This Is Your Ticket to Freedom | What Ryan Holiday Told Shawn Ryan to Read Next

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

0:14Ryan Holiday: This is your ticket to freedom. In 1962, as this Navy fighter pilot prepared to leave graduate school and return to duty, his philosophy professor handed him a worn, thin volume. I think you'll be interested in this, Philip Rhinelander, the dean of philosophy at Stanford, told Commander James Stockdale. That night, Stockdale opened the Inchiridion, a short handbook containing the teachings of the formerly enslaved Stoic philosopher Epictetus. At first, Stockdale struggled to understand these writings from the first century A.D. What could this possibly teach a fighter pilot, he thought. But he kept reading.

0:58Ryan Holiday: He carried the book with him. He kept it at his bedside table aboard the USS Ticonderoga as it steamed across the Pacific less than a year later. He read and re-read the teachings of Epictetus. He committed many of its passages to memory. And slowly the lessons began to take hold. Life is not fair. Circumstances are not ours to command. What remains is the power to choose how we meet them. Epictetus, Rhinelander had told him, saw the world as a kind of buzzsaw, and that his teachings were a means by which a man could live with himself, resist being ground down. I began to realize, Stockdale said, that for me, Epictetus offered that ticket to freedom.

1:47Ryan Holiday: On September 9, 1965, Stockdale's plane was shot down over North Vietnam. He ejected, landed in a village, and was badly beaten. His leg was severely broken. He lost control of his body, his surroundings, his status, and his physical freedom. In a matter of minutes, the commander had become a prisoner. He would remain in the Hanoi Hilton for the next seven and a half years, tortured, held in solitary confinement, and repeatedly denied even the most basic control of his life. Yet he continued to lead his fellow American prisoners, organizing their resistance and helping them preserve their dignity against their captors.

2:30Ryan Holiday: In the buzzsaw of life, he turned to Epictetus and it saved his life and changed the lives of the men he led. Most of us will never experience slavery and few will ever face the danger of becoming prisoners of war. But we will face adversity. We will encounter people who have power over our careers, our circumstances, even our physical freedom. We will lose things we value. We will be treated unfairly. We will find ourselves in situations we did not choose and cannot immediately escape. Yet there is one thing that remains always in our control, our will. This is why the teachings of Epictetus mattered to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who first encountered them through a copy shared by his teacher.

3:19Ryan Holiday: This is why they mattered to a fighter pilot facing war nearly 2 ,000 years later, and why they still matter to us today. We may not control what happens to us, what other people decide, or what circumstances take away, but we can still choose what we believe, how we respond, and who we become. And if you haven't read Epictetus yet, I don't blame you. He can be intimidating. It can be difficult to get into. I was actually turned on to Epictetus first before Mark Surrealist, but I looked at it and I said, I don't think this is for me. So we've been thinking a lot about that here at Daily Stoic.

3:59Ryan Holiday: We put together what we've been calling Epictetus Month. We're spending all month doing a deep dive into Epictetus. And we built this sort of guide module course thing. Basically, if you grab a copy of Epictetus from the Painted Porch, we'll throw in this digital guide. There's all this other awesome stuff. You work through it at your own pace. We break down all the big lessons. We don't all have a Rhinelander to walk us through Epictetus, but this is close enough, right? And we're going to be doing a Q &A about Epictetus towards the end of the month, all that jazz. I think it's going to be awesome.

4:34Ryan Holiday: I'd love to have you join us. You got to sign up by August 26th. I'll throw the link in today's show notes, or you can just go to dailystoic.com slash Epictetus course. Or if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get this one and all the other courses for free. As I said, this is Epictetus month. I want to see you in the Q &A on the 27th. So sign up by the 26th at dailystoic.com slash Epictetus course.

5:05Ryan Holiday: Recording this on a Sunday, just spent a nice lovely day at home, kind of redecorating the house. Just, you know, school's going to start soon. We want to get this space, like, less stressful, just set up better. And so the first place we checked was Wayfair, because on Wayfair, you'll find the stuff you need, stuff that stands up to real life. They've got furniture and decor, all of it built to last. And when you shop with Wayfair Verified, you get pieces that are hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. They test the materials, the functionality, the features, even how long it takes to build.

5:43Ryan Holiday: One of the good things about Wayfair is the reviews. They've got more than 20 million verified five-star reviews from real shoppers. You get to see real customer photos and feedback before you buy, right? Sometimes it looks good in the photo, but you've experienced this. The hotel lobby looks good, but you want to see the actual room from an actual human being. Well, Wayfair lets you see that with the stuff you're buying for your house. And Wayfair Rewards members get 5 % back every day, helping you get more value from your Wayfair purchases. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5 % back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade.

6:18Ryan Holiday: Head over to Wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's Wayfair, W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Wayfair, every style, every home. One of the things I think the internet has shown us is that you got to directly connect with the people that you're trying to reach. You want as few intermediaries and as few sort of artificial blocks between you and what you're trying to do or what you're trying to say or who you're trying to reach as possible. Right? You want those one-on-one interactions. And I don't know if you've seen this app, Whatnot, but it's live shopping. So sellers have direct access to their customers in real time, where people are seeing your face and not a website, not a logo.

7:08Ryan Holiday: Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. People who sell those things are building real thriving businesses on Whatnot. Anyone can sell, whether your business is big or small, just starting. And people selling on Whatnot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. Because you're not just listing products, you're building a real direct connection with buyers. Across Whatnot, the number of sellers making over$1 million a year has doubled. That means it's not just a side hustle, but a real path to building something that lasts.

7:43Ryan Holiday: just search what not w-h-a-t-n-o-t in the app store download it and you can start selling and buying right away my wife and i have a bookstore outside austin and so uh my favorite thing is when i'm going to meet someone or someone comes in like what what books would i think they like that's what gets me excited i brought you a good edition of marcus realist i don't know which one you have This is my favorite translation. So I think what's cool about this is like here you have the private thoughts of the most powerful person in the world. And almost certainly not intended for publication. Like he might be mortified that we're holding this right now.

8:25So, you know, most books are written for the audience. Right. But this is a book for the author. Like that it's a book is the byproduct of the philosophical process, which is like he has a temper. He has anxiety. He has a shitty job with people he can't trust and an empire that's coming apart. And he has health problems. He has marital problems. He has a plague. There's floods. It's a series of endless wars. And what he's doing is sitting down and writing to himself, trying to get back to center. Right? And it just wasn't burned upon his death or it wasn't destroyed when he died. It doesn't read like a typical book.

9:13I mean, it's 12 books. Each passage is numbered. But it's really almost like journal or diary entries. Because that's what stoicism is, is like this. You know how you're trying to be and then you're here. There's a great line of meditations where he's saying, like, fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. And that's what he's doing. Right? It's like we all know the ideal, like what our best self is, and then we're dysregulated or we're tired or we're hungry or somebody's being really awful and annoying. And we're struggling to get from the lower self to the higher self. Gotcha.

9:51Right? And that's what this is. So I got you this. And then this one will hopefully. Like meditations should be. Thank you. It should be a book that you, like most books you read, right? Meditation should be a book that you are reading. Like it should sit on the nightstand and you pick it up and you read it throughout your life. Because it was written throughout someone's life. But the idea is that you don't know what passage you're going to need until you're flipping through the book and it jumps out at you. That's the idea of meditations. Roger that. Thank you. All right. I got a bunch more.

10:24I won't take so much time. But I know you got young kids. Do you know Steve Rinella? Yeah. He's a meat eater. This is, I think this is, he wrote an amazing book about hunting called the American Buffalo, which is like one of my favorite books. He gets a buffalo tag in Alaska and he goes to hunt the American bison. And it's all about that. That's my favorite Steve Rinella book. But as a parent, this is outside kids in an inside world. I think that's what every parent is struggling with right now. Because screens are so addictive and video games are so exciting. And we're all glued to our devices, right?

10:58I mean, people are probably listening to this, almost certainly listening to this on a device right now. But the point is you want to raise outdoor kids, right? Kids. He says, you want to raise kids that don't say ew a lot. Because they're good being outside, getting dirty, doing nonsense. I love that book. I think it's amazing. You spend a lot of time outdoors with your kids? Yeah, we live on a ranch in Texas. So we're pretty outdoorsy. But, you know, it's a constant fight. It's like they love it when they're out there. but they hate the process of getting out there. Really? Do you know what I mean?

11:33It's like when we were yesterday, we went on a hike. They did not want to get out of the car. They did not want to go on it. And then as soon as they were in it, they loved it. And that's, I think, the struggle is the starting. You know what I mean? Yeah. All right, so we got that. Oh, this is another interesting parenting one. This is about Churchill and his son. So Churchill has a horrible father and horrible mother basically neglect him, becomes a great man. And he tries to do better with his son, but he doesn't do a great job. I think that's another thing that keeps us up at night as parents.

12:06It's like, if you're successful, how do you not raise spoiled, entitled kids? You don't, they have comforts and security and love that maybe we didn't get. But how do you make sure that that works to their advantage, not that they're to their disadvantage, right? And so I thought it's a really interesting sort of... Because it looks at three generations, right? It looks at Churchill and his father, and then obviously Churchill, and then Churchill and his son. It's a great book. I thought you might like that one. Have you read any Stockdale? No, I haven't. All right. So this is Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot.

12:42So Stockdale goes to the Naval Academy in 43, graduates, becomes a pilot, And it's not until he spends 20 years as a pilot, it's not until the Navy sends him to Stanford, where he gets a graduate degree, that he's introduced to Stoic philosophy. On his last day at Stanford, his philosophy professor goes, hey, I think you might like this book. He gives him a copy of Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher. And he does two more deployments there before he gets shot down. Every night in his bunk on the Ticonderoga and then the Constellation and a little bit on the Ariskany, he's reading Stoic philosophy.

13:21So when he gets shot down in 65, he famously says to himself, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. And it's in the Hanoi Hilton that he basically takes Stoic philosophy, which was a sort of theoretical thing, and he applies it in this, what he calls the laboratory of human behavior. Holy shit. Did you get to meet him?

13:46Ryan Holiday: I see he died in 2006. I never got to meet him. He died, yeah, I think he died in 2008 or six. What does it say? He died in 2006 at the age of 81. Yeah, no, I met his children and met a lot of people that have met him. But just, I mean, one of the greatest Americans ever. Man. Incredible book. You'll love that. I was just, I'm doing, I'm actually doing a book on Stockdale right now. And this is, do you ever read The Right Stuff? Tom Wolfe book? No. Oh, you would like that too. So that's about test pilots who become the first astronauts. So it's about John Glenn and Chuck Yeager. Really good. But this is about, there's a little Stockdale in there too.

14:22This is like about carrier pilots in Vietnam. Not enough people know about this book. It's incredible. It's called Over the Beach. It was Stockdale's favorite book about the air war in Vietnam. And then the guys that get shot down. So I just read that. I think you would like that. If you don't read a lot, I think you would like that book. Perfect. And then the last one, you ever read any Hunter S. Thompson? Yes. Okay, so Hunter S. Thompson we think of as the badass wild man crazy guy. You think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book about drugs and alcohol, which it is. But the subtitle of that book is about the American dream.

14:57Because he's also one of our most astute sort of cultural and political writers. And so this is Freak Kingdom, and it's about Hunter S. Thompson as a political thinker and critic. Because he covers Nixon, he covers Carter, he covers every presidential candidate between the late 60s and then his death. And I don't know, I got the sense, I think it would line up with where, because you're kind of like a man without a party. You're politically engaged, but you're not like Democrat, Republican. I think you'd like that book. What he's primarily is anti-fascist. Not like Antifa, but anti-fascist. Like, doesn't like fascism, doesn't like people telling him what to do, doesn't like liars, doesn't like hypocrites, doesn't like corruption, and...

15:49I'm checking him at this guy. I think you're going to like it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Really appreciate that. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years, and you can sign up at ryanholiday.net slash reading list.

16:29We'll be right back. to fill that void. Oh boy, will they dad? It feels good to worry less. It feels good to Geico.