If Money Could Talk, What Would It Say? | What Would the Stoics Tell Us Today?

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14If money could talk, what would it say? Just as it does today in the ancient world, currency got around. Coins with Marcus Aurelius' face on them have been found in Eastern Europe and Egypt and London, thousands of miles from Rome. Even today, you can buy them online, have them shipped thousands of miles further, thousands of years after they were made. What do you think that money, or indeed any currency, modern or ancient, would say? If it could talk, certainly it has seen a lot, seen the best and the worst of people, been used for transactions of all kinds. If money could talk, the Stoics imagined, it would probably say something like, although people chase me, I don't matter like they think I do.

1:01I have not helped anyone live forever, and nobody, even the people who insisted I be buried with them, was able to take me with them when they died. The things I have helped to buy never brought people as much pleasure as they thought, and losing me never brought people most of the dangers they feared. I have never been able to give anyone class or decency, and often the people who had the most of me had the least of these things. Of course, the Stoics have been saying this exact thing about money for thousands of years, and generations have always found it hard to listen. Money isn't evil. It can do real good, but it is a tool, not a measure of life.

1:41It can tell you what something costs, but not what it's worth. And maybe that's the lesson those old coins are still carrying. Empires fall, fortunes disappear, their faces stamped on silver fade into history. What remains is the question. Do we own our money, or does our money own us? And that's one of the questions we talk about in The Wealthy Stoic, which is a daily Stoic guide, challenge, course, class, whatever you want to call it, about what the Stoics teach about money, how to make money, but more importantly, how to think about it, how to integrate it into your life, how to use it, not be used by it.

2:24If you join us in Daily Stoic Life, you get this course and all our courses for free, or you can just sign up for the course at dailystoic.com slash wealthy.

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5:36So it's 2026. We're living in a Wi-Fi, fast food, short attention span age. You know, if the Stoics or the truly greats could come back into our time, what do you think they would feel like a mandate to say to us? Like, you've missed this about life. You've missed this about what it means to be a human. What would they speak to us? I mean, it is kind of insane if you think that, you know, 2000 years ago, the most powerful man in the world, he oversees an empire of millions of square miles, 20, 30 million human beings. He's responsible for all of it. He would look at what's coming at us through our phones and be like, how do you keep track of all of it?

6:14Right. Like like the ancients would be, I think, both amazed and appalled by the sheer amount of information that comes at us, the sheer amount of noise, the speed at which things are happening. And so I think they probably wonder how we ever have any time for reflection, for contemplation, for long-term planning, for checking in with our values, for holding ourselves accountable. So I think the reason that Marx realises meditations, his work of philosophy has endured for almost 20 centuries is because that really powerful, busy person was taking the time at morning, at night to converse with himself, to put himself up for review.

6:56And I think they would wonder why we don't do enough of that. I think that would be one thing. And then at the same time, as modern and new and as sort of fast paced as everything seems, like one of the themes that the Stoics talk about more than basically anything else is change. Just how fast things are moving, how nothing is stable. One of my favorite lines in Meditations Mark Sreo says, you're frightened of change, but what could exist without it? And, you know, he didn't think that he lived in antiquity and neither did Socrates or Julius Caesar. they lived in what was then the cutting edge future, right?

7:30The most advanced time in human history. And so on the one hand, I think they would be surprised and disappointed at some things. And then the other, they'd probably, they'd go, hey, I know what you're dealing with. Cause it was like that back then too. Things are always being disrupted. Things are always feeling like they're falling apart. People are always annoying and frustrating and weird. And, you know, we just have so little control of what's happening around us. And what stoicism and mezzas of philosophy is really how do we respond to that well. That's kind of my definition, that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens.

8:03But the Stoics, the key there is that we can respond to anything and everything with virtue, right, with excellence. And so for the Stoics, that virtue, what do they mean when they say, oh, you can turn this obstacle or this incredible abundance that you're dealing with, good or bad situations, there's this chance for virtue. By virtue, they mean these sort of four key stoic concepts, courage, self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the idea was that whether what's in front of you is an obnoxious person or the most successful deal of your life or global events, or, you know, just, you know, you come down with a cold or you get a diagnosis from your doctor.

8:51The idea for the stoics is, what is this going to draw from you? How are you going to respond well to this? How are you going to do your duty, your responsibility here? And so instead of going, oh, things aren't the way that I like them to be, I don't like this. The Stoic is saying, it is what it is. And it's a chance for me to do X, Y, or Z. Easy to say, hard to do, as I think we all can attest, right? Like knowing that, hey, what matters here is what I tell myself about the situation. What matters is the choices that I'm making in response to the situation. We know that. And then stuff happens and we complain or we whine or we try to find out who's responsible or we spend a lot of time wishing it was otherwise.

9:37You know, we know how we should respond. Stoicism as a practice is trying to get a little bit closer to that day by day. so yeah marcus was emperor yes of rome which at his peak at the height of his collar yes and so you're saying he would in the morning and all we're all busy too but i imagine that's pretty busy yeah uh and a lot of responsibility a lot of weight yes saying he wouldn't in the morning and evening yes take time yeah marcus really says meditations one of the most remarkable works of of a philosophy wasn't intended for you and me it was intended for him it's the most powerful man in the world trying to talk to himself about why did you lose your temper yesterday?

10:21Why are you worried about what other people think? Hey, are you doing your duty? Are you fulfilling your responsibilities here? Are you the kind of person that you want to be, that you know you can be? And it's this conversation that he's having with himself. That book, it survives to us as a byproduct, but it was intended for his own benefit. And so So, you know, journaling is great. Like journaling is a practice I think everyone in this room should do. Your children and your grandchildren in the future might get some benefit out of it, but it's mostly for you. It's dumping your thoughts out on the page instead of on other people.

10:57It's creating a little bit of space, a little bit of perspective so you can see things as they are, not as they feel in the initial moment when you're caught up or frustrated or scared or anxious or whatever the emotion that we have. It's not that the Stoics have no emotions. That's what people think that lowercase stoic means. Like, oh, that person's very stoic. I never know what they're thinking or feeling. It's not that a stoic has no emotions, like that a stoic would never be pissed off or angry because someone stole from them or hurt them or did something. It's that the stoic thinks about it before they respond.

11:31And the stoic tries not to do something out of anger. And journaling, I think, is one of those steps, right? It's like you wake up, you're pissed off, and you sit down and you go, why am I so angry about this? What am I planning on doing? Is this going to make things better or worse? Is this the person that I want to be? And we can tell that Mark Shrews is doing this in meditation. It's one of the best passages. He talks about revenge. It seemingly talks about revenge a lot. And he's saying, you know, look, the best revenge. And he could have been speaking about one of his most trusted generals who had betrayed him.

12:04And we know this happened in real life. But he's saying, you know, the best revenge is to not be like your enemy, right? And so he's trying to catch himself. So he has power. He could do whatever he wants, but he's saying, hey, I don't want to be like this person. I want to be like the person that I want to be. And so for the Stoics, the idea is to try to fight to be this person that you know you're capable of being, that you are in your best moments. But sometimes you let yourself off the hook in your worst moments. And it's about that struggle between those two extremes. So when you have the stimulus or the press station or that issue, the person cuts you off or hit you with a chopping part.

12:41If someone cuts off Marcus, what would he do? Well, you know, the emperor, he could put them to death. You know, he could do whatever he wanted. There's a story about the Emperor Hadrian, who's Marcus' predecessor. He's dictating something to a secretary and the man screws up. And Hadrian gets upset. He grabs the stylus. The Romans wrote usually on these waxen tablets, and they etched it into the stylus. And he grabs the stylus, and he plunges it into the man's eye and immediately blinds him. It's horrible and bloody and violent, and he feels bad after. So I guess he's not a total psychopath. He feels bad after, and he tries to apologize.

13:23And he says to the man, you know, I'm the emperor. Tell me whatever you want. It's yours. And the man says, well, I'd like my eye back. And so what Marcus is dealing with, and I think this is important for anyone who's in any position of responsibility or leadership. Obviously, this thing matters to everyone, but it's all the more important when you are important, is that you just can't afford to be angry. You don't have the luxury of spouting off, of making impulsive, you know, emotional decisions because there are consequences for other people because of the imbalances, because of the people who are dependent on you.

13:58So for Marcus Rebilius, what he's trying to, I think, do, what Stoicism really is, is this, the Latin phrase would be pausa et reflecte, pause and reflect. Like, ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this later? How is this decision going to age? What are the consequences for other people going to be here? and so it's again you can feel it and you wouldn't be human if you didn't but you don't have to act on it