and making us sick. People are annoying. People are frustrating. Your co-worker is a jerk. Your kid just broke his arm. Everything is expensive, so expensive. This isn’t how things are supposed to be is it? Well, it’s pretty much how things have always been. Look at Marcus Aurelius, in his reign and life, he knew all those things intimately, plus many other tragedies. A few years ago, a Daily Stoic reader wrote in to make an interesting observation. In Meditations, Marcus is vague about some things and very specific about others. As a general rule, Marcus does not talk much about the plague he lived through or the grief he felt. Nowhere does he bemoan the disasters which happened with such frequency that one ancient historian described Marcus Aurelius’ reign as an unending series of troubles. Marcus skips over all this, but you know what he spends a full 10% of Meditations talking about in very clear detail? The gratitude he felt to the people who had helped him, who had inspired him, who had taught him. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s not that the Stoics didn’t love. It’s not that they didn’t like the nice stuff that they had or the jobs they had worked hard to earn. Of course, they liked these things and would have preferred to keep them, would have preferred a world in which fortune was less fickle, where everything lasted and no one ever grieved or missed or regretted. When Richard Feynman was in high school, he fell in love with a woman named Arline Greenbaum. They had a lovely, youthful kind of happiness that seemed like it would last forever. But while Feynman was a graduate student at Princeton, Arline was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Despite the terminal diagnosis and their parents' protest, they married a year later. She died within a year and a half. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan speaks with assistant professor and MFA program at George Mason University, Timothy Denevi The economics of a book being different than the media, How much do you internalize the tumult and danger around you as a journalist, Fundamentally journalism is a form of lying and an act of aggression and his book Freak Kingdom · Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We have a false picture about how success happens. We often only see the results and almost never the process of things, so we tend to think that the finished product—a book, being in shape, being wise—is impressive, and therefore the process by which that event was created must have been equally brilliant. In fact, it’s not. All success happens the same way: “action by action,” as Marcus said. Just after the release of Metallica’s eleventh album, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich explained the simple secret to their high output: See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Amazon tells us that’s one of the most highlighted passages in the digital version of Stillness is the Key. It’s an idea that’s impossible to disentangle from Stoicism. Epictetus said there were things that were up to us and some things were not. Ok, but then what? Remind yourself, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, that the past and the future are not in our power, only the present is. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In today’s audiobook reading, Ryan presents an excerpt from one of the seminal texts of Stoicism, the Discourses of Epictetus, read by Michael Reid. As a series of lectures given by Epictetus that were written down by his pupil Arrian in 108 A.D., these discourses provide practical advice to think on and practice in order to move oneself closer toward the ultimate goal of living free and happy. In this third section, Epictetus discusses how we should see ourselves in comparison with the gods. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan speaks with assistant professor and MFA program at George Mason University, Timothy Denevi on mastery in learning the entire playbook so that you can throw it away, How the information makes us blind to the facts, Fundamentally journalism is a form of lying and an act of aggression and his book Freak Kingdom · Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oscar Wilde was the victim of a terrible tragedy and a terrible injustice. At the height of his artistic powers, he was thrown in jail–an awful prison which contained the germs that later killed him. It was intolerance and tyranny, plain and simple. Everything he cared about was taken from him. His family. His freedom. His work. As he sat in that dark cell, rotting, festering, angry, he had a kind of slow but life-changing spiritual awakening. Coming out of his resentments and fear and despair, gifted with some paper by a sympathetic politician, he decided that his position would, “force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce even one more beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom and cowardice of its sneer and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.” ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A man walks through a field of flowing grain, the grass bending low under its own weight. The wind blows softly on a cold day. He looks and sees a small bird sitting on a branch, the steam rising off the ground behind it. The bird takes flight and he follows it with his eyes, smiling at the beauty of nature’s inadvertence. But when the man turns, you see that he is surrounded by darkness–uprooted trees and thick mud. An army marches to get behind thick, sharp palisades. Weapons of war are being prepared to do terrible damage. Within seconds, ferocious, ceaseless, primal violence will erupt. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marcus Aurelius spent 14 years at war with the Marcomanni. It was a brutal, grinding campaign which he eventually won at great cost and risk. His victory was celebrated as a triumph, immortalized in a 97 foot tall marble tower which winds upward, showing in brilliant detail, "the heroic emotion and despair of Roman soldiers along with the unwavering leadership of Marcus Aurelius." And some 19 centuries later, this monument to his accomplishments still stands, disproving, you might say, Marcus Aurelius’s reminders to himself in Meditations that posthumous fame doesn’t last, that no one would remember him. Except it’s more complicated than that. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan speaks with book athour & screenwriter Steven Pressfield on fewer possessions, superstition in memorabilia, the impact of working without any attachments to the outcome, and his new books The Daily Pressfield. Steven is an American author of historical fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays. He’s most known for The War of Art, Do The Work, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire, and Government Cheese. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Seneca thought he knew Nero. He was confident in his ability to teach or contain or even control him. Other Stoics knew better. Thrasea (whose story we tell in Lives of the Stoics) opposed him from the start. Agrippinus (another fascinating Stoic in Lives) wouldn’t even attend Nero’s parties, because it was clear to him that the man was a tyrant. Surely these men (and women) communicated their concerns to Seneca. Surely people raised questions. But Seneca thought he knew better. He was also paid so handsomely by Nero, was so powerful as a result of his position as Nero’s teacher and advisor, that it became hard for him to see what was there. It was a classic case of that problem outlined by Upton Sinclair many centuries later: It’s very hard to get someone to see something that their salary (or status or identity) depends on them not seeing. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. 📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion are back! And this time they’re combing through all the NBA news from the past week and handing out six pop culture-themed trophies to six basketball-related activities. Every week, superlatives will reign down on basketball culture like Steph Curry threes when Jason and Shea dish out hoops honors like they’re Stockton to Malone running a pick & roll. Was that too many analogies for one sentence? Hell yes, but get used to it! On this new NBA pop culture show from Wondery, the guys will honor the most magical and messy moments from the NBA and beyond by handing out hardware like “The Step Brothers Catalina Wine Mixer” Trophy for the matchup they’re most excited about. Or “The Liam Neeson ‘I Have a Very Particular Set of Skills’ Trophy given to an aging player who proves they still got it. And on and on. Till the break of dawn. Enjoy Six Trophies with Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion wherever you get your podcasts: Wondery.fm/SIX See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.