#795 - Ryan Holiday - 11 Harsh Stoic Truths To Improve Your Life

26:53and he has this meeting with this editor and he's meeting with him and he telegraphs his wife and says, hey, I need you to come meet me. This is Hadley. And so she gathers up all his stuff. She's thinking that Hemingway is going to want to show it to this editor. And she hops on the train, she stops in Lyons or somewhere in France, and gets up the train for a second to grab a newspaper or whatever. and she comes back in the briefcase full of all of Hemingway's writing is gone. Everything he's done in his life up until this point, just gone. They don't know if someone stole it, they don't know if she lost it, they don't know if it was thrown away.

27:30So Hemingway loses everything that he had produced up until this point. And it's obvious like when you hear the story, you know, okay, yes, this was the defining moment, he reinvents his style, he comes back from it. We know how the story ends, But there's this letter that he writes to Ezra Pound and he goes, this is right after it happens. He's telling him the story. He goes, I know you're going to tell me this is all for the best. It's all going to work out. I should be grateful that it happened. And he says, but I'm not there yet. And I love that because I think that's an important, it's okay to not be there.

28:05It's okay for it to feel shitty when you've gotten dumped, when you've failed, when you've lost a bunch of money and when you've had to admit defeat on something. It's okay, but you can simultaneously know that in the future, you don't have to feel the same way, and you almost certainly won't feel the same way. And I like that Hemingway said, I'm not there yet. He got there, but he wasn't there yet. So he's understanding of the process, this sort of acceptance of my own psychological fallibility, but this hope in the future as well. Yeah, and he does get there very quickly. Almost immediately, he starts writing again, and his sparser sort of hamming way, Esk style comes as a result of this kind of burning, unintentional burning of the boats behind him.

28:51And he later, he even fictionalizes the scene where this happened to the writer. So he's able, in that scene, to articulate everything that Ezra Pound was trying to say to him in this moment, but he wasn't there yet. And so, like, when the Stokes say the obstacle is the way, like, I try to be, you know, I'll get people to be like, Hey, my brother -in -law just got diagnosed with cancer or my spouse cheated on me or my company just failed. I don't like give them the book and be like, this is awesome, like really soak this shittiness in. I like, it sucks to be a person and devastating heartbreaking things happen.

29:32It's just knowing that you can put the work in on that and you can get to a place where you feel very, very differently. your most popular tweet, most consistent, most popular tweet. I have zero idea what this would be. Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. I would say that the thing when I hire people, the number one thing I'm looking for is, I'm looking for something I'm looking for the absence of. I want someone who is not nuts. like I was when it was not nuts. And the problem is a lot of young ambitious people, they have shit that they have to deal with first.

30:14You know what I mean? That they're too high -strung, they're too worried, they've got bad boundaries. Like they're not, I was very cognizant early in my career of like not giving anyone the creeps, not having bad energy. And that was why I would get invited to things. That's why I would get asked to participate in things is that trust that, hey, this person isn't gonna fuck this up is almost more important than, they know you're not gonna knock it out of the park, you're 20, they want you to not fuck it up. So anyways, I just try to work on my shit. And I did have a lot of momentum early in my life.

30:59The kid going places, I can't believe you're this young, How did you get here? And I just wanted that to play actually no part in my identity and how I saw myself because I also know that most of those people regressed the mean. So to actually have staying power to like take advantage of getting shots early at stuff, the main thing is not fucking it up. That's like the main thing. It sounds like a be quiet workhard and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill, but sanity, it sounds like there's a sort of long -termism component in there as well. Yeah, I don't want to do something, make a bunch of money, and then not do the thing.

31:39I like doing the thing. I want to be able to do it, and I want to... I remember I listened to someone once say they were like, if you stick around long enough you'll get a shot. Everyone gets a shot. Just don't fuck the shot up. And that's, to me, I felt very fortunate to get those shots early. So it was actually more imperative that I did also more risky, you know, because you haven't put the requisite Preparation and work in that hole if you say ready you don't have to get ready thing But I got the opportunity before I had chance to get ready. Yes. Yeah, you You think you want these things in your early 20s, you know, you want your first Video to go super viral you want your first show to get purchased you want your first book to You know, getting a bidding war, you want your first company to have all the VCs knocking on the door.

32:32You think that's what you want. If you get it, you're immediately behind. You immediately now have to go retrofit or earn this somewhat misguided faith that they put in. You know, you have to, you know, there's a lot of catching up. I mean, you are speaking to me. So I signed with Portfolio and a hot hatchet in the UK. And there's, they're expecting, they're expecting me to not fuck it up. Yeah, let's say that. And I'm like, sat down with Mark a couple of weeks ago and I was like, dude, this is like fucking a big deal. I've got, originally the summit, he nearly killed me. The submission date originally was August this year.

33:18He was like, if you try and do that, I'll come and fucking smash your laptop. It's like you can't do that. You can't do that. So we pushed it back by another year, which is fine. But yeah, I feel that a little bit. And I think it's something people need to understand now more than ever because of how easy it is to potentially blow up. But still, this random blow up on you. Yeah, yeah. There's forces acting on you that have nothing to do with you. It's the right place, right time. at just a level that, yeah, like you would have had to get vetted by all these gatekeepers before. You really would have had to pay aduse and build these relationships.

33:58And I'm not saying one system is better or worse than the other. It's just the algorithm can give you something that that previously would have taken years and years to acquire. So there's something I read this really phenomenal breakdown from Gwinda Bogle about how everything is turned into a game and he talks about how people that are given fame and status and accolade. In the past, you could still have a huge, you know, be a child star and all the rest of it, but for the most part, the returns weren't so horseshoey, they weren't so just, you know, like insane. Anybody that wasn't built psychologically to deal with fame was selected out of the pool before they got to the stage where they had that huge thing to deal with.

34:45Not true for everybody, but certainly all of the weird protection strategies, like have you got the right people around you? And can you deal with it? Here's your first red carpet. Here's your second red carpet. Maybe you go through some of those before you get the equivalent of an Oscar. And yeah, on an egalitarian, no -holes, bards, tick -tockification world, anybody can go. There's that dude that went viral for drinking ocean spray, cranberry juice, skateboarding down the street and then he put some 50 year old song back in the chart like just this 50 second video of like a world -changing moment.

35:20You go, that man, he may have been very well prepared for it from other things but there's no reason to expect that he would have been. There's another layer on this, you know who Dr. Drew is? Kind of. Yeah, he did, he for many years the host of this radio show called loved line on the West Coast. And he gave this survey, it was in a position that most academics wouldn't be able to do. He was able to actually do a scientific experiment on famous people, because every day, multiple times a week, he had famous people in the studio. So he gave them this narcissism questionnaire. He's basically looking at, are just being a celebrity, make you a And what he found, it was interesting that the more craft oriented what you did was, the more protected you were or less likely you were to have some of these narcissistic traits.

36:21What's craft? So like a drummer, which is a very hard thing to become famous for, it would tend to be less narcissistic than a reality television star. And so if your path to success is based on you getting good at an extremely good at a very hard thing, you have this safety mechanism, which is it's always kicking your ass. So even if the genuinely generating evidence. Yeah, yeah. That also, so if the world is saying you're amazing, you're the best, you're a godship, you know one how many hours it took to do the thing. And then And two, it's still hard. It's still hard to you, especially if you're trying to get better at it.

37:03And that's very different than being blessed by the algorithm or being spotted on a street corner and suddenly you're on the cover of magazines. Like to do the work is a protection against that. And it would tend to be that the people who, like if you become famous for being a drummer, fame is a byproduct of you loving the drums, right? And that's where you want to, Bruce Dickens and Lee too. So it's the same was taken away, the love of the drums would still remain. Yeah, Bruce Dickens and the lead singer of Iron Maiden said, you know, fame is the byproduct of creativity. And that that's, but not always, not anymore.

37:42I think social media has changed that. But if your recognition or celebrity or platform is a result of you being this woodchuck that Chuck's would, that's a much safer place than your famous is because you are famous. And you were not exactly sure how you got famous. That's why audience capture is perilous in like a million different ways. One of them being that if you get famous feeding red meat to an audience that you don't believe in, you'll not only resent the work, but you'll resent the audience. You'll resent these people that are so easy, you'll pity them. They're so easy to be conned into believing this thing and you feel like a puppet master, but in no way will you ever be connected to the work that you do.

38:25But I think that's true. It's also if you got famous for saying something that maybe you didn't fully believe the word that you were just riffing on or whatever Not you got well known for saying these things that you believe in. It's hard for you even to know what you believe and The you know the expression it's very hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding It's hard to it's hard period to know what your beliefs are, but it's very hard to maintain beliefs in the light of those beliefs, either costing you money or another belief being better for you financially.

39:02So you get in this place where you're like, what is the, you wake up and you go, what does my audience want? Which is not the way that you should have. Not instinct. It's not curiosity, it's not wonder, it's not all. Yeah, I went to a retreat last summer and this guy who used to create a ton of content online was there and I asked him why he'd stopped. And he said, because I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public. He was making these proselytizations online about how to do business or about how a relationship should work. And maybe he did or did not believe it at the time, but he then sort of planted this stake in the ground that he could retroactively be compared to.

39:39He's like, I keep evolving and I want my opinions to be able to change very quickly, but everybody has this sort of post -hoc hypocrisy thing to be able to say, you're saying that the S &P is now good. in the past you said it was crypto and now we do blah blah blah. Like you want to be all to change your mind. Yeah. And he had to live up to imprive at the things that he was saying in public. All right, next one. If it makes you a worse person, it's not success. If starting a business has your relationships apart, makes you better off restricted with people, then it doesn't matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives.

40:13That's not success. What do you want your life to look like? I think it's very easy to go, these people are successful, I'm going to do what they do. But if you don't have a sense of day -to -day what you want your life to look like or who you want to be in your life, it's very easy to lose your bearings very quickly. Because you're going to get offered things. Do you want to go over here? You want to do this? Do you want to do that? So the audience capture thing comes into. You are doing what makes rational sense or is in your immediate self interest, but it may well be taking you much further away from where you wanna go or where you should go.

40:53Then you wake up one day and your spouse leaves you, you wake up one day and your children hate you, you wake up one day and you go, oh wait, I'm the bad guy. Like I'm not a positive contributor to humanity. And so I think being really clear with yourself about what success looks like is really important because if you start to get it, it becomes this rocket ship that you're riding on and you are not going to have the control then of it. Isn't it strange that the judgment we all have, most of us have, about what is success? We have to swim so fast upstream to get towards something which we probably actually value.

41:35Almost, I've got this really lovely idea I'm working on with a friend at the moment about hidden and observable metrics. And it's my contention that we often trade hidden metrics for observable metrics. So for instance, hidden metric might be time that you get to spend with your kids, quality of sleep, how much you don't need to work. And we'll trade that for an increase in salary, we'll trade an increase in salary for a longer commute, which downstream from that, how much more stress style you'll less trying to be your kids and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because the best game in the world is money and job title and the way that you look and but what is it that you actually do and trying to bifurcate that's?

42:14If the observable metrics are easy to compare against other people and so we default to them because we go, oh, this person has it. So having more than them is winning. This is where that competition imposes so insidious. You go like I talk whenever I hear someone tell me that they have a certain number of books that they're trying to sell like they're like I want this book to sell a million copies. I'm immediately not interested because I Know that they just pulled this number out of their ass. There's no there's no reason that a specific number is a goal like you're so They've already said that they're a goal for the project is not to write something amazing.

42:53It's not to write something meaningful And also what timeline are we talking about? You know Are we talking in any year or are we talking 50 years, right? So what they have effectively done almost always is they heard some book that they like sold this many copies and then they've said, well that's my thing. As opposed to figuring out their own race and thinking about it in a way that's sort of up to and about them. So yeah, we look at people who have achieved things and we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what it's like to be that person. 100 % dude, I'm obsessed with that question. Yeah, and it's Neil Strauss was sitting that seat a couple of weeks ago.

43:39How is the best? I first time I met him, we got on Superwell, like he's a real one. And he told me, do you know what the title of his next book is? Yeah. It's called The Power of Low Self -esteem. Fucking awesome. I've texted him a bunch of times because I just want you to know how sticky that idea is. The power of low self -esteem, you know, and the courage to be just like, it's a lot like it's kind of in that sort of oxymoron kind of way. But I'm beyond obsessed with thinking about the price that people pay to be someone that other people admire. Yeah. Like Elon Musk, that conversation he had with Lex Friedman, who's like, most people think they would want to be me, but they don't, they don't know, they don't understand.

44:19My mind is storm and then I've got this which I've been wanting to drop on you for a little while. So Winston Churchill was, he's got this letter from his father when he doesn't make it into Sandhurst. Have you heard this letter? Yeah, it's just so fucking phenomenal. His father sort of accuses him of being risking being a social waste rule. One of the many upper class tops that never makes it no longer will I ever lay even the slightest piece of credence at anything that you say dot dot dot your mother sends her love Churchill was 19 and it's just you know I read this thing and I see someone that's driven to go and do phenomenal things and maybe is one of the greatest military leaders like one of them ever and you think I bet on V day whenever I was June 30th with 1945, something like that.

45:10I bet that he had this brief, relinquishing of the internal tyrant. And then almost immediately it would have come back. There would have been no respite from his degree of low self -esteem. And that was why I was like, dude, you fucking... There's a great book called Churchill and Son about Churchill's relationship with his own son, which was so much better than his relationship with his own father, but still fundamentally... You see the just generational wounds that being a shitty parent can have on a person. And, yeah, if you think doing all these things is going to make dad finally proud, you're going to be very sorely mistaken, right?

45:54Because he's supposed to be proud from the beginning. And he's supposed to be able to make, you know, Mr. Rogers would say, like, you make the world better just by being you. The role of a parent is to communicate that fundamental fact. You are enough. You are enough. I like you as you are. Sure, it is an incredibly powerful motivator to not feel that way. It's also an incredibly tragic motivator and ultimately destructive form of fuel. It's a potent but toxic fuel. Yeah, it's fuel that destroys the engine. It's a one -way trip. You can't come back from it, you can't adjust, and it ruins all the things that you end up achieving.

46:40In other news this episode is brought to you by Momentus. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They have the most rigorous testing and production standards of any supplement company I've ever found. One of my favorite supplements from them are their sleep packs, which contain an evidence back blend of magnesium, L3 and L3 in Ait, Apegianin and L -thienine in research back dostages. If you are struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, stay asleep throughout the night, or if you're not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, this is a great place to start.

47:15Dr Andrew Hyman is actually the scientific advisor for mementus, so if you've ever wondered what supplements he uses or what he would design if he could. This is the answer. Right now, you can get up to 32 % off site wide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentus .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom. A checkout that's live m o m e n t o u s dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. I think there's an interesting sort of two -step process that you can go through. I've spoken about with another friend Alex who very much is driven by that fuel.

47:50I wanted to make more money than my father had made any year, then in a decade, then in a lifetime, then in a lifetime in a day, and you know, he's sort of like... And then you tell your dad, he's like, what about this? You know, it never happens. But one of the things that I quite like from him, which is like kind of like alchemy with this, when you're at the start of any journey, you're going to have bitterness and resentment and a point to prove and a chip on your children, all of those things. And I think that what you really just need is activation energy to get started. And I think that in the beginning, using like, it's a toxic fuel that you can't use for too long.

48:23It's potent, but toxic in the long term. Like, that's the framing for me. And like, you know, when I think back to the reason I started, any of the things I started, it was to prove all of the people from school wronged, you know, get out of this culture that I didn't really like, all of the rest of it. And I'm like, right, okay, I don't need to necessarily feel ashamed of using that fuel. I do need to transcend it and know that I can't keep on relying on it. But I also think, look, if you're somewhere that you don't want to be, use what you've got. Sure. And just not for too long. It's kind of like those rockets.

48:54You know, they're dropping fuel tanks and engines as they go because you need different rockets to escape different levels of the atmosphere. Yeah, it's very hard. It's very hard to go from nothing to something without some kind of motivating factor. But you, the sooner you realize, you're never going to get the satisfaction that you want. They're never going to admit they wrong, you know, you're never, it's never going to be satiated the better, right? You have this moment where you get the thing that you want. You get something that you worked on for a very long time, you get it. And this is a pivotal moment in every ambitious person's life, right?

49:30You win a gold medal, you make the varsity team, you get a check for an incomprehensible amount of money. And I remember I was mowing my lawn when I hit number one for the first time. And it feels like people go, what does it feel like? It feels like fucking nothing. It feels like nothing. It doesn't feel like anything. Because nothing has changed. Like the work didn't change. The only thing that changed is someone recognized it in some way or it almost certainly was not the person or the people that you've wanted it the most from. So in that moment, you win the Super Bowl, do you go, okay. I've now eliminated this fallacy, this idea that if I do this, I will feel good.

50:18Because you don't feel good. That sadness or emptiness or weirdness, you feel you either eliminated as a possibility and then you can continue doing the thing from a new motivation or a new understanding because you actually like doing the thing or you want to have some positive impact on the world or you just want to see how far you can take it. Or you go, oh, it's because it wasn't. I gotta do it twice. I gotta prove that it wasn't a fluke. I gotta prove it wasn't a fluke. Or I, oh, it's not that I won one super, I have to win the most super balls, right? It's not that I made a billion dollars.

50:53I have to make the most money there is. I have to, yeah, I have to, I have, you go, oh, it's just the dosage wasn't enough. The gold posts keep getting moved. How possible do you think it is to realize that the mountain is the wrong mountain to climb without having climbed it. Probably impossible. There, I think there's some. I've not got a lot of it. There's a lot. Ineffable. Like, here's the thing. So it's not hopeless. Like people who are listening this and they're like, just, it is easy for you to say, I've never done. I get it. You're gonna have to experience some of this to get it. But what you're hearing now should help you recognize that pattern when you're in it faster.

51:33Yes. So you don't have to come to this same hard one epiphany or understanding, which by the way almost every appears in every biography and memoir and character study and work of art and literature ever. You don't have to discover it on your own. Just take it, let it sit there. There's this experience you have where you read something and you either doesn't make sense to you or doesn't register to you at all. And then years later something happens, or you experience something, you go, that's what that's about. And you, pieces come together. And a lot of what you're doing early on in your career in life is just accumulating those things.

52:14So you don't know that this is gonna be the final piece of that puzzle until later. It's so funny, man. Like I'm glad that you said, I think it's essentially impossible because I've kind of arrived at that as well. It's far easier to achieve material desires than to renounce them. And that goes for status fall validatedly, and they pick your domain of pursuit of choice. But it's kind of funny where I think I've believed and known that insight. I'm like, would you believe this is true? Yes, yes, I do genuinely believe it. Yes, yes, I genuinely do. And are you still gonna pursue that thing? Yes, I am.

52:51Like it's one of those lessons that you want to face palm yourself to like implode your own head that hard. because you go, I knew this and I believed it. And I still had to go through that. And maybe that's just like the cost of doing business as a human. Look, it's very hard to become successful at something, to make a lot of money, to master a craft. But in many ways, it's easier to do that than to have self -awareness and self -understood. Like, there's an expression, it's easier to be a great man than a good man. Like it's easier to win public office, build an institution, make your mark in history, than it is to just be a good dude, be a good human being.

53:37And I would say the rare thing is to have both. Like how many people can be great at something or be world class at something? Maybe it's impossible to be the number one all time go at something and be balanced, but to be like, well, in contention, in the league, and have a balanced, normal family life be a part like that. And so to me, if the sooner you can go, okay, actually, that's the mountain that I want to climb, correct? That's a worthwhile mountain. That's a mountain that has a positive impact on the people around me. That and so like I just did this book on the virtue of justice. I think when people hear justice, they think like legal system and law and politics.

54:22And that can be part of it, but like just the fundamental level to decide what you're going to be great at. There's a quote from Mark's story, which I love because he's writing this in Meditations himself. He goes, a better wrestler question mark, like because that was his hobby. He liked to basically do an ancient form of mixed martial arts. He's like, a better wrestler, but not a better friend, a better forgiving of faults, a better citizen, a better human being. And so he's saying like, look, why am I working? He's like, I'm working at getting better, but where am I working on just being a good friend or a good human being?

55:00What am I optimizing for? Yeah, and so the decision to say, hey, actually, these two goals are, they're not in conflict with each other, but there's a tension to each other. And the decision to not be what they call an art monster is great. Like Hemingway, great writer, shitty human being, like leaves all sorts of damage in his wake. And that's so true for like a lot of the people that we hold up. And so the decision to go, hey, maybe what I'm aspiring to is to not be a better writer than Hemingway, but to be a really good writer, but not such a piece of shit. Significantly better person. Yeah, dude.

55:35What's easier? I'm obsessed with this whole sort of section. I must have thought about it probably more than any of the topic for the last few years. So what are you optimizing for? What are you sacrificing happiness in order to be successful so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can allow yourself to be happy. If you just cut off this sort of need for validation, it's so interesting. It's so, so interesting. All right, let's do one more. Let's do one more and then we can get into the new book. What do I love from these? This is good. Stop wanting things to be easy and prepare for them to be hard.

56:09That seems pretty straightforward. forward. You think you want it to go, you think you want all green lights and you think you want all the things to pop every time. And you know, show me someone for whom that went well. Where you build it. It's like, look, you want to be, you think you want to have all these natural resources like you want to be super tall. You'd be wonderful if you inherited it had money. And then you look at the people to whom that advantage also created a pretty great deficiency. And then you go, oh no, maybe you need just, there's a right amount of struggle and difficulty.

56:49You don't want everything to go wrong. But it's probably not going to all go right. And so when you get those moments of struggle to just go, this is actually what I asked for. Like this is, this is what I need. You can, I can make the best of anything. That's kind of how I think about it. I've had you say before that you're a naturally anxious person or you have a, sometimes anxious disposition. How have you overcome that or how do you deal and compensate that? I'm working on it all the time. I mean, I go to therapy for it. I build a routine around it. I build, you know, I built my life around it.

57:28It's understanding like my desire to control things or have them be a certain way is a recipe for misery.

57:45It's usually the expectation or the desire that gets you into trouble. I need it to go this way or it will be stressful. And what I notice in my own life, what I'm working on is I noticed the way in which this is where you know you have a compulsion about something like it's one thing just be like anxious like hey is a sky going to fall that I don't wake up just feeling anxious like that what I do is I create sort of a cycle so I pack things where I set things up in a way where they need to go a certain way and then the reward for them going that way is not good. It's relief. And so you have this sort of compulsive cycle.

58:25where you are creating tension and stress. You're just ratcheting that up the stress. And the only reward is that there's some moderate release of the stress. It's never good. Yeah, all of a bookman calls it productivity debt. Yeah. He says you start each day at minus 10 and the best that you can hope for is to get back to zero. Yeah. You don't start at zero and good things take you to plus 10. Yeah, and it's a very fragile place because all these things have to go right for you to feel not shitty. not like, hey, if everything goes right, you're like, what an awesome day. But if everything goes right, you feel like you kept everything perfectly balanced.

59:05Right. And that's it. Yeah. Take me through the highest return routine things that you do. You know, it's weird. I'm very routine oriented person. A lot of what I'm trying to do and having kids has been really helpful slash also awful in the sense that your control over that goes away. And so, you know, just realizing like, hey, if I try to keep things this way, maybe I can keep them this way. I can keep them this way until my kids are 17 or 18, and then I'll wonder why they don't want to come home from college, right? So realizing when you have systems or habits or practices that are in conflict with other things that are important.

59:52So this thing that I've developed that's been a cycle that's, you know, let's say tolerable for me, slash rewarding for me is now in conflict with this other thing that's important to me, which is like the happiness of my household. And so I don't have good answers to this one because it's something I'm still working through and reading a lot about and talking about and working on, but like realizing like, Oh, I've created this like cage that I'm in. And that seems like a strange reward for being successful at the thing that you do. Not that I mind being disciplined or whatever, but I'm saying that like, the reward for getting to a place where you don't really need to think about money, you don't really have anything to prove.

1:00:40your own boss, you decide what you work on, and you have skills should not be waking up at minus 10. Yes. You shouldn't wake up at plus 100. You know, that's probably delusional and not conducive to doing good work or being a nice person. But like, if you can't get to a place where you feel good, where you feel full from that, probably more it's not gonna get to it. Like negative, hedonic adaptation in a way that, as my capacity increases and my expectations about myself increase, I don't take more pleasure and gratitude in the things that I've done and the skills that I've accumulated. I just continue to ramp up the ever increasing relative goal that I have.

1:01:28And yeah, I mean, dude, what an interesting insight to think about the fact, if everything goes well, I end up in a place where I'm in more of a cage than I would have been in before. if I don't think about it carefully. Yes. My seven year old said something the other weekend, he was like, we've got, I was like, we gotta go, you know, like, let's wrap this up guys. And he's like, we've got, he goes, seven year old goes, you know, we've got nothing to do and nowhere to be. And he was totally fucking right. You know, we have, I said it. Wisdom bitched by a seven year old. It's Saturday, there's nothing on the schedule.

1:02:03There's nowhere we have to be, there's nothing we have to do. and yet what I'm doing is the thing that served me so well as a person which is controlled, controlled, don't waste time, do things efficiently, go to the next thing, squeeze one more thing in. First off, it's nonsense and second, I get rewards from that, right? But like the cost is born by this person who's never been to this restaurant before or you know or has to be in school weekend this is his weekend right so so realizing that like yeah the if if the reward is not don't look the reward should for success should not be that you just do nothing and you're good but it should also relieve in some way the emptiness or the needing to prove right like you should you should be coming at it from a place of enoughness rather than the same sort of compulsion or emptiness of the cycle.

1:03:08Exactly. Because it's objectively not true anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I have a good amount of work to do before I have kids. I can't wait to be a dad, but that is going to be a red pill and a half for me to... It's good to try to do that work before. and then in some ways it's like the, you know, you got to succeed to realize success, not to be, you have to, you have to just do it. The forcing function of the child is ultimately going to be the thing. Because it changes you like hormonally and biologically and logistically, you know, it just changes you in every way and so all these things that you could only consider a contemplate before are now real.

1:03:50And you also have this thing of the consequences of your decision. You realize the willingness with which you would subject yourself to abuse or consequences to your decisions and just grit your teeth and bear it. You have to be a real asshole to not be affected by watching the consequences of the decisions or habits or lifestyle that you have manifest in a child. Innocent. It's interesting that it's kind of like that. I think on average people finish 50 % of antibiotics courses, but they make their dogs finish 95%. That we're prepared to torture ourselves in a way, but the second that we have this external thermometer type thing that says things like we've got nowhere to go and nothing to do.

1:04:38Well, have you done any inner child work? I'm going to leave from here to go and do some. I've been doing it every twice a week for a couple of months now. It can be, it's been a transformational thing for me, but I was very stuck understanding who and what that child was. Like my memories of childhood are not great, which is not a great, let me fix this thing I can't remember. Well, which is not a great verdict on your child. Like most people either really good or really bad, they know what they were feeling when they were six or 10 or 11 and you're just like, I don't really remember. That's indicative in it of itself.

1:05:18But when you have a physical manifestation of you at every age and every day, it's you one day older. This isn't a reason to have kids, but it's a very powerful thing about having kids. It's suddenly you go, oh, this is what a seven -year -old thinks. This is what a seven -year -old thinks. This is who, and they look like me and they talk like me. you started to see yourself and your own development arc, despite the fact that much of it was omitted from your own memory in the experience of... And you can have compassion and feel like the part of what inner child work is, as I understand it, is about loving and reparenting that child, who, if you're disassociated from that person, that can be difficult to do.

1:06:06If you've got a surrogate you in front of you. You know, and you also have this benefit, this reality of like, you can see that's seven -year -olds interacting with your own parents. And that's also illustrator. Because they're like, oh, okay, I see. That's so interesting. This is what they obviously need in this scenario. And this is what they're incapable of giving in that scenario, it makes sense. So that's been a powerful thing. Who knew that having kids was the ultimate therapeutic tool? That's what should be prescribed. We don't need psilocybin therapy. Everybody have a couple of kids and just watch them like a Hulk.

1:06:44There's a scene in that church notebook I was talking about where he's sitting talking to his son and his daughter -in -law. And he just hits him and he goes, I'm pretty sure I talk to you this evening more than my father talked to me in his entire life, cumulatively. And so that's an insight that you can only really have with the next generation. Well, I think certainly for me, I'm an only child. So there's no split test. Yes. There's no one there that anchors are the memories. Do you remember when we went to the thing in this, the fish and chip shop and that happened? There's none of that. And so you don't know what's real or not?

1:07:23You don't know what's real. There was never, there's no additional vantage point to look at your memories from or to prompt things that are just latent and probably would be pulled out in that same kind of a way. And yet there's nothing to compare and contrast against. That's just childhood. It's just the way that it was. I have no idea. Normal, abnormal, better, worse. There's no such thing as relativity in this. It's just absolute. How fascinating, man. and I'm really happy that you're using holistically, healthily, using raising a kid to also improve yourself and sort of work on yourself as well.

1:08:07That's really, I mean, what a gift as well that you're unknowingly, that your son is able to give you, you know, just simply by being, that he's able to give you this thing where you go, wow, like by raising him and being rewarded for it, I'm also like fixing myself. But it's a choice you make, right? Because you go, hey, get in the fucking car. Right? You can see the choice that parents make. And I see this because I do this thing called daily dad, which is like a parenting email every day. And you can see, I basically cannot look at the comments anymore because the shitty dad energy is so triggering for me.

1:08:47You know? Like the things that people manage to disagree with. You know, it's interesting. But yeah, you can decide to, it just hit me at some point I go, I think about the, I think about the pain I feel or the problems I've had in my life because of things from my childhood and how those have been passed down generationally and then the decision to go,

1:09:17the default is that that happens again. And so if you wanted to go differently, the amount of work that you have to do is considerable. I think that's a really heroic thing for guys, especially, you know, we're going to get onto it when we talk about justice, but you know, a modern crisis of masculinity and men finding purpose and all the rest of it. Really, if you're millennial, maybe even Gen X, but millennial Gen Z, your parents and you come from different universes in many ways, and they didn't have the tools to be able to do this stuff. And I'm sure that had they have had the tools they would have made changes that would have blah blah blah.

1:09:51But you do. And I mean, what is more heroic than acting as a breakwater or a dam from this sort of weird parental generational patterning trauma response coping mechanism, all of this stuff being like, Hey, guess what? It ends here. Yeah. This is the end. Yeah, or I'm going to do my best to make it not as mostly as it most the end. and say it nice. Yeah, but no, no, yes. Again, we tend to think of justices like, okay, philosophers wanted to debate like the trolley problem or let's discuss whether we live in a computer simulation or not or we wanna discuss, should it have gone this way or that way at this sort of historical or political juncture point?

1:10:36And it's all very interesting, but much more imperative are the sort of day to day decisions we make as people in our own lives. And you know, you want to talk about multi -generational impact. Chances are 95 % of the work that all of us do will be very quickly forgotten. But like, I'm affected by choices that my great -grandfather made. I'm very affected by choices my grandfather made. And I'm extremely affected by the choices that my father made. And so, the decision to focus on that sphere, just as much as you focus on the others, like a fridical responsibility to assume. We'll get back to talking to Ryan in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1.

1:11:1990 % of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. We know that food is always first. Many of us eat well some days, even most days, but no one has the perfect diet and signs keep showing us that our bodies need more nutrients and that we need this support consistently every single day to build a truly healthy body and operate at a high health baseline. AGE1 provides daily nutrients and gut health support in one. No confusion, one thing that works and works for you. Plus, it's NSF certified for sport, meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it. That's the level that it's tested to.

1:11:52Best of all, there is a 90 -day money -back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it, and use it every single day for three months. And if you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. You can get a year's free supply, a vitamin D3, K2, and 5 free travel packs. plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink a G1 dot com slash wisdom that's drink a G1 dot com slash wisdom. You're in the middle of the four stoic virtues at the moment. I think maybe the only one less sexy than justice is temperance. So why say that justice is the most important like what happens without justice is justice is what everything else has to be directed towards.

1:12:34So the courage to put yourself out there to take some risk, is it admirable in pursuit of a socially destructive end or a nonsensical end because you've had your brains scrambled by things that you watched online? It's funny, temperance is not sexy, so I render it as discipline. And it's far away the best performing in the series and almost certainly will be because it's a thing people want. I think they want and definitely need the most. Justice to me though is the North Star, the value that unlocks the others. If you don't have a code, a moral compass, a sense of, you know, what's right and wrong or why you're here or not here, what is any of it for?

1:13:27What is the Talk to me about the relationship between justice and the other three. Mark Zurelis' line is, the fruit of this life is good character and works for the common good. I like that definition of justice. So first off, just the things that you control. Do I keep my word? How do I treat other human beings?

1:13:52Ethics, do I operate under? How do I run my business? How do I, you know, do I litter or not litter? You know, like just the little decisions we make about what kind of person we're gonna be. That's character. And then the other side of that is, you know, the impact that we try to positively have in the world, in the political sphere, the social sphere, the things we write, the things we say, to be participating the issues of our time. So that tension, that the balance of those two is how I would define this idea of justice. like what the right thing is. And then the other virtues are in pursuit of that.

1:14:29Like courage, if we lived in a perfectly just world, it wouldn't take any courage to pursue these things. But we don't, right? In fact, most of the people that we admire, say a Martin Luther King or a Gandhi, we admire them simultaneously, not just for their strong sense of right and wrong, they're not just these monkish figures who retreated from the world, but the courage and the tenacity with which they brought that thing into being. And then we throw the fourth, like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the astuteness. In some cases, like the, the, the, the, the political genius of them, this is where the discipline of wisdom comes in.

1:15:13So that they're, they're these inseparable interrelated virtues that for the most part, you cannot separate. Knowing what the right thing is and doing the right thing are very different things. And so even the virtue of justice, just having a good conscience is in and of itself only so valuable. So that's why it's right thing right now because presumably deeds are important here. There's no point in just thinking about justice. There's a role of practicing and actually doing the thing. Yeah, I don't know about you, but I, like, I didn't spend a lot of time in the book in these sort of incredibly complex philosophical discussions about, you know, should you do this or should you do that?

1:15:56I tend to find at least in my own life knowing what the right thing is is usually pretty obvious to me. Should I say this or not say this? Should I go with this or with that? Should I work with this person or not work with this person? Should I refund to this money or keep this money? You know, should I buy this or buy that? Like, what is right is usually pretty obvious, where the complexity comes in is when the mind works on the reasons why you don't have to do it this time, or you don't have to do it right away. And so I wanted to try to just say, do the right thing, felt to me insufficient.

1:16:38It's doing it now. You know, like, we tell ourselves, hey, I'm gonna go do all this stuff that I'm gonna be really rich in that, maybe a philanthropist where I'm not a garbage person. You know, and then how many people make that turn? We don't make the turn. And so that's sort of where I was coming at it from. Florence Nightingale pursuing, actually doing a thing, competence, pursuing justice. What was the story, though? So she gets, she's this young girl in England. She has rich parents in Victorian England. The expectation of a girl of her stature is not just there's no expectations, there is an expectation of no expectations.

1:17:20Like you are not to do things. And so she just hears one day, she hears this call that, you know, from above that she should find a vocation that she should help the less fortunate. She gets called to nursing and her parents are like, are you out of your mind? You cannot do that. It was considered almost worse than prostitution that a young, rich white woman would be in the same room as these. Like, can't be done. You're working at KFC or something. Yeah, dirty, rowdy soldiers. It was, there was all this immorality applied to it. And so she, you know, based on the sort of, the social pressures of her time, she ignores the call for eight years.

1:18:04Eight years later, she gets the call again. So 16 years go by of her just ignoring the call. And then finally the call becomes much more explicit. And again, to her, there's a religious connotation to this call. But the call is, are you going to let what other people think deter you from being of service, or being in my service? And she finally decides, no, but she realizes that she has to break from her parents in order to do this. Not just from her parents, but from all conventions of the time. and so she decides to volunteer in this hospital. And she very quickly realizes like, there was no place more dangerous in 19th century England than a hospital.

1:18:48Like your mortality rate in a hospital was exponentially higher than anywhere else because that's where they sent all the sick people who got the other people sick. The idea of like keeping a window open or treating wounds or washing your hands, not all this was not there. And so she realizes, I think this is another important part of this idea of doing the right thing. She realizes that doing the right thing isn't just this place or this thing you come at from your heart, but you have to develop like actual competence in the thing you want to do and the good you are trying to do. Because without the competence, what real impact are you able to have with your good intentions?

1:19:29Yeah, she says it only in medicine what we have to come up with this idea of first to do no harm because That was not the the status quo at that time that like most of the things were well intentioned but ultimately harmful and So she actually starts to study these things and she's like hey maybe actually none of this shit We're doing matters if we just fed people better if we stopped giving them moldy, you know So, rancid meat might they just survive. And so, she sort of reimagines medical care, like from the ground up, and she becomes, like, there's this famous long fellow poem about Nightingale, and she's this, you know, apparition in white, and it's beautiful.

1:20:16And one of her aunts who volunteers in the hospital with her was ultimately, that's the thing, when people have the courage to pursue something, they often bring people along with them. And she says like, I hate this poem because that's not what the job is at all. She's not going with a candle from bed to bed helping people. She's like, I wish you could see her writing the letters and pouring over balance sheets and fighting for resources and insisting on sanitary standards. She was like, it's this incredibly unsexy bureaucratic battle that she is a master fighter you're in that is saving these lives, right?

1:20:56So like one of the things I really am fascinated by is not just people who are morally correct, but people who had the political will or the strategic mind or the organizing capacity or the PR mastery to change public opinion about a thing or to build a movement from nothing. We say this now, you know, young people get upset about stuff and they're like, let's protest because the civil rights movement was based on protests. But do you know why the civil rights protestors protested? It's because it was illegal for them to protest. It was a very deliberate tactic to seek conflict with the police just as Gandhi was doing for the police to morally undermine their authority by enforcing unjust laws.

1:21:48Yeah. What was the Gandhi story? I mean, Gandhi understands the British were laughably outnumbered in India. Could he have led a guerrilla movement against the rule of the British almost certainly? Could he have led like a violent uprising against the British almost certainly? But he understood that it wasn't just about the, it wasn't just about sort of self -rule in the political sense, but it was about self -rule in the spiritual and economic sense. It was about becoming independent masters of oneself. But we don't give Gandhi enough credit for the geniusness, for the genius with which he was able to take on the greatest military power of the day without military means and not just like kind of defeat them, but humiliate them and the political astuteness with which he operated is again something we don't understand that non -violence was both an invention like like some attack that did not exist before, and also a genius tactic in a world of mass media, which he operated in, that what he was doing was performing for the newspapers at home and undermining colonialism as a whole.

1:23:18The salt march was done with the intention of, what's the salt march? So he marches from the interior of India to the coast to gather up salt, which was heavily taxed by the British. Basically the British, they don't actually conquer India. They just conquer and loot its resources. And then they use the people who lived there as the means of financing this and the labor to exploit it. And Gandhi proposes this campaign where they'll go on this like 20 -day march from the interior of India to the coast to gather salt, which was forbidden without paying attacks. So first off, just a 20 -day slow -moving caravan is itself this media story.

1:24:08This is also the beginning of cameras, video cameras, but mostly radio and newspaper reports, and the culmination of it with the clash with the British, where unarmed protesters are being slammed with rifle butts and their hands are being smashed by, you know, boot heels is to illustrate the moral abomination that is inherent in colonialism and to ultimately make occupation and exploitation politically and morally untenable. Well, Gandhi fundamentally understands Christianity and what its levers are and he's exploiting, he's shoving it back in their face. This is who you are. This is what's being done in your name.

1:25:01Fagiveness, grace. Yeah. How you treat them the meek. And so Gandhi has a political strategist. We don't think about enough, which is one of the things I got really excited about in the book. Given that there's lots of corruption in the world, why play by the rules when other people aren't? What do you mean? Oh, we're talking about justice here. We're talking about doing the right thing. Sure. A wide, a good person. Yeah, there's lots of corruption in the world. Other people don't need to, or choose to not play by these rules. Sure. They get some advantages. So the expedite success, avoid failure, do the thing, look cooler, or all the rest of it.

1:25:41Why should we play by the rules? You have to look keeping your word as expensive, giving a shit about how your decisions manifest themselves in the environment or other people. These all add costs to the bottom line, right? The idea of caring about whether your employees get to make a living wage or not is in some ways,

1:26:08like self -destructive, right? Like in a fully capitalist society, it's a bad call. But I think there's, I think you can make two cases for it. The first would be like what John McEyed -Hole Foods would say, is that like, you know, when everyone wins, actually the business does much better. The idea of thinking about, expanding your definition of stakeholders actually creates a more sustainable

1:26:35and viable business. business, and also in a media world, makes it easier to market said business, right? Like when there's not a lot of transparency or visibility, you can get away with things that I think are increasingly less possible. The Stokes talk about not doing anything that requires walls or curtains, you know. If full transparency from what you do, what you say, what the public appears to see. And in certain environments, there are walls and curtains, but in an immediate world That can go away like that. So the thing you thought you were getting sure the sweatshop in China is abysmal But China's many thousands of miles away and nobody cares and they don't care until they care Right, then you find out and this thing that you thought was saving you 12 % a year on your margins is evaporated in one singular PR crisis.

1:27:35That's the first thing. That's the first. The second is, well, what kind of person are you? Like there's a stoic argument or there's a Christian argument that you treat people well, you don't treat them poorly because eventually you die and you get judged in heaven. I think that's one argument. I think the other argument is there's a hell on earth that you can live in also. So, and that's a hell where you have to live in denial of the consequences of your decisions on other people. So, the reason not to do it, the reason to be honest, the reason to be decent, the reason to be kind is it sucks to not be those things.

1:28:20It might make you somewhat financially more successful to not be those things. But to what end? What do you do? What do people spend the money on? They spend the money on trying to feel good and you can just feel good by doing good. So living with the consequences of your decisions, I love that idea about like having to deny the things that you did to yourself. There's an expression that the things you work on work on you. Yes. And so if your business, if your life, if how you've set up what you do is inherently exploitative or merciless or toxic, I think it's very unlikely that that is not that, warming its way into who you, the person that you have to be to turn those things off inside you, I think ultimately comes back around.

1:29:19And I'm not just saying that in the karma way, I'm saying that the blind spots that you have to develop, the indifference that you have to develop, sets you up for a kind of catastrophic failure or collapse. you end up making the decision or the decisions that there is a seed of destruction in that. Even in a less utilitarian transactional literal way, most of the people listening to this, if they're an hour and 40 minutes into me, a new offling on about or a psychology, or philosophy, they already think and reflect and ruminate, they consider, they are asking themselves questions like, is this the best that I could be doing in my life?

1:30:09If you think that you are going to be able to do something, which really goes against your principles, your honor, whatever code of conduct you want to live by, and not know that you've done it, you're kidding yourself. Like, if you are a thoughtful person, this is a land of autonomous says, loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to a tone for a certain complexity of mind. And the loneliness side, I've got a sort of mixed opinion on which I've changed recently, but certainly there are taxes that you have to pay to a tone for a complexity of mind. And one of them is that you cannot hide things from yourself in the fog so much anymore.

1:30:49I think that's right. Or the things you have to do to maintain the fog become increasingly elaborate and dangerous in and of themselves. So the kind of oblivion or obliviousness that is required to maintain the fictions is so intense that I think eventually you end up destroying yourself. What was Marcus Aurelius's solution to always keeping your word. What do you mean? Well, he was someone who seemed to have a massive amount of transparency between what he did publicly, what he felt privately and sort of what his intentions were, what he wrote, what he, the way that he behaved, how did the most powerful man in the, like, fucking known world avoid the temptation of not keeping his word?

1:31:42This is why the study of history is so important. So Marcus really says, as these two role models in his life, and it's helpful to have this. He has the positive role model and the negative role model. So Marcus really says, he has this, he's kind of like the boy in the Emperor has no close as a young boy. He's in the court of the Emperor Hadrian, and he's just like notoriously honest. He had like no filter. And Hadrian actually nicknames him like the truest one. It's the play on Marcus's name, which is an madman true. And so he's just like the purity and the honesty of this little boy and Hadrian's sense is something in him and that.

1:32:23But Hadrian was a degenerate, destructive sort of everything that you think that being, having absolute power would do to a person, it does to Hadrian. He gets worse over time and towards the end where Marcus lives with him in this palace, this sort of pleasure, palace monument to his greatness surrounded by sick offense and a secret police. He's haunted by the ghosts of the people that he killed. It's a terrible sad, destructive end. But Hadrian does one good thing, which he sees something in Marcus, and he wants him to succeed him, but Marcus is too young. So he chooses his successor, this man, Antoninus, who becomes known to us as Antoninus Pius.

1:33:09And why does he choose Antoninus? We're told that he watched secretly one day as Antoninus helped his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs. This is moment of goodness, this powerful influential politician just helping out another human being because this is the guy. So he he anoints Antoninus as his successor on the condition that Marcus has to be Antoninus's successor. So these three people who are not related set in motion, this incredible transition of power. And Hadrian probably thought Marcus would, or the Antonines would live for a few years. He lives for 20 years. So Marcus has this handful of years with Hadrian, the who you don't want to be, how it, how badly it can go.

1:33:54And then he has an Antoninus, everything you would want in a ruler, in a father, in a human being. And so he has these two models of what he wants to be. And like, I think there's this war in Marcus, this battle, which whose vision of him is he going to fulfill, right? Which one of these heroes is he going to follow? At least from what you've said there, it sounds like maybe Hadrian even had a degree of self -awareness about his own flaws and he saw in his successor, the seeds of his success, success, success. I think so. And maybe even saw how corrosive and destructive power was and the idea that you shouldn't get it too early.

1:34:44Like why doesn't he just, like why does he, why does he create this transition plan? Yeah. And so, yeah, he sets in motion this plan, and you can see in the beginning of meditation, Marcus is riffing on Antoninus always. He's trying to live up to this model always. I think he's asking himself, in many cases, what would Antoninus do here? So when he found himself, he has unlimited power, he can do whatever he wants. But there is this check against him always, which is this sort of person he doesn't want to let down. It's like an ideal. Yeah, this person whose faith and belief he wants to live up to.

1:35:26And I think that this is the formative influence on Marcus' life. And we just, this is what we talk about. We have to have that in our life. Who is that person? Or who are those people? Who's standard we are trying to bear? And that can help us in these moments where, okay, if I make this decision, people are going to hate me, but it's the right decision. I'm going to make this decision. It's bad for me financially, but it's right for my community or for my employee. And when we have these sort of hard, wrenching decisions, what do we have that sort of swings us in the right direction out of just, is this good for me?

1:36:10Can I get away with this? What will the reaction be? To me that's that's such a critical part of Being this person we want to be you've read some stuff about John Boyd, right? Uh -huh. Yeah, he's got that quote about to be someone or to do something. It's a beer to do is his famous speech that he would give to every ambitious promising young officer, you know like he's basically asking what's your North Star? Is your North Star to have positive impact, to serve your country, to make people better? Or is your North Star rank power influence money, fame? And these things are in conflict with each other.

1:36:53And the sooner you make that choice, the better. And a lot of us think we can defer making that choice, or we deny that it is a choice. And it's only when you come face to face with some really tough decisions, you realize you can't have both. What was that story of Marcus Drusus? Oh, the... Oh, yes, yes, yes. So there's this famous Roman politician. He's powerful and important. He has friends and enemies in this architect notices his house on Capitoline Hill that that is partly visible to pass or spy. And he says, hey, you know, for about five talents, which is an extremely large amount of money, and he was basically saying, I don't know, 500 ,000 or five million, I can make your house totally private.

1:37:46And he says, private. He's like, I'll give you 10 talents, make it entirely visible. And he's not an exhibitionist. What he's saying is that he doesn't want the walls or curtains that Mark's really said we should be wary of the things that allow us to create a distinction between who we are in public and who we are in private. The things we think we can get away with when no one is looking and There's a reason, you know, transparency laws aren't just good for the consumer. They're good for the creators and the manufacturers too, because they allow them to not get away with things. Yeah, that they may be tempted to do.

1:38:32Yes. You know, would it be nice if we all were the captains of our own soul and never needed external accountability to do a thing and never needed the pressure of others? But we do. This is why accountability buddies inhabit setting challenges are so useful. And I've found this with the show when I first started it, almost everybody is able to be unrigorous and inconsistent with the things that they say. Because mum isn't talking to girlfriend, isn't talking to boss, isn't talking to football team captain about your view on anything. And you can kind of just sort of flip -flop between it. And one of the things that I really loved, I have a prescription that everyone should do a fake podcast with a friend once a week, records for 30 minutes on their phone about an idea.

1:39:22And the reason that I think it's useful is it causes you to be very rigorous with the things that you say. It's good for communication, it's good for other stuff. It's like, hey, I actually need to make sure that what I said last week and what I said this week, and what I'm going to say next week, is in line, that doesn't mean that your opinions can't change, but that if they do change, you have an anchor that tells you, oh, I don't think that thing anymore. and why, as opposed to just allowing yourself to be blown around or to say whatever is convenient to the person that's in front of you. Yeah, and to have articulated, hey, I think it's fucked up when people do X.

1:39:52And now I'm now later you find yourself in a position to do X, which you didn't have the temptation or the opportunity to do before. And now you've gone on the record, so to speak. And it's a little more real. And I think that's important. There's something about philosophy as something you talk about and do and write about yourself and publish and whatever that I think should keep you, keeps you honest and makes you better in a way that just reading a book or thinking about a thing doesn't quite do. So yeah, there's obviously, as a creator, you always want to be worried about hypocrisy, but also like you should be falling short of what you're saying, because you should be creating an aspiration ideal that is hard to live up to.

1:40:39What was Harry Truman's perspective on honor and ethics? Harry Truman's was one of the most incredible presidents in American history because basically you have a regular guy just suddenly the most powerful person in the world and a guy who had struggled, one of the last presidents had ever go to college, but he had kind of a very clear moral code which actually he literally derives from Marx's Relius, the sort of forest -to -work virtues. There's a copy of his copy of meditations is there with his underlines of these things. So you have this guy that studied these people historically as this fan of history and then he finds himself there.

1:41:23Suddenly, the most powerful person in the world, the sole possessor of nuclear weapons, the only non -ravaged nation after the Second World War. And now he has to put in practice all these ideals, all these things that he talked about. But it was, it's this remarkable story because with Truman, he literally comes up in one of the most corrupt political machines in American history. The Kansas City Mah basically is controls democratic politics there. And he sort of gets, he runs for office, They think maybe there'll be someone that can do business with and he's so like unflinchingly honest and good They're like we got to get this guy out of here, but he's so popular.

1:42:07They make him senator Because because like it's it's more convenient to have him far away than oh Yeah, yeah, and then he becomes the senator and You know basically Doesn't have the same political ambitions as all the other senators. So he gets made vice president and and And then suddenly finds himself president. It's this like remarkable trajectory where you had this fundamentally decent human being. One of, there's this amazing quote, they asked a bunch of people who grew up with Harry Truman like were you, when he became president, were you like nervous? Like, and he was, and they asked this guy who was the, the format on a railroad that Truman had worked on as a boy.

1:42:53And he said, I wasn't worried. He's like, that kid is all right from every direction from his asshole on out. So you just get this kind of blue collar work ethic of just like a fundamentally decent human being that supposedly isn't, doesn't work in politics, right? It doesn't, but it does. It gets in there and then he has to make some of the most consequential decisions of the 20th century that are by the way extremely unpopular at the time. Every single one of them is unpopular. He leaves the presidency as close to the, least popular president of all time. And now is regularly ranked as one of the greatest presidents of all time, because that's what doing hard, right things tends, that's how it tends to go.

1:43:39It's that they age well. We spoke about sort of transparency between you out to the public, this sort of scrutiny, the skepticism that can be useful as being a controlling mechanism, but much of the things that we do are just in private. It's whether or not you do throw a letter on the ground, whether or not you say this thing, stand up for whatever you blah blah blah. How do we know if we're doing the right thing? My favorite story in the book is this story about, there's this poet, Daniel Deprema. She's a aspiring female poet. She's at this party in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It's all the New York, all the beats are there.

1:44:17Ginsburg is there, Kerawak is there. All the, it's, it's where you want to be the coolest movement, coolest artists all in one place. And, uh, you know, the party's just getting going and she gets up to leave like nine o 'clock and they go, where are you going? You know, nobody leaves a party like this. And she says, um, I've got to go relieve my babysitter. She had a young kid. And Kerouac looks at her and goes, if you don't forget about that fucking babysitter, you are dead as an artist. And And you could imagine a person without a lot of confidence or without a moral compass. This is where you are inducted into the pantheon of talented artists who are shitty people.

1:45:01Like here's a much more successful, powerful person telling you that success is built on selfishness and partying and hanging out in the scene. And she has the grit. She looks at him and she goes, if I don't go relieve the babysitter, I'm dead as an artist. And she walks out. And what she would say later is that she knew that she had given someone her word that she would be backed by a certain time, right? Like that the babysitter, hey, I'll be back by eight. But she also knew she gave her kid, her word, which she had her, right? That that, that, hey, I'm going to put you first, or I'm going to take care of you.

1:45:43I'm not going to abandon you. And so to her, the, the, the breaking of the word and the breaking of the discipline are the same thing. So that, the same, the same commitment when you say, hey, I'm going to get up at 9 a .m. tomorrow and write. or, hey, I'm going to finish this by this date because I signed a contract with the public. These are all the same commitments, right? And so I just, I love that story because, you know, again, we think of justice as this high, pollutant, fancy, abstract notion. And it can be, you know, all manner created equal and, you know, saving the less fortunate, but it's also just like who we are in these day to day decisions.

1:46:30And when we make these, when we do the harder thing, when we do the thing that's better for someone else, but worse for us, you know, that's usually a sense we're kind of on that right track. When we're not acting in our own naked self interest, but we're considering what the stoves who call the common good or something bigger than ourselves. That to me is like a check against that. But I just, I think like is, is what's the easier thing here? You know, the easier thing is usually the wrong thing and the harder thing is usually the right thing. They say it's not a principle unless it costs you money, you know, and asking yourself, hey, am I acting out of expediency here or am I acting out of principle?

1:47:15These are the kind of decisions that the virtue of justice to me is all about. But not, you know, should we provide weapons to Ukraine or not? You know, what, what, what, what, you know, should we pass this law? What's the best political solution to this problem? Again, all of this is extremely important and part of the virtue just. But it starts with these sort of fundamental decisions that we make as individuals over the things that we have the most control over. Isn't it interesting that there's this odd tension between what feels like the right thing to do. How much is my subconscious going to torture me this evening when I try to go to sleep having done or not done this thing?

1:47:57So there's this degree of instinct and releasing and sort of just allowing for this to come up. And then there's also the temptation for that, for some of your instincts to do these act opposite thing. So there's this, I need to sort of engage the front brain and then turn it off. What's like, it's the same with like thinking faster slower. We have like, we have these massive, incredible cognitive tools. And then we also have these embarrassing, preposterous cognitive biases. They find like even baby, they've done studies of babies. This is psychologist Paul Bloom. Like even babies, he has a rose book called Just Babies, like Justice Babies.

1:48:39Like that even in infants, they can do tests that like indicate fairness or unfairness or basic sort of the illustrations of moral principles that in a way that a baby, a child would understand and that babies instinctively know these things, that these notions of right and wrong fairness and unfairness are there in some cases at our absolute earliest days. I'm pretty sure that there's a study that was done on giving cucumber slices to monkeys as well. And if they see that one monkey in a different cage which is given three and I only got one, then they get angry about it. The Christians call us like the hunger and the thirst for righteousness.

1:49:22There's our inherent sort of moral capacity. It's there. Programmed into us. And then we have these things on top of it, right? We have the incentives of the market. We have the ideas of our culture. We have the example that we saw with our parents. And then we just have the positive and negative reinforcement of like, if I do this, it'll be easy. And if I do this, it'll be hard. And so we have to have this ability to sort of intuitively trust that instinct. And then also have the ability to step back and question and go, Hey, is this who I want to be? You know, like, you know, you think about something like the practice of nonviolence, the incredible discipline required to not do the most human thing.

1:50:10There's this famous story of Martin Luther King. It's on stage. Obviously, he's preached about nonviolence. He's talked about nonviolence. He's giving this talk and a neo -Nazi storms the stage and just begins beating the shit out of him. And so here he is. He's talked about it. He's being watched by all these people and he has this choice. And it's not even a choice, right? Because it's wired into us to defend ourselves and then to eliminate the threat between us. I mean, this is like the most monkey part of us. And one of the observers who watched this, they talked about first the sickening sound of flesh on foot.

1:50:53Like you're watching this man be beaten. Exactly. And instinctively his hands go up. And then they said they'd never forget at the rest of their life the deliberate dropping of the hands. that he exposed himself to it. And so that is in, I'm just getting goosebumps thing about. That is, whatever training goes into being a great fighter, that's a level of training above that thing, at a transcendent like spiritual level. It's also crazy, but the point is he's saying, like, I'm gonna prove this to you. I'm gonna show you that this is how it works. And then the first words out of his mouth when he's the neo -Nazi is ultimately grabbed is he goes, don't hurt him, don't hurt him, and he goes backstage and he talks to him.

1:51:43And so this was the culmination of years of study and practice. And this is something we don't give the suffragettes enough credit for, the civil rights protesters enough. They trained them, like they would train like the sit -in protesters who would sit in the segregated lunch kind of as they knew the people, the first round, they would be ignored. and then suddenly people would start coming up and getting in their face and then people would spit on them and then people would kick them and then people would knock them off the chairs. Their job was to not respond, was to just sit there. And then someone would go to the ground and the next thing was that they all had to jump on top like they would practice how you would defend with a human igloo.

1:52:28Yeah, how you would defend without using violence, someone from violence. And this practice, again, it's this transcendent level of discipline and spiritual pureness, but also there's also this kind of Machiavellian political genius behind it because they also know it's being immoral and watched. and that the person who wins the bout of violence ultimately loses in the realm of public opinion and probably leaves sick and you know like you can't senselessly beat a person for sitting at a lunch counter without it having some effect on your soul. And also the difference in how that's interpreted, if that person fights back, it seems like a much fairer fight.

1:53:21Yes. As opposed to it being this completely disgusting one -sided aberration. Yes. And so I'm just fascinated by that. And I think what we take from that is not, hopefully that's not anything that anyone here ever needs to do. But what you take from that is the idea. It's not simply that they were right. It's not simply that they were morally correct. but the ability to understand and master the self in pursuit of the thing is what changes the world. And it changed the thing that at the beginning of the civil rights movement, or at the beginning of Gandhi's campaign, not just his campaign in India, but first his campaign in South Africa, if you would ask someone was changing this possible, was this outcome that flash forward 10, 20 years was the outcome, is that possible?

1:54:19It was obviously impossible. Fundamentally, you fundamentally transformed society and that comes from that. The afterward book, you talk about the adoption of stoicism by young men struggling with meaning and direction and purpose and stuff like that in life, given that you are the best known popularizer of stoicism at the moment, what do you make of that sort of absorption and the good and bad elements? I have a little note card next to my desk that I look at every single day because I am in this It's an incredibly strange position of being associated with and credited as a kind of representative of the thing I did not invent and that is what I am working on being, not what I am, but what I'm working on being.

1:55:14It's the thing that changed my life. I just happened to have communicated about it and brought my same journey to other people. So I have this weird relationship with it in that I feel, well, I feel very graced by it, but I also feel, I don't feel like it's mine because it isn't. And so I feel like I have a responsibility. And so I have this little little card in the no cards is, are you being a good steward of stoicism? And I try to judge my decisions based on that metric. So, you know, what the audience wants and what is most palatable and what is most algorithmically friendly, and then what is true, and what is important, and then what is most in line with what the stokes actually said.

1:56:03These are not always the same thing. And I don't know if you see this with your audience, but there is a strand of nihilistic,

1:56:17angry, disenfranchised sort of group of mostly young men, but I guess it's on both, it's probably genderless at some level also, where, and it is an incredibly powerful, if not lucrative, vein or that you could tap into or wave you want to surf. And I sense that energy and I see people, you know, we talked about to be here to do, I see people going, hey, is that, is that what I, is that, and I'm very sensitive to that and I'm very, I'm very not interested in, in becoming subservient to that. Like, I understand the frustration and the grievance. I get it, And I get that there are problems in our society, but to me, Stoicism is a philosophy of self -respecting responsibility for the self, but then acting like fucking adult, like who tries to make the world better, as opposed to wanting to see it burn.

1:57:26Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, this culture of cynicism is something that I've railed against an awful lot. It's one of the reasons that I was so happy moving to the US. There is a big tall, poppy culture in the UK. It is a cynical crabs in a bucket style mentality. Population densities way higher, weather's way shitter was surrounded by water. We've got this sort of weird heritage which means that all of the ossified social classes are in there. There's a lot of things I think about this a lot about why it's changed. And I came up to America and it's like everybody here has got permanent first line cocaine energy.

1:58:00Like everyone's so fucking enthusiastic about what's going on. sure that can be parodied and annoying at times. But for me I seem to flourish around that and I want to make enthusiasm great again. I like I think to me enthusiasm is one thing I'm a big believer in earnestness instead. Earnessness has a kind of a sincerity and a realism as well. A realism and a kindness to it and an openness and an honesty to it that I love. But you know the they call it sort of brosism. And there is a version of talking about and writing about and reading about stoicism in which you only focus on what it does for you, right?

1:58:43And I think early in my life and my career, so I relate to it. I'm not judging anyone. Oh, stoicism helps me wake up earlier. It helps me do hard things. It helps me manage my emotions. This is all great stuff, but it's not the full, Well, the virtues are much more inclusive than that, and they ask more of you than that. They offer, but they also ask. You know, and what they ask is that you care about other people. After you've mastered yourself with this philosophy, how can you use that mastery to help other people? Yeah, in the ancient world, the Epicurians retreated to the Garden for pleasure, but for their own self -improvement and development, because the world is messy, because people are shitty, because things are broken.

1:59:33And stoicism said, that's all well and good, the self -improvement, self -mastery stuff. But if you abdicate your responsibility, who steps in in your place? Usually a worse person. Sure, people. Yeah, and they say, who's supposed to run things? Who's supposed to be involved? Who takes the responsibility upon themselves? And so I think stoicism is a philosophy that gets involved, that gets engaged, that tries to make a positive difference. Again, not always by becoming a senator or something, but by how you choose to run your business, how you choose to run your life, how you choose to show up and do things for your family, for your community, for your neighbor who's struggling.

2:00:15To me, that's the stoicism that I'm interested in, not the sort of like manipulated, you know,

2:00:24toxic stoicism of your sort of Andrew, Like the idea that Andrew Chait would be a hero to someone is so laughably preposterous to me. When you actually see who that person is and what they do to say nothing of the sort of marketing techniques of it. Like I just, that's not what the philosophy is about. Well, I think stoicism kind of has a certain areas that lend itself to the sigma male, like lone wolf grind set mode type thing, which is this kind of denial of emotional vulnerability, this massive amount of self -reliance. This sort of odd self -righteous sense of about doing hard things and about leaning in, but that is only one quite parodied element of a much broader philosophy.

2:01:21The philosophy is not there to make you a better sociopath. Stoicism is not a philosophy to help you suppress the pesky emotions that come up when you're running an international webcam ring of exploited women, right? Like, it's not to help you do not have to feel human emotions because you're exploiting or manipulating people, right? Like, and that's obviously an extreme case, but the decision of like, you know, hey, I know this thing doesn't work, but people like to hear about it. Or I know this guest would be popular, but they're full of shit. Or, hey, I know, I think we both see this a lot where it's like, this person is obviously unwell, but they make good copies.

2:02:15So I'm going to bring... So just the decisions about... These are hard decisions. These are hard choices. These are... It's not that there's no right or wrong, but what I'm saying is that they're complicated. Stoicism is not... Cutts through the gourdian knot. Don't have to think about it. You never have to worry. Just optimize for whatever. Yeah. And by the way, all the stuff in Stoicism is just don't care about what other people think, ignore the critics. whatever, it's not to shield you from the criticism that you're getting for doing awful things, right? Like that's not, so there's this way you can pick and choose from stoicism to enable you to do things that are not good, that are not right.

2:02:56And so I just, I talked a lot, I just focused the afterward, I tried to put my own journey, and again, I relate to it. Like in my 20s, there were people I worked for that I shouldn't have worked for. There were things I took on that in retrospect why did I take them on and I tried to do a lot of work on myself about Understanding what those motivations were understanding what those The impact was trying to atone for those things, but trying to set your your life up so When people see it you don't have much to be ashamed of is Again, what this idea of virtue is about there's a famous story about a Spartan king the bumps into this this boy and his lover, you know, in the marketplace and they see him and he sees them and they blush very heavily and he goes.

2:03:49You should probably not spend time with people whose face changes color when you're seeing or who makes your face change color when you're seeing. right? The idea of like, hey, if I had to open the books, if I had to disclose the suppliers, if my email was hacked, how would that look? And to try to be that person, which goes all the way back to Adam Smith, Adam Smith wrote this book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments before he wrote a wealth of nations. And it's based on Stoicism. He said, operate as if you had an impartial spectator on your shoulders at all times and to make the decisions and go, hey, what would I do here if I had it if someone was watching?

2:04:30Is a check against the sort of the expedient or the self -interested impulse that we all have? Paul, yeah. Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen. Ryan, it's really fun. I very much appreciate when I read your stuff, I try and tap into a much more virtuous, higher version of myself. So thank you for constraining the sort of x -fuck by that I used to be. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. DailyStoke .com, DailyStoke on pretty much all platforms. And then if you're a parent, you want to apply some of this wisdom stuff to your family life, daily dad, same on all the platforms.

2:05:10And then the new book is right thing right now. But any of the books in the series, hopefully, will get you going. Hell yeah. I appreciate you. Thanks, man.