I think one of the really exciting things about the world that we live in now is how accessible

like basic entrepreneurial practices have become like anyone could throw up a Shopify store and sell things, right?

Anyone could build a platform and talk to an audience.

So instead of it being this thing that like the elites in Hollywood are doing or that the

the business people in Wall Street are doing it's a thing you yourself are doing.

I'm Mary Long and that's Ryan Holiday, a best-selling author, business owner, and student of Stoic philosophy.

His latest book is right thing right now. Good values, good character, good deeds. My colleague

Dylan Lewis caught up with holiday for a conversation about how investors and

entrepreneurs can use stoicism in everyday life, holiday's realization about

advertising spent, and what he's doing instead, plus why even retail investors

should participate in proxy votes.

So I think I want to just start out with your overall journey with stoicism and

what brought you to it and kind of how you've gone

through it over the last decade. Yeah I realize in retrospect there's sort of a

long tradition this idea of like somebody passing on this book and going,

hey, this worked for me, it might work for you.

Which is effectively how Stoicism is spread

for 2,000 plus years.

There's actually a little note in Marcus Relius's meditations, the Emperor of Roman.

He's thanking his philosophy teacher for passing along to him the works of Epictetus.

He says, thank you for loaning me the copy of Epictetus's lectures out of your own library and that's sort of

what happened for me I just got past Mark's realist in Epictetus and I read it and I was sort of like,

...