Ryan Holiday on the Case for Stoicism in an Age of Distraction

16:26Ryan Holiday:Should I be doing this or not? It's just like, hey, can this get funding or not? Will this go viral or not? And I think the Pope is sparking something there, which I think great philosophers and spiritual leaders are supposed to spark, which is go like, hey, that's all well and good, but there are some other questions to consider here. And these are, in fact, the most essential questions to consider.

16:49Kara Swisher:It's also not anti-tech, actually, if you read it carefully, if you read every word. And that's what I thought he did. And really, I wonder if the Pope is a Stoic. He feels a little bit.

16:58Ryan Holiday:You know, I was just in Rome and we went and saw a blessing of the Pope and you see him going around in the little Popemobile. And it was funny, you know, they'd be like, oh, you're American. You're like, Bob from Chicago. Like the idea of the Pope being a human being that's accessible to Americans is interesting. I like to point out that Marcus Aurelius and the Pope have the same title, Pontifex Maximus, that Rome absorbs, Rome as the Catholic Rome absorbs so much of the iconography and the names and the words and the titles of the Romans and then the Stoics, this sort of continuity is interesting to me.

17:37Ryan Holiday:But yeah, I thought the work was really interesting. And I just wish we would, I wish we were having those kinds of discussions. I think this is what's really great about the Odyssey. I hate that so much of the dialogue about the Odyssey is about who should have been cast and this or that. But the Odyssey is supposed to be contentious and create debate, and Odysseus is a hero and a villain for the purposes of spurring—

18:06Kara Swisher:He's a complex man. Yes.

18:08Ryan Holiday:It says it right there in the first line. Yes. That's the whole point, is you're supposed to argue at these different ways and then make different choices in your own life.

18:18Kara Swisher:100%. We'll get to tech in a second, but every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.

18:24Ryan Holiday:Hello, my name is Louis Swisher. I'm Kara's eldest son. And like many young people, I found comfort in the words of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. But I do wonder, what is the purpose of a philosophy of self-regulation in a modern world that incentivizes self-access and indulgence? Ooh, that's a great question. I love that. Thank you. I raised him right. Yeah. I mean, the Stoics were thinking about this themselves, right? So, Marcus Aurelius can do anything he wants, right? And we know, we can guess at what some of those things might be based on the behaviors that we know from the other emperors.

19:01Ryan Holiday:Like, they were remarkably creative at the excesses they figured out how to go to. So Marcus Aurelius could do all that. But I think what he realizes is that that's actually not freedom, but a kind of a punishment. That Tiberius isn't actually having a good time on this pleasure island that he's, you know, throwing people off of cliffs when they fall out of favor with him or whatever. That this sort of excess is a kind of a prison. And so the idea for the Stoics is like not whether you can or can't, but whether you should or shouldn't. And I think, in a way, it's remarkable that your average person in America 2 ,000 years later could relate to the luxuries and temptations of a Roman emperor.

19:46Ryan Holiday:But that is how fortunate we are as a society, right? And that we have a level of choice and agency that would be unimaginable, not just to the ancients, but even to people a couple of generations ago. So it then becomes imperative on us to go, well, how should I live? What should I do? and what kind of person do I want to be? And so those are the questions that we have to ask. And the answer becomes, what kind of life do you want to live? Do you want to, because you're free to do anything, actually become a slave to whatever your impulses are? Like Epictetus looking around at Nero's court, even though he's literally enslaved, I think what's striking to him is that he's actually freer than many of these people.

20:29Ryan Holiday:Like he tells one of my favorite scenes, he sees this guy sucking up to Nero's cobbler to win favor with the emperor. And he goes like, this guy's to blow smoke up the ass of a guy who makes shoes because he doesn't want, you know, to lose favor with this deranged emperor.

20:46Kara Swisher:Yeah, that sounds familiar.

20:47Ryan Holiday:It does, it does, right? It's like, do I want to go to the Melania premiere? Yeah, yeah. And you go, okay, if a billionaire can't say no to doing something that they obviously don't want to do, Is it actually that great to be a billionaire? Correct. I'm sure it's great. Is the billionaire as powerful as you think they are? And the answer is no, because there's things that they can't not do.

21:12Kara Swisher:Yeah, we'll get to these billionaires in a second. It's sort of like the, why would you have fuck you money if you can't say fuck you, essentially. Right? Totally. And to me, it's more like, I always think, I did a podcast on succession. I call them cashmere prisons, right? They're in prisons. And when I look at a lot of the tech people, I'm like, I can leave. You can't. You're Kashmir prison. Like, you have so much stuff around you now. You can't move. And I feel much freer. But how do you grapple with the idea that Marx really, of course, was a dictator, if you can apply that, to our modern era?

21:45Kara Swisher:He had every choice. But I guess we're like that, too. We have every choice, at least in the United States.

21:50Ryan Holiday:I like to think of Marx a little bit like Thomas Jefferson. You know, he said all men are created equal, but we have to take him literally, even though he probably didn't mean it. There's an interesting passage at the beginning of Meditations where Mark Strews says, I encountered Thrasia, Helvidius, Cato, and Brutus and conceived of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and of speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. So I like the idea of it. And then it's hard to escape the fact that Rome had ceased to be a republic and it's now this empire.

22:28Ryan Holiday:He doesn't choose this. How much can he change the system? I don't know. I'm fascinated by the moral predicaments that these philosophers get themselves into.

22:41Kara Swisher:Yeah. I own slaves and yet I'm asking for freedom.

22:44Ryan Holiday:Yeah. And look, it's easy to talk about it from where I sit or where a Harvard professor sits, where you don't have the same ethical conflicts because you're not actually in the arena, like literally or figuratively. So I like that the Stoics were involved to a degree that their philosophical principles are being tested. I don't like that they didn't always pass these tests, right? Like Seneca would be a familiar character in our era in that he starts off as Nero's sort of governor and teacher and guardrails and towards the end is widely seen as his enabler and doesn't break with him until far too late.

23:24Ryan Holiday:So I have no problem criticizing the Stoics. I have no problem putting them up and analyzing their moral predicaments. I just, I think ultimately the game should be thinking about, you know, what choices are we making in our own lives that give us evidence that if we were thrust in such a position, we would do anything differently.

23:48Kara Swisher:Yeah. How often do you have to think about the Roman Empire? Because the relationships you can make very easily between now and then.

23:54Ryan Holiday:I mean, look, our system is based on Rome. They're called senators because that's what they were called in Rome. It's called the capital because in Rome there was Capitoline Hill. Like, we are living in a system designed by people who are cosplaying as the Greeks and Romans. And so I do think about Rome all the time. Like, Rome is my Roman empire. And I love it and I find it endlessly fascinating. It's also just there. It's like it was the center of the world. It was the most powerful empire on Earth. And so a lot of the predicaments and dilemmas that America is in, a lot of the forces acting on America are the forces that were acting on Rome just as it was acting on the Greeks, you know, in the Socratic period.

24:39Kara Swisher:And the British.

24:41Ryan Holiday:Yeah, sure. I mean, the reason you study history is to understand the present. And I think they have a lot to teach us, both good and bad.

24:52Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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28:21Kara Swisher:so as we noted stoicism has gained a lot of popularity with young men today there's been much written about the ways young men in particular struggling in modern society scott my partner on pivot writes and talks a lot about this so it makes sense that young men would turn to stoicism as a means of finding resilience and strength it's either that or peptides and tea i guess but can also be warped into a more problematic message of be tougher hide your feelings or that it holds secrets to becoming rich and powerful. Be very clear with people. What does it say about what it actually means to be a man for people who sort of take it and use it for whatever purposes?

29:01Ryan Holiday:Well, one of the most interesting pieces of writing, or I guess it was speaking that survives to us as a little essay, is from Musonius Rufus, who's the teacher of Epictetus. And he asks, should women be taught philosophy? And ultimately where he comes down is the idea that virtue is virtue. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. You know, he says like, you don't really care what the sex of your hunting dog is, just whether they do their job. Or, you know, is the horse fast or not? That's all that really matters. And so although Stoicism, because the ancient world was inherently patriarchal, 95 % of the Stoics we know about are men.

29:41Ryan Holiday:and a lot of the metaphors are wrestling and fighting and, you know, things women weren't allowed to do. That being said, there were plenty of Stoic women. One of the most impressive Stoic women in history is Cato's daughter, Portia, who assassinates Julius Caesar with her husband, Brutus, though she gets sort of short shrift in both Shakespeare and the Plutarchian histories of it. I guess what I would say is that Stoicism does talk a lot about being a man, but it primarily talks about what it means to be a good person, like what our obligations as a human being is as a member of society, of which I think obviously being a man or a woman is a part of.

30:21Ryan Holiday:So I do think there's this like sort of overemphasis on what it can teach young men. Like I know from my talks that like a good chunk of the audience is women in positions of leadership. It's not like women are not stressed out and overwhelmed in dealing with things, like, of course they are. So I don't want it to be a particularly gendered philosophy.

30:42Kara Swisher:You know, you found Stoicism as a young man across his lives. You were in early 20s. You were director of marketing for American Apparel. It faced many PR crises under its problematic founder, Doug Charney. What a job. And in your first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which I read I liked a lot, you admit to using some pretty unseemly publicity strategies to generate buzz. is that what brought you to it? Like, what the fuck am I doing?

31:07Ryan Holiday:It's one of those things where it takes a while to sort of get its teeth into you. I think the reason that young men are attracted to stoicism is that it speaks so clearly about mastering your emotions, about, you know, fulfilling your potential, about being great, about accomplishment. It is a philosophy that can make you stronger and faster and more productive and tougher and all these things that I think young men are particularly after. So if that's the way in, I'm all about it. And that was certainly the way in for me. I was thinking like, hey, how does this make me better professionally?

31:46Ryan Holiday:It took a good chunk of my 20s for the ethical framework of the philosophy to trickle all the way down. And for me to see that actually these things are related to each other, that they're equally essential. So I think as a motivational philosophy, the entry point is often there, which is good. You know, I mean, the early stuff that even someone like Jordan Peterson was talking about is great. You know, make your bed, read the great books, you know, find your purpose. All that stuff's really important. The problem is when that gets yoked to sort of grievance politics and stuff. Yes, yeah.

32:26Kara Swisher:I call it the grievance industrial complex. Totally. Totally. So what motivated you? What got you there to actually start living stoicism as opposed to chewing on it in your head like that?

32:36Ryan Holiday:Yeah, I mean, watching somebody destroy a billion-dollar company because they were a slave to their appetites and their ego was quite eye-opening, you know? Doug Charney built an incredible company that was making the world a better place. Like a garment worker should not work for 50 cents an hour in a sweatshop in Guatemala, especially when that T-shirt is being sold for$50, right? Like he used to say like, you can't make a bikini for$6 without fucking somebody over. And he's totally right. You know, like so much of the fashion industry is built on exploitation and people make millions of dollars for it.

33:13Ryan Holiday:But it comes at the expense of the workers. It comes at the expense of the environment, comes at the expense of all these things. So I very much believed in that company. and I was very inspired by it and I loved it. And then watching him destroy it to choose, you know, he could have walked away. They offered him a bunch of money that said, look, you basically took this thing as far as you can take it and it's not going well. The stock price is 70 cents. Like we got to bring in some adults. And he was like, I'd rather burn it to the ground. And so to watch -

33:45Kara Swisher:Yeah, I know that, yeah.

33:47Ryan Holiday:Right, watching somebody do that, But I think it, first off, again, we talked about the timelessness of these things. Like, that character exists in all sorts of works of history and literature. And so to watch that, I think it was eye-opening. And I never was part of the sort of the scene of that company. My wife and I have been together for 20 years. I didn't go to the parties or do any of that stuff. But just realizing that that sort of chaos and dysfunction and megalomania was ultimately like it always ended in the same place was was for me a really powerful inoculation against Trumpism is a powerful inoculation against some of the Silicon Valley ism that Elon Musk ism.

34:29Ryan Holiday:It's like I've I've seen I saw a microcosm of this. When you were, yeah, no, absolutely.

34:35Kara Swisher:Now, in your interview with comedian Hasan Minhaj, you talked about the thing that Marcus really just wrote about most was the common good and how stoicism is inherently a philosophy about our obligations and responsibility to other people. Yes. But as we were talking about earlier, our tech and social media puts a premium on the opposite, on the individual, on self-projection, on performative behavior. And it's turned us all into marketers or ourselves, our personal brands. Talk about how you counsel young people about the way social media takes us away from that. It's the opposite direction of stoicism.

35:07Ryan Holiday:Yeah, it's like a recipe for being a hyper sociopath. Like, it's like, hey, let me take your worst impulses and exaggerate them and incentivize them and monetize them. And look, I do think this is why mentally ill people do so well on social media. They lack some of the restraints and the shame that is kind of a final check on some of our worst behaviors. They can fully turn themselves over to the algorithm in a way that I don't think the rest of us can. What I love about Stoic philosophy is that ethical core that we're talking about, that it says— There's a great passage of meditations that I've been thinking about lately.

35:52Ryan Holiday:Mark Srealis is talking about how everything is going wrong and it's sideways. And he says, you know, I was once fortunate and then at some point fortune abandoned me. And then he says, but that's not true. We make our own luck. He says, like, we make our own good fortune. And so you might think he's about to say, you know, like this pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of make your own luck. And he says, like, good luck and good fortune is good actions, good character and good intentions. And so you think about what a refreshing frame of reference that is for someone who has power and responsibility over a lot of people.

36:30Ryan Holiday:And then you sort of compare that to the model we have today, whether it's political or, you know, economic, we're talking about the leaders of big companies, like this transition towards like, hey, my fundamental obligation is to shareholder value or to my investors or to scale or to my own, you know, my own self-interest, you see just how fundamentally distortive that is.

36:54Kara Swisher:Now, what's interesting, though, at the same time, I think about this a lot, how to reconcile the inherent tension. Myself, and you would probably have the same thing, you're growing your platform, so am I, and making money in no small part to social media, and you have millions of followers. Talk about how you reconcile that because I don't think all of it is bad for sure. No. But it does incentivize, as you said, narcissism.

37:18Ryan Holiday:And look, like book publishers are multi-billion dollar companies selling through multi-billion dollar companies, selling through multi-billion dollar companies, moved by multi-billion dollar trucking companies. Like there's really no way to sort of operate in this world or in this system with totally sort of clean hands. Like you're always going to be dealing with unsavory trade-offs or dilemmas. So I think that's part of it. The thing I get a lot is people go, well, what would Seneca think about, you know, you doing this or that? I go, look, Seneca inherited wealth and lived on an estate tended by his many slaves.

37:54Ryan Holiday:Like, there is something fundamentally more honest and decent about our system where you make something and if someone likes it, they purchase it under their free will. And if they don't like it, they can get their money back or not purchase it. But I do think the sort of world of commerce is not inherently in conflict with art or the exchange of ideas. So I don't have a problem with making money or working on these platforms. I think about, am I contributing a positive message? Am I carrying water for people that shouldn't have water carried for them? Am I providing intellectual cover for bad things?

38:35Ryan Holiday:I think more about that. Like, I don't think about so much of like, what platforms am I on? I think about what ideas or people am I having on my platform? Like, I've had the number of friends I've texted that said, look, I realize this episode will get lots of downloads, but you don't have to have RFK Jr. on your podcast. Like, you don't—there's no law that says you have to interview this person. And in fact, you should think about when you are interviewing him, you know, what message you are allowing him to propagate into the world. Like, you can't silence him or shut him down, but you can decide not to contribute to the propagation of fundamentally horrible ideas.

39:18Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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40:57Kara Swisher:So like we've been talking about, a lot of major figures in tech, mega-politics, and the manosphere claim the mantle of stoicism. I have listened to them. But you correctly say they get a lot of things wrong. They did a similar dance around Yuval Harari, who surprised them by thinking they're awful in many ways. You said there are worse things these tech people can study than stoicism. But in tech world, embrace the philosophy. It feels like it's been stripped of its essential parts, like courage and justice. Talk a little bit about that, because they feel betrayed by some—they definitely are betrayed by me, and I have betrayed them.

41:33Kara Swisher:But you—talk about you. You've all went under this. Sam Harris had this moment with them.

41:39Ryan Holiday:Yeah, I have been slowly removed from all the group texts that I was once on. And some of the conference invites have certainly evaporated. evaporated. That's a favor to you.

41:51Kara Swisher:Yeah.

41:52Ryan Holiday:It's been weird. I don't feel like I've changed that much. And it's been interesting to watch people radicalize. I talked about this in the book I did on Wisdom. Watching Elon Musk go from reading Soviet rocket manuals to getting all his news from social media, you realize just how easily smart people can fry their brains. And I think that's kind of the main problem of our time is how to avoid getting brain fucked. And watching some of these people.

42:19Kara Swisher:That's your next book, Brain Fuck.

42:21Ryan Holiday:Yeah. Watching some of these people who are incredibly smart, who have had all sorts of interesting intellectual conversations, just like say the most deranged things. And to say them sincerely is almost the most alarming part.

42:37Kara Swisher:With certainty is the thing. Yeah. You know, I always say they're frequently wrong, but never in doubt. Like one time Mark was talking about the First Amendment and I was like, that's not what it said. Like, Like, did you read it? It's short. It's really easy kind of stuff. And so it's often that case. So if markets really, as they're sending a walk through Silicon Valley today, what would they make of the kind of stoicism practiced by some of these elite figures? Because they do think of themselves that way. They actually do.

43:03Ryan Holiday:Yeah. Someone tweeted a couple of years ago, it was like, every athlete wants to be a VC and every VC wants to be a stoic philosopher. And, again, there's worse aspirations than being a philosopher. But ultimately, I think the most important philosophical questions are not the things they're hammering out on these group texts or at these dinner parties that I'm sure you used to go to as well where they would talk about things.

43:31Kara Swisher:I did.

43:31Ryan Holiday:The interesting philosophical question, this is what I love actually about having a business, about being an entrepreneur, is that all of a sudden theoretical or abstract issues are decisions you have to make. Like you have to decide whether you want to be on this platform or that platform, whether you want to do a deal with this company or that company. What advertise, like I don't accept gambling advertising. I don't accept alcohol advertising. I don't accept weed advertising. This, you know, cumulatively will cost me ultimately millions of dollars over the course of my life. And so to me, the philosophy and philosophy in general is about the dilemmas and situations we find ourselves, particularly where there's money on the line or status on the line or access on the line.

44:13Ryan Holiday:And I think what's been fascinating to me and also disappointing to me with the Silicon Valley people is with billions of dollars on the line and real questions about national security, about the future of our democracy, they've all made the decision about what's good for, you know, the investors in VC Fund 17 or whatever it is that they just raised money for and not like, hey, what kind of worlds do I want my grandchildren to live in?

44:41Kara Swisher:What would you, when you think about why they've become this way, and I'm just using technology because they're the current power, right? Sure. The current power. Why do you think that is? And what would change if they actually did follow these principles? I'm thinking of someone like Peter Thiel or Mark Andreessen. Now, Thiel is not a Stoic. In fact, he's criticized Stoicism at times for being too passive. Andreessen has occasionally talked about it, but also infamously said he practices zero introspection. This is not true. This is a lie. Talk about how it would be different and why they're practicing it the way they are, but they seem attached to it in some fashion at the same time.

45:17Ryan Holiday:Yeah, it's probably worth stipulating there's not a single American industry that has distinguished itself particularly well in particularly the second Trump era as far as living up to these philosophical principles. But I trace it back a little bit to when the media turned hostile on tech. They took it very personally. They did. And they all kind of hunkered down in this bubble and created their own media ecosystem that's actually not that dissimilar to Trump itself, which is like, I don't think they're all living in reality. Like, sometimes when I see some of these extremely bad takes, they remind me of things that I heard when I used to get invited to the dinners that reminded me of bad takes that they would say at the dinners.

46:05Ryan Holiday:But when you looked around and everyone there was on their payroll or wanted a deal of some kind, no one would go like, that was spectacularly dumb. Or that is, that's not just politically incorrect. It's like, it's mean and it's offensive and it's stupid.

46:20Kara Swisher:I have to say, I've been in those rooms, and I actually would say, that's stupid. And then people would stare at me. Because it drove me insane. And then I stopped going, because it was, like, pointless. Totally. You're an outspoken critic of President Trump, but you say you're not out here to be a regular political commentator. How do you decide when to use your platform for political criticism, when to use restraint? You could very easily just stay in Stoicism.

46:44Ryan Holiday:I could, except, you know, the Stoics are all involved in politics, right? Like, it is hard to be philosophical or ethical and then just simply tune out what's happening in the world. So I think it's, I don't know about you, but I find it particularly obnoxious when people get mad. They say, why do you have to get political? And I go, you know, I'm not talking about like the House budget or, you know, state referendums. referendums. I don't talk about these policies. I talk about where politics intersects with the most basic parts of the social contract or with the most basic obligations that we have as human beings.

47:20Ryan Holiday:I don't know how you can say, sure, the government is running around with mass agents in unmarked cars and throwing people in concentration camps and then deporting them either to foreign gulags or countries they've never been to before and go, well, look, I write about personal philosophy and that's just not my bag, right? Like, I just, I don't know. What is the point of having a platform if that's not the line that you draw about what you're going to speak up, especially as a grandchild of immigrants, people who came here as refugees? Like, look, Everyone should pick their issue, the thing that resonates with them.

48:06Ryan Holiday:But I do think there are some things that no one is excused from commenting on completely. And commenting is only the start, right? You also have to be involved locally and as a citizen, too.

48:18Kara Swisher:But do you feel like it's cost you? I don't think it's cost me at all. I think the cost is fine.

48:23Ryan Holiday:It has certainly cost me people who would have—who disagree with me on those things, right? But like one of the realities of having a newsletter, having a podcast, having social media is like, do you have the audience or does the audience have you? And I think this goes to the stoic idea is like, look, you could have 10 million YouTube subscribers or newsletter subscribers or whatever. And then is that something that frees you to say what you think is important? Or is that something that constrains you from saying what those people might not want to hear? And then you go, okay, well, actually, is this person, is that a form of power or is it a form of slavery?

49:07Kara Swisher:Right. Yeah, I agree. You talk a lot about stoicism is ultimately a call to get involved, not just accept things as they are. Give us an idea of what that looks like in practice from your point of view.

49:16Ryan Holiday:So there's this idea that stoicism is about not being affected, right? Like not being affected by what's happening. And I think we can stipulate to that if by not affected, we mean in corrupt times, you do not become corrupted. If in times of cruelty, you do not become cruel. In times of mass distraction, you don't get distracted. You know, if you're able to maintain your moral compass, your decency, your goodness in a fundamentally indecent, screwed up, broken world, then that's great. I think it was Montaigne said, you know, the job is to remain human in an inhuman time. So I think first and foremost, that's really important.

49:59Ryan Holiday:And I don't know about you, but I talk to people I know that are like, I can't write. I'm just so upset about what's happening in the world. I go, you're letting them win. Yeah, that's right. Same thing. If they came in and tried to physically prevent you from writing, you would see that as textbook oppression. But if you just let the vibes get in your head and prevent you from doing your work, then in a way it's even worse. And then I think practically, like, how involved are you other than just talking about things on social media, you know?

50:32Kara Swisher:Hashtagadism, right? Yes, yes.

50:34Ryan Holiday:Like, have you actually been to a protest? Do you actually vote? So I think it's about being involved. Like, unless something is preventing you from being involved, like your parents are dying or, you know, you're living hand to mouth, you should be involved. And not just you vote every two years, but like really, really involved.

50:55Kara Swisher:You are very obviously steeped in teaching of these ancient philosophers. You own a bookstore near Austin and advocate not just reading books like the Odyssey, but reading them multiple times. I completely agree with you on that. There's a big conversation happening right now about whether we're witnessing the end of reading. One study found that fewer than half adults reported on reading a book in 2022. Talk about the tension here of interesting people to these works without reducing them to digestible content, because you want them to actually read it.

51:23Ryan Holiday:Yeah, I think people are consuming too much news and not reading enough books. And the ancient texts are about all of the dilemmas that we are talking about today. I mean, that's what's so fascinating about this movie edition of The Odyssey is like, The Odyssey is about a collapse in the order of things and the contradictory and conflicting desires of the human heart against itself. And so—

51:49Kara Swisher:And people like it. They seem to be attracted to it.

51:52Ryan Holiday:Yes. But I just think people are reading too much contemporary news and they're not rooted enough in history and psychology and humanity. It's like, I would love for you just to be reading more literature and poetry. And these are all going to help maintain that, again, ethical, moral core, that fundamental humanity that all these people are talking about preserving Western civilization. That's what Western civilization is, what we owe the stranger, what's beautiful and good, what are our values. That's Western civilization, not blonde hair and blue eyes or whatever. Skin color is not Western civilization.

52:31Ryan Holiday:It's the texts, which, by the way, would have been lost if it weren't for the writers and thinkers in the East. So this silliness of racial distinctions is absurd.

52:44Kara Swisher:Well, that's a whole other show. But a lot of people are extremely skeptical of the world of self-help and the people evangelizing self-improvement. It's been around forever. But if there's one thing that even someone who's not on board ought to try, what would it be from your perspective?

52:59Ryan Holiday:If I could give like a basic thing, you know, a sort of a make your bed kind of a piece of advice that people should do just to push back on that idea from Marc Andreessen about not being introspective. Like, actually, the smartest, most successful, big prime movers of history, most of them kept journals or wrote memoirs because they were putting themselves up for review. They were thinking about what they were doing. and one of the incredible things about Mark Struess' meditations is we have the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world who is trying to get better and I do think spending some time off of a screen with a pen and a piece of paper and writing and analyzing your own thoughts is an extremely powerful, transgressive, life-changing thing that we would be better if more people did.

53:53Kara Swisher:Yeah, I agree with you. I think the reason Mark Andreessen doesn't do it is because in the quiet moments, he knows exactly the damaged, troubled person he is.

54:03Ryan Holiday:He would have to make some changes.

54:04Kara Swisher:So that is an excellent piece of advice. Write things down and read the text. Please read the text. Anyway, Ryan, you're a wonderful person. I really enjoy a lot of your stuff. I'm a big fan. Thank you. And I really appreciate it.

54:14Ryan Holiday:Oh, well, that's so nice. Thank you very much.

54:20Kara Swisher:today's show was produced by Nishat Perwa, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch special thanks to Rosemary Ho, Dave Shaw Jim Mackle, and Manolo Moreno our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Trackademics if you're already following the show you think about the Roman Empire a reasonable number of times each week if not you practiced zero intro introspection. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Carol Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Carol Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

54:57Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.

55:04Ryan Holiday:Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

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