This Is What Freedom Requires | Ask DS

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1:02Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

1:59Hopeful successes on the battlefield were repeatedly followed by dispiriting defeats. The uncertainty of victory shrouded in the certainty of death and misery and suffering for what could be years. They were lucky. It had been only a year since George Washington assumed command of the Continental Army, and the hardest years of fighting were still ahead for the loose coalition of patriots fighting for self-determination. Fighting, as we would call it today, for their country. All of this while there wasn't even a real country to speak of. America was just an idea. We were still nearly 13 years away from the election of General Washington as the first American president.

2:35In fact, on July 4th, 1776, you were more likely to call yourself a Virginian or a Pennsylvanian than you were an American. So what does one need in a crisis like that? They need something to turn to, something to turn inward towards that provides strength and solace and a higher calling. In the case of the founders of the future United States of America, what they turned to was a philosophy called stoicism. Thomas Jefferson kept a copy of Seneca on his nightstand. George Washington staged a reproduction of a play about Cato at Valley Forge in the winter of 77 and 78 to inspire the troops. Patrick Henry cribbed lines from that play, which we now credit to him.

3:12Give me liberty or give me death, he shouted. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the United States may not have had an independent state to celebrate if the founding fathers had not been inspired by Cato, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. At the core of the American experiment was liberty. At the core of stoicism, we have not only a love of freedom, but the counterbalancing virtues to that freedom, justice, duty, self-control, honor, selflessness. Those are the traits that were required not only in those dark days of revolution as bloody footprints from starving soldiers marked the snows in New Jersey and New York, but also the traits needed equally now in moments of prosperity and plenty, division and distraction.

3:52So today, while you're grilling and relaxing with friends, remember the comfort you enjoy now grew out of the philosophy that was made to embrace discomfort and to do the right thing, whatever the costs. Remember that the American victory over the British came because a group of American Stoics first found victory over themselves. That's what later allowed them to take on and handle the responsibility that true freedom requires. In the Take Responsibility chapter of the new book, Right Thing Right Now, we talk about how while there's a statue in New York City dedicated to liberty, there is no such monument to responsibility.

4:26That's because what the American Stoics understood and what we've lost today is that monument is something we must find within ourselves. The phrase, I am not responsible, has become a standard response in our societies, but Admiral Hyman Rickover once pointed out. He says this response is a semantic error. Generally, what a person means is I can't be held legally liable. Yet from a moral or ethical point of view, he says the person who declaims responsibility is correct. By taking this way out, he is truly not responsible. He is irresponsible. Let today be a celebration of recommitment, a rededication to truth, to work, to taking responsibility, because the work must continue if this great experiment, first founded 245 years ago to the day is to continue as it should, as it must.

5:15Actually, we've got a couple of great podcast episodes about this. I'll link to the episode with Jeffrey Rosen, who talks about the influence of stoicism on the founders, and also our interviews with the great Tom Ricks, whose book First Principles is incredible and talks about the philosophical influences on the founders. And of course, I talk a lot about this in Right Thing right now, the new book, which you can grab anywhere. The subtitle is Good Values, Good Character, and Good Deeds. I've got a chapter on taking responsibility there. It's one of my favorites in the book. And I'll link to that.

5:44You can grab it at store.dailystoic.com. Happy Fourth, everyone. Scary times, I would say, for the American Republic, but let's do what we can about it.

6:01hey it's ryan holiday welcome to another episode of the daily stoke podcast as you know on thursdays we do the q a i'm lucky enough i get to go around and talk about stoicism all over the world sometimes it's companies businesses whatever i don't do a lot of talks i'm going to be doing some this fall that's going to be really cool summer and fall i'm heading over to australia in a couple weeks. I'm going to be in Sydney on July 31st. I'm going to be in Melbourne on August 1st. Then in November, I'm doing Vancouver and Toronto, London, Dublin, Rotterdam, all awesome cities I'm really excited to go to.

6:33If you want to come to those talks, they're open to the public. You can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net. And that's what I'm bringing you today. Robert Green and I did a joint talk and then a Q &A with the audience at the Wilshire Ebel Theater in LA back in September of 2023. It was the first time he and I really ever got to do something like that. It was so awesome. One of the joys of my life. And to see like over a thousand people out in the audience was just unreal. Thank you to everyone who came for that. And I think you're really going to like this conversation with Robert and I. And Robert won't be joining me in Australia, although he's the one that first told me I had to go there and swim in these amazing rock pools.

7:13but I will be answering questions at all those gigs and you can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour.

7:29I kind of want to go back and spend all the time because we learned from our past. Is that capable? Is that even relevant in today's new tech generation where we're heading? So if possibly see who could be heading with AI and everything else? Thank you. Well, the way I look at it is the time that you live in is a resistance factor. It's like when you're swimming, you get stronger because you're moving against the force of the water. When you're weight training, you have the resistance of the weight. When you live in a cultural moment, there are all kinds of bad habits, obsessions, addictions that can happen.

8:08It happened in the 50s. Just look at how people were smoking and drinking, etc. You know, they exist, they're television. So you want young people to resist the times. You can make yourself stronger than I ever could have been if you develop discipline, if you work against all of the addictions, all of the sugar rushes, all the dopamine fixes that people are surrounding you with. If you cut short your time on Instagram, if you force yourself to learn a foreign language, if you get your children to play the piano, etc., they're going to be the biggest weirdo in their neighborhood. People are going to wonder what's wrong with that.

8:46But they are going to be the masters of the future. So use these bad times as a resistance factor to make yourself even stronger. Ryan, I pulled your research assistant Billy Longman. I think he recently wrote something. Robert? Oh, yeah. I'm going to get into my point. he recently wrote something about how a conversation he had with you about why Ryan was your best research assistant and how everybody else that succeeded will show it yeah and he talked about how you pause explain to him why that a lot of them didn't really grasp onto the idea of being interested in boredom yeah so I'm just wondering what your maybe deeper thoughts are why people in their own creative acts why they aren't interested in boredom maybe Ryan briefly touch on in your own process how you kind of embrace boredom and maybe why that made you stand out over time?

9:37Well, boredom is a great thing in life. You want boredom. If you don't experience moments of boredom, then something is wrong with you. And the reason is, is that when you're bored, you have to develop internal skills for dealing with it. You have to learn how to, with your own mind find ways to entertain yourself. And so the worst thing that happens are people go for instant gratification, right? We are animals that want pleasure in life. We are drawn to things that are pleasant, and we're not drawn to things that are unpleasant. But if you can deal with boredom, you understand that greater things will happen if you postpone your need for immediate gratification, Right?

10:23So boredom is teaching you something. It's telling you to develop your own skills. So instead of grabbing a video game to entertain yourself, when I was a kid, not that we were superior back then, please don't get me wrong, we had to invent games to deal with the boredom when our parents left us alone. We had to become creative and inventive. So you want to feel boredom. Boredom means that you have to do something yourself to get over it. You have to develop those internal muscles and go, I've got to entertain myself. I can't turn on a show. I can't play this game. I have to do it from something from within.

11:03If you listen to it, it will develop your character. If you listen to it and you learn the lessons from it properly. I think also it's when you love it, when it's fascinating to you and exciting, it's actually not boring. So all the things that maybe other people thought were boring or they couldn't get through, you know, I was riveted by it. Getting to listen to hundreds of hours of interviews was tedious in the sense that I'm transcribing. You mean the 50 cent tapes? Yeah, but I found that to be fascinating. I thought, I would tell myself, how much would someone pay to listen to this, right?

11:38What would a reporter be making of this? You find different lenses to look at it that allows you to get excited about it, then it's not boring. And if you have a terrible crap job, like I had so many of them, if you approach it that I'm learning about people, I'm learning about what I hate, I'm learning about people's weird psychology, that boring job flipping burgers suddenly becomes a kind of an education for you. How do you also believe it is too long or too short or not well-added enough? Well, I'm guilty of always writing too much. I work in chapters I don't work in the whole book length and I'm very attuned to the reader and the worst thing is I'm going to be boring my reader with this so I know when that chapter is 20 ,000 words long it's way too long, it's starting to bore me my eyes are glazing over I've got to cut it, I've got to cut it, I've got to cut it I've got to cut that chapter down to a size that I think a reader will be engaged in it, will be excited, will learn from it, the stories are taught.

12:48I don't like wasted words. I don't like wasted verbiage. I want it to be clean and compact and forceful. And when it gets to that point, then it's great. And unfortunately, with the laws of human nature, it's a 560-page book. And I didn't go out intending to write that. But the shock of it all is that book is selling really well. It's selling better than the 48 Laws of Power right now. So, you know, I think it's more like... I hope so. It nearly killed you. Yeah, exactly. It did. Thank you.

13:25He's right. Like two months after it, I had my stroke. Two months after writing about mortality, I faced it. But, you know, each chapter felt like it was right, and then it was 560 pages long. My books aren't meant to be read cover to cover, so I think I can kind of get away with that strategy. I mean, you do have to be ruthless. You do your first draft and you try to get it all down and then you have to go, what's extraneous here? What actually isn't essential? And it's this process of winnowing and refining and reducing it down until there's everything that needs to be there and there's none of the things that should not be there.

14:05And that's the hardest part because writing is a creative act. So it's fulfilling and exciting and additive. And then the process of having to cut things that you were excited about, that you love Stephen King talks about killing your darlings. It is a brutal process. And there's little tricks. Like I sometimes keep a separate Word document and I'm cutting stuff and I go, I'm going to use that later. I'll use it in something else. I never touch it again. It's just a lie I'm telling myself. so it doesn't feel like I'm killing something that means so much to me. But I know that if I don't do it, if I'm not brutally honest and don't hold a firm line with it, I'm abusing the most important thing that there is, which is the reader's time and the reader's trust.

14:51And so, yeah, a rule is like if you're bored by it, certainly the reader's going to be bored by it. But also, when did you use two words when one will do, right? When did you make your point more than you need to make it? And that is a brutal process that you do over and over and over again. Maybe an editor comes in, but it's the hardest part. It's the hardest part. But then when you get it right and it reaches that point where you go, yeah, I finished it, you tie the knot and it's over, it's a great feeling. You know, you expressed it, you expressed it in a short way, and it's what you wanted.

15:27I have so many things that I've cut out. it is very painful as Ryan says but in the end it's all for the good because I want my reader to be as excited as I was when I was writing it. As Robert Frost says, no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader, no excitement in the writer, no excitement in the reader. So when I reach that point go yeah this is it, it's a it's a great feeling it's it's almost euphoric. Thank you. You're welcome.

16:01Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

16:31Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free.

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