They Have Been Misled | The Road Trip That Put Stoicism To The Test

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: They have been misled. Why do they do it? Why do they support those policies, condone such things, shrug their shoulders at such injustices? It could be because these people are evil and awful. It could also just be because they don't know any better. It could be that they don't know any better because someone told them much worse. Mark Twain grew to hate slavery and those who support it, but his mother, whom he loved and knew as a sweet and wonderful person, grew up as a participant in that system. So how did he square those two contradictions? As he reflected, kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation.

1:01Ryan Holiday: As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for. In other words, she had been taught to see slavery as something other than what it was. The church, the government, her parents, her neighbors all told her it was right. And like most people at that time, she found it easier to accept what everyone around her believed than to question it for herself, than to see it with her own eyes. And so it has always been thus.

1:40Ryan Holiday: In Meditations, Mark Srelitz talks about how people who do evil often have had their souls cut off from truth. They do not mean to be awful or evil. They were misled. We should remember this today and always, especially if our goal is to bring those people around. We almost certainly are not going to change their minds by arguing with them, and we definitely won't bring them around if we write them off as irredeemable. Instead, we should ask questions. We should listen. We should try to understand what they have been told and why they believe it. And if we want people to change, we have to give them a way to see the truth for themselves.

2:24Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is Saturday. I'm recording this. I don't know when you're listening, but just got my haircut. Spent some time with the kids this morning, hanging out. And I thought I'd record this episode. I've been meaning to do it since June when we got back. But we had kind of a crazy, cool experience, some stoic lessons. Basically, school got out. We were home for a couple of days. And then we headed to the West Coast. My wife had gone out there on a girl's trip, the sort of Oregon coast last year. And she just had this like amazing experience.

3:01Ryan Holiday: She was like, I've never seen anything like this. It's beautiful. Which is one of the awesome things about parenting. When you experience something, you're like, I can't wait to show this to my kids. And so she'd been wanting to do this. And so I thought when she said this, I was like, oh, well, they've been asking me to do some more dates for the Daily Stoic Live things. I'll tell them that that's what I want to do. Let's see what they could line up on the West Coast. So maybe some of you came out. I had a talk in Portland and then a talk in San Francisco. And then I wanted to see my grandmother in Sacramento.

3:28Ryan Holiday: So that was kind of the loose journey we were planning. So we flew into Seattle in early June and we drove out to Bremerton, Washington, where my wife's friend Holly lives. I'm also friends with her husband. I don't know if you ever listen to the band MXPX. Mike is the lead singer and the bassist in MXPX. I wrote about him in Perennial Cellar. We've gotten to know each other over the years. But Holly and Sam have become friends, and I'd never been out there. So that's where we started. We drove out there, and it was lovely. The weather was incredible. My son left his backpack on the bus as we were leaving the Seattle airport.

4:06Ryan Holiday: We took the bus to the rental car. We get in the car. My wife, who's much better at tracking all the things that we have, she goes, wait, is his backpack in the car? and we're like five minutes down the highway. I go, what? She said to my son, did you leave your backpack on the bus? And he was like, you didn't get it? And anyways, it was a great thing we try to practice in our family. We're not perfect at it, but our thing is we solve the problem first. We don't blame, we don't freak out about it. We just go, okay, what do we need to do? And so we immediately reroute the directions. We go back to the rental car place.

4:39Ryan Holiday: We could track it. We could see it was like sort of still in the vicinity so she runs out to one of the buses my son's kind of freaking out and go hey look we don't need to freak out about this yet right like it may be that you lost your ipad and your stuffed animals and that's going to be rough but right now we don't know where it is we just know that it's in this vicinity someone could have taken it but like this also could be easy to solve so we're just trying to you know remember this is it's about the idea of getting regulated about like staying in the moment what are we going to do about this situation?

5:12Ryan Holiday: So it turns out the bus driver still has it. One of the bus drivers drives my wife over to where the other bus driver is. Get it? It's totally fine. But it was an auspicious way to start the trip. Anyways, we drove out, get to Seattle, and it was lovely. It was just absolutely lovely. It was gorgeous. There was a whale sort of not trapped but back in this cove i ran the bridges in bremerton which is this sort of loop i was training for this big run which i'll tell you about i was out the next trip but i got some long runs in there and i'm writing this book about stockdale right and one of the things that i have found as a researcher and a writer for the years is like you put the confirmation bias to work for you i i don't believe in like energy but like we planned this trip for no reason other than we're going to go visit these friends driving over.

6:06Ryan Holiday: I go, what ship is that? I see like a, a Navy destroyer parked in this like little cove area as there's a Bremerton shipyards there. They built the long time Navy installation, but this is like, you could tell it's kind of a museum. And I look it up. I go, Oh my God, are you serious? The Turner Joy, which is the ship that Stockdale flew over in the second night in the Gulf of Tonkin, the incident in quotes here, that basically the attack, again, in quotes, that sets in motion the Vietnam War, which Stockdale was there for. That ship is right there. I was writing about it that time. A year ago, exactly, I'd started working, writing this book.

6:53Ryan Holiday: And then I show up in this town and the ship I am writing about is there. We took this tour. The kids had an amazing time, but I got all these details that I needed for the writing because we just magically were there. And that was just awesome. Two little things I'll bring you from this trip. I stopped by the Bremerton Cemetery. It's this gorgeous cemetery because I wanted to riff on something that I've been thinking about recently. Let me play. There's a little memento mori lesson here for you.

7:50Ryan Holiday: who thought they were the exception to the rule, they all ended up here. They all ended up dead eventually. The Stoics had a phrase for this, memento mori, remember you will die. It was part of their philosophical practice. They tried to think about it constantly. What they wanted us to understand is not that we will die eventually. It's in fact that we're dying right now, dying every minute. We are dying every day. A gorgeous cemetery, by the way. And then a couple hours later, Mike said, hey, do you want to see my studio? I said, of course. And he showed me the studio where they do all their live recordings, where they record their albums, where they practice.

8:27Ryan Holiday: And then he and I sat down and did an episode of the podcast. Let me bring you a chunk of that. To me, writing is, I think maybe songwriting is a little bit more inspirational based than book writing. Like book writing, I think is more workmanlike in the sense that you're, because like um you're working on it and working on it and working on it and reworking it's i i think and it's part of a much larger whole you know where i think each song is a self-contained thing even if it fits inside of a an album so for for me it's it's much more about yeah like the the more uninterrupted periods of being in one place at one time in some kind of a rhythm or routine, the better it is.

9:15Ryan Holiday: And then the irony is, of course, like I travel all the time. I'm gone a lot. So like there's a tension there. But yeah, I like to write in my office at the same time with as few interruptions as possible. And the more that I allow things in to fuck with that, the more trouble I'm in. I actually have a quote on my wall next to where I write. And it's this conversation between Johnny Cash and his manager. And the manager was saying, like, you got to have like this vault, this sort of mausoleum that like no one can get in. Not your wife, not the manager, not the press, not the fan where you just like do your thing.

9:54Ryan Holiday: And kind of my office is like for me that just like the space of doing it. And I'm showing up and doing a little bit every day. and, you know, six months or a year or two years or five years later, you have something close to publishable. Yeah. I mean, I can, like, I wrote a little bit this morning and I can, I wrote on the airplane yesterday. Like I can, I can do little pieces, but like, if it's, if it's like a difficult thing or a big thing, it's like, I need to be in my space. I need to have all my stuff laid out. I'm very. I like that actually. I mean, I think traditionally songwriters started out.

10:31I mean, everybody's a little different, but I started out writing in different places all the time. But I do kind of have a similar thing that you're talking about, like a space, a mausoleum, a tomb where you can go.

10:43Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And it takes a few days for me to kind of get into songwriting mode. And I know Eminem's talked about how he carries a notebook on him all the time. So he's always ready to write. He's always in that mode. And because it is a mode, like it's like a thought process. It's a whatever it is. But to live in that all the time is not easy. It is not for me anyway. So anyways, Bremerton was awesome. We were sad to leave. We drove from Bremerton. Where did we go? I guess we went down to Cannon Beach. That was the next place we were staying. That was like just ungodly beautiful. We stayed at this little Airbnb, like an A-frame Airbnb, which the kids loved.

11:27Ryan Holiday: We wake up the next morning. I start the car and I swear when I stopped the car that night before, there was a hundred miles left in the tank. I'm pretty paranoid about this. Not paranoid, but I'm pretty good about this. Like my wife will take it down to zero. I never do that. I'm like, when it's a quarter full, I'm refilling the gas tank. Anyways, I start the car the next morning. It says seven miles left. I could not have possibly done that. So somebody siphoned gas out of the rental car that night, I guess, maybe, or it massively malfunctions. I don't know. Let's say three days into the trip, we're in our second solve the problem first thing where like there was a gas station five miles away.

12:15Ryan Holiday: And we basically coasted in on fumes, but I was sort of proud at how calmly we handled it. and then we started driving south from there. Part of the routine is I would get up early before the family. Every morning, we don't have a dog, we don't have responsibilities while we're traveling. So I would get up early. I would go for a long run and then I would come back right as they're waking up. We'd pack up, we'd go onto the next thing. That was my way of, like you've got to figure out how you regulate yourself, how you are best able to show up for your family, for yourself when you're in stressful situations.

12:53Ryan Holiday: I knew that if I would save like sort of that little me time or exercise towards the end of the trip, then there would be like pressure. I'd feel rushed. I'd also need it at the end, as opposed to getting it at the beginning and then being able to carry that sort of stillness or energy, you know, with me through the difficult days of being in a small car with two noisy kids who were getting tired and bored, who just wanted their iPads. We're stopping in the Redwoods. We stopped, saw this Lewis and Clark Park, I guess, or whatever. That was cool. Then we pulled into Portland where I was doing the first talk.

13:33Ryan Holiday: That was lovely. We stopped at Powell's, one of my favorite independent bookstores. They also sell used books. And it was funny to see copies of my books used at Powell's, where I've done a talk before, that had the stamp from the painted porch in it. So someone had bought a copy of one of my books from here, from this bookstore, and then resold it to another bookstore. So that was lovely. Did the talk in Portland. Let's say attendance was a little light, but it was a beautiful venue. It was Revolution Hall, which I guess was an old school, but just absolutely gorgeous. So I made fun of Portland a little bit when I got there.

14:11Ryan Holiday: It's good to be here. Came all the way from Austin, Texas, where it was a little warmer and drier, I will say. You know, the slogan for Austin is keep Austin weird. You guys know this because you stole it. Although every time I come to Portland, I think maybe you guys deserve it a little bit more than us. I looked up the actual slogan for Portland. Do you guys know what it is? It's the city that works.

14:41Ryan Holiday: So maybe Austin and Portland could trade and it'll all be good.

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15:57Ryan Holiday: So apparently everybody that works for us at the bookstore and Daily Stoic is using Whatnot. And I guess I'm out of the loop. But once you flip open the app, you see why. There's something like super exciting about live sales. like, whoa, you can get this right now that they're talking about it right now. And the sellers look like they're having fun. And, you know, it's not edited photos and videos. Like you see it right there in the seller's hands. It's like a really cool estate sale or like the coolest fair you've ever been at. And that's just like not what the online chopping experience is normally like.

16:35Ryan Holiday: Check it out today. Just search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the app store. Download it and you can start selling right away. but my cousin was there. That was cool. She lives in Portland with her partner. But my favorite thing is Ben, who's the promoter organizer of all the talks. He goes, Hey, could your sons help? And I'm like, what do you need them to help with? He's like, I need some people to run mics in the audience to do the Q and A. And my kids were so excited. They did it. So they're running up and down the halls. They got to pick, but then my son broke in and gave me some good news. Hey, Dad.

17:14Ryan Holiday: Hey, bud. I know you're invested in the basketball game. Yeah, what's the score? The Spurs won. They did. Amazing. Oh, that's great. That was lovely, but one of the devastating parts of the trip was, you know, we're traveling. We couldn't always sit down and watch all the games in the NBA finals, but, you know, I checked my phone and the Spurs were up. And then, you know, we'd pull in right as the game was finishing, wherever we were. And then it's like, just in time to watch them lose. Like just a heartbreaking series. We went to game one of the NBA Finals, which was absolutely incredible before we left on the trip.

17:52Ryan Holiday: But to watch the Spurs lead in every game and have a chance to win basically every game and to end up losing the series. It's an incredibly young team. Wemby is awesome. The Spurs have been very good to me. And I wrote about them in the Justice book, in the Discipline book. Hopefully they'll learn and grow from this, but that was sort of happening in the background. Again, this feels like an eternity ago. But anyways, Portland went great, kept going south from there. The next day we did the Redwoods, which was amazing. I've seen the sequoias, but I don't think I'd ever been that far north to see the redwoods.

18:33Ryan Holiday: And we just had an absolutely full day looking at those. You know, Seneca has this line about how the whole world is a temple of the gods. And when you're looking up at three, four hundred foot tall trees, the date back before the Renaissance, the date back hundreds and hundreds of years, you know, it blows your mind. It humbles you. Sometimes they'll have like one that's fallen and they'll show on the rings like, this is what was happening here. This is what was happening here. And you just see the enormous time span of humanity and how even the greatest and biggest lives, as the Stoics would say, don't last very long.

19:18Ryan Holiday: I mean, it kind of makes me think of that famous passage from Marcus Aurelius. Let me find this here. I think it's four something. This is the one about Vespasian. Ah, yes, this is 432. He says, the age of Vespasian, for example, people doing the exact same thing, marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office, and the life they led is nowhere to be found. or the age of Trajan, the exact same things, and that life too is gone.

20:00Ryan Holiday: Survey the record of other eras and see how many others gave their all and soon died and decomposed into the elements that formed them. But most of all, run through the list of those you knew yourself, those who worked in vain, who failed to do what they should have, and what they should have remained fixed on and found satisfaction in. And then, you know, in the next passage, he riffs on this morning, lists like the names of other famous emperors and power brokers. He says, everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are only the ones who shone, the rest unknown, unasked for, a minute after death.

20:36Ryan Holiday: What is eternal fame? Emptiness. Obviously, it's a little rich hearing that from a 2 ,000-year-old book that's still relevant today, but that's sort of what I was thinking about going through the Redwoods. There was this sort of roadside attraction where we could drive through one of them in our car. That was surreal. That was all lovely. We listened to The Odyssey on audiobook The Claire Danes reading on the way down. That was beautiful. My kids are obsessed with The Odyssey, as we talked about. And that's also the book club for the Quarterly Classics book club we've been doing with The Painted Portrait, which I'd love to have you join us in.

21:10Ryan Holiday: So that was lovely. And The Claire Danes reading was just like just profoundly moving. I loved that. I think we stopped in Montecito, which was gorgeous, and then pulled into San Francisco, went for a long run. My friend Jeff Waldman recommended that they closed down this highway and turned it into a running trail. So I did that. And I thought I'd sort of turn around and come back. I ended up accidentally doing like a 12 mile run, which was not great the day of a talk, but it's cool. I don't really think we saw the sun until we got to San Francisco. Like it's crazy that San Francisco was the warmest part of the trip in June.

21:49Ryan Holiday: It was just an incredible escape from the heat. We didn't know how spoiled we were, you know, going to Europe a couple of weeks later, which I'll bring you in another episode, that it was going to be the hottest it's literally ever been there. and jackets and pants. It was cold a lot of the mornings when I got up to go running. But just like, you know, being in forests so dense with such canopies that like you'd have to take your sunglasses off. Like seeing those redwoods was to me like going to church. I mean, it was as holy and as moving to me as some of the cathedrals and ruins that we would see in Rome a couple of weeks later.

22:29Ryan Holiday: I saw the Buffalo in Golden Gate Park and then did the talk. My parents came. That was lovely. My aunt and uncle and cousin came. That was cool. The boys were there. Some kids that went to high school came. San Francisco was awesome, thanks to everyone that came out there. It was a union theater, so my kids couldn't do the running, but I thought that was a great talk. I did a little riffing on my neighbor here in Bastrop, who'd taken his company public for a trillion dollars. Let me play a little bit of that riffing, too. Many, many people are about to become millionaires because of the SpaceX IPO.

23:08Ryan Holiday: That's all great. But I think when we think about justice and when we examine this life on a whole, we're going to have to look at a literal illegal immigrant who came here on an expired student visa from Canada. spreading misinformation about immigrants and advocating for mass deportations. We have to look at the fact that he treats people and employees like garbage. Musk gets involved with Doge. Like how are we to square the idealism and the impact and the innovation with Tesla and SpaceX and SolarCity with the conservative estimates that say the cuts to USAID should amount to something like 500 ,000 excess deaths this year.

23:50Ryan Holiday: They think by 2030, four and a half million, like literally millions of people. It is a holocaust of starvation and suffering and death that can really be traced back to one person, to a tweet where the richest man in the world tweets, I could have gone to some cool parties today. Instead, I fed this government agency into the wood chipper. I would say that the fact that that didn't result in like the immediate expulsion from polite society that it wasn't condemned universally by all people. Like Elon Musk has talked about how he thinks empathy will be the death of Western civilization. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.

24:30Ryan Holiday: I would say that our willingness to tolerate and accept that is the death of a moral society. That is what puts the values of Western civilization on the line. Do we actually mean them? or, you know, if someone comes and turns them upside down, undoes generations of work and compromise and political progress, and we just accept that because we don't want to have people tweeting about us on the internet, or we don't want to piss off the richest person in the world, or we don't want to be primaried in an election. Like, we are willing to accept that. To me, that is the extinction-level event that we should be worried about.

25:08Ryan Holiday: So San Francisco was great, again, doing the tour dates was a nice excuse to see some places in the country that I hadn't got to get to to do this wonderful family time. And I'm going to be doing some more talks, I guess, in August. What am I doing? Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit, October. I believe I'm in Australia and New Zealand. That's going to be fun. Then we're going and I'm doing East Coast stuff, Boston. I think there's a Nashville date in there, D.C. Anyways, all that's at DailyStokeLive.com, so I'll see you there. If you want to come, that would be cool. There's a couple VIP tickets left at those various shows.

25:45Ryan Holiday: That was my favorite thing. Actually, in San Francisco, the CEO of Sutter Health, which is the big hospital that I was actually born in, in Sacramento, he came and brought a bunch of his staff, so that was surreal to be like, hey, this is my mom. She gave birth to me in your hospital. That was lovely. The VIP stuff is really cool. This really nice guy gave me some picks and drumsticks from Talica's studio where he worked. I lost his name. So if he's listening to this, I would love to say thank you. Shoot me an email. That was really cool. And then we did the final drive down. We drove down to Sacramento.

26:25Ryan Holiday: And then we went to see my grandmother, putting that in quotes. She's 97. That was lovely. It was funny. I had taken my son to see her. A couple of months ago, we're just sitting there having breakfast. And he goes, you know, you're the second oldest person I've ever met. I was really what? Who's the oldest? And he started telling her about Richard Overton, who when my son met him when he was like one or two years old, was the oldest man in the world. But the kids were amazing, had a lovely time with her. And then we were leaving. I was like, OK, what do you guys want to do? And they were like, we'd like to go to the cemetery.

26:57Ryan Holiday: What? The cemetery? It's funny because I'd wanted to do that when we were in Washington. and said, yeah, we want to go see where your grandfather is buried, which is very moving to me. My grandfather was one of the, I think, the few people that believed in me as a sort of writer, creative person. She died as I was working on my first book, like right before I sort of announced it, told anyone about it. A therapist told me once, she's like, it only takes one person. I was like, what do you mean? She said, it only takes one person to believe in you. And he was that person for me. So it was lovely to go see that.

27:31Ryan Holiday: And then when we were in Sacramento, I got up and I ran around downtown and did a couple laps around Sutter's Fort and then made my way over to the house that Joan Didion grew up in, the great California writer, the great Sacramento writer, whose chair, I don't know if you can hear this, I'm sitting in right now. I record the Daily Stoic podcast at her table. I just didn't know anything about her growing up there. I don't know why no one ever told me, but it was a sort of a surreal experience. That's, again, what I like to do is find stuff that I know about, that I've read about, that I've experienced.

28:10Ryan Holiday: I try to find things that I've heard about, that I've read about, that I have context for, and then I try to go experience them. And that, to me, helps understand it and see it from different angles. And then we went down and jumped in the water in Lake Natomas. And my kids just sang the lines from that SNL skit, Lake Beach, as we dived in the very, very cold water. I took them to see where I went to high school. It was just a great, lovely trip. And then we went to fly home and were immediately delayed. We spent several hours in the Sacramento airport before flying home. That sort of scrambled the plans.

28:55Ryan Holiday: So I was getting back the next day and I was supposed to do a long run for this thing. As I said, I'm going to tell you about training this thing. And it was a little final act of discipline for me to have to reschedule and change those plans, not force something. So we had a nice long flight home, got home very late, like 1.30 in the morning, crashed and then back at it. So that was our West Coast trip. You know, drove several hundred miles, many, many hours, saw family, saw friends, had some issues, but I think we handled it well. You know, my rule when we travel as a family is like, it should go in such a way that you want to have another trip.

29:38Ryan Holiday: You want to plan the next road trip. You want to plan the next destination. And that's what I try to remind myself. I wrote this down in my journal, right, doing my sort of premeditatio malorum. Like, what could go wrong? What mistakes might I make? What things, emotions, urges do I want to be careful of? Do I want to control? So we can do it again. So it doesn't go sideways. So even if there are problems, even if there are difficulties, even if you run out of gas, even if your gas is stolen, even if attendance is good, attendance is bad, weather is good, weather is bad, that you can handle whatever life throws at you, which is ultimately what parenting is about, ultimately what stoicism is about.

30:18Ryan Holiday: and it was a lovely trip. Again, thanks to everyone that came out and supported me. It was lovely to meet all of you and I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in the Midwest and on the East Coast and in Australia, which is going to happen very soon. All right, be well, everyone.