¶ Intro / Opening
About to head over and pick my kids up from school and after I do I know what they're gonna ask. They're gonna go, hey, can we go to Whole Foods? And I am going to say yes. One,'cause then uh keeps them off their screens. But two, groceries are my responsibility in our household. And so yeah, we usually swing by the Whole Foods headquarters and uh we get all our groceries for the week. My wife has like a bazillion dietary restrictions.
Sometimes that can be tough, but not at Whole Foods they got everything. Even for Valentine's Day, they got miles of t chocolate dipped strawberries that I think we're gonna get. They got gluten free stuff, they got dairy free stuff. I got basically everything. And I usually pick her up flowers while I am there too. If you're looking for something for someone for Valentine's Day this year, Whole Foods has got bouquets and arrangements.
They've got succulents. Sometimes they'll just bring home a plant. She always appreciates it. The point is you can taste love all month at Whole Foods. And maybe you'll see me there here at Austin. You know what has also been crazy? Cause it integrates with your Amazon account. When I pull up Amazon, I can see all the stuff that I ordered, which is always good to remember. Pull up my little Amazon in-store code, get all my prime benefits.
It's lovely. Anyways, I'm off to Whole Foods and you should too. New Year, new systems, right? This is the time when we should look at the messier parts of our business and think, there's gotta be a better way. And there is. Streamlining your communications is one of the quickest and easiest system upgrades you can make. And that's why today's episode is brought to Quo is brought by Quo. That's Q-U-O, the Smarter Way to Run Your Business Communications.
Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over three thousand reviews, and it's built for how modern teams work, and that's why over 9,000 businesses. From big companies to little ones, use Quo to stay connected, professional, and reachable. Your entire team can handle calls and text from one shared numbers, so stuff doesn't get dropped, nothing gets missed, and the customer gets taken care of.
Plus it's easy. Calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, and contact details all live in one clean view and you've got it all at your fingerprints. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. And you can try Quo for free, plus get 25% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Daily Stoic, QUO.com slash daily stoic. Quote No miss calls, no miss customers. What?
¶ Diogenes: The Radical Philosopher's Origins
Those four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Do you know who the most brilliant, the most badass, the most powerful philosopher in the ancient world was? Because it wasn't Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome. It wasn't Socrates, it wasn't Plato, it wasn't Aristotle, it was a man who lived on the
streets. It was a man who begged for his food. Yet it was this poor homeless man who could challenge Alexander the Great to his face, who could walk into Plato's house and stamp on his carpet. And yet, even though he didn't write basically anything down, had an enormous philosophical legacy. Stoicism as a philosophy would not exist.
without this man. And in today's video, that's what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about Diogenes the Cynic. We're gonna talk about the school of philosophy known as Cynicism, and we're gonna talk about some lessons that the Cynics can teach us. to apply here in our very modern lives. Now you might have heard the word cynic before, like with a lowercase, and and maybe you think that that's negative, right? That's someone who makes fun of stuff, who's pessimistic.
who doesn't believe in anything. But just as stoicism is not lowercase Stoic, you know, has no emotions, has no feeling, totally invulnerable. That's not what I'm saying. school of cynicism is as a philosophy either. The cynics actually like the stoics tried to live in accordance with nature. That yes, they actively rejected some normal social conventions.
Materialism. They didn't care about superficial stuff. They were in favor of self-sufficiency and virtue. But they were also known for taking these ideas. To the expensive. Stream. There are stories about them that are they're kind of punk, right? They're like nude in public. They're using the bathroom wherever they want. They are testing and questioning.
Things that other people are afraid to do. And actually, this was something I talked about with the philosopher and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks about when he was on the Daily Stoic podcast. We don't understand that. Because we cast as Persians of people who are cynical. Yes. I mean the whole idea of the skeptics and the cynics, different schools, of course. Yes. That that there's something that's kind of
suspect about the character. You know, we don't you don't want to be a cynical person because you're you're just negative all the time, and that's exactly getting it wrong. How do you characterize this this school of cynicism? I I say they're like the the punk rockers of the philosopher world. They are transgressive and radical by taking it
sort of a moderate middle ground. Like I if if everyone lived as Diogenes lived, the world would be a horrible place. But if everyone lived as according to ambition and trying to you know make as much money and get as much power and
valued all the wrong things, you also get a really bad society. Right. And he's like the hippie sort of going, None of this matters, man you know, like and doing this. Not even saying none of it matters. He's saying this is stupid. Yes. So it's w it's worse than what ev's. Yeah. And he's making fun of your suit. Yeah. And your tie and your fancy car. I mean the famous story about Diogenes that I love is, you know, he has very few possessions.
He walks up to the well and gets a cup of water. A young boy runs up and gets water front with his hands. And Diogenes realizes that even here, having reduce what he thought his needs were to nothing actually has one more that he can get rid of and he smashes his cuff on the ground. The cynics are interesting because what they do is they they can make you realize that life is hilarious.
So Diogenes is probably the most well-known and the most extreme of the cynics. He's actually known as Diogenes the Dog because he lived in a barrel on the street in Athens. try not even to have clothes. But he wasn't always like this. Like all the
Great philosophers. There's an origin story. How does he go from his ordinary life to what he's known for? And this is something I talked to Professor Inger Kuhn about. She's a professor of classics at the University of Virginia. So for people who aren't familiar with the Where he starts. How does he end up as a philosopher in Athens? He's in exile, right? Yes, that's right. Diogenes is born in Probably a pretty well to do Family uh in
a town that's called Sinope, um and it's on the um the coast of the Black Sea and today it's in Turkey. At a certain point either just him or him and his father get exiled from Sinope. So they have to leave, they cannot live there anymore, most likely because there was some problem with the coinage, with the with the mint. So Diogenes' dad was in charge
of the mint and there was some irregularity um that led to them having to leave. He gets exiled, which means he loses his citizen rights in that place, and ends up in Athens, which to him ends up being really exciting. Right. A few times he says like, well the Sinopians might have convicted me to exile, but they have convicted themselves to staying in Sinope. So not not all that bad. In Athens, he meets Antisthenes.
who was a student of Socrates and who sort of sets him most likely on the on the on the path of philosophy. This is right after the death of Socrates. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a few decades after the death of Socrates, which is still, you know, very
reverberating uh for people and um and something. And this philosophy thing is kinda new. Like Not I obviously w we go there's the pre Socratics and then the post Socratic, but it's like it's still up for grabs what this philosophy thing is gonna be and mean. to the Western world because it's all being figured out.
Just then. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a very v vibrant time for it. And if we think about ancient wisdom and and and people trying to figure out how the world works, if there are gods, what they are like, I mean this is something that people have been doing for at least two centuries already at this point. But at this time, uh fourth century BCE in Athens, there is a very vibrant be, what it should be like, what kind of questions should be pursued, and in what way they should be pursued. So
In that sense, um is a perfect time for Diogenes to show up there. And then Diogenes is right there in the middle of the reign of Alexander the Great, who's in the middle of gobbling up the world We've got an employee here at Daily Stoke. I won't say who, because it's kind of private, but they've been using Monarch, today's sponsor, to track their progress as they try to pay off their student loan debt. I'm a college dropout, so I don't have any debt, thankfully.
But I can only imagine how overwhelming it would be to have this thing hanging over you. And she's been using the app to budget and save, and it's bringing her a little bit closer every day to being debt-free, which I can only imagine would be a huge relief.
Monarch shows you exactly where your money is going. It helps you redirect it towards what matters. With automated tracking and clear projections, you can actually see yourself getting closer to being debt-free or hitting your savings milestone instead of just hoping it happens. Unlike most other personal finance apps, Monarch is built to help make you proactive and not just reactive. And Monarch helped users save over$200 per month on average after joining.
You can set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch. the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. And you can use code STOIC at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com code STOIC. We're all gonna experience pain and injuries and physical obstacles, right? That's part of life. But we choose how we respond to those setbacks.
And Built for Broken is an award-winning book from corrective exercise specialist Scott Hogan that helps you heal painful joints and rebuild your body stronger. Obviously mindset's a big part of that, but this book arms you with knowledge and gives you practical recommendations for rebuilding painful joints, whether you're a runner like me, or a lifter, whether you're an active dad.
Whether you're getting up there in age, your loved ones need you to be strong and pain-free. And right now it's time to invest in the one vehicle that gets to carry you through in life, which is your joint. To celebrate the launch of Built from Broken and Stores nationwide, listeners get access to a bunch of exclusive offers.
Just visit saltwrap dot com slash daily stoic to get your copy and download the full exercise video library for free. And you also get free access to the Built From Broken Guide to Regenerative Therapies, which Scott wrote in partnership with a clinical advisory board of physical therapists and regenerative medicine practitioners. And second, if you use code daily Stoic at SALTRAP.com
to save 20 bucks on your first order of therapeutic nutrition formulas. This book and tools are references you can turn to for the rest of your life to turn setbacks into comebacks.
¶ Challenging Hypocrisy and Cultivating Freedom
Diogenes believed that there was corruption, there was lies, that people were being sold a bill of goods. And and I think he believes that his job is to is to point out this hypocrisy, to call it out. You know, there's a story about him walking into a crowded theater backwards and people go, Why are you walking backwards? and they start to laugh at him and he says, You're laughing at me for
Walking backwards, even though you've been walking in the wrong direction your whole life. There's another story about Diogenes, he's walking through Athens and he sees a thief. Arrested from the temple, and he's being led out of the temple by the priests. He says, Oh, look, the big thieves are leading away the little thieves. And here he is calling out the hypocrisy, the greed of uh the religion of his time. He's kind of questioning everything.
He's he's calling it all out. And this is what makes him such a provocative thinker and such a provocative thing to read, you know, even 2,500 years later. And Diogenes took his training. Really seriously. And in the winter he would embrace statues. Imagine a stone or a bronze statue that's freezing cold or even covered in snow. We're told he was trying to inure himself to hardship. He's trying to toughen himself up to feel.
Out what he's capable of. And you can imagine seeking out discomfort so that the discomforts of ordinary life are comfortable to him. There's another story about Diogenes when there's someone he wanted to learn from, another philosopher. Philosopher named Antisthenes. But apparently Antisthenes was not interested in teaching Diogenes. And and when Diogenes kept asking, you know, will you teach me? Will you teach me? The teacher raises his hand as if to strike.
Diogenes to send him away. But Diogenes says, Go ahead, hit me. There isn't wood hard enough that's gonna From you. Diogenes supposedly practices being rejected too, or practices the indifference. of other people were told he he's one seen begging in front of a statue, and and by that I mean literally begging the statue, which of course could not respond. He wanted
Use to the crickets, right? To having his request ignored entirely. And this idea of rejecting the favors and important people is actually a source of disagreement that Diogenes has with Plato. And Plato says, you know, if you had come to Dionysus's court, served this. this this tyrant that that Plato had worked for, you wouldn't have to do that. And Diogenes looks at him and says, You know, if you just washed your cabbages, you wouldn't
Have had to go to Dionysus' court. And Diogenes was totally right because Plato had degraded himself in the service of this man and was fooling himself about it. And Diogenes saw right through this. Diogenes was once asked what the Beautiful thing in the world was. And he said it was freedom of speech. He wasn't afraid to offend people, he wasn't afraid to question convention. He wasn't afraid to say what he thought was true. Even if others thought it was weird, even if others didn't.
Disagreed, even if others thought it was inappropriate or uncouth. He said what he wanted to say, and that's the kind of freedom he was trying to cultivate. So in Athens, Diogenes is living on the streets, but this also puts him in a position to bump into Some of the most influential
Of his time, right? Athens is the center of the world. There's actually a famous story of Diogenes and Alexander the Great. He's lying on a on a rock or in the road somewhere, just sunbathing. And Alexander the Great Comes up to him. Alexander the Great's a fan. And he says, You know, I I'm Alexander the Great. Is there anything that I can do for you? And Diogenes looks at him and says, Yeah, you can get out of my son. Right? His request for the most powerful man in the world, a man
A man who has conquered enormous swaths of territory is to just get out of his way. So, in this, I think there's a very stoic idea of. Of what power is, right? Do you have power over yourself or are you dependent on other people? There's something here about not needing anything from anyone, right? Seneca talked about how poverty isn't
The person who has little, it's the person who wants more. There's obviously a lot of people in Greece that wanted something from Alexander the Great, that were dependent on him, or that thought of power as what they could get, not power as reducing what they needed.
¶ Cynicism's Link to Stoicism and Differences
Needed. This idea from Seneca may actually have come from the cynics, as Inger and I talked about. I mean, essentially um what happens is that Zeno. founds his own school. Yeah. Right? And comes to be known as um as as the Stoics after the place where they meet, um, as is all well known. So I would say there's sort of a a big philosophical difference between the two.
And then there is, shall we say, uh a historical difference between the two, right? Where um where the Stoics were quite invested in um, distinguishing themselves from the cynics and saying w like we are doing our own thing, we are doing something different, right? This is important to them precisely because the cynics were the guys
who lived in the street. At the same time the Stoics cannot really deny their connection to the Cynics because then they cut their own tie to Socrates and sort of Socrates as the important forefather of of living a conceptual life of philosophy is a forebear that the Stoics do want. Which means that they have to accept the genealogy from Socrates to Anthysenes to Diogenes to Cratus to Xeno. Got it. Right.
They are in this bind, right? Where they're both wanting to underplay the connection, but they can't um completely deny it. So, in a historical sense, Um it's clear that uh one descends from the other. Exactly, exactly and that Crates. himself in person was a student of Diogenes. They lived at the same time and that Zeno then lives at the same time as Crates and is a student of Crates. So that all sort of works
uh works just fine in from a historical perspective. Then in addition to sort of needing this needing this distance, there's also pretty fundamental differences philosophically. I think the um sort of the most impactful difference ultimately is that for the Stoics there is a divine organizing principle that is at the heart of everything, and that means that the world
well organized. Right. So to put it a little bit in a banal way. The thing to do is to understand this organization and then to bring yourself, bring bring your inner self in line with this organization. Now for the cynic There is no such overarching organizing principle. For the cynics, that also means that.
the status quo, the world that we live in such as is is today, is not necessarily the best of all outcomes. Right. And Diogenes and the Cynics, they definitely love the world, right? They think that the the human body is is an awesome
thing in in terms of everything that it can do. Um they admired a natural world. They admired the fact that the sun warms us that we can drink water from uh, from the river that animals are able to take care of themselves and find food just like that and if we are a little bit more like that then Um then we can live a good life with what nature has has given us. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Beyond that, there's nothing about this world that's necessary. Right. So when it comes to the social structures, the city that we live in, um sort of the societal institutions. Um for the sitting that are not necessary. Precisely because, for instance, animals seem to be able to do without them quite well, right? And that has a lot of downstream consequences in terms of how Diogenes thinks about
Kingship and how he thinks about rulership. One believes in order and systems and logic and the other is a little bit more random and anarchic. uh that like hey this is All made up, and you can choose to believe in the made-upness, but you don't have to. It doesn't mean anything. This is just How things are. God didn't make them this way, and they don't have to remain this way. Exactly. The society that we live in, the status quo.
Is not God given, is not That's not part of nature. Exactly. It's not part of nature. And any anything that's not part of nature for the cynics is open to questioning. Right. And and is you know You know that Margaret Thatcher thing where she says, uh there's no such thing as society. There's just individuals and their families, right? Yeah. Uh although she's obviously coming at it from a very
But Diogenes is saying, like, this is all made up. You can do whatever you want. And the Stoics are like, No, no, no, there's a reason for all of this. Whether there is a reason or not, probably have some fundamental fear of the anarchy that comes if you question it.
So it's like even if there is no reason, this is better than the alternative. So let's there's a conservatism to stoicism that maybe isn't lowercase conservatism to stoicism that is not there in Diogenes. And ultimately for the Stoics it's about understanding. and making sense of society such as it is. Yes. Right? In order to adjust to it and in order to sort of
most virtuous and and dutiful life within that context, within your station, within the city that you live in. Whereas for cynics we're questioning it to see if maybe there might be a better way to live.
¶ Diogenes's Enduring Lessons: Rigor and Change
Descending from the cynic school, there's there's obviously a lot of overlap. There's a a big similarity between the two schools. I think the big place they overlap is this idea of Freedom. Freedom not in the legal sense, but freedom from the things that enslave most of us. Diogenes talked about people. Slaves three times over. He meant sex or gluttony or sleep. Seneca coming a couple hundred years after Diogenes talked.
Show me somebody who isn't a slave. He was talking about powerful people who are slaves to ambition. They're mistresses to a compulsion, to money, to fear, to work, whatever it is. And so they might have been on paper much more powerful than some of the other. Yeah. This but if you actually look at their lives their day to day Uh Seneca would talk about this one Roman general. He says, you know, he commanded armies, but ambition commanded. him. And so we come back to this
Of Diogenes, who's more powerful, Diogenes or Alexander the Great? Now, of course, the cynics go a lot further than this does. Uh, in terms of achieving this freedom, you know, getting rid of almost everything they own, reducing their desires to nothing. I don't know how practical or realistic that is for most of us, but I think there still is. a lesson here that basically the more you want need the more you are vulnerable, the more you are not under your own power. And this is not just true For
You know, sort of material things, but also desires and urges and passions. Now, another crossover between the Stoics and the Cynics is this idea of treating the body rigorously. Now, we might think of uh Diogenes sort of living on the streets as some kind of of weakling. But he's kinda seeing this as like an athletic feat. Like how little does he need? How tough
can he be? How exposed can he be to the elements? What can he endure? And so for Diogenes he he's thinking about training and pushing the body and in pushing the body also pushing the mind and vice versa. You know, today we think of philosophers as Sitting in a in an ivory tower in a cushy office being a bit soft. But Diogenes was a hard guy who lived a hard life. And again, I think we can see a connection between Right. Seneca said we treat the body rigorously so that it is not disordered.
Mind. The Stoics are saying you push yourself, you find out where your limits are, you develop strength and self-confidence and independence as a result. of pushing yourself in this way. And not only does this make you healthier Uh it helps you think more clearly, it makes you more resilient, and it makes you ultimately better. We're told by a a biographer.
But he says, sure, we have the ideals, and that's what part of the philosophical training is about, the ideas. He says, but none of this, the the ideas and the virtue, he says none of it is complete without health, because health and strength are equally essential for training both. the body. There's another story that I like about Diogenes. Diogenes is Slow down. And Diogenes is sort of taken aback by this. He says, why would I take
Slow down when you were approaching the finish line. He says, wouldn't I do better to speed up? And this reminds me of one of my favorite stories about Aerelius. Mark Cerlius is an old man, he's considered wise, he's considered powerful, he's a philosopher king, and he's seen leaving the palace in in in Rome, and a friend stops him and he says, You know, where are you going? The man's amazed he says here we have the king of the Romans still taking up the room.
To school. Epicurus, another philosopher from around this period, says sort of the same thing: that to say that you're too young or too old to learn is to say or too young or too old to be happy. Like this is the whole point of existence. And so I think Diogenes is right here. We should not just become students at some early point in our life, but we have to
students at all points of our life we always have to be learning and while we are alive we should be living. And so what makes Diogenes so great? What's He's not trying to be rich. He's not trying to be famous. He's not trying to be Trying to be a great athlete. In fact, he he thinks it's interesting that people compete in all these areas and not the area that actually. We're told that he says, I see many men competing in wrestling and running, but no one competes.
Excellence. So that's what Diogenes is after, sort of human. Excellent. Core of the human experience, what actually makes a great and powerful person. And he believes it's not all these trappings, it's not status. It's not any of the things that other people are after. It's something deeper, something more profound, and that's what makes him this great philosopher. And lastly, I I think uh one of my favorite lines from Diogenes, he's he's asked like why he changed his opinion about something.
Right. We would think that a philosopher would be consistent. And he says, Look, I used to piss my bed, but I don't do that anymore. Right. The point is. a philosopher should be able to change your mind. Cicero talked about this, about remaining a free agent. Things are always changing and we should be able to change. Mark Swilis talks about how
If someone brings you new information, they point out where you've been mistaken. They're not harming you, they're helping you, they're helping you become what you need to be. But that can only happen if you change. If you're willing to change your mind, if you're willing to change your practice, if you're willing to include
incorporate this new information in. And I think we should even think about this with Diogenes. A lot of what he says might make us uncomfortable. It might question some assumptions we've long held. But he knew what he was talking about. And in hearing from him, he can help in the right direction.
Maybe you love the the Stoics, maybe you're Christian, maybe you prefer the Eastern thinkers. But there's something in Diogenes, something in the Cynics, even if it's not totally practical, even if it's a little too extreme for some of us that can help us question things, that can help us think about things from a new perspective. By taking things to a logical extreme or by by subjecting them to extreme circumstances, Diogenes helps us understand ourselves.
our own us assumptions, our own ideas better. Seneca talked about this too, how we want to read like a spy in the enemy's camp. I think studying other schools of philosophies help us understand and improve our beliefs as a result.