4.6 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Despair is so easy, even reasonable in moments like this. The Stoics knew that feeling well.
📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work
🎙️ 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 Facebook
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation |
0:11.7 | designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. |
0:18.8 | Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of |
0:24.2 | history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, |
0:33.0 | and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. |
0:40.3 | For more, visit Dailystoic.com. There is hope within despair. |
0:58.3 | It can be hard, especially right now, to feel good about anything. |
1:02.2 | There is dysfunction. There is conflict. There is outright lawlessness. There is corruption. |
1:07.5 | There is cruelty. What is working well? Not the economy, not the government, perhaps not |
1:13.4 | even your own business or your own day-to-day life. Despair is so easy, even reasonable in |
1:20.7 | moments like this. And the Stoics knew that feeling well. Seneca in the time of Nero, Epictetus chained |
1:27.3 | to slavery, Cato watching the |
1:29.5 | Republic fall. Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of the end of the empire. But they did not despair. |
1:35.6 | They did not give up. They knew that there was hope within despair. Where? Marcus Rialis notes that |
1:42.8 | it was within us. It did not matter how much dung you threw on top of an |
1:48.4 | underground spring, he noted. Fresh water was still there. He said we needed to dig for it. If we |
1:54.2 | want to live in good times, he said the solution is easy. Do good things. Hope is there. It is within you. It is up to you. |
2:10.4 | Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. |
3:08.3 | I was out for a walk last night. I was taking the dog for a walk. The sun was setting. The weather had cooled off. And I was eating a plum cot. Do you know what that is? It's like a combination between a plum and an apricot. And it was so good. Me, it is a little epicure to me. It just occurred to me. I was like like, I don't think Marx really knew anything better than this. I mean, he might have been incredibly rich. He might have been incredibly powerful. He might have believed he was, you know, had the divine right of kings. I don't know. But it was pretty amazing. And it's those simple pleasures, too. When I said, you know, Epicureanism that we sort of gave Epicurus a bad rap. He wasn't a hedonist. He took delight in these small pleasures. And then the thing I thought about as I'm enjoying this is I said, when I get home, am I going to have another one of these? And I thought, you know what? No, I'm not going to feel good if I have another one of these. So I didn't. |
3:12.6 | Anyways, that has nothing to do with the Q&A today. |
3:21.0 | I was down in Palm Springs back in June right before we left for Greece for a trip. |
3:23.7 | And I gave a talk at this conference. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 12 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.