Ryan Holiday’s Stoic Approach | How to Balance Self Improvement and Justice

28:31And this also, you know, was contagious and it drove ultimately a lot of social change. But it could be traced down to a collection of individuals who are able to, you know, bring out the best in each other. So, yeah, I think that's an understated part of it. I maybe should have thought about that more. Well, because then you have other examples, like Ralph Ellison walking through Harvard, seeing the names of the Harvard students who died in the Civil War, made him realize that even though he still suffered from many of the things that he wrote about in his books, particularly Invisible Man, he was standing on this collective set of shoulders that had actually fought for his rights.

29:17And that encouraged him that he needed to do, to feel like that collective. Well, there's this idea from Seneca that I think about a lot. He says, look, we can't choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we want to be. And I think about that all the time in a less sort of birthright sense, but of like deciding who your ancestors are. So one version of American history is a parade of unmitigated evils and awfulness, right? We stole this land from the natives. We broke every treaty you could possibly imagine. We essentially committed genocide. It was a bunch of rich white slave owners who set up a corrupt capitalistic system.

30:03You know, blah, blah, blah, right? You could tell this very negative version of American history, which is largely true. And then you could also look at American history as a striving to live up to some of these impossible ideals. You could look at all the good that's been done. You could decide that your founding fathers are not just the people who signed the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention. Um, but, but also, uh, it could include Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and it could include the suffragettes and it could include Martin Luther King. And you could see it as this unfinished march of people making, genuinely striving to make things better and to be better.

30:57And so the question is not just which of these narratives you believe, but which one do you feel like you're an heir to? And so I was quoting, there's a famous World War I poem that I was quoting when I titled the second part of the book. But it's, to you from failing hands, we throw the torch. It's this idea that like you take it as far as you can or the generation before you took it as far as you can. And then they're handing you the torch and then you decide to carry it forward. And I think you could look at where America is today and you have different factions carrying forward different torches.

31:41Some of those are good torches and some of those are bad torches. But we as individuals have to decide which ancestors we're going to be descended from and which traditions we're going to carry forward. And you could just think there's not to be American. It could be a world history argument as well. Do you think in general, right has won over wrong generation over generation going back like all the generations? Do you think there's any generation that's worse than the generation before it? That's a broad worse. Put it in quotes. I mean, there's definitely been moments of severe backsliding for sure.

32:19Would you choose to be alive at any other time in history? To me, that sort of answers that question. Like if you had to roll the dice, like if you had to choose - The answer is no, though, because of plumbing. Well, look, do you know John Rawls' theory of the veil of ignorance? No. So he's a more modern philosopher. But, okay, so look, if you knew for certain you were going to be a rich white guy, there might be other eras in history that it might have been better to be you, right? But if you put all the possible fates, all the different levels of society in a hat, and then you said you have to pick one and then you have to pick a time to be that person, you would almost certainly pick now because the bottom is higher now than it's ever been in history.

33:21Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's certainly true. So the idea is that as a collective, things are indisputably better than they've ever been. But, you know, even it's actually an interesting intellectual challenge in the sense that, okay, is there any kind of status you could have where being in a different time might be better than now? And so you pose that maybe rich white guy, it would be better if you were in a different time than now, perhaps because of a variety of things. But I'll go back to a question you posed to me. I think it was 2016 or 2017. We were having dinner and I wrote about this question, which is we were talking about jealousy.

34:04And you said, you know, you might be jealous of different aspects of someone, but is there anybody out there you would actually want to really permanently change places with? And the answer is no. And so I'll pose the same question back to you historically. is there anyone from the past you would ever and this answers your question about oh if you were some status that you could be in an earlier time is it like i wouldn't want to be a king of france in the 1700s when they had absolute power because now you'd be freezing in the wind yeah you'd have been freezing in the winter and you'd sweating your balls off in the summer and you would have probably had syphilis and uh yeah it would have been awful it's funny there's a Taylor Swift song on the new album where she has a line about arguing about this exact question about what era you'd rather be born in.

34:54And she says, I would have rather lived in the 1830s, except for with, without all the racists and without, um, uh, women being sold off like, like property or, or sold off to the highest bidder. And, and I think that kind of gets to the core of it, which is that actually, yeah, no, there's no other period that you would want to live in where you wouldn't be making some very big caveats, right? Because yeah, things are better. And we can take a couple things from that. One, we can be grateful for what we have, but specifically, we should see that people made it this way, right? That things are better now than they were a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago.

35:39That's not a natural process. There was a quote famous with the civil rights activist that Martin Luther King popularized. He said, the arc of justice is long, but it bends towards truth. And you can hear that quote and think, okay, I don't have to worry about what's happening because the arc of history is long and it bends towards truth. That's bullshit. It is bent towards truth. People are pulling on it. Right. Things weren't naturally getting better in the 1950s and 1960s. And Martin Luther King Jr. was there to catch it. Right. Martin Luther King significantly directed the trajectory of truth.

36:26He changed things. Abraham Lincoln was not surfing a wave of anti-slavery sentiment. and he happened to be the guy in the White House when the Civil War happened and then ultimately the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed. Lincoln was the driver of said movement. He was probably the only person that could have successfully steered the ship of state in that direction. And we're not so fond of the great man of history theory these days, but the truth is history is changed by individuals, groups of individuals also, but individuals. And Thomas Clarkson is one of those. Thomas Clarkson bent the arc of justice in a direction it was not going to go on its own.

37:22Yeah, because, you know, and I was thinking of this exactly when you wrote that story about Thomas Clarkson, because you say in there that slavery might not have been abolished in England in the 1830s, if not for Thomas Clarkson. And I never really thought about that. I always thought it was a natural, just sort of thing that, you know, England abolished slavery around then because they, like you say in the book, they had less direct contact with it. They didn't see the horrors of it. So, so also they didn't see other aspects of it. And it was easier for them to distance themselves from the decision.

37:57So they abolished it. But then this is the first time I'd ever read about Thomas Clarkson. And you did. I'd never even heard of him. Yeah, I didn't either. And, and, but I knew when England had abolished slavery. And so it turns out it wasn't just a natural thing in history. It was this guy going above and beyond and creating, like you just mentioned, the modern protest movement, which, which did it. And that, that was fascinating. and you know i wonder also how nuanced it is you know we we deal we ask this question all the time like you mentioned thomas jefferson in the book you mentioned the good aspects but also the horrible aspects of him and i think history now tends to punish the horrible aspects more than it um you know congratulates the positive aspects but i don't know if it should do i don't know what the right thing is or the wrong thing is there.

38:49But it's like, you know, people change. Like, like, like, so doing the right thing is very nuanced depending on time and culture. And I hate to use the word, but context, but like LBJ, you mentioned LBJ in many ways was like a horrible guy, but he passed all of these, you know, the civil war, the civil rights acts of 1964 and all all these other things. And so, you know, doing the right thing is often very nuanced. You can't, you can't just be kind of the philosopher. There's very few philosopher kings out there. Well, what I take from, from LBJ, there's a bunch I want to touch on. What I take from LBJ is not, hey, you have to be an imperfect asshole monster to get things done.

39:36What I take from the story of LBJ is what would the world look like if people with good hearts and the right ideas were slightly, not to his level, but just slightly more politically competent, right? What if they actually understood how the levers of power worked? What if they could be a little bit more pragmatic? And what kind of change and improvements are left on the table because people are idealistically pure or unable to horse trade or be strategic. And a lot of times we look at the changes. By the same token, we look at the past and we go, things are always getting better, so they're just going to keep getting better.

40:25We often look at causes that triumphed and we go, they triumphed, they succeeded because they were morally correct, which isn't true at all. They usually succeed because of political acumen and skill and willpower and drive. It's interesting, right? Again, you think, of course, slavery was always going to go away. But actually, I mean, there were countries in the Middle East that continued to use some form of slavery up until the middle of the 20th century. And there are some sort of legal forms of slavery that exist even to this day. You think of something like segregation. Of course, segregation was going to go away.

41:11Well, it went away in America in the 60s, but it lasted in South Africa for like another 40 years or 30 years. So just because something is inevitable doesn't mean that sooner is not better, right? And the people that bring it about are not doing a great service. But I think we have to figure out how to figure out what the right thing is. That's of course, part one. And then part two is, how do we actually bring that into reality? You don't just, being right is not sufficient. So I was really fascinated by the example of Harvey Milk, who again, I saw, I just simply knew as this, you know, groundbreaking sort of figure in the gay rights movement.

41:55But I didn't think of him so much as a politician. But that's what he was. I mean, he was famous for being the first openly gay elected city council member in San Francisco. But that is a political position. And Harvey Milt got into that by being an effective, intelligent politician. And his first sort of foray into politics was helping Teamsters boycott Coors Beer through his connections with gay bars in San Francisco. And he said, look, I'll help you do this if you hire some gay truck drivers. And just the sheer horse trading of that, it doesn't seem sexy, but that's the foundation upon which his political career was built.

42:42And then he was talented in the sense that the first two times he ran for city council, right? He lost, but like the first time he, after the first time he cut his hair and after the second time he started wearing suits. So he started looking like what he wanted to be and that's how he won. So I view that as talented politically is when you learn how to kind of subtly accommodate large masses of people. And - Yeah, Kennedy said famously, like too many parents want their kids to be president and no one wants their kid to be a politician. But presidents are politicians. That's how you get there.

43:20You don't just sit over here as this perfectly formed ethical figure and then magically find yourself the head of state. I mean, the only one time that happened is Marcus Aurelius. You had this philosopher kid who is randomly selected to be king. The reason we don't do it that way is that nine times out of 10, it ends incredibly badly.

44:01By the way, incidentally, have you ever seen the Kennedy-Nixon debates? Mm-hmm. Like on YouTube, I would encourage everybody to, after you watch whatever the next presidential debate is in 2024, watch, go on YouTube and watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates from 1960, because it is fascinating the differences. Like they are gentlemen to each other. They are respectful. There's no insulting. I don't think there was a single insult. I mean, they disagree with each other, but they didn't insult each other. And they talk for five minutes at a time about obscure issues and agriculture and whatever. And it's, it was just fascinating to watch a different style of political debate than now.

44:44Well, you know what's even, have you read any of the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Yeah, yeah. That was like a five-hour debate. They each talked for like two hours extemporaneously off prepared, you know, basically some prepared notes. It was so long, people like went home and had dinner and then came back. These were like these intellectual giants lecturing in these cow towns in the American Midwest we think we're so advanced, you realize that, yeah, probably politically we've gone in the opposite direction in some ways in terms of the level of discourse. It's also, I mean, Daniel Boorstin would argue this is, Daniel Boorstin and Neil Postman would both argue that this is all the fault of television because politics went from a sort of a venue in which ideas were being discussed in long form or in oratory to television soundbites.

45:43And that's impossible. That favors a very specific kind of messaging, one that is not always in line with truth or moral clarity. Well, I think, and this has been measured for a long time, just the amount. So presidential elections are obviously covered a lot by the news media. And you look at each segment and how many seconds are issues discussed. And let's say 40 years ago, it would be 60 seconds worth of issues would be discussed in a segment. Now it's down to like four or five seconds of issues are discussed or maybe even smaller. I remember like 10 years ago, it was about eight seconds. And so you wonder at some point, it's just about branding rather than real discussing of issues.

46:36And that concerns me. Well, I mean, you and I are talking, we're going to talk for an hour or whatever. We're getting into some depths and you've actually like read my book and you and I have known each other for 10 years. There's a bunch that's happening here. I'm supposed to do the today show, like the day the book comes out and I'm, I'm preparing for a four minute segment, right? Like I, this is a thing I've been, I've been working on this series for five years. I've been working on this book for two years. I've been researching these ideas for over a decade. I've got to distill it down into four minutes and four minutes is an eternity compared to a 140 character tweet, you know?

47:15So, so you keep drilling down and down and down. of course we're going to lose the substance on a lot of issues. It's just, it's just a really hard way to discuss the complicated nature of, of all of these, of all of these issues. Yeah. It's almost like for the today show. I mean, I used to go on CNBC quite a bit or many business shows and I still do occasionally. And you, you get like a minute or two, which to discuss stuff, which means you're only talking out of that minute or two, 20 seconds. Cause there's other people in the segment, just like there'll be people interviewing you in your segment.

47:48And it's almost like you have to distill this to one idea from the book that you want to get out. And you know this, you're more of a media expert than me, but you have to think of what is that one idea where people listening to this, they're going to watch the show and then their day is going to change because of what you said. Yeah. But you know, and not to get too nerdy about this, I know I just said something positive about podcasts, which I actually do think are largely a very good medium. I think we're also seeing though in podcasts, the way that like two people can bullshit for like three hours and people listen and it sounds like substance.

48:28And then you realize like one of those people is certifiably insane or, or just like, like has zero idea what they're talking about, but because the host or whatever, isn't holding them accountable because it's supposed to be this conversation. They have the ability to propagate and dress up what is, you know, really flimsy or fringe shit. So it's interesting. And I agree with you. Look, there are a lot more podcasts than there are people who are entertaining. And ultimately, the goal of a podcast is to entertain the listener so they keep listening. And I entertain by talking to Ryan holiday who wrote, you know, all these great books and wrote and has a book coming out now called right thing right now.

49:17But we do that. You're entertainer. Also we do that by telling stories. So we've probably told several stories that people might not have heard of before or are now hearing in a, in a different way or thinking about things in a different way. So it's, it's, I recognize that my goal is to entertain because I have to give it, I have to give this talk next week at a conference where I've done 1500 podcasts now. So I've interviewed 1500, very, very smart, talented, successful people. Some of them more than once, like, like, this is like the billionth time you've been on the podcast. And, uh, and I have to say what I've learned.

49:55And the first thing that comes to mind is don't eat processed sugar. like that is a bad thing yeah i know that for sure now after 1500 episodes of this podcast but there's not that many other things i really know i mean okay yes be grateful and um i've learned you know some very get up early i i don't know about that you know eight hours seven hours six hours nine hours of sleep unclear 10 000 steps unclear how much exercise per week and should it be high intensity? Should it be cardio? Should it be weights? Unclear. So Mediterranean diet versus keto? Unclear. I was just thinking, and I could pick this one because it's not a political example.

50:41People tend to see things differently through different lenses. I was watching some clips of Terrence Howard on Rogan, and you're like, this man is not well. This person is straight nuts. but you know over two and a half hours if you have a modicum of charisma which he does as an actor there are some people that are listening to that and going this man is a genius and he's not a genius he is a he is he is uh whacked out like i having met people he is in the middle of some kind of manic episode or uh you know not wellness and um it's just fascinating that there there are no perfect mediums, I guess is what I'm saying.

51:21We can shit on television for being, you know, too brief or cinematic. You know, we can tweet on, we can shit on social media for being this, that, or the other. The reality is we're in a constant battle against nonsense and trivia in every medium that's ever existed. And I think this is actually one of the weird breakthroughs of the 20th and the 21st century, you know, you read Orwell or Huxley, there was this fear of censorship being the problem, right? That authoritarian governments, Fahrenheit 451 is about this too, you know, that authoritarian governments would constrain the supply of information to keep the population doing X, Y, or Z.

52:06And then you realize actually, and you look at authoritarian regimes across the world, Russia, et cetera, that actually it's too much information that is the way that we control people. It's through flooding the zone with shit that we can make people apathetic or confused. And so, I don't know. This is getting far afield from the topics of the book, but I think it's interesting. No, I think it is very interesting. And don't worry, I'm going to bring it back. But it's not only too much information. that just went up exponentially with like deep fakes are no longer a conspiratorial thing. Like maybe approximately half the videos now I see of Biden are Biden and his voice and his mouth saying things that he'd never actually said.

52:51And this is true for Trump. This is true for Taylor Swift. I just, there's a whole account of LeBron James, like hanging out with Hitler, deciding how to like fight the Russian front and it's in LeBron James voice. So, uh, so it becomes to this point where you actually are being told, look, you just can't trust anything. It's all entertainment. You can't listen or trust anything. And I don't know where that ends up, but this gets back to your point of, you know, this is all about messaging and, and, and, you know, all of these media are forms of disseminating information, but also forms of entertainment.

53:29So let's say a talented, hopefully talented entertainer wants to get people to understand what it is to do the right thing. Okay. That person could write a book. Like you're a talented writer and you're an entertaining writer. So you write a book about it. You don't just cite academic studies. Well, if you do the right thing, your oxytocin levels go up and that's why you should do it. And I then get the opportunity to interview you. Hopefully I do a good job and an entertaining job. And I think that's how things get done is the combination of some insight and knowledge that fills a hole in our societal knowledge and some way of disseminating it that travels over this bridge of storytelling and entertainment.

54:15So you gotta be talented at both, is accumulating and curating inside yourself knowledge, but also being entertaining. I hate to say it that way. but that's the word. No, no, you're right. And this is what Clarkson did so well, right? Clarkson works with these great artists. He drew the picture of them crowded, like how, I didn't know that, how they were packed into the slave ships, like basically just lying side by side with nothing, like only inches above them and they can't move the whole trip. Well, and it's funny, I remember seeing that picture when I was in school and we were learning about slavery.

54:51So here this guy, 200 years later, is still informing people about this moral issue because he didn't just go, hey, we all know slavery is wrong. He basically starts from a premise which originates from Socrates that most people are not wrong on purpose, right? Most people are not doing wrong on purpose. They don't know. Like they actually don't know. Their opinion is based on either bad information or no information. And so he realizes that slavery is already illegal inside England. So all the slavery is happening thousands of miles away to people who don't look like you. So if I'm a blacksmith in England in 1790, what do I give a shit about a slave in a sugar plantation in Barbados?

55:42I can't even conceive of who that person is, why I should care about them, let alone understand what's being done to them. And so Clarkson tackles it on both ends, humanizing a slave. There's a famous image of a slave with a banner over him, and it says, am I not a man or a brother? And he's basically getting people to see these people that look very different as fundamentally as human beings. And then on the other hand, as you said, he really diagrams like what the slave trade looks like. And he shows how inhuman and cruel the slave ships were. And I thought this was really interesting and smart.

56:25He also points out how many sailors die on slave ships. So he's not just saying, hey, this is wrong because all these slaves are dying. A lot of people don't care about that. He's saying, hey, did you guys know like 20 to 30 percent of the crew dies on every slave journey? That's bad for your sons, right? He's making a self-interested argument. He's deterring people from participating in the slave trade. And so he was really an effective communicator. And that was such a huge part of it. Now, it also brings to mind for me, though, that in this book, you tell very big stories, not big in length, but big in terms of impact stories about doing the right thing right now.

57:15But on a daily basis, and you refer to this, but the stories are always big because they have to kind of match what we know from history and everything. On a daily basis, there's thousands of micro moments where we have to do the right thing. And Louis CK has this great joke where he says, nobody wants to do anything less than their favorite thing at any point. So like if you're all the way in the right lane and there's four lanes, but you need to make a left, you forgot to get left earlier. Yeah. You will stop all traffic and like squeeze your way through and block all the lanes in order for you to make a left turn rather than just going one block further and gradually getting over to left and making a turn because it's not your favorite thing.

58:01And so that's just the general – his point was that's just the general tendency of people is they'd rather do their favorite thing than the right thing because there's only subtle differences between your favorite thing. Like that person, yes, he disturbed people because he didn't wait one more block to make a left, but it didn't matter that much. Okay. It just bothered people for a few seconds. And so really kind of, it's almost like a muscle. You have to exercise where, how can I do, how can I make sure I really am doing good things when I, when I didn't even think about it and why should I do it?

58:37Yeah, I heard a powerful question once that I think a lot about, which is like, what would the world look like if everyone did what I'm about to do? Right. So the golden rule is obviously important. But a lot of times we don't think about the golden rule because it just doesn't exactly apply. Why? I was thinking of a, I was reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk. And he was like, he told this sort of offhanded story about, you know, Elon Musk flying his private jet to New York to pick up his dog. Like he sent an empty plane to New York to then fly down to him with his dog in it. Right.

59:18Just like typical sort of rich person, very rich person things. And to me, that's a good example of what the kinds of things humans do when they don't think about, hey, what would the world look like if everyone could or would do this, right? And so how do we just take the time to go, okay, this is obviously easier for me. But if everyone did what was easier for them all the time, the world would either be uninhabitable, or things would grind to a horrendous halt. And so I look, I'm not perfect at it by any means, but I do try to think about that. And I try to catch myself when I'm about to do something that's very easy for me, but hard for other people.

1:00:02One of my favorite stories, I don't even know if it's in the book. I told the story about Antoninus, who is Marcus Aurelius' stepfather, that the reason Hadrian chooses him to be Marcus's sort of regent is that he sees him when Antoninus doesn't think that anyone's looking, helping like an elderly man up a flight of stairs. He's just helping. So I love that story. I told that story in the book, but there's another story about Antoninus when Antoninus was the emperor. He's the most powerful man in the world. And he was one of the only Roman emperors who didn't travel extensively throughout the provinces of the empire.

1:00:40And he was asked why he didn't do this. and he said he didn't do it because he knew what an incredible inconvenience it was to host the emperor like how many people had to travel with him how many cows had to be slaughtered to feed all those people how expensive it was to shower him with gifts he just he he didn't want to be this huge inconvenience for everyone and i was thinking about that pretty much every president Republican and Democrat, especially the modern ones, like, you know, they fly home for the weekend or they, you know, they golf, you know, 150 times in four years. They do all this stuff, which sure, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but they don't seem to consider like how many school recitals the Secret Service has to miss as a result of that, how much money that costs the country they live in.

1:01:34You know, I like, do you just think about how hard it is for the president to go somewhere? And then the flippancy with which the president will be like, you know what? I was thinking about, uh, sleeping in this place tonight instead of this place, even though it's basically exactly the same, cause that would be better for me. It's just extremely inconvenient for everyone else. Yeah. So, so, so the idea is in a situation, I'm going to make a decision to do something. what would it be like if the rest of the world does what I do? Or what would it be like if I take this to an extreme? Like if I travel, if I'm the president and I travel every day to everything I want, it would just ruin the lives of like the thousands of people who work for me.

1:02:15They'll never see their kids again and so on. And it's so unnecessary. What are the costs of my decisions on people other than me? And being conscientious of that. And I would say, by the way, there is a benefit to thinking in this way. And it's like the Frederick Douglass, Sojourner truth thing is that when you start thinking this way, you start naturally hanging around with other people who think this way. I think like that, you know, if I am just trying my best to do my best, okay, first off, it's going to affect the people around me, like my kids, my friends, my spouse, and so on. So suddenly they become the people I hang out with and they become, they're becoming more like me, just like I'm becoming more like, like them.

1:03:02And, uh, so there are benefits in that you kind of elevate your sort of, you know, the, the, the wellbeing of the people around you, which in turn, you know, the community around you, which in turn elevates your wellbeing, you know, which is also not healthy, right? Like it's not healthy to, to, to, to travel around and be, uh, fed it as this super important visiting dignitary all the time. It's not good for your psyche, you know? When you sort of go, hey, do I actually need to do this? And then the answer is no. And then you realize that, oh, I'm actually a little bit more self-sufficient than I thought.

1:03:38My needs are less than I thought. The decision to be conscientious and to think about how our behavior affects other people, it's actually empowering and clarifying for us also. It's not like you're not just becoming this martyr who's just not doing things for the benefit of other people. you're also learning like how unnecessary a good chunk of most of this stuff is. And it's also a good metric for decision-making. Like you could say, okay, well, I could do the money thing right now. I could do the right thing right now. I could do the bad thing right now. I could do the most indulgent thing right now.

1:04:15Which one will I do? And, you know, doing the money thing right now maybe leads to some degree of success and fulfillment in your twenties, thirties, maybe later, but we all, we always know that always doing the money thing and only that, and using that as your metric is not going to lead to happiness. And you could go just category category by category, which one is most likely to lead to some sort of personal happiness. It's probably doing the right thing, by the way, in the case of Hadrian doing the right thing in front of him led to being emperor. So it is a path to success as well, as opposed to doing So as opposed to like tripping my father-in-law down the stairs, helping him instead, made that guy emperor or, you know, regent.

1:05:02And, but it leads me to kind of a final question, which is, I sort of think after going back and forth on this issue for decades, I sort of think I'm actually a poor judge of character. Is that when I meet somebody, if they seem nice to me, I'm just going to think, oh, this is a great person. I'm going to trust him on what he's saying. and I'm not really, and then I find out later, oh my God, this guy is a total criminal. And I make this mistake a lot. And so - Me too. And by the way, Marcus Aurelius does too. His children were awful emperors. So how can I not be sort of optimistically stupid and still do the right thing?

1:05:49Yeah, you know, there's that biblical idea of being wise as serpents. There is sometimes a naivete in people who want to see the good or are themselves good. They can be taken advantage of. They can assume that other people are operating by the same principles or the same values. And that's like just not the case at all. And so I do think cynicism isn't the right response either, but there does kind of need to be some awareness and some, some, some understanding that, uh, you know, there are things that go bump in the night. There are bad people out there. You do want to, you do want to forgive.

1:06:34You do want to offer people grace. You do want to see the best in people. At the same time, we were talking about Harvey Milk. I mean, he's ultimately murdered by, uh, uh, one of his colleagues that he tried over and over and over again to like see the best in and work with. I think at the end, he probably wouldn't have had it any other way. He saw that sort of hope being essential, being what made life worth living. But I'm like you. I have assumed the best in a lot of people. I have also been gullible at times. Like I found this just in the number of controversial clients that I've worked with over the years.

1:07:14I, I, for, for a startlingly, uh, long period of time, you, you could say a self-interestedly long period of time, I guess I, I really did believe they were all sort of being mistreated, uh, that, that, that they were just misunderstood or that they had gotten a bad rap, you know, that the coverage of them was always unfair. And then I kind of became like the, you know, like the defense attorney that after a long enough time realizes like, Hey, probably not all my clients are innocent. You know, like they can't all be, they can't all have been framed by the police, you know? And I think for me, I was, there was things that I, I didn't want to see.

1:08:00And then also there were, there was reasons that I wasn't seeing it like that Upton Sinclair line about how it's, it's hard to see what your salary depends on you, not, uh, not understanding. And I think sometimes we can not see things because if we see them, it means we'll have to do something to go back to where we started. If we can dismiss it as either not real or somebody else's fault or whatever, then we can just keep operating as we've always operated and we won't have to get our hands dirty. Yeah, or quit your job, for instance, that your family depends on, you know, in terms of Optimus and Claire's quote.

1:08:45Yeah, exactly. So right thing right now. What's the next book? So Courage, Discipline, Justice. The last one is Wisdom. That's what I'm writing about now. That's a hard one. It's the hardest one. I knew it was going to be the hardest one, and that's the one I'm on now. Because I always get back to what I'll call the Thomas Jefferson paradox. Like clearly Thomas Jefferson had, however you define wisdom, Thomas Jefferson had wisdom. But he also had these deep flaws. And it's not just smart, right? It's not just IQ. Like he understood how to organize an entire government in this framework that still exists, you know, hundreds of years later.

1:09:31And by the way, every other modern country is modeled after that as well. So he, there's some wisdom there, but he had also these incredibly deep flaws that, that are, are in modern society is unforgivable. Maybe then is unforgivable. You know, I, forgiveness is a weird issue, but. No, he's a, he's a, he was a staggering genius. And at the same time, you know, he didn't like getting his own cup of coffee in the morning. And he liked to be able to have sex whenever he wanted. Right, have children with the woman who got him this cup of coffee. Yeah, and so that's what's so powerful about that Upton Sinclair quote, right?

1:10:13It's very hard to get someone to understand something. Their salary depends on them not understanding. And there's actually a fascinating passage that Jefferson wrote where he goes, you know, I'm such a big fan of Epictetus and Terence and Pubilius, these Roman and Greek slaves who were great philosophers, right? and and he's like obviously it was wrong to enslave them so how can we be enslaving people here in america what what if there's an what if there's a black epictetus he was saying you know um so he you see him wrestling it's like it's almost there he's almost able to do it and then he goes no no no black people are different biologically that's why it's okay because they're, um, they're, they're, they're an animal and I'm a human, right?

1:11:03So, so he, he comes face to face with this, um, this truth that challenges the foundation of his comfort and his privilege and his wealth. And he has to look away because to accept it would mean, how am I going to pay for this house? Uh, and he can't do it. And, and look, that, that, that's obviously morally inexcusable, but I don't know where this jacket was made, you know, and I'm not thinking about where this jacket is made because then I'd probably have to stop wearing it and go buy a different jacket. Right. So there, there are, you know, where your phone is made though. I know where my iPhone is made, but I still have an iPhone.

1:11:46What should I do? What's the right thing? When we look at the ancients or the not-so-ancients, the exercise should not be moral condemnation and then letting ourselves off the hook. It has to be to think about how we can make better decisions in the present. Well, right thing right now. Again, great book, great storytelling. great examples of, it made me think of a lot of things. And I, and always with your stories, I learned something new. Like some of these stories you've, I mean, you've written stories about, you know, Hyman Rickover before, but I always learn new things. There's new things in this book that in other books, there's new things about LVJ, there's new, and there's new, many new stories and characters.

1:12:41You know, one thing that I'm, I'm curious about something for you to maybe, maybe it's related to wisdom, but changing your mind. You know, a lot of times, like take an LBJ. At some point, he changed his mind about civil rights. I mean, he came out of the deep South and Texas and the voters he had to appeal to didn't want civil rights. And then at some point, he changed his mind. Or, you know, someone like Abraham Lincoln changed his mind over time and understood a little bit more of the complexities of slavery and how to deal with it. And Malcolm X is a good example. You talked about Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X ultimately came over to Martin Luther King's idea of things in terms of violence and peace as a use for making change.

1:13:32And Malcolm X changed his mind. You could argue he was wrong before and right later, but really it's the wisdom that kind of connects those two pieces. No, I'm way ahead of you. And we are on the same page because I have a chapter in the Wisdom book about changing our mind. And I talk about Malcolm X because it wasn't just that Malcolm X changes from one strategy to another. Malcolm X has to basically realize that he was in a cult and break away from that cult and embrace an entirely new way of thinking. You know, we're afraid to change our mind. He knew that he would probably be killed for changing his mind.

1:14:11or was having to at least turn away from all of his supporters and his income and his community. And he had the sort of courage to do that as well as the brains to do that. Yeah, I'm fascinated by people who change their mind. I think it's an underrated skill. And by the way, with the risk of negative benefit, like you say, he was killed. Now, sometimes changing your mind could make a great advance in technology. and innovation and business, but sometimes changing your mind, you know, could go fully against that Upton Sinclair quote, like in the Malcolm X case, not only does he lose his job, he loses his life.

1:14:52Yes. And so that's an interesting thing. So look, I wish you luck on wisdom. Right thing right now is a must read. I hope everyone goes out and buys it. The way I buy everything that I literally, Ryan, I just sit around waiting for your next books to come out. And I'm not even kidding. You could ask Jay, like, when's Ryan coming out with another book? I want him back on the podcast. So, oh man. And I always love reading them and I learn not only about the stories, but I always study your writing technique as I know you do with other writers. And thanks once again for coming on the podcast. Ah, thanks for having me.

1:15:31I feel like it's been forever since I saw you and hopefully we can link up one of these days.

1:15:42Thank you.