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

Chris Williamson
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ryan Holliday. He's a podcaster, marketer and an author. Stoicism is like the hot new girl in school, a popular, perfect blend of ancient philosophy which is applicable to modern challenges.

Given that Ryan is probably the world's most famous stoicism expert, what are the most important insights that he's learned about how to apply this wisdom to daily life? Expect to learn why Ryan doesn't talk about the projects he's working on because before finishing them, why Ryan thinks that competition is for losers how self belief is overrated what Ryan's morning routine and typical day looks like why broicism has found a new lease of life, the importance of taking responsibility for yourself instead of other people, and much more huge fan of Ryan's work. I have been for a long time and this is my favorite episode that I've done with him, maybe his fourth or fifth time on the show. And this is so good, so many awesome quotes and mantras and insights. And as much as stoicism might be a sort of a meta meme now, there's still so much great, useful stuff that was written 2000 years ago and still applies to all of our lives as if it was written yesterday, which is pretty cool.

Don't forget, over the next few weeks we have some of the biggest ever guests coming on modern wisdom, and you don't want to miss it. The only way that you can ensure you will not miss those episodes is by hitting the subscribe button. It supports the show and it means that you don't miss episodes when they go up. And it makes me happy. So please go and do it.

Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever else you are listening, I would very much appreciate. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ryan Holiday.

I've collected some of my favorite quotes from you over the last year and I want to go through some of those and get your reflection talking about the thing and doing the thing. Vie for the same resources. Allocate your energy appropriately. Yeah, I don't talk about projects as I'm working on them. That's just a rule I found.

Ryan Holiday
There was this thing many, many years ago, it was this Twitter account that just collected tweets of people talking about the novel they were working on, which they were obviously not working on or they wouldn't have been tweeting about it. And look, I'm not saying you do the thing for validation. That's a bad reason to do things. But there is some sort of light at the end of the tunnel that keeps you going, right when you're doing a thing like, hopefully people will like this. Hopefully it'll be received well.

Hopefully they'll pat me on the back, whatever. You don't want to take that on credit. You want to earn it. And so when I working on a project, I wait until I am nearly done or done before I start to talk about it, because what it does is it starts to make this thing feel real that is not yet real, and that you are the only person that can make real. So it's this sort of temptation this bad.

Steven Press will call it the resistance. The resistance wants you to go, hey, I'm training for a marathon. And people to go, that's so great. I'm so impressed. But they're impressed with the thing you haven't done yet.

Tell them after you run the marathon, that's when you want to cash in on the work that you've been putting in. I think about the people that I really admire are people who work for years and years on things. And I just think about what it must be like to be in the wilderness that long, to just show up every single day and work on a thing and not get any recognition or appreciation for that thing, to not know if you're heading in the right direction or not, the kind of character and determination that that takes. And so my projects are thankfully much shorter than that usually, but you just do the thing, and then if people like it at the end, that's great. I mentioned that quote to Andrew Huberman, and he told me that there is a neuroscientific basis for that, too, that you actually get little sort of titrated drips of dopamine when you do talk about doing the thing.

Chris Williamson
So your philosophical, artsy wanky insight is also reflected quite nicely in the neuroscience. I worked for this guy for a long time, and he had this habit of telling people what he was like, his plans for sort of world domination, like all the things he was working on. And I noticed that he would tell the story so many times in so many ways, and it was always so smart and clever and bound to work. But he would do it so prematurely that it would almost be that he would get tired of it, right? Like he would tell it.

Ryan Holiday
It would become real in his mind and become real, you know, reified, as they say, in these conversations, that he would get bored of it before it came time to actually do the thing. He's almost got the satisfaction and from completing the thing by talking about it. So much before he's completed it. Yeah. And he was so good at entertaining people about it and making it feel real and making the genius of it so obvious that, yeah, he would just move on to the next thing.

And in his mind, this was never quitting. Right. In his mind, he was never like, it was like I could have. I just chose not to or maybe even like, sort of blurring in his mind that he did do it. Right.

And so it's this very seductive, insidious thing where the more you talk about it, the more real it is. But by definition, it's actually less. Pushes you further away from it. Yeah. Because you didn't, you had an hour conversation about this thing you're going to do and how it's going to blow everything up.

You didn't spend 1 hour making that thing closer to reality. And so I have an aversion to it. I just found that so, like, so gross and, and then I saw what it's doing for him. But, but in my own practice, just like, hey, I'd rather just do the thing. And the other side of it that I have found is that one of the hardest parts about doing a book is that you usually have to sell the book, the idea from start to finish before you've done any of it.

So you have to have this vision of this thing that you can't actually really have a vision of because you haven't done it. And when you make contact with the enemy or reality, it changes. So this part of talking about it is really awkward and weird because it's not real. And if you're intellectually honest and you've done it enough times, you know, you can't possibly know. And so what I would find is I would talk about a thing and then I'd describe a project I'm working on or this idea I have, and then people go, what about this?

What about this? And then I would lose confidence in the thing I was doing because I was, I was out. Like, I didn't believe it and I didn't know it because it wasn't real. And so I just thought, you know what? I'm just going to spend all this energy and all this attention on doing the thing and people like it at the end, great.

But I'm not going to get, I'm not just going to get caught up in this thing. From pete to teal, competition is for losers. When people compete, someone loses. So go where? You're the only one.

Chris Williamson
Do what? Only you can run a race with yourself. Yeah, that's a great line in zero to one that I've always loved. The essence of stoicism is this idea that you focus on what's in your control. And Epictetus said something very similar about 2000 years before Peter Thiel.

Ryan Holiday
He said, if you only run races where winning is up to you, you'll always win. Right? If winning for you is, I have the most money, if winning for you is, I'm the most beloved, I'm the most well known, I received the most awards.

If winning to you requires someone or something to deem you something, you might get it, but you also might not get it. If your goal is to be the best version of yourself or to put a certain amount of time or energy or to push yourself to a place that you've never been before, well, now winning is something that's in your control. And so I just, I just try to focus on that. I try to run my own race. I've been a runner most of my life.

And that's one of the things you learn very early, is that, like, you know, you have these competitive impulses, so somebody blows past you or whatever, and you go, I got to keep up with this person. I got to beat this person. And then you realize you have no idea when they started and you have no idea when they're finishing. You're almost never actually running a race with a predetermined beginning and end. And so when you can be really clear about defining success in your own terms, then success is much more attainable.

And this isn't like some cop out where you make, you just sell yourself short. You don't try hard. Yeah, you're actually, I think, determining standards that are much higher and much harder, but you are not allowing other people to do it. And now what Peter Thiel is also saying, he's pointing out this thing that people, people almost instinctively go to well defined spaces because they don't have a clear sense of what they want to do or why they want to do it. And so they just try to do something else, someone that everyone else is doing, and by definition, it's a commodity, right?

So they go, oh, this person has a big podcast. I want to have a big podcast. Or this person, this is where restaurants tend to go in this town. And so they just go where everyone else goes. And this feels safer in that no one's going to laugh at you.

It won't be obviously stupid. You know, the chances of catastrophic failure are lower, but also the chances of, like, real and profound wins or gains is lower this the red ocean, blue ocean. Have you heard Rory Sutherland's take on no one ever gets fired for hiring McKinsey? That's right. Yeah.

You do the thing that everyone in your position does, and this is, I mean, you experience this with people in publishing, right? Like, the main thing is you don't want people to go, why the hell did you buy that book? Right? What the hell were you thinking giving that book a big marketing budget? Right?

And so people go towards what's safe, what doesn't feel, you know, obviously wrong or ridiculous. But the reality is, a lot of things that really do succeed seemed that way. Like an obscure book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. That would have been preposterous to think it would go on to do. You know, my books would go on to do what they did, but I was really interested in them.

I had a very sort of clear and set defined market that I wanted to reach, and I was really interested in it, and that was it. And then everything else was extra. And it's funny now, you know, remembering going to my publisher with that idea for that book and them giving, you know, basically humoring me with it, to now hear all the people who want me to blurb books that really exist only because they are trying to reach the audience that I have cultivated is a surreal experience. That's like, you do this thing and everyone tells you it's crazy and it will obviously not work. And then not long after that, those same people are copying you.

Chris Williamson
How do you keep your ego in check when things like that happen? How do you keep the chip off your shoulder, not get bitter, resentful, self righteous? Well, but those are two different sides of, uh, the same reaction that can happen to this very common thing, which is you did something that everyone said wouldn't work, and then it does work. So what lesson do you take from that? Is it fuck other people?

Ryan Holiday
They're trying to hold me down. I got to prove them all wrong. Or is it, um. They're, uh. Nobody knows anything.

I'm the only one that knows. I saw this at American Apparel. Dev Charney did this, build this fashion brand from nothing that should not have worked. And the result was he lost the ability to calibrate good feedback from bad feedback, warnings from unwarranted criticism. So I try to ask myself, when I get feedback and you get this thing in you, that's like, who the fuck are you?

Or what? What do you know to go like, first off, let's not trust that reaction. And then second, let's let's like, wait it out, right? Like, like this idea that, who are you to tell me this is almost never going to be the right way to come at any kind of feedback. It may well be that you should completely disregard this advice and this person doesn't know what they're talking about.

You just want to make sure that you're. You're doing that calmly and rationally and kindly, and then you can be more confident that you're not doing it from a place of fragility or sensitivity. Yeah. Yeah. All right, next one.

Chris Williamson
The idea of fuck yes or no, it's far too simple and has caused me quite a lot of grief. Dropping out of college, I was maybe 51 49 on it. Leaving my corporate job to become a writer, maybe 60 40. The certainty comes later. The truly life changing decisions are never simple.

Ryan Holiday
I would love to say in retrospect that I knew all the big risks that I took in my life were going to pay off, but if I did, I guess they wouldnt have been risks and they probably wouldnt have paid off because I wouldve been doing them from a place of entitlement or ego or certainty, rather than a place of openness, self awareness, humility, hunger.

I think hell yes, hell no or fuck yes. Fuck yes. Fuck no is a nice rubric for, like, do you want to go to this conference or not? You know, you want to have coffee or not? Some friends are getting together.

Do you want to come or not? But when it's taking your life in your hand, like, when you're deciding to move here, that it could not have worked, right and it ended up working out great for you. It's been crazy to watch. But, like, if you had, if you had been 100 or 1000% certain that it was going to work, first off, you would have been willfully ignorant of all the reasons that it couldn't work and the things you needed to, and most importantly, you would have been therefore discounting all the things you actually had to do to make it work. That's interesting.

Chris Williamson
So is it your belief that sufficiently big or complex decisions are always going to have so many things on both sides of the ledger that the fuck, yeah. Is often very hard to reach? Yeah. There's some historians said the one thing you can never miss out on when you're studying a person or a series of events is that it could have been otherwise. Like, it seems obvious in retrospect, there.

Was going to go the way that depression, 1920s. Yeah, but it always could have gone otherwise. And most importantly, to the people in that moment, it could have gone otherwise, right? They could have done this or they could have done that. And so when you look back at your successes and your failures, understanding that, like, it was the result of these choices that you made or these things that you did is really, really important, because you don't.

Ryan Holiday
The Midas touch is an ancient story that is a cautionary tale. Right. The idea that you are perfect, that you know, that you knew better, is almost always a very dangerous way to come. It doesn't do anything about, like, me making up a story about how I always knew I was gonna be a writer, even though that wasn't true. Me knowing that dropping out of college would lead to this and this and this or that.

My first book would do this or that. Stoicism would do this. Me telling myself a story about those things doesn't change why and how it actually happened. That's not the danger. The danger is me carrying that story.

Chris Williamson
Forward to confidence that doesn't reflect where you were at the time. This retrospective sort of, uh, glow up of your. You're discounting the lucky bounces, you're discounting the things that you actually did that determined, look at how hard I had to work. This wasn't a fuck. Yeah, this wasn't an easy win.

This was something that took blah, blah, blah. Right. Okay. That's totally. And so, and so it.

Ryan Holiday
You tend to see this with, like, people who do, like, really, like, groundbreaking, revolutionary things. In reality, they were trying to do something much smaller, or they had a much humbler view of it, and then it became this thing. But then if you update your identity as visionary, revolutionary, future seer, you're going to overreach on the next thing, almost certainly. And most things start small and you build on them. And so that's just a much safer, better way to come from it, in my view.

So I try to stay in reality, not the narrative that other people make up or you make up, and that when you do things that are in the public eye, it's not just your own version of your story that you have to be careful of. Like, because I was so young when I was doing a lot of the stuff, early in my career, there was this sort of whiz kid kid going places, and that never works out well for those people. You know, you don't want that. I wanted to just be a person. I was just trying to.

I was trying to strip that away and see it for what it was. And I was always trying to, in a way, like, actively give credit to the things that were not up to me. So I wasn't overemphasizing the credit warranted by the things that I did control. Yeah. How do you maintain confidence when so much of what you're doing is kind of disparaging of that?

Chris Williamson
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. There was some joke about the author, Ayn Rand, who wrote this book, the virtue of selfishness. And the writer said something like, has that ever been something people needed a reminder of? Does anyone need help being more selfish?

Ryan Holiday
We're intrinsically, intuitively that. Right. And I tend to find, for the most part, that I need help stripping the ego away, not. Is that true? I wouldn't have guessed that about you.

Yeah. I think if you're ambitious, if you're talented, if you're driven, you know what you can do. I think you want to be reminding yourself of where you have the limitations or where you can get better. And that's a. That's a helpful feedback loop versus the other, right.

So if your feedback loop is, look how amazing I am. Look at everything I've done. I shoved it all in their faces. That, to me, tends to create superiority complex, entitlement, complacency, et cetera. If you're focusing on where you can get better and what else you need to do, I find that tends to make you better and intends to make you do those things.

To me, confidence is based on the evidence of what you've done, but it is coupled with an awareness of where you could have done better, what wasn't a result of your efforts. So that balance of those two, well. You'Ve got, one of my favorite ones from you is self belief is overrated. Generate evidence. Yeah.

I say, I don't believe in myself. I have evidence. I know what I have done because I have done it, and I can see it, and it's real. And when people talk about trusting the process, um, it's much easier to do when the process is paid off for you. It's hard to trust the process when you've never seen it work, but when you've seen it work over and over, like, I now know in my soul what it feels like for a book to not be coming together.

And I know how if you stick with it and you keep going, it does eventually come together. I know the rhythms of the process. I know all the different peaks and valleys of it. So I don't think that much about it. I just show up and I do the stuff.

Right. And the more you do it, the more reps you get. You just have this confidence of, like, I can handle anything because I've handled everything up until this point. That's what, to me, what confidence is. So do you have more self belief now than you did five years ago than you did ten years ago?

I guess it depends on what we're saying. Like, to me, belief is faith without evidence. I have an understanding of what I am capable of. But the paradoxical part is, how do you know you can do something that you've never done before? This is where it gets interesting.

When I sat down to write my first book, I was confident that I could do it because I'd done hard things before, because I'd worked on similar projects. I had an awareness of the positive traits that I bought, but I didn't know I could do it. To know I could do it would be belief in something that I did not have. I could not actually say. Does that make sense?

Chris Williamson
It does. I suppose the alternative to know that you could do it, would be that the task that was in front of you was so unchallenging to you that there was no way that you could fail. There's a great Seth Godin bit about how imposter syndrome is just a natural byproduct of you stretching your limits each time that you do choose to do something which is so far beyond what you've done before. Like, what would it mean to not feel like an imposter? Yeah.

Ryan Holiday
If you're not afraid, you're not reaching. Right? And you should be putting yourselves in positions where you're not sure if you could do it. You hope you can do it. You have confidence that you're not someone who quits when things are hard.

And these are what allow you to make a rational bet that it's not a totally reckless thing to do. You know, it was cool. We were talking before we started about the live things that I was doing. You've got some live shows coming up this summer. Australia.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, Australia. And I did this last year, and I had a phenomenal first show in Dublin on a Thursday night. And it was classic, sort of slightly rowdy irish crowd that had had a few drinks beforehand. And it was. I mean, I got like a 500 person standing of it, which was totally like, I wasn't going out there giving a sermon, but it was just very nice, a lot of positive encouragement.

And then the Manchester show, which was the Friday I just ate shit and it was a Friday. It was a slightly bigger venue. It was a bit brighter. Maybe my delivery wasn't quite there. My mum and dad were in the crowd and loads of my friends were there.

So I was a little bit more tense and more nervous. And at the halftime interval, 45 minutes in, I was like. I just wasn't happy with how it was going. And I went and I looked in the mirror and I had a little word with myself and I was like, hey, 600 people came to see you in Manchester on a Friday night. Some of your best friends from your entire life are here, and your mum and dad are sat four rows back.

Like, if you can't have fun with this as your second ever show and give yourself a bit of grace, that this is a great learning experience for you. And also, how can you turn it around? How positive can you now come out in the second? And that, you know, of all of the shows that I had, that little 32nd chat I had with myself in the mirror. Yeah.

Is one of the things that sticks in my mind the most. And that's an undeniable piece in my stack of proof that I can do the things that I say that I can do. Yeah. And if it had gone the way, if it had just gone swimmingly, you wouldn't have had that sort of moment where you. I think what you actually emerge from that with is a better thing, which is you have the sense that you can lose your grip on it a little bit and grab it back 100%.

Ryan Holiday
And so that's a super valuable skill, because now when you go up there, you're like, I got this right. Things can go wrong. The projector can stop the mic. And we did this show in Vancouver, and it was so much fun. That was another Friday night in Canada.

Chris Williamson
This time it was me and James and, dude, it was. The audience was great. Venue was fantastic. Mike just kept on dying. Kept on dying all the time.

And we had so much fun with it because we were both really comfortable. And I was like, again, going back now, I was telling you about Jimmy Carr. One of the first shows I ever saw him do is Mike kept on dying, and he just styled it out. And you want. You love the guy even more because of how charming he is with going through the nightmare.

He doesn't get uptight. He doesn't start shouting at people. It was awesome. So, yeah, I think, oddly, what we want in anticipation is for everything to go smoothly and for nothing to go wrong. And what we value in retrospect is all of the shit going sideways, as long as we come out of it.

Ryan Holiday
Like, relatively unscathed or even not unscathed. Right. Because you. Let's say you just completely bomb. Like, it's just the worst.

And I've had some. I've had some where, you know, like, they told me the audience was this, so I built it around that. And then, oops, we miscommunicated. Like, I've had it go really miss. And it's not that bad.

You know what I mean? Like, comedians talk about the feeling of bombing, the freedom of it because you don't die. It's not fun, it's not great, but you still get paid, and it is what it is. Strategic learning. So having the worst case scenario happen to you can be freeing in another way, which is you realize it's not actually that bad of a worst case scenario.

Chris Williamson
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The fact that in retrospect, this is going to be something that I'm really going to value, that going through difficult times at the time just sucks so hard. Have you been able to sort of metacognizant, pull yourself out a little bit more? Yeah. Freud said once, in retrospect, the struggle will strike you as most beautiful like, the years of struggle will strike you as most beautiful. And it's true.

Ryan Holiday
You think about the worst moments of your life from earlier. Now they're integrated into who you are. And in some ways, we understand that we couldn't and wouldn't be where we are without those things. We know not only is that true in a positive way, but it's also just true in how the mind works. Like, the mind is really good at this is what cognitive dissonance does.

It works on you in a way that makes this thing for the best, even if it wasn't for the best. Like, we're so worried about. And some of the cognitive psychology on this bears it out, too, is like, we're worried about, like, will I regret it? You won't regret it, because you actually don't have that many regrets at all. That's.

The mind is pretty good at minimizing that feeling of regret. We convince ourselves that what happened was for the best. So we know this is almost certainly where we're going to end up in six months, in a year, in ten years, in 30 years. And so why torture yourself in the interim? Why not give yourself some of that grace now?

Why not go, hey, I understand that this is going to be a thing that forms me as a human, and in the future, I will be grateful for it. Maybe I can't get there right now. There's this story. Hemingway moves to Europe with his wife. He's writing in France.

He's struggling as this journalist, writer, freelancer. And he has this meeting with this editor, and he's meeting with him, and he telegraphs his wife and says, hey, I need you to come meet me. This is Hadley. So she gathers up all his stuff, thinking that Hemingway is going to want to show it to this editor. And she hops on the train.

She stops in Lyons or somewhere in France and gets off the train for a second to grab a newspaper, whatever, and she comes back, and the briefcase full of all of Hemingways writing is gone. Everything he has done in his life up until this point, just gone. They don't know if someone stole it. They don't know if she lost it. They don't know if it was thrown away.

So Hemingway loses everything that he had produced up until this point. And it's obvious when you hear the story, you know, okay, yes, this was the defining moment. He reinvents his style. He comes back from. We know how the story ends, but there's this letter that he writes to Ezra Pound, and he goes, this is right after it happens.

He's telling him the story and he goes, I know you're going to tell me this is all for the best. It's all going to work out. I should be grateful that it happened. And he says, but I'm not there yet. And I love that because I think that's an important.

It's okay to not be there. It's okay for it to feel shitty when you've gotten dumped, when you've failed, when you've lost a bunch of money, when you've had to admit to feed on something, it's okay. But you can simultaneously know that in the future, you don't have to feel the same way, and you almost certainly won't feel the same way. And I like that. Hemingway said, I'm not there yet.

He got there, but he wasn't there yet. This understanding of the process, this sort of acceptance of my own psychological fallibility, but this hope in the future as well. Yeah. And he does get there very quickly. Almost immediately, he starts writing again.

And his sparser, sort of Hemingway esque style comes as a result of this kind of burning, unintentional burning of the boats behind him. And he later, he even fictionalizes a scene where this happened to the writer. So he's able, in that scene, to articulate everything that Ezra pound was trying to say to him in this moment, but he wasn't there yet. And so when the stoics say, the obstacle is the way I try to be, I'll get people to be like, hey, my brother in law just got diagnosed with cancer, or my spouse cheated on me, or my company just failed. I don't give them the book and be like, this is awesome.

Really soak this shittiness in. It sucks to be a person. And devastating, heartbreaking things happen. It's just knowing that you can put the work in on that and you can get to a place where you feel very, very differently. Your most popular tweet.

Chris Williamson
Most consistent, most popular tweet. I have zero idea what this would be. Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. I would say that the thing when I hire people, the number one thing I'm looking for is I'm looking for.

Ryan Holiday
It's something I'm looking. I'm looking for the absence of. I want someone who is not nuts. Like, I want someone who's not nuts. And the problem is, a lot of young, ambitious people, they have shit that they have to deal with first.

You know, what? I mean, they're too high strung, they're too worried. They've got bad boundaries. Like, they're not. I was very cognizant early in my career of, like, not giving anyone the creeps, not having bad energy.

And that was why I would get invited to things. That's why I would get asked to participate in things is that. That trust that, hey, this person isn't gonna fuck this up, is almost more important than they know. You're not going to knock it out of the park. You're 20, you know, they want you to not fuck it up.

So anyways, I just try to. I just try to work on my shit. And I did have a lot of momentum early in my life, you know, the kid going places. I can't believe you're this young. How did you get here?

And I just wanted that to play actually no part in my identity and how I saw myself, because I also know that most of those people regressed the mean. So to actually have staying power, to, like, take advantage of getting shots early at stuff, the main thing is not fucking it up. That's like the main thing. It sounds like, be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill, but sanity.

Chris Williamson
It sounds like there's a sort of longtermism component in there as well. Yeah. I don't want to do something, make a bunch of money and then not do the thing. I like doing the thing. I want to be able to do it and I want to.

Ryan Holiday
I want. I remember I listened to someone once say they were like, if you stick around long enough, you'll get a shot. Everyone gets a shot. Just don't fuck the shot up. And that's.

To me, I felt very fortunate to get those shots early, so it was actually more imperative that I. It's also more risky, you know, because you haven't put the requisite preparation and work in that whole if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready thing. But I got the opportunity before I had chance to get ready. Yes. Yeah.

You think you want these things in your early twenties, you want your first video to go super viral, you want your first show to get purchased, you want your first book to get a bidding war? You want your first company to have all the VC's knocking on the door? You think that's what you want? If you get it, you're immediately behind. You immediately now have to go retrofit or earn this somewhat misguided faith that they put in.

There's a lot of catching up I. Mean, you are speaking to me. So I signed with portfolio and harder Hatchet in the UK.

Chris Williamson
They're expecting me to not fuck it up, let's say that. And I'm like, sat down with Mark a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, dude, this is fucking a big deal. I've got. Originally, he nearly killed me. The submission date originally was August this year.

He was like, if you try and do that, I'll come and fucking smash your laptop. He's like, you can't do that. You can't do that. We pushed it back by another year, which is fine. But, yeah, I feel that a little bit.

Ryan Holiday
And I think it's something people need to understand now more than ever because of how easy it is to potentially. Bestow this random blow up on you. Yeah, there's forces acting on you that have nothing to do with you. It's the right place, right time at just a level that, yeah, you would have had to get vetted by all these gatekeepers before you really would have had to pay your dues and build these relationships. And I'm not saying one system is better or worse than the other.

It's just the algorithm can give you something that previously would have taken years and years to acquire. There's something. I read this really phenomenal breakdown from Gwinda Bogle about how everything has turned into a game, and he talks about how people that are given fame and status and accolade in the past, you could still have a huge be a child star and do all the rest of it. But for the most part, the returns weren't so horseshoe y. They weren't so just insane.

Chris Williamson
Anybody that wasn't built psychologically to deal with fame was selected out of the pool before they got to the stage where they had that huge thing to deal with. Not true for everybody, but certainly what all of the weird protection strategies, like, have you got the right people around you and can you deal with it? Here's your first red carpet. Here's your second red carpet. Maybe you go through some of those before you get the equivalent of an Oscar.

And, yeah, on an egalitarian, no holds barred tiktokification world, anybody can go, there's that dude that went viral for drinking ocean spray, cranberry juice, skateboarding down the street, and then he put some 50 year old song back in the character. This 52nd video of a world changing moment. You go, that man, he may have been very well prepared for it from other things, but there's no reason to expect that he would have been. There's another layer on this. You know who Doctor Drew is kind of.

Ryan Holiday
Yeah, he did. He was for many years the host of this radio show called Loveline on the west coast, and he gave this survey. It was in a position that most academics wouldn't be able to do. He was able to actually do a scientific experiment on famous people, because every day, multiple times a week, he had famous people in the studio. So he gave him this narcissism questionnaire.

He's basically looking at, does being a celebrity make you a narcissist, or are celebrities attracted. Are narcissists attracted to fame? And what he found, it was interesting that the more craft oriented what you did was, the more protected you were, or less likely you were to have some of these narcissistic traits. What's craft? So, like, a drummer, which is a very hard thing to become famous for, would tend to be less narcissistic than a reality television star.

And so if your path to success is based on you getting good at, extremely good at a very hard thing, you have this safety mechanism, which is. It's always kicking your ass. So even if the world permanently generating evidence. Yeah, yeah. That also.

So if the world is saying you're amazing, you're the best, you're God's gift, you know, one, how many hours it took to do the thing, and then two, it's still hard. It's still hard to do, especially if you're trying to get better at it. And that's very different than being blessed by the algorithm or, you know, being spotted on a street corner and suddenly you're on the COVID of magazines, like, to do the work is a protection against that. And it would tend to be that the people who like, if you become famous for being a drummer, fame is a byproduct of you loving the drums. Right.

And that's where you want to. Bruce Dickinson. So if the fame was taken away, the love of the drums would still remain? Yeah. Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, said fame is the byproduct of creativity.

But not always. Not anymore. I think social media has changed that. But if your recognition or celebrity or platform is a result of you being this woodchuck that Chuck's wood, that's a much safer place than you are famous, because you are famous and you're not exactly sure how you got famous. That's why audience capture is perilous in a million different ways.

Chris Williamson
One of them being that if you get famous feeding red meat to an audience, that you don't believe in. You'll not only resent the work, but you'll resent the audience. You'll resent these people that are so easy, you'll pity them. They're so easy to be conned into believing this thing, and you feel like a puppet master, but in no way will you ever be connected to the work that you do. I think that's true.

Ryan Holiday
It's also if you got famous for saying something that maybe you didn't fully believe or that you were just riffing on or whatever, not, you got well known for saying these things that you believe in. It's hard for you even to know what you believe. And the expression, it's very hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. It's hard, period, to know what your beliefs are, but it's very hard to maintain beliefs in the light of those beliefs, either costing you money or another belief being better for you financially. So you get in this place where you're like, what is the, you wake up and you go, what does my audience want?

Which is not the way that you should be. Not instinct. It's not curiosity, it's not wonder, it's not awe. Yeah, I went to a retreat last summer, and this guy who used to create a ton of content online was there. And I asked him why he'd stopped, and he said, because I started feeling like I had to live up to in private, the things that I was saying in public.

Chris Williamson
He was making these proselytizations online about how to do business or about how a relationship should work. And maybe he did or did not believe it at the time, but he then sort of planted this stake in the ground that he could retroactively be compared to. He's like, I keep evolving, and I want my opinions to be able to change very quickly, but everybody has this sort of post hoc hypocrisy thing to be able to say. You're saying that the s and p is now good. In the past, you said it was crypto, and now you want to be.

Ryan Holiday
Able to change your mind. Yeah. He had to live up to in private the things that he was saying in public. All right, next one. If it makes you a worse person, it's not success.

Chris Williamson
If starting a business tears your relationships apart, makes you bitter or frustrated with people, then it doesn't matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives. That's not success. What do you want your life to look like? Right. I think it's very easy to go these people are successful.

Ryan Holiday
I'm going to do what they do. But if you don't have a sense of day to day, what you want your life to look like or who you want to be in your life, it's very easy to lose your bearings very quickly because you're going to get offered things. Do you want to go over here? You want to do this, you want to do that. It's where the audience capture thing comes in, too.

You are doing what makes rational sense or is in your immediate self interest, but it may well be taking you much, much further away from where you want to go or where you should go. Then you wake up one day and your spouse leaves you. You wake up one day and your children hate you. You wake up one day and you go, oh, wait, I'm the bad guy. You know, like, I'm not a positive contributor to humanity.

And so I think being really clear with yourself about what success looks like is really important, because if you start to get it, it becomes this rocket ship that you're riding on, and you are not going to have the control then of it. Isn't it strange that the judgment we all have, most of us have about what is success? We have to swim so fast upstream to get towards something which we probably actually value. I've got this really lovely idea I'm working on with a friend at the moment about hidden and observable metrics. And it's my contention that we often trade hidden metrics for observable metrics.

Chris Williamson
So, for instance, hidden metric might be time that you get to spend with your kids, quality of sleep, how much you don't need to work. And we'll trade that for an increase in salary. We'll trade an increase in salary for a longer commute, which downstream from that, how much more stressed are you, less time with your kids, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because the best game in the world is money and job title and the way that you look, but what is it that you actually do? And trying to bifurcate that with the.

Ryan Holiday
Observable metrics are easy to compare against other people, and so we default to them because we go, oh, this person has it. So having more than them is winning. This is where that competition impulse is so insidious. You go, like I talk whenever I hear someone tell me that they have a certain number of books that they're trying to sell. Like, they're like, I want this book to sell a million copies, I'm immediately not interested because I know that they just pulled this number out of their ass.

There's no reason that a specific number is a goal. So they've already said that their goal for the project is not to write something amazing. It's not to write something meaningful. And also, what timeline are we talking about? Are we talking in a year, or are we talking 50 years?

What they have effectively done, almost always, is they heard some book that they, like sold this many copies, and then they've said, well, that's my thing. As opposed to figuring out their own race and thinking about it in a way that's sort of up to and about them. So, yeah, we look at people who have achieved things, and we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what it's like to be that person 100%. Dude, I'm obsessed with that question. And Neil Strauss was sat in that seat a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, he's the best. First time I met him, we got on super well. He's a real one. And he told me, do you know what the title of his next book is? No.

Chris Williamson
It's called the power of low self esteem. Fucking awesome. I've texted him a bunch of times because I was like, dude, I just want you to know how sticky that idea is. The power of low self esteem and the courage to be disliked. It's a lot like it's kind of in that sort of oxymoron kind of way, but I'm beyond obsessed with thinking about the price that people pay to be someone that other people admire.

Like Elon Musk, that conversation he had with Lex Friedman, who's like, most people think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand my mind is a storm. And then I've got this, which I've been wanting to drop on you for a little while. So Winston Churchill, he's got this letter from his father when he doesn't make it into Sandhurst.

Have you heard this? Yeah. It's just so fucking phenomenal. His father sort of accuses him of being. Risking being a social wastrel, one of the many upper class toffs that never makes it.

No longer will I ever lay even the slightest piece of credence at anything that you say. Dot, dot, dot. Your mother sends her love. Churchill was 19, and it's just I read this thing, and I see someone that's driven to go and do phenomenal things and maybe is one of the greatest military leaders, like, one of them ever. And you think, I bet on V Day, whenever it was June 30, 1945, something like that.

I bet that he had this brief relinquishing of the internal tyrant, and then almost immediately, it would have come back. There would have been no respite from his degree of low self esteem. And that was why I was like, dude, you fucking. There's a great book called Churchill and Son about Churchill's relationship with his own son, which was so much better than his relationship with his own father. But still, fundamentally, you see the just generational wounds that being a shitty parent can have on a person.

Ryan Holiday
And, yeah, if you think doing all these things is going to make dad finally proud, you're going to be very sorely mistaken, because he's supposed to be proud from the beginning, and he's supposed to be able to make you. Mister Rogers would say, you make the world better just by being you. The role of a parent is to communicate that fundamental fact. You are enough. You are enough.

I like you as you are. And sure, it is an incredibly powerful motivator to not feel that way. It's also an incredibly tragic motivator and ultimately destructive form of fuel. It's a potent but toxic fuel. Yeah, it's fuel that destroys the engine.

It's a one way trip. You can't come back from it. You can't adjust, and it ruins all the things that you end up achieving. I think there's an interesting sort of two step process that you can go through. I've spoken about this with another friend, Alex, who very much is driven by that fuel.

Chris Williamson
I wanted to make more money than my father had made in a year, then in a decade, then in a lifetime, then in a lifetime, in a day. And then you tell your dad, and he's like, well, what about this? You know, it never happens. But one of the things that I quite like from him, which is, like, kind of like alchemy with this, when you're at the start of any journey, you're going to have bitterness and resentment and a point to prove and a chip on your shoulder and all of those things. And I think that what you really just need is activation energy to get started.

And I think that in the beginning, using, like, it's a toxic fuel that you can't use for too long. It's potent but toxic in the long term. Like, that's the framing for me. I'm like, you know, when I think back to the reason I started any of the things that I started, it was to prove all of the people from school wrong to, you know, get out of this culture that I didn't really like all of the rest of it. And I'm like, right, okay.

I don't need to necessarily feel ashamed of using that fuel. I do need to transcend it and know that I can't keep on relying on it. But I also think, look, if you're somewhere that you don't want to be, use what you've got. Sure. And just not for too long.

Ryan Holiday
It's kind of like those rockets, you know, they're dropping fuel tanks and engines as they go. Cause you need different rockets to escape different levels of the atmosphere. Yeah, it's very hard. It's very hard to go from nothing to something without some kind of motivating factor. But the sooner you realize you're never gonna get the satisfaction that you want, they're never gonna admit they were wrong.

You know, you're. You're never. It's never gonna be satiated, the better. Right. You have this moment where you get the thing that you wanted.

You get something that you worked on for a very long time. You get it, and this is a pivotal moment in every ambitious person's life. Right? You win a gold medal, you make the varsity team, you get a check for an incomprehensible amount of money. And I remember I was mowing my lawn when I hit number one for the first time.

It feels like people go, what does it feel like? It feels like fucking nothing. It feels like nothing. It doesn't feel like anything because nothing has changed. The work didn't change.

The only thing that changed is someone recognized it in some way, and it almost certainly was not the person or the people that you wanted it the most from. So in that moment, you win the Super bowl, do you go, okay. I've now eliminated this fallacy, this idea that if I do this, I will feel good. Because you don't feel good. That sadness or emptiness or weirdness you feel.

You either eliminate it as a person, as a possibility, and then you can continue doing the thing from a new motivation or a new understanding because you actually like doing the thing, or you want to have some positive impact on the world, or you just want to see how far you can take it. Or you go, oh, it's because it wasn't. I got to do it twice. Yeah. I got to prove that it wasn't a fluke.

I got to prove it wasn't a fluke. Or I. Oh, it's not that I won once. I have to win the most super Bowls. Right?

It's not that I made a billion dollars I have to make the most money there is. I have to. Yeah, I have to. I have you go, oh, it's just the dosage wasn't enough. The goalposts keep getting moved.

Chris Williamson
How. How possible do you think it is to realize that the mountain is the wrong mountain to climb without having climbed it? Probably impossible. I think there's some. I've battled with this a lot.

Ryan Holiday
Ineffable. Like, here's the thing, so it's not hopeless. Like, people who are listening to this, and they're like, just. This is easy for you to say. I've never done.

I get it. You're gonna have to experience some of this to get it. But what you're hearing now should help you recognize that pattern when you're in it faster, so you don't have to come to this same hard won epiphany or understanding, which, by the way, almost every appears in every biography and memoir and character study and work of art and literature ever. You don't have to discover it on your own. Just take it.

Let it sit there. There's this experience you have where you read something and either it doesn't make sense to you or doesn't register to you at all, and then years later, something happens or you experience something, you go, that's what that pieces come together, and a lot of what you're doing early on in your career, in life is just accumulating those things. So you don't know that this is gonna be the final piece of that puzzle until later. It's so funny, man. Like, I'm glad that you said, I think it's essentially impossible, because I've kind of arrived at that as well.

Chris Williamson
It's far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. And that goes for status, full validation. Pick your domain of pursuit of choice. But it's kind of funny where I think I've believed and known that inside, I'm like, would you believe this is true? Yes.

Yes. And do you genuinely believe it? Yes. Yes, I genuinely do. And are you still gonna pursue that thing?

Yes, I am. Like, it's one of those lessons that you want to face. Palm yourself, to implode your own head that hard, because you go, I knew this, and I believed it, and I still had to go through with it. And maybe that's just like the cost of doing business as a human. Look, it's very hard to become successful at something, to make a lot of money, to master a craft, but in many ways, it's easier to do that than to have self awareness and self understanding.

Ryan Holiday
There's an expression, it's easier to be a great man than a good man. Like, it's easier to win public office, build an institution, make your mark in history than it is to just be a good dude, be a good human being. And I would say the rare thing is to have both. How many people can be great at something or be world class at something? Maybe it's impossible to be the number one all time goat at something and be balanced, but to be, like, in contention in the league and have a balanced, normal family life, be a part like that.

And so, to me, if the sooner you can go, okay, actually, that's the mountain that I want to climb. Correct. That's a worthwhile mountain. That's a mountain that has a positive impact on the people around me. And so I just did this book on the virtue of justice.

I think when people hear justice, they think, like, legal system and law and politics, and that can be part of it, but just the fundamental level to decide what you're going to be great at. There's a quote from Marc surrealist, which I love. He's writing this in meditations of himself. He goes, a better wrestler, question mark. Because that was his hobby.

He liked to basically do an ancient form of mixed martial arts. He's like, a better wrestler, says, but not a better friend, a better forgiver of faults, a better citizen, a better human being. And so he's saying, like, look, why am I working? He's like, I'm working at getting better at all, but where am I working on? Just being a good friend or a good human being?

Chris Williamson
What am I optimizing for? Yeah. And so the decision to say, hey, actually, these two goals are, they're not in conflict with each other, but there's attention to each other, and the decision to not be what they call an art monster is great. Like Hemingway, great writer, shitty human being, like, leaves all sorts of damage in his wake. And that's so true for, like, a lot of the people that we hold up.

Ryan Holiday
And so the decision to go, hey, maybe what I'm aspiring to is to not be a better writer than Hemingway, but to be a really good writer, but not such a piece of shit. Significantly better person. Yeah, dude. Much easier. I'm obsessed with this.

Chris Williamson
This whole sort of section. I must have thought about it probably more than any other topic for the last few years. So what are you optimizing for? What are you sacrificing? Happiness in order to be successful so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can allow yourself to be happy if you just cut off this sort of need for validation.

Oh, dude, it's so interesting. It's so, so interesting. All right, let's do one more. Let's do one more, and then we can get into the new book. What do I love from these?

This is good. Stop wanting things to be easy and prepare for them to be hard. That seems pretty straightforward. You think you want it to go. You think you want all green lights, and you think you want all the things to pop every time.

Ryan Holiday
And show me someone for whom that went well. Where you build, it's like, look, you think you want to have all these natural resources, you want to be super tall. You'd be wonderful if you inherited money. And then you look at the people to whom that advantage also created a pretty great deficiency, and then you go, oh, no, maybe you need just. There's a right amount of struggle and difficulty.

You don't want everything to go wrong, but it's probably not gonna all go right. And so when you get those moments of struggle to just go, this is actually what I asked for. Like, this is what I need. I can make the best of anything. That's kind of how I think about it.

Chris Williamson
I've heard you say before that you're a naturally anxious person, or you have a sometimes anxious disposition. How have you overcome that? Or how do you deal and compensate? I'm working on it all the time. I mean, I go to therapy for it.

Ryan Holiday
I build a routine around it. I build. I built my life around it. It's understanding. My desire to control things or have them be a certain way is a recipe for misery.

It's usually the expectation or the desire that gets you into trouble. I need it to go this way, or it will be stressful. What I notice in my own life, what I'm working on, is I noticed the way in which this is where, you know, you have a compulsion about something. It's one thing to just be, like, anxious, like, hey, is the sky gonna fall? I don't wake up just feeling anxious like that.

What I do is I create sort of a cycle. So I pack things or I set things up in a way where they need to go a certain way. And the reward for them going that way is not good. It's relief. And so you have this sort of compulsive cycle where you are creating tension and stress.

You're just ratcheting up the stress. And the only reward is that there's some moderate release of the stress, it's never good. Yeah. Oliver Berkman calls it productivity debt. He says you start each day at minus ten, and the best that you can hope for is to get back to zero.

Chris Williamson
You don't start at zero, and good things take you to plus ten. Yeah. And it's a very fragile place because all these things have to go right for you to feel not shitty, not like, hey, if everything goes right, you're like, what an awesome day. But if everything goes right, you feel like you kept everything perfectly balanced. Correct.

Ryan Holiday
And that's it. Yeah. Take me through the highest return routine things that you do. You know, it's weird. I'm a very routine oriented person.

A lot of what I'm trying to do and having kids has been really helpful. Also awful in the sense that. But your control over that goes away. And so just realizing, like, hey, if I try to keep things this way, maybe I can keep them this way. I can keep them this way until my kids are 17 or 18, and then I'll wonder why they don't want to come home from college.

Right. So realizing when you have systems or habits or, you know, practices that are in conflict with other things that are important. So. So this thing that I've developed, that's been a cycle that's, let's say, tolerable for me, rewarding for me, is now in conflict with this other thing that's important to me, which is the happiness of my household. I don't have good answers to this one because it's something I'm still working through and reading a lot about and talking about and working on, but realizing I've created this cage that I'm in and that seems like a strange reward for being successful at the thing that you do.

Not that I mind being disciplined or whatever, but I'm saying that the reward for getting to a place where you don't really need to think about money, you don't really have anything to prove. You're your own boss. You decide what you work on and you have skills should not be waking up at minus ten. Yes, you shouldn't wake up at plus 100. That's probably delusional and not conducive to doing good work or being a nice person.

But if you can't get to a place where you feel good, where you feel full from, that probably more is not gonna get. It's like a negative, hedonic adaptation in a way that as my capacity increases and my expectations about myself increase, I don't take more pleasure and gratitude in the things that I've done and the skills that I've accumulated, I just continue to ramp up the ever increasing relative goal that I have. And, yeah, I mean, dude, what an interesting insight to think about. The fact, if everything goes well, I end up in a place where I'm in more of a cage than I would have been in before if I don't think about it carefully. Yes.

My seven year old said something the other weekend. He was like, we've got. But I was like, we gotta go, you know, like, let's wrap this up, guys. And he's like, we've got. He goes, a seven year old goes, you know, we've got nothing to do and nowhere to be.

And he was totally fucking right. You know, we have wisdom bitched by. A seven year old. It's Saturday. There's nothing on the schedule.

There's nowhere we have to be. There's nothing we have to do. And yet, what I'm doing is the thing that served me so well as a person, which is control. Control. Don't waste time.

Do things efficiently, go to the next thing, squeeze one more thing in.

First off, it's nonsense. And second, I get rewards from that. But the cost is born by this person who's never been to this restaurant before or has to be in school all weekend. This is his weekend. So realizing that the.

But if the reward is not. Look, the reward for success should not be that you just do nothing and you're good, but it should also relieve in some way the emptiness or the needing to prove. You should be coming at it from a place of enoughness rather than the same sort of compulsion or emptiness. Exactly. Because it's objectively not true anymore.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah. I have a good amount of work to do before I have kids. I can't wait to be a dad. But that is going to be a red pill and a half for me to.

Ryan Holiday
It's good to try to do that work before. And then in some ways, it's like the, you know, you got to succeed to realize success is not going to be. You have to. You have to just do it. The forcing function of the child is ultimately going to be the thing because.

It changes you hormonally and biologically and logistically. It just changes you in every way. And so all these things that you could only consider or contemplate before are now real. And you also have this thing of the consequences of your. You realize the willingness with which you would subject yourself to abuse or consequences to your decisions and just grit your teeth and bear it.

You have to be a real asshole to not be affected by watching the consequences of the decisions or habits or lifestyle that you have manifest in a child. An innocent person. Isn't that interesting that it's kind of like that? I think on average people finish 50% of antibiotics courses, but they make their dogs finish 95%. That we're prepared to torture ourselves in a way.

Chris Williamson
The second that we have this external thermometer type thing that says things like, we've got nowhere to go and nothing to do. Have you done any inner child work? I'm gonna leave from here to go and do some. I've been doing it every twice a week for a couple of months now. It's been a transformational thing for me, but I was very stuck understanding who and what that child was like.

Ryan Holiday
My memories of childhood are not great, which is not a great. Let me fix this thing. I can't remember well, which is not. A great verdict on your childhood. Like, most people either really good or really bad.

They know what they were feeling when they were six or ten or eleven, and you're just like, I don't really remember. That's indicative in it of itself. But when you have a physical manifestation of you at every age and every day, it's you one day older. This isn't a reason to have kids, but it's a very powerful thing about having kids is suddenly you go, oh, this is what a seven year old thinks. This is what a seven year old needs.

And they look like me and they talk like me. You started to see yourself and your own development arc, despite the fact that much of it was omitted from your own memory in the experience of. And you can have compassion and feel like the part of what inner child work is, as I understand it, is about loving and reparenting that child who, if you're disassociated from that person, that can be difficult to do. If you've got a surrogate you in. Front of you, you're like, you know, and you also have this benefit, this reality of you can see that seven year old interacting with your own parents and that's also illustrative cause then you're like, oh, okay, I see.

Chris Williamson
That's so interesting. This is what they obviously need in this scenario, and this is what they're incapable of giving in that scenario. It makes sense. So that's been a powerful. Who knew that having kids was the ultimate therapeutic tool?

That's what should be prescribed. We don't need psilocybin therapy. Everybody have a couple of kids and just watch them like a hawk. There's a scene in that Churchill book I was telling you about where he's sitting talking to his son and his daughter in law, and he just hits him and he goes, I'm pretty sure I talked to you this evening more than my father talked to me in his entire life, cumulatively. And so that's an insight that you can only really have with the next generation.

Well, I think certainly for me, I'm an only child. So there's no split test. Yes, there's no one there that anchors other memories. Do you remember when we went to the thing and this fish and chip shop and that happened? There's none of that.

Ryan Holiday
So you don't know what's real or not. You don't know what's real. There was never. There's no additional vantage point to look at your memories from or to prompt things that are just latent and probably would be pulled out in that sense kind of a way. And yet there's nothing to compare and contrast against.

Chris Williamson
Like, that's just childhood, you know, it's just. That's just the way that it was. You have no idea. Is this normal, abnormal, better, worse? Like, there's no.

There's no such thing as relativity in this. It's just absolute. Yeah. How fascinating, man. I'm really happy that you're using holistically, healthily, using raising a kid to also improve yourself and sort of work on yourself as well.

That's a really. I mean, what a gift as well, that you're unknowingly. That your son is able to give you just simply by being. That he's able to give you this thing where you go, wow, like, by raising him and being rewarded for it. I'm also, like, fixing myself.

Ryan Holiday
But it's a choice you make, right? Because you go, hey, get in the fucking car. Right? And you can see the choice that parents make. And I see this because I do this thing called daily dad, which is like a parenting email every day.

And you can see, like, I basically cannot look at the comments anymore because the shitty dad energy is so triggering for me. You know, like, the things that people manage to disagree with. You know, it's interesting, but, yeah, you can decide to. It just hit me at some point, I go, I think about the pain I feel or the problems I've had in my life because of things from my childhood and how those have been passed down generationally. And then the decision to go, the default is that that happens again.

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

Chris Williamson
And I mean, what is more heroic than acting as a breakwater or a dam from this sort of weird parental generational patterning, trauma response, coping mechanism? All of this stuff being like, hey, guess what? It ends here. This is the end. Yeah.

Ryan Holiday
Or I'm going to do my best to make it not as mostly ends. It mostly ends. Yeah, yeah. But no, no, that, like, yes, again, we tend to think of justice as like. Like, okay, philosophers want to debate the trolley problem, or let's discuss whether we live in a computer simulation or not.

Or we want to discuss should it have gone this way or that way at this sort of historical or political juncture point. And that's all very interesting, but much more imperative are the sort of day to day decisions we make as people in our own lives. And you want to talk about multigenerational impact. Chances are 95% of the work that all of us do will be very quickly forgotten. But I'm affected by choices that my great grandfather made.

I'm very affected by choices my grandfather made, and I'm extremely affected by the choices that my father made. And so the decision to focus on that sphere just as much as you focus on the others is a critical responsibility to assume. In other news, this episode is brought to you by momentous. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with momentous.

Chris Williamson
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You can get up to 32% off site wide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentous.com modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's live momentous.com modernwisdom. Wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. You're in the middle of the four stoic virtues at the moment. I think maybe the only one less sexy than justice is temperance.

So why say that justice is the most important? Like, what happens without justice is what. Everything else has to be directed towards. So the courage to put yourself out there to take some risk, is it admirable in pursuit of a socially destructive end or a nonsensical end because you've had your brain scrambled by things that you watched online? It's funny.

Ryan Holiday
Temperance is not sexy. So I render it as discipline. And it's far and away the best performing in the series and almost certainly will be because it's a thing people think they want and definitely need the most. Justice, to me, though, is the North Star, the value that unlocks the others. If you don't have a code, a moral compass, a sense of what's right and wrong, or why you're here or not here, what is any of it for?

Chris Williamson
Talk to me about the relationship between justice and the other three. Marcus Aurelius line is the fruit of this life is good character and works for the common good. I like that definition of justice. So, first off, just the things that you control. Do I keep my word?

Ryan Holiday
How do I treat other human beings?

What ethics do I operate under? How do I run my business?

Do I litter or not litter? Just the little decisions we make about what kind of person we're going to be. That's character. And then the other side of that is the impact that we try to positively have in the world, in the political sphere, the social sphere, the things we write, the things we say, do we participate in the issues of our time? The balance of those two is how I would define this idea of justice, what the right thing is, and then the other virtues are in pursuit of that.

If we lived in a perfectly just world, it wouldn't take any courage to pursue these things. But we don't, right? In fact, most of the people that we admire, say a Martin Luther King or a gandhi, we admire them simultaneously, not just for their strong sense of right and wrong. They're not just these monkish figures who retreated from the world. The courage and the tenacity with which they brought that thing into being.

And then we throw the fourth, the learnedness and the astuteness, in some cases, the political genius of them. This is where the discipline of wisdom comes in. So there are these inseparable interrelated virtues that for the most part, you cannot separate. You know, knowing what the right thing is and doing the right thing are very different things. And so even the virtue of justice, just having a good conscience, is in and of itself only so valuable.

Chris Williamson
So that's why it's right thing right now? Yes, because presumably deeds are important here. There's no point in just thinking about justice. There's a role of practicing and actually doing the thing. Yeah.

Ryan Holiday
I don't know about you, but I didn't spend a lot of time in the book, in these sort of incredibly complex philosophical discussions about should you do this or should you do that? I tend to find, at least in my own life, knowing what the right thing is is usually pretty obvious to me. Should I say this or not say this? Should I go with this or that? Should I work with this person or not work with this person?

Should I refund this money or keep this money? Should I buy this or buy that? What is right is usually pretty obvious. Where the complexity comes in is when the mind works on the reasons why you don't have to do it this time, or you don't have to do it right away. And so I wanted to try to just say, do the right thing felt to me insufficient.

It's doing it now. We tell ourselves, hey, I'm going to go do all this stuff, that I'm gonna be really rich, and then I'm gonna be a philanthropist, where I'm not a garbage person, you know? And then how many people make that turn? We don't make the turn. And so that's sort of where I.

Chris Williamson
Was coming at it from Florence Nightingale, pursuing actually doing a thing. Competence, pursuing justice. What was the story there? So she gets, she's this young girl in England. She has rich parents in victorian England.

Ryan Holiday
The expectation of a girl of her stature is. It's not just, there's no expectations. There is an expectation of no expectations, like, you are not to do things. And so she just hears, one day, she hears this call from above that she should find a vocation, that she should help the less fortunate. She gets called to nursing.

Her parents are like, are you out of your fucking mind? You cannot do that. It was considered almost worse than prostitution that a young, rich, white woman would be in the same room as these. Kind of kid, ashen, working at KFC or something. Yeah, dirty, rowdy soldiers.

There was all this immorality applied to it. And so she, based on the sort of the social pressures of her time, she ignores the call for eight years. Eight years later, she gets the call again. So 16 years go by of her just ignoring the call. And then finally the call becomes much more explicit.

And again, to her, there's a religious connotation to this call, but the call is, are you going to let what other people think deter you from being of service or being in my service? And she finally decides no. But she realizes that she has to break from her parents in order to do this, not just from her parents, but from all conventions of the time. And so she does. She decides to volunteer in this hospital, and she very quickly realizes there was no place more dangerous in 19th century England than a hospital.

Your mortality rate in a hospital was exponentially higher than anywhere else because that's where they sent all the sick people who got the other people sick. The idea of, like. Like keeping a window open or treating wounds or washing her hands, all this was not there. And so she realizes, I think this is another important part of this idea of doing the right thing. She realizes that doing the right thing isn't just this place or this thing you come at from your heart, that you have to develop actual competence in the thing you want to do, in the good you are trying to do.

Chris Williamson
Because without the competence, what real impact are you able to have with your good intentions? Yeah, she says, only in medicine would we have to come up with this idea of first do no harm, because that was not the status quo at that time, that, like, most of the things were well intentioned but ultimately harmful. And so she actually starts to study these things, and she's like, hey, maybe actually, none of this shit we're doing matters. If we just fed people better, if we stopped giving them moldy, rancid meat, might they just survive? And so she sort of reimagines medical care from the ground up, and she becomes, there's this famous Longfellow poem about Nightingale, and she's this apparition in white, and this is beautiful.

Ryan Holiday
And one of her aunts who volunteers in the hospital with her was ultimately, that's the thing. When people have the courage to pursue something, they often bring people along with them. And she says, like, I, I hate this poem because that's not what the job is at all. She's not going with a candle from bed to bed helping people. She's like, I wish you could see her writing the letters and pouring over balance sheets and fighting for resources and insisting on sanitary standards.

She was like, it's this incredibly unsexy bureaucratic battle that she is a master fighter in that is saving these lives. Right? So, like, one of the things I really am fascinated by is not just people who are morally correct, but people who had the political will or the strategic mind or the organizing capacity or the pr mastery to change public opinion about a thing or to build a movement from nothing. We see this now. You know, young people get upset about stuff and they're like, let's protest.

Because the civil rights movement was based on protests. But do you know why the civil rights protesters protested? It's because it was illegal for them to protest. It was a very deliberate tactic to seek conflict with the police, just as Gandhi was doing for the police to morally undermine their authority by enforcing unjust laws. We'll get back to talking to Ryan in 1 minute, but first I need to tell you about ag.

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You can get a euro's free supply of vitamin D, three k, two and five free travel packs, plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag one.com wisdom. That's drinkag one.com wisdom. Yeah. What was the, what was the Gandhi story? I mean, Gandhi understands the British were laughably outnumbered in India.

Ryan Holiday
The, could, could he have led a guerrilla movement against the rule of the British? Almost certainly. Could he have led like, a violent uprising against the British, almost certainly. But he understood that it wasn't just about.

It wasn't just about sort of self rule in the political sense, but it was about self rule in the spiritual and economic sense. It was about becoming independent masters of oneself. But we don't give Gandhi enough credit for the geniusness, for the genius with which he was able to take on the greatest military power of the day without military means and not just kind of defeat them, but humiliate them. And the political astuteness with which he operated is, again, something we don't understand. That nonviolence was both an invention, like a tactic that did not exist before and then also a genius tactic in a world of mass media, which he operated in that what he was doing was performing for the newspapers at home and undermining colonialism as a whole.

The salt march was done with the intention of. What's the salt march? So he marches from the interior of India to the coast to gather up salt, which was heavily taxed by the British. Basically, the British, they don't actually conquer India. They just conquer and loot its resources.

And then they use the people who lived there as the means of financing this and the labor to exploit it. And Gandhi proposes this campaign where they'll go on this 20 day march from the interior of India to the coast to gather salt, which was forbidden without paying a tax. So first off, just a 20 day, slow moving caravan is itself this media story. And this is also the beginning of cameras, like video cameras, but mostly radio and newspaper reports. And the culmination of it with the clash with the British, where unarmed protesters are being slammed with rifle butts and their hands are being smashed by boot heels, is to illustrate the moral abomination that is inherent in colonialism and to ultimately make occupation and exploitation politically and morally untenable.

Gandhi fundamentally understands Christianity and what its levers are. And hes exploiting, hes shoving it back in their face. This is. This is who you are. This is what's being done in your name.

Chris Williamson
Forgiveness, grace, how you treat the meek. And so Gandhi, as a political strategist, we don't think about enough, which is one of the things I got really excited about in the book. But given that there's lots of corruption in the world, why play by the rules when other people aren't? What do you mean? Oh, we're talking about justice here.

We're talking about doing the right thing. Large. Why be a good person? Yeah, there's loads of corruption in the world. Other people don't need to or choose to not play by these rules, they get some advantages.

Expedite success, avoid failure, do the thing look cooler, all the rest of it. Why should. Why should we play by the rules? Yeah, look, keeping your word is expensive. Giving a shit about how your decisions manifest themselves in the environment or other people, these all add costs to the bottom line, right?

Ryan Holiday
The idea of caring about whether your employees get to make a living wage or not is in some ways like, self destructive, right? Like in a fully capitalist society, it's a bad call, but I think you can make two cases for it. The first would be like, what John Mackey at Whole Foods would say is that, like, when everyone wins, actually the business does much better. The idea of thinking about expanding your definition of stakeholders actually creates a more sustainable and viable business, and also, in a media world, makes it easier to market said business. When there's not a lot of transparency or visibility, you can get away with things that I think are increasingly less possible.

The stoics talk about not doing anything that requires walls or curtains, full transparency. From what you do, what you say, what the public appears to see. In certain environments, there are walls and curtains. But in a media world that can go away like that, you thought you were getting. Sure, the sweatshop in China is abysmal, but China's many thousands of miles away and nobody cares.

And they don't care until they care, right? Then you find out and this thing that you thought was saving you 12% a year on your margins is evaporated in one singular pr crisis. So that's the first thing. That's the first. The second is, well, what kind of person are you?

There's a stoic argument, or there's a christian argument that you treat people well, you don't treat them poorly, because eventually you die and you get judged in heaven. I think that's one argument. I think the other argument is there's a hell on earth that you can live in also, and that's a hell where you have to live in denial of the consequences of your decisions on other people. So the reason not to do it, the reason to be honest, the reason to be decent, the reason to be kind, is it sucks to not be those things. It might make you somewhat financially more successful to not be those things, but to what end?

What do you do? What do people spend the money on? They spend the money on trying to feel good, and you could just feel good by doing good. So living with the consequences of your decisions, I love that idea about having to deny the things that you did to yourself. There's an expression that the things you work on work on you.

Chris Williamson
Yes. And so if your business, if your life, if how you've set up what you do is inherently exploitative or merciless or toxic, I think it's very unlikely that that is not worming its way into who you are. The person that you have to be to turn those things off inside you, I think, ultimately comes back around. And I'm not just saying that in a karma way. I'm saying that the blind spots that you have to develop, the indifference that you have to develop, sets you up for a kind of catastrophic failure or collapse.

Ryan Holiday
You end up making the decision or the decisions, that there is a seed of destruction in that even in a. Less utilitarian, transactional, literal way. Most of the people listening to this, if they're an hour and 40 minutes into me and you waffling on about bro psychology, bro philosophy, they already think and reflect and ruminate. They consider. They are asking themselves questions like, is this the best that I could be doing with my life?

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

Ryan Holiday
I think that's right. Or the things you have to do to maintain the fog become increasingly elaborate and dangerous in and of themselves. So the kind of oblivion or obliviousness that is required to maintain the fictions is so intense that I think eventually you end up destroying yourself. What was Marcus Aurelius solution to always keeping your word? What do you mean?

Chris Williamson
Well, he was someone who seemed to have a massive amount of transparency between what he did publicly, what he felt privately, and sort of what his intentions were, what he wrote, the way that he behaved. How did the most powerful man in the fucking known world avoid the temptation of not keeping his words? This is why the study of history is so important. So Marcus Aurelius has these two role models in his life, and it's helpful to have this. He has the positive role model and the negative role model.

Ryan Holiday
So Marc Aurelius, he's kind of like the boy in the emperor, has no clothes as a young boy, he's in the court of the emperor Hadrian, and he's just notoriously honest. He had no filter. And Hadrian actually nicknames him the truest one. It's a play on Marcus's name, which enlightenment. True.

So he's just like the purity and the honesty of this little boy. And Hadrian senses something in him in that. But Hadrian was a degenerate, destructive sort of. Everything that you think that being, having absolute power would do to a person, it does to Hadrian. He gets worse over time.

And towards the end, where Marcus lives with him in this palace, this sort of pleasure palace, monument to his greatness, surrounded by sycophants and a secret police. He's haunted by the ghosts of the people that he killed. It's a terrible, sad, destructive end. But Hadrian does one good thing, which he sees something in Marcus and he wants him to succeed him. But Marcus is too young, so he chooses his successor, this man, Antoninus, who becomes known to us as Antoninus Pius.

And why does he choose Antoninus? We're told that he watched secretly one day as Antoninus helped his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs. Just his moment of goodness. This powerful, influential politician just helping out another human being. He goes, this is the guy.

So he anoints Antoninus as his successor on the condition that Marcus has to be Antoninus successor. So these three people who are not related set in motion this incredible transition of power. And Hadrian probably thought Marcus would, or that Antoninus would live for a few years. He lives for 20 years. So Marcus has this handful of years with Hadrian, the who you don't want to be, how badly it can go.

And then he has in Antoninus, everything you would want in a ruler and a father in a human being. And so he has these two models of what he wants to be. And I think there's this war in Marcus, this battle. Whose vision of him is he going to fulfill? Right.

Which one of these heroes is he going to follow? At least from what you've said there, it sounds like maybe Hadrian even had a degree of self awareness about his own flaws and he saw in his successor the seeds of his successor's successor's success. I think so. And maybe even saw how corrosive and destructive power was. And the idea that you shouldn't get it too early.

Why doesn't he just, why does he create this transition plan. Yeah. So, yeah, he sets in motion this plan. And you can see in the beginning of meditations, Marcus is riffing on Antoninus always just this. He's trying to live up.

He's trying to live up to this model always. I think he's asking himself in many cases, what would Antoninus do here? So when he found himself, he has unlimited power, he can do whatever he wants, but there is this check against him always, which is this sort of person he doesn't want to let down. It's like an ideal. Yeah.

This person whose faith and belief he wants to live up to. And I think that this is the formative influence on Marcus life. And the Stokes talk about, we have to have that in our life. Who is that person? Or who are those people whose standard we are trying to bear?

And that can help us in these moments where, okay, if I make this decision, people are going to hate me, but it's the right decision. I'm going to make this decision. It's bad for me financially, but it's right for my community or for my employee. And when we have these sort of hard, wrenching decisions, what do we have that sort of swings us in the right direction out of just, is this good for me? Can I get away with this?

What will the reaction be to me that's such a critical part of. Of being this person we want to be? You've read some stuff about John Boyd, right? Uh huh. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
He's got that quote about to be someone or to do something. That's a beer to do, is his famous speech that he would give to every ambitious, promising young officer. You know, like, he's basically asking, what's your North Star? Is your north star to have positive impact, to serve your country, to make people better? Or is your North Star rank, power, influence, money, fame?

Ryan Holiday
And these things are in conflict with each other. And the sooner you make that choice, the better. And a lot of us think we can defer making that choice, or we deny that it is a choice. And it's only when you come face to face with some really tough decisions, you realize you can't have both. What was that story of Marcus Strusus?

Yes. Yes. So there's this famous roman politician. He's powerful and important. He has friends and enemies.

And this architect notices his house on Capitoline Hill that is partly visible to passersby, and he says, hey, for about five talents, which is an extremely large amount of money, and it's basically saying for, I don't know, 500,000 or $5 million, I can make your house totally private. And he says private? He's like, I'll give you ten talents. Make it entirely visible. And he's not an exhibitionist.

What he's saying is that he doesn't want the walls or curtains that Marx really said. We should be wary of the things that allow us to create a distinction between who we are in public and who we are in private. The things we think we can get away with when no one is looking. And there's a reason transparency laws aren't just good for the consumer. They're good for the creators and the manufacturers, too, because they allow them to not get away with things that they.

Chris Williamson
May be tempted to do. Yes. I mean, you know, would it be nice if we all were the captains of our own soul and never needed external accountability to do a thing and never needed the pressure of others? But we do. This is why accountability buddies and habit setting challenges are so useful.

And I found this with the show when I first started it. Almost everybody is able to be unrigorous and inconsistent with the things that they say. Yeah, because, like, mum isn't talking to girlfriend, isn't talking to boss isn't talking to football team captain about your view on anything. And you can kind of just sort of flip flop between it. And one of the things that I really loved, I have a prescription that everyone should do a fake podcast with a friend once a week, record for 30 minutes on their phone about an idea.

And the reason that I think it's useful is it causes you to be very rigorous with the things that you say. It's good for communication, it's good for other stuff. It's like, hey, I actually need to make sure that what I said last week and what I said this week, and I'm going to say next week, is in line. That doesn't mean that your opinions can't change, but that if they do change, you have an anchor that tells you, oh, I don't think that thing anymore. And why?

As opposed to just allowing yourself to be blown around or to say whatever is convenient to the person that's in front of you. Yeah. And to have articulated, hey, I think it's fucked up when people do x, and now later you find yourself in a position to do x, which you didn't have the temptation or the opportunity to do before. And now you've gone on the record, so to speak, and it's a little more real. And I think that's important.

Ryan Holiday
There's something about philosophy as something you talk about and do and write about yourself and publish and whatever that I think should keep you, keeps you honest and makes you better in a way that just reading a book or thinking about a thing doesn't quite do. So, yeah, obviously, as a creator, you always want to be worried about hypocrisy, but also, you should be falling short of what you're saying because you should be creating an aspirational standard deal that is hard to live up to. What was Harry Truman's perspective on honor and ethics? Harry Truman was one of the most incredible presidents in american history, because basically you have a regular guy, just suddenly the most powerful person in the world and a guy who had struggled, one of the last presidents, to never go to college. But he had kind of a very clear moral code, which actually, he literally derives from Marcus Aurelius, the sort of four stoic virtues.

There's a copy of his meditation. His copy of meditations is there with his underlines of these things. So you have this guy that's studies these people historically as this fan of history, and then finds himself there, suddenly the most powerful person in the world, the sole possessor of nuclear weapons, the only non ravaged nation after the second world war, and now he has to put in practice all these ideals, all these things that he talked about. But it's this remarkable story, because with Truman, he literally comes up in one of the most corrupt political machines in american history. The Kansas City mob basically controls democratic politics there, and he sort of gets.

He runs for office. They think maybe he'll be someone they can do business with. And he's so unflinchingly honest and good. They're like, we got to get this guy out of here. But he's so popular, they make him senator because it's more convenient to have him far away than their meddling.

And then he becomes the senator and basically doesn't have the same political ambitions as all the other senators. So he gets made vice president and then suddenly finds himself president. And it's this remarkable trajectory where you have this fundamentally decent human being. One of. There's this amazing quote.

They asked a bunch of people who grew up with Harry Truman, like, were you when he became president? Were you, like, nervous? And they asked this guy who was the foreman on a railroad that Truman had worked on as a boy, and he said, I wasn't worried. He's like, that kid is all right from every direction, from his asshole on out. So you just get this kind of blue collar work ethic of just like, a fundamentally decent human being that supposedly doesn't work in politics, right?

But it does. It gets in there. And then he has to make some of the most consequential decisions of the 20th century that are, by the way, extremely unpopular at the time. Every single one of them is unpopular. He leaves the presidency as close to the least popular president of all time and now is regularly ranked as one of the greatest presidents of all time because that's what.

But doing hard right things tends. That's how it tends to go. It's that they age well. We spoke about sort of transparency between you out to the public, this sort of scrutiny, the skepticism that can be useful as being a controlling mechanism. But much of the things that we do are just in private.

Chris Williamson
It's whether or not you do throw litter on the ground, whether or not you say this thing, stand up for whatever, blah, blah, blah. How do we know if we're doing the right thing? My favorite story in the book is this story about there's this poet, Danielle da Prima. She's this aspiring female poet. She's at this party in San Francisco or Los Angeles, all the New York, all the beats are there.

Ryan Holiday
Ginsburg is there, Kerouac is there. It's where you want to be the coolest movement, the coolest artists all in one place. And the party's just getting going. And she gets up to leave, like, 09:00 and they go, where are you going? Nobody leaves a party like this.

And she says, I've got to go relieve my babysitter. She had that young kid, and Kerouac looks at her and goes, if you don't forget about that fucking babysitter, you are dead as an artist. And you could imagine a person without a lot of confidence or without a moral compass. This is where you are inducted into the pantheon of talented artists who are shitty people, you know, like, here's a much more successful, powerful person telling you that success is built on selfishness and partying and hanging out and you know, the scene. And she has the grit.

She looks at him and she goes, if I don't go relieve the babysitter, I'm dead as an artist. And she walks out. And what she would say later is that she knew that she had given someone her word that she would be back by a certain time, right? Like that. The babysitter, hey, I'll be back by eight.

But she also knew. She gave her kid her word when she had her right, that, hey, I'm going to put you first, or I'm going to take care of you. I'm not going to abandon you. And so to her, the, the breaking of the word and the breaking of the discipline are the same thing. So that the same commitment, when you say, hey, I'm going to get up at 09:00 a.m.

tomorrow and write, or, hey, I'm going to finish this by this date because I signed a contract with the public. These are all the same commitments, right? And so I love that story because, again, we think of justice as this high fancy, abstract notion, and it can be all men are created equal and saving the less fortunate. But it's also just who we are in these day to day decisions. And when we do the harder thing, when we do the thing that's better for someone else but worse for us, it's usually a sense we're kind of on that right track, acting in our own naked self interest.

But we're considering what the stoics would call the common good or something bigger than ourselves. That, to me, is a check against that. But I think what's the easier thing here? The easier thing is usually the wrong thing, and the harder thing is usually the right thing. They say it's not a principle unless it costs you money and asking yourself, hey, am I acting out of expediency here, or am I acting out of principle?

These are the kind of decisions that the virtue of justice, to me is all about. Not should we provide weapons to Ukraine or not should we pass this law. What's the best political solution to this problem? Again, all of this is extremely important and part of the virtue of justice, but it starts with these fundamental decisions that we make as individuals over the things that we have the most control over. Isn't it interesting that there's this odd tension between what feels like the right thing to do?

Chris Williamson
How much is my subconscious going to torture me this evening when I try to go to sleep having done or not done this thing? So there's this degree of instinct and releasing and sort of just allowing for this to come up, and then there's also the temptation for that, for some of your instincts to do the exact opposite thing. So there's this. I need to sort of engage the front brain and then turn it off. Well, it's the same with thinking fast or slower.

Ryan Holiday
We have these massive, incredible cognitive tools, and then we also have these embarrassing, preposterous cognitive biases. They find even babies, they've done studies of babies. This is psychologist Paul Bloom. Even babies, he wrote this book called just babies like justice. Babies like that even in infants, they can do tests that indicate fairness or unfairness or basic illustrations of moral principles that in a way that a child would understand and that babies instinctively know these things, that these notions of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness are there in some cases, at our absolute earliest.

Chris Williamson
Days, I'm pretty sure that there's a study that was done on giving cucumber slices to monkeys as well. And if they see that one monkey in a different cage is given three, and I only got one, then they get angry about it. The Christians call us the hunger and the thirst for righteousness. There's our inherent moral capacity. It's there, programmed into us, and then we have these things on top of it, right?

Ryan Holiday
We have the incentives of the market. We have the ideas of our culture. We have the example that we saw with our parents, and then we just have the positive and negative reinforcement of, like, if I do this, it'll be easy, and if I do this, it'll be hard. And so we have to have this ability to sort of intuitively trust that instinct and then also have the ability to step back and question and go, hey, is this who I want to be?

You think about something like the practice of nonviolence, the incredible discipline required to not do the most human thing. There's this famous story of Martin Luther King. He's onstage, obviously, he's preached about nonviolence. He's talked about nonviolence. He's giving this talk, and a neo Nazi storms the stage and just begins beating the shit out of him.

And so here he is. He's talked about it. He's being watched by all these people, and he has this choice, and it's not even a choice, right? Because it's wired into us to defend ourselves and then to eliminate the threat between us. I mean, this is like the most monkey part of us.

And one of the observers who watched this, they talked about, first the sickening sound of flesh on flesh, like you're watching this man be beaten. Exactly. And instinctively, his hands go up. And then they said they would never forget it the rest of their life, the deliberate dropping of the hands, that he exposed himself to it. And so that is in.

I'm just getting goosebumps thinking about that is whatever training goes into being a great fighter, that's a level of training above that thing at a transcendent spiritual level. That's also crazy. But the point is, he's saying, I'm going to prove this to you. I'm going to show you that this is how it works. And then the first words out of his mouth when the neo Nazi is ultimately grabbed is he goes, don't hurt him, don't hurt him.

And he goes backstage and he talks. And so this was the culmination of years of study and practice. And this is something we don't give the suffragettes enough credit for. The civil rights protesters, enough. They trained themselves like, they would train, like the sit in protesters who would sit in the segregated lunch counters.

They knew the first round, they would be ignored, and then suddenly people would start coming up and getting in their face, and then people would spit on them, and then people would kick them, and then people would knock them off the chairs. Their job was to not respond, was to just sit there. And then they. Someone would go to the ground. And the next thing was that they all had to jump on top.

Like, they would practice. How you would defend. Like, with human Igloo. Yeah. How you would defend without using violence, someone from violence.

And this practice, again, it's this transcendent level of discipline and spiritual pureness. But also, there's also this kind of machiavellian political genius behind it, because they also know it's being toothless and watched, and that the person who wins the bout of violence ultimately loses in the realm of public opinion and probably leaves sickened. You can't senselessly beat a person for sitting at a lunch counter without it having some effect on your soul. And also, so the difference in how that's interpreted, if that person fights back, it seems like a much fairer fight, as opposed to it being this completely disgusting one sided aberration. Yes.

And so I'm fascinated by that. And I think what we take from that is not, hopefully, that's not anything that anyone here ever needs to do, but what you take from that is the idea. It's not simply that they were right, it's not simply that they were morally correct, but the ability to understand and master the self in pursuit of the thing is what changes the world. And it changed a thing that at the beginning of the civil rights movement or at the beginning of Gandhi's campaign, not just his campaigns in India, but first his campaigns in South Africa, if you had asked someone, was, was changing this possible? Was this outcome?

Flash forward, 1020 years, was the outcome? Is that possible? It was obviously impossible. You fundamentally transformed society. And that comes from that.

Chris Williamson
The afterword of the book. Oh, yeah. You talk about the adoption of stoicism by young men who are struggling with meaning and direction and purpose and stuff like that in life. Given that you are the best known popularizer of stoicism at the moment, what do you make of that sort of absorption and the good and bad elements? I have a little note card next to my desk that I look at every single day, because I am in this incredibly strange position of being associated with and credited as a kind of a representative of a thing I did not invent.

Ryan Holiday
And that is what I am working on being. Not what I am, but what I'm working on being. It's the thing that changed my life. I just happened to have communicated about it and brought my same journey to other people. So I have this weird relationship with it in that I feel.

Well, I feel very graced by it, but I also feel. I don't feel like it's mine, because it isn't. And so I feel like I have a responsibility. And so I have this little note card in the note card says, are you being a good steward of stoicism? And I try to judge my decisions based on that metric.

So what the audience wants and what is most palatable and what is most algorithmically friendly, and then what is true and what is important, and then what is most in line with what the stokes actually said. These are not always the same thing. And I don't know if you see this with your audience, but there is a strand of sort of nihilistic, angry, disenfranchised sort of group of mostly young men. But I guess it's on both. It's probably genderless at some level also, where.

And it is an incredibly powerful, if not lucrative, vein that you could tap into or wave you want to surf. And I sense that energy. And I see people we talked about to be or to do. I see people going, hey, is that what I is that? And I'm very sensitive to that, and I'm very not interested in becoming subservient to that.

I understand the frustration and the grievance. I get it. And I get that there are problems in our society, but to me, stoicism is a philosophy of taking responsibility for the self, but then acting like fucking adult who tries to make the world better, as opposed to wanting to see it burn. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Chris Williamson
I mean, this culture of cynicism is something that I've railed against an awful lot. It's one of the reasons that I was so happy moving to the US. There is a big, tall, poppy culture in the UK. It is a cynical, crabs in a bucket style mentality. Population density is way higher, weather's way shitter.

We're surrounded by water. We've got this sort of weird heritage, which means that all of the ossified social classes are in. There's a lot of things. I think about this, a lot about why it's changed. And I came up to America and it's like everybody here has got permanent first line cocaine energy.

Like, everyone's so fucking enthusiastic about what's going on. Sure, that can be parodied and annoying at times, but for me, I seem to flourish around that. And I want to make enthusiasm great again. To me, enthusiasm is one thing. I'm a big believer in earnestness.

Ryan Holiday
Instead, earnestness has a kind of a sincerity and a. And it's a realism as well. A realism and a kindness to it and an openness and an honesty to it that I love, but they call it sort of broicism. And there is a version of talking about and writing about and reading about stoicism in which you only focus on what it does for you. Right.

And I think early in my life, in my career, so I relate to it. I'm not. I'm not judging anyone.

Oh, stoicism helps me wake up earlier. It helps me do hard things. It helps me manage my emotions. This is all great stuff, but it's not the full. The virtues are much more inclusive than that.

And they ask more of you than that. They offer, but they also ask, and what they ask is that you care about other people. After you've mastered yourself with this philosophy, how can you use that mastery to help other people? Yeah. In the ancient world, the Epicureans retreated to the garden not for pleasure, but for their own self improvement and development, because the world is messy, because people are shitty, because things are broken.

And stoicism said, that's all well and good, the self improvement, self mastery stuff. But if you abdicate your responsibility, who steps in in your place? Usually a worse person. Shitty people. Yeah.

And they say, who's supposed to run things, who's supposed to be involved, takes the responsibility upon themselves. And so I think stoicism is a philosophy that gets involved, that gets engaged, that tries to make a positive difference again, not always by becoming a senator or something, but by how you choose to run your business, how you choose to run your life, how you choose to show up and do things for your family, for your community, for your neighbor who's struggling. To me, that's the stoicism that I'm interested in. Not the sort of, like, manipulated, toxic stoicism of your sort of. Andrew, the idea that Andrew chait would be a hero to someone is so laughably preposterous to me when you actually see who that person is and what they do, to say nothing of the sort of marketing techniques of it.

That's not what the philosophy is about. Well, I think stoicism kind of has certain areas that lend itself to the sigma male, lone wolf, grindset mode type thing, which is this denial of emotional vulnerability, this massive amount of self reliance, this sort of odd, self righteous sense of nobility about doing hard things and about leaning in. But that is only one quite parodied element of a much broader philosophy. The philosophy is not there to make you a better sociopath. Stoicism is not a philosophy to help you suppress the pesky emotions that come up when you are running an international webcam ring of exploited women.

Right.

It's not to help you not have to feel human emotions because you're exploiting or manipulating people. Right. And that's obviously an extreme case. But the decision of, like, hey, I know this thing doesn't work, but people like to hear about it. Or, I know this guest would be popular, but they're full of shit.

Or, hey, I know, I think we both see this a lot where it's like. Like this person is obviously unwell, but they make good copies. So I'm going to bring. So just these decisions about. These are hard decisions.

These are hard choices. It's not that there's no right or wrong, but what I'm saying is that they're complicated. Stoicism is not a cuts through the gordian knot. Don't have to think about it. You never have to worry.

Chris Williamson
Just optimize for whatever. Yeah. And by the way, all the stuff in stoicism says, don't care about what other people think. Ignore the critics, whatever. However, it's not to shield you from the criticism that you're getting for doing awful things.

Ryan Holiday
Right? So there's this way you can pick and choose from stoicism to enable you to do things that are not good, that are not right. And so I talked a lot. I just focused the. Afterward, I tried to put my own journey.

And again, I relate to it. Like, in my twenties, there were people I worked for that I shouldn't have worked for. There were things I took on that why, in retrospect, why did I take them on? And I've tried to do a lot of work on myself about understanding what those motivations were, understanding what the impact was, trying to atone for those things, but trying to set your life up. So when people see it, you don't have much to be ashamed of, is, again, what this idea of virtue is about.

There's a famous story about a spartan king. He bumps into this. This boy and his lover in the marketplace, and they see him and he sees them, and they blush very heavily, and he goes, you should probably not spend time with people whose face changes color, who makes your face change color when you're seen. The idea of, hey, if I had to open the books, if I had to disclose the suppliers, if my email was hacked, how would that look? And to try to be that person, which goes all the way back to Adam Smith.

Adam Smith wrote this book called the Theory of moral Sentiments before he wrote a wealth of nations. And it's based largely on stoicism. And he said, operate as if you had an impartial spectator on your shoulders at all times and to make the decisions and go, hey, what would I do here if someone was watching?

Is a check against the expedient or the self interested impulse that we all have? Hell, yeah. Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen. Ryan, it's really fun. I very much appreciate when I read your stuff, I try and tap into a much more virtuous, higher version of myself.

Chris Williamson
So thank you for constraining the ex fuck boy that I used to be. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. Dailystoic.com, comma, Dailystoic on pretty much all platforms. And then if you're a parent and you want to apply some of this wisdom stuff to your family life, daily, dad, same on all the platforms.

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

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

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1: Introduction to Ryan Holiday and Stoicism

2: The Pitfalls of Premature Disclosure

3: Competition and Self-Belief

4: Reflections on Stoic Practices

5: Concluding Thoughts

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