Ryan Holiday on Why You Must Do the Right Thing, Right Now EP 466

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That's better. Help. H e l p coming up next. On passion struck we don't control what our politicians do. We don't control where the culture is going.

We don't control what our neighbors do. We don't control what other businesses are getting away with or the ethics that they're operating by. But we do control the decisions that we are going to make. We decide who we are going to be. And to me, that's a much more important and often much more neglected part of this virtue of justice.

We spend a lot of time when we think about justice, talking about politics, how should the legal system be set up? All of this matters, but we don't often enough think of justice as a thing that we ourselves are doing and are responsible for. We talk about these issues happening all over the world, but then we're not thinking about who are we hiring and firing? How are we forgiving or forgetting? How are we treating the people that we come across in our daily lives?

And so to me, that's where we have the chance to be. The conduit for these ideas is in our own individual behavior most of all. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Our mission is to help you unlock. The power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions. On Fridays, we have long form interviews. The rest of the week with guests.

Ranging from astronauts to authors, CEO's, creators. Innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 4466 of Passion Struck, a heartfelt thank. You to each and every one of.

You who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, to be better, and to make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank. You so much for being here. Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to.

John R. Miles
Get acclimated to to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com starterpacks to get started. I'm also so excited to announce that my book Passion struck won the gold medal at the nonfiction Book Awards and is also a winner of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. You can purchase it on Amazon or. Find it@passionstruck.com dot in case you missed it, last week I had three fantastic interviews with Alex Edmonds, Angela Foster, and Robert Breedlove.

Alex is a luminary in finance and economics from the London Business School, and in our episode we delve into his compelling book may contain lies how stories, statistics and studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it discover how to dismantle the minefields of misinformation that bombard our daily lives. From fabricated tales to flawed studies, Alex provides strategies to thrive in a world awash with misinformation. Angela Foster is a leading voice in health optimization and biohacking who has transformed her life and now helps others to do the same. In this episode, we dive into her insights on achieving peak physical, physical and mental performance, exploring the latest in biohacking, nutrition and lifestyle changes. Lastly, Robert Breedlove, a former hedge fund manager turned bitcoin advocate, joins us to bring his unique perspective to the transformative power of decentralized finance.

In this episode, we explore his deep insights on the future of money, the ethical implications of digital currencies, and his compelling vision for a more transparent and equitable financial system. And if you like those pretty previous. Episodes or todays, we would appreciate you. Giving it a five star rating and review. They go such a long way in strengthening the passion star community where we can help more people to create an intentional life.

John R. Miles
And I know we and our guests. Love to hear your feedback. Today on the podcast, we are joined by Ryan Holiday, a voice that has shaped modern stoicism and inspired millions to live with resilience and integrity. Ryan isnt just an author, hes one of the worlds best selling living philosophers. His works, like the the obstacle is the way, ego is the enemy, and the number one New York Times bestseller, stillness is the key, have been translated into over 40 languages and have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

In our episode, Ryan shares insights from his latest work, right thing right now. Good values, good character, good deeds. This book isn't just another installment in a stoic virtue series. It's a powerful call to action for each of us to live with profound integrity and justice. Ryan will guide us through how to embody these virtues in our daily lives, drawing on the powerful examples of historical figures who turn personal commitment to justice in legendary heroism.

As we discuss the foundational virtue of justice, Ryan will challenge you to consider what actions will you take to live up to your highest values? What will you stand against in pursuit of greatness? Through today's conversation, you'll gain actionable insights into living a life marked by good values, strong character, and impactful deeds. So join us as Ryan Holiday helps us navigate the practical applications of stoic philosophy in overcoming today's challenges and achieving true greatness through goodness. Thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

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John R. Miles
I am absolutely honored and ecstatic to have Ryan Holiday on the show today, someone my audience has been asking for for such a long time. Welcome, Ryan. Yeah, thank you for having me. I wanted to start out today with the whole concept of stoicism because it's been a central theme in your writing. Can you share how this ancient philosophy first resonated with you and has gone on to influence your life's work?

Yeah, I was in college. I wasn't studying stoicism. I just got past this book recommendation, the writings of Marcus Aurelius, and I remember getting it in my college apartment and just being blown away by it. I hadn't read anything like it. I didn't know anyone had ever written anything like it.

To have the most powerful man in the world writing his sort of private thoughts about how to be a better person and for that to be what philosophy was, I think that was just refreshing and exciting and felt like some secret that I was in on. And that's what began my love of this philosophy. I went on, and I had a marketing career and a business career. I did a lot of other things, but stoicism was always there and it was what I was thinking about and trying to apply and I would write about sometimes. And in 2014, my first book on the philosophy came out.

It's called the obstacles the way. Well, I think that's where I wanted to go. Next is as we mark that ten anniversary of that great book. How do you assess the growth of stoicism's popularity since then? Well, I remember very distinctly going.

I'd written my first book was this sort of expose of the media system. It was a sort of a straight down the middle marketing and business book. And when I went to my publisher, like almost immediately after it came out, I'm a big believer in always having your next project in mind. I remember I went to them and I said, hey, I want to write this book about this thing called stoicism. And as you can imagine, they were not super excited about a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy.

And they offered me about half what they'd paid me for the book I had just done. I remember that quite vividly. It wasn't like there was some bidding war for it. It's not like there was a ton of anticipation and flash forward ten years, and I'm just. I've just finished a ten year anniversary edition of the book for that to be.

So the opposite. I mean, now there's trend pieces against stoicism and there's a backlash against stoicism. It's funny, you know, just be careful what you wish for. You want something to be more popular with that comes criticism and haters and all sorts of other things. But to me, it's just an outgrowth of taking these ideas that are ancient and tried and true and reintroducing them to people in formats or in a medium that's accessible.

I think it would be insane to say that this is what I thought would happen. It's not even what I hoped would happen, but I'm very glad and excited that it did happen. Yeah, well, thank you for sharing that. And I've seen that play out, especially over the past five years. And as we're in the middle of the social and political divides and, of course, a crucial election year here in the United States, how do you believe stoicism can offer a path to understanding and action in these turbulent times?

Yeah, I mean, to me, the four virtues of stoicism, which I have on my wrist here are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And I think with the resurgence of stoicism, a lot of the popularity is around the self discipline side of things or the wisdom side of things. How do I manage my emotions? How should I think about learning? They like the sort of the tough, masculine side of stoicism.

And what I'm trying to write about in the new book, which is about the, what I think is actually the key, stoic discipline or virtue. This idea of justice, the code with which one operates, the things one will do and won't do, one's sense of right and wrong, one's obligations and duties as a person, a parent, a citizen, a member of society. I think that side of stoicism gets talked about less. I think back to what got me excited about stoicism, and it was all the things that stoicism could do for me. Right?

And then as I've gotten older and studied it more and talked about it more, I see more and more what stoicism asks of me, asks of an individual person. Person. And that can be a little less sexy. That can be a little less fun. But it's very clear when you look at the great, the greatest of the stokes, that they had a very clear sense of what.

What their obligations were as people, and this is what ultimately drove them. So since you held up the book and the audience can't see it if. They'Re listening, the name of your new. Book is right thing right now. Yes.

John R. Miles
And in the beginning of the book, you use the story of Hercules at the crossroads to introduce the four cardinal virtues that you just talked about. How does this ancient myth reflect the daily choices that people who are listening today or watching this face in modern life, particularly when they're confronted with their own metaphorical crossroads? Yeah, it's funny. John Adams proposed that be the seal of the United States, this choice of Hercules as a young mythical figure being forced to choose between the right way and the wrong way, the easy way and the hard way, virtue and vice. And I think, you know, we all come to crossroads in our life, some big, some small, about what we're going to do, about who we're going to be, about where we're going to go.

And to me, that virtue is this set of beliefs. The cardinal virtues, specifically, are hopefully the thing that points you in the right direction. I don't think it's a coincidence. On the north, southeast, west on a compass are called the cardinal points of a compass. We need something that helps us rise above our inclinations, our urges, our emotions, the path of least resistance.

And so I think, as we come to these various crossroads in our life, a strong sense of justice coupled with courage and discipline and wisdom, they help us in the right way. One of the stories I tell in the book, another crossroads moment, I tell the story of this man named Thomas Clarkson. In the 17 hundreds is asked to write a college essay about slavery, the right and wrongness of owning other people. And he writes this essay and he treats it simply as a school assignment. What do they want to hear?

What's going to make for an interesting argument? And he ends up winning this latin competition, arguing that, in fact, it is wrong to own other human beings. But as he's leaving that ceremony where he's been awarded this prize, he has this sort of crossroads moments. He's actually on the road between Oxford and London, and he has to stop. It's a metaphysical crossroads.

He's not actually at choosing between going this direction or that direction, but he has this epiphany. He goes, if it is wrong to own another person, somebody should do something about it, right? And then the crossroads it comes to is, should I be that person, or should I let or leave it to another person? And he decides, actually, yes, I am going to be that person. I am going to try to solve this intractable, profound injustice that has been for.

That has been with the human race for as long as there have been humans, probably. And so he makes this decision. He becomes this activist that within a very short amount of time, a shockingly short amount of time, he eradicates slavery from the british empire, ends the international slave trade, and then ultimately, you know, this sort of virus that he puts out in the world spreads to all these other countries, and we live in the world that Thomas Clarkson helped create because one man came to a crossroads and decided to go the hard way, decided to go the way of doing the thing instead of leaving it to someone else. And I would argue that most social change, most breakthroughs, most bits of human progress come as a result of similar choices at similar crossroads. It's so interesting that you bring that up, because I've studied Abraham Lincoln a lot, and I think what people see about Lincoln is they see what he accomplished in kind of the twilight period of his life, but what they don't see is the person who self described himself as a boundless piece of driftwood just bouncing off the shores until, similar to what you just described, he found this pinnacle moment in his life where he found something that he found just so outrageous and gruesome that he couldn't live with himself not to pursue.

John R. Miles
Seeing it eradicated in the same way. I think I would add, on top of that, every head of state, every american president that preceded Abraham Lincoln had some sense that slavery was either a moral crisis or a political crisis. Right. Even if they didn't disagree with the institution, they saw that it was tearing the country apart and had a chance to do something about it, and did not. Right.

Lincoln's predecessor being probably the most egregious example of this, just sitting there as the country tore itself apart, right. Basically chooses not to make a decision, which is itself a decision. And so I think the idea that what leaders do is they decide to act. They don't always get it right, but they decide to act, and they. They are propelled by or directed by some kind of conscience or some sense of how things should be or how things could be is ultimately a very sort of powerful force.

The great man or woman of history theory is not so popular today, but when you study history, you can't escape the fact that things could have gone very differently had singular. Men and women decided to make very different choices. I think what we ought to take from that is not that we can have the same level of impact, because there's something that they call moral luck. You don't determine when you're born or what situations you find yourself in, but we can have similar impact in spheres in our own life. And the decision to take this on and to decide to do it is, to me, what the choice of Hercules is really about.

John R. Miles
Yeah, I know. I love that. And I released a book earlier this year myself, and I built it around something that I call the passion struck model. And I actually tied it to the four stoic virtues. And in this model, I describe mindset shifts that we have to make, which are influenced by wisdom, behavior shifts that are influenced by temperance, or what I think of as self mastery, deliberate action, which is influenced by courage to take those actions.

And then in the middle of the. Model, I ended up putting justice, or what I considered to be our core values, which kind of influence all of it. And as I was researching it more and more, I, like you, determined that these virtues are both interrelated and they're distinct. Yes. Can you elaborate on this a little bit?

Well, welcome to the problem I've been wrestling with now for the last five years, because I sold a series on the Cardinal virtues back in 2019. And when you are proposing an idea, it's one thing, and then what you find when you take action is it's always more complicated to sit down and go, okay, I'm going to write about a book about courage. That's simple. As the first book in the series, and then you go, okay, but wait, is this an issue of courage, or is this an issue of justice? Is this an issue of self discipline, or is this an issue of courage?

Once again, it's been really interesting and challenging to try to figure out where one virtue begins and where one virtue ends. And then certainly each of them in isolation is not worth so much. So I'll give you an example. We were just talking about the Civil War. Were there incredibly courageous soldiers in the Confederacy?

Of course there were. To march into battle at that time, especially in a cause where you're the underdog, in many ways, it would have been terrifying. And then the people that overcame those fears were, in some ways, acting out of courage. But because of the moral bankruptcy of that cause, that courage is certainly undermined. Right.

There's a Lord Byron quote where he says, tis the cause, makes all that hallows or degrades courage in its fall. And I think he's absolutely right. The righteousness of the cause determines the value of that courage. And then what about, I don't know, let's say something a little less historical. Just speaking out about something, right?

To put one's career on the line, to speak out about some issue or some cause, right? This takes courage to swim upstream, to say something that disputes or disagrees with what most people believe. But what if most people are right? What if you've fallen prey to a conspiracy theory or nonsense? What if you're just plain wrong?

Right? This is, of course, where the virtue of wisdom comes in. It's not just what are your values, but what are those values based on? Right? What have you your ability to discern them, to discern true from false is such an important part about it.

And then we could say, to simply be morally right about an issue and to speak out about that issue, these are all great, but there has to be some intersection of wisdom and discipline that come together to create a plan in which one is actually able to bring this to fruition. I think we were just talking about Thomas Clarkson. Thomas Clarkson was also a tireless researcher and a tireless social organizer, and he was also a very astute political organizer. And it was all of these traits coming together that was able to swing public opinion in Britain from one poll to the other and then bring about real legislative change on top of it that allowed him to go from this essay, which is just arguing abstractly that a thing should not exist, to then actually making it the law of the land in the greatest empire on earth at that time. That is no easy feat.

And this is where all the virtues are, as you said, interrelated and inseparable. Buying a master mechanics toolset usually means high prices, higher interest rates, and who knows how many years of monthly payments. But at Gearwrench, we dont believe that your tools should take years and years to pay for. So check out Megamod Master sets, the master mechanics toolsets that deliver pro quality tools, organized storage solutions, an easy to use lifetime warranty, and much, much more, all for thousands less than youd expect. So dont wait.

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with the Code podcast 15.

John R. Miles
Yeah, it makes me think of a personal story. I told you before we came on that I was a senior executive at Dell. What I didn't share with you is a backstory of the time when I was there. I was in charge of the largest technology initiative that we were doing at the time. It was about $125 million a year we were spending to implement this system by Oracle.

And I came to the conclusion that at the end of the day, given where the business was going, that it wasn't going to solve the issues that we would face in the future as a company. And this was initially created by the person who had my job before, who is now one of the presidents of the large business vertical. And so there was a lot of politics involved. And I remember I was having coffee one day with Michael Dell, and I was talking to him about my dilemma of, should I do what's right for the stockholders, or should I just go along with the crowd? And he looked at me in the eye and he said, john, something I've come to learn through my own journey is sometimes being right means being alone and living with the consequences of your decision.

Sure. And he's really profound in his advice, because if you look at someone even like Steve Jobs, and some of the decisions that he made, they even cost him being the CEO of Apple and having to take time away from it, because he so deeply believed that he was doing the right thing, that he was willing to risk it all to put his actions behind his words. And I think it's something too many people today shy away from. Yeah, I think that's right. It's tricky, right?

The stoics would say that courage is on a spectrum. There's cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other. And courage is somewhere there in the middle. And I think what these virtues do is they have a moderating effect on each other. Thinking about where one begins and one ends is probably the wrong way to think about it, but instead to think about how they work in conjunction with each other to help you from going too far in any one extreme, but then also helping you actually take that view or opinion or insight from a notion or an opinion into a reality, which is ultimately where it has to go.

So knowing what the right thing is and then having the toolkit to actually act on that is really the important part of this that I've been thinking a lot about, how do we bring the words into deeds, is where it counts. So when I think about this whole concept about doing the hard thing that you and I are talking about, it really, as I was reading your book made me reflect upon my time as a midshipman at the Naval Academy, and I was fortunate to actually have Vice Admiral James Stockdale as my leadership professor. Wow. And I understand and thank you so much that you go and you actually go and talk to the midshipmen almost. On a yearly basis.

John R. Miles
So thank you for doing that. But I was so influenced, and a lot of people don't know this about Stockdale, but a lot of his life, he based on stoic philosophy. And I remember when we were learning from him, he often emphasized Alexander Solnitsyn's insights that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, which is so profound. How do you see this concept of internal moral conflict playing a role in the everyday decisions that we make and how we choose between that good and evil? Yeah, I've been lucky enough, as I've been writing these books, I've been lecturing each year to the incoming class at the Naval Academy.

It's been one of the honors of my life, especially to think about where I was when I was 18 or 19 years old. I was definitely not at the naval academy. So I'm just so impressed by these young men and women from all over the country. I think they represent the best of us and the sort of potential of a generation. And I've been, yeah, it's been an incredible experience, and I can only imagine what it must have been like to actually meet Admiral Stockdale and to hear him talk about these ideas.

Because what Stockdale did was take stoicism, which he'd been introduced to, unfortunately, not at the Naval Academy, but when the naval, when the navy sent him to do some post grad work at Stanford. Much later in life, he's introduced Epictetus. What he really has the opportunity to do is test these ideas in what he would call the laboratory of human experience. So famously as Stockdale is parachuting into what we now call the Hanoi Hilton, he says something like, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He was talking about actually getting to test these ideas.

And I think what's so powerful about that experience, and I think where Solzhenitsyn comes in, is they're placed in this utterly inhuman, depraved situation, whether it's soviet gulag or a north vietnamese prison camp. And they're so much is outside of their control. Right? They don't control why they're there, how long they're there, what they're going to be subjected to. But ultimately, they have some choices in regards to the decisions they make for themselves and for the men around them.

The sort of matters of individual character are still there. There's an epictetus quote that Stockdale loved, something like a podium in a prison is each a place, and therein we have some freedom of choice. And he was saying that whether you're the emperor or whether you're thrown in a jail somewhere, you are constrained in many ways, but then you have choices about who you're going to be in that situation. Solzhenitsyn said something once about how he said, evil and untruth is going to exist in the world. And you can imagine being a citizen of Soviet Russia.

I mean, misinformation and lies and propaganda are everywhere. He said, let it come into the world, but not through me. And he was saying that you don't control what other people say and do and think, but you control for the most part what you do and say and think. And so that's where I think we can learn so much from them, especially in our much cushier, more protected lives. We don't control what our politicians do.

We don't control where the culture is going. We don't control what our neighbors do. We don't control what other businesses are getting away with or the ethics that they're operating by. But we do control the decisions that we are going to make. We decide who we are going to be.

And to me, that's a much more important and often much more neglected part of this virtue of justice. We spend a lot of time when we think about justice, talking about politics, how should the legal system be set up? All of this matters, but we don't often enough think of justice as a thing that we ourselves are doing and are responsible for. Right. We talk about these issues happening all over the world, but then we're not thinking about who are we hiring and firing?

How are we forgiving or forgetting? How are we treating the people that we come across in our daily lives? And so to me, that's where we have the chance to be the conduit for these ideas and our own individual behavior. Most of all, I love that answer. And since we're talking about the naval academy in the book, you talk about another famous graduate.

John R. Miles
And so I wanted to go back in time. Ooh, let's talk Jimmy Carter. The year was 1952, and in those days, just before I graduated, in fact, midshipmen who wanted to be a submariner were all interviewed by Admiral Hyman Rickover, who, from the graduates who I talked to, who were interviewed by him, said it was the most intimidating interview that they were ever put through. And here enters, as you said, future. President Jamie Carter, who's being rigorously interviewed by Admiral Rickover for this position in the nuclear submarine program.

How did the admiral's final probing question. Did you do your best? Challenge Carter's self perception and really his understanding of his own personal values. Yeah. So Rick over asks Carter how he stood in his class at the naval academy.

And I think he said something like, oh, I was 53 out of 500. And by the way, this was perhaps the most impressive and elite of all of the classes, this or the last class graduating during the final days of World War Two. It had multiple admirals and presidents and all these important, impressive people in it. But so Carter's answer is full of pride about how he did academically. And Rick overlooks at him, and he says, yeah, but did you always do your best?

And Carter has to think about it, and he wants to be able to say, yeah, of course, when his first inclination is just answer that way. And then he catches himself and he goes, you know what? No, I didn't always do my best. Because he was thinking of times he could have tried a little bit harder. Questions he could have asked, I don't know, extra credit he could have done.

And so Rick over, when he hears this answer, he just says, okay, but why not? And then he gets up and he leaves the room. And this question of, why didn't you always do your best? Why did you leave something on the table? It haunts Jimmy Carter for the rest of his life.

And actually, I was just at the Naval Academy in April, and I gave a talk, and I decided to just make the whole talk about Jimmy Carter, who I think is one of the greatest Americans to ever live. I actually think one of our most impressive presidents, certainly, I would say unequivocally, our greatest ex president. And yet there's something about. There's something fundamentally stoic that you would have this man who goes from the Naval academy to the submarine service to the presidency, who's basically ignored by the institution that he graduated from. They had just renamed, like, the year before.

Like, so last year, they. They named the first and only building at the Naval Academy after Jimmy Carter. There. There were multiple buildings at the Naval Academy named after confederate admirals, that is to say, traders, before there was one named after the only person to go from the naval academy to the White House. And I was talking about how perfect that was for someone like Jimmy Carter, who seemed associates would say that the number one thing you could say to make Jimmy Carter do something was, I think you should wait until your second term on that.

He was this big believer of, of something that, that he had, in fact, gotten from Admiral Rick over that. You don't just do the right thing, but you do it right now. You don't wait until later. You don't wait until conditions are more favorable. You don't see if you have political cover for it first, but you do the right thing because it's the right thing, and you let the chips fall where they may.

And that was the idea that Carter lived by, the sort of values he was steeped in there at the naval academy. And then the irony, to be such a fundamentally decent person and to do so much good and to be so right about so many big issues of our time, and then to have what you might say is the most negative of any of the 20th century presidents as the reward for that is pretty nuts. But that can be sometimes how it goes. No, it absolutely can be. And since we're on this topic of the naval academy, I'm going to just stay here one more minute, because I think this is a teaching moment.

John R. Miles
When I was there, I got elected to be on the board of the brigade honor committee, which is a prestigious thing, but typically not that many people are lying and cheating and stealing. So it's normally not that busy a job. I come back from Christmas vacation my senior year to find out that I am now in the midst of the largest cheating scandal that the academy has ever happened. It was the electrical engineering scandal. And this is where I really learned hardcore the concepts that you talk about in this book and the importance of doing the right thing, because what played out here was you had somewhere between a third to a half of the class who ends up cheating, and then you have a superintendent at the time who I think is trying to protect the institution, but he ends up trying to cover the whole thing up, which then leads to a navy, an investigation where they end up finding two to 300 midshipmen guilty, where we were only allowed to put 27 of them originally up for trial.

But what I came out of this really thinking about is I was talking and interviewing Angela Duckworth, and we were talking about grit, where she starts her whole book talking about West Point and what allows people to graduate from West Point. And she says it's passion and perseverance. And I started having this argument with her that I think she's missing something that's extremely important. And whether you call it the behavior science of self control or, as I do, intentionality, it's really knowing when you're. Going to make decisions that are taking.

You far away from the goals that you want in life. In this case, to cheat on the exam, that you really have to do that self introspection and have self discipline, which I know is a topic you love to talk about, to relook at. The situation and the decisions that you're. About ready to make. And I was hoping you could use.

This example, because I think it really plays into what you're trying to describe in the book. Yeah, I think what I have been so struck by being a civilian who was not steeped in these values as part of a sort of a culture or a code. What I'm most impressed by is when you meet people who are and how fundamentally different they then see the world. I was talking to someone who was a graduate of the Air Force academy, and he had. He went on, he's had this illustrious career in the air Force, but probably not been as successful as he could have been.

And that's because he had, at two different times in his career, been what we would call a whistleblower, been a person who came forward with information about a scandal or a problem or someone who wasn't operating right. And I was talking to him about it, and I said, why did you do it? It seemed like it didn't really work out for you. And he said, with, like, sort of total sincerity and earnestness in a way that I've never heard another person in my life say something. He goes, well, I graduated from the Air Force academy, and I swore an oath.

And I just remember, swore an oath. Like the idea that reciting some words as part of being accepted or graduating a place would bind you to some higher standard of behavior for the rest of your life, even at the consequence of your career advancement in the world we live in, that sounds insane. And what you find about sort of warrior cultures or you find about people who have converted to a sort of a tradition or a thing like stoicism is you go, oh, this is an operating system that guides them. They now have kind of a north star. They have a very clear black and white view of what's okay and what's not okay.

And this guides them. I think again to another naval Academy example. You think about John McCain there in that same camp as Admiral Stockdale or future Admiral Stockdale. But McCain has this chance because his father is basically the theater commander of the Pacific. When the captors find this out, they see this opportunity to embarrass the United States, undermine the morale of the country, show that it's all this sort of hypocritical thing.

By offering McCain a chance to go home, they go, look, you can leave. Just walk out of here right now. And McCain, though, understood that it was supposed to be first in, first out. This is sort of standard operating procedures for prisoners of war. And that more importantly, as an officer, the idea that he would leave the other men behind was unfathomable.

And when you hear about what McCain undergoes there as a prisoner of war and the torture he subjected to the injuries that he bears for the rest of his life, the idea that to a certain degree, this was voluntary, again, it's unfathomable. But when you meet these people who have made that sort of choice that we were talking about earlier, they've chosen very clearly the way that Hercules did, the easy way, the hard way over the easy way. It makes it possible for them to do these things that almost feel superhuman or certainly feel iconoclastic. And that's what I was really trying to celebrate in the book and what I'm trying to inch closer to in my own life with my own decisions. How do you make these very hard decisions that are in some cases against your self interests but are clearly motivated by your sense of justice or right and wrong?

John R. Miles
Ryan, you're going to love this. John McCain did my commencement speech when I graduated, and it was probably one of the best commencement speeches, I think, that's ever been given. And he did it completely on the topic that you just discussed, telling us as we were sitting there that we're going to be faced with difficult decisions as we go out into the fleet and how our legacy is going to be defined by those decisions that we make. And I think this really ties into something that you assert in the book, which is that justice is more than just a legal concept. It's really a way of life.

Yes. And so for a listener or Watcher right now, given this broader perspective that you're trying to portray, how can individuals who are listening to us recognize and act upon moments of injustice in everyday life, from even small interactions to significant decisions that they face, to truly embody this as a daily practice? I think there is this easier way to go through life, which is I'm just a person. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to be doing or what's possible for me to do. And then there are these other people, the responsible people, the adults, the powerful people, the elites, whatever you want to call them.

And it's their job, it's their responsibility to make these tough decisions, to solve these tough problems. My job is just to do my job. And I think there's something about stoicism. I think there's something about the sort of warrior cultures we're talking about where they go. Actually, I am one of those people.

The famous Hillel question of if not me, then who? The decision to say, hey, I'm going to step up and I'm going to take a crack at this, I'm going to solve this, that actually there is something resting on whether I do this well or not. Well, right or wrong, if I shirk my duty or not right. And the idea that we're going to step up and see ourselves as responsible to me is one of the first and the most important steps in this thing. I'll give you like a, just a really banal example that I was thinking about yesterday.

I was riding my bike by my house and I live on this little dirt road out in the country in Texas. And I thought what I saw was a nail in the road. And I'm going pretty fast. So maybe it's a nail, maybe it's not a nail. And there's a part of me that thinks, hey, I should pick this up.

It's going to pop someone's tire. And then there's another part of me that thinks somebody else will get to it. Or there's that just that part of you that goes, don't think about it. It's not a nail. Just go on about your business.

Right. And that wrestling that we do, I think is important because it's not fair to the great men and women of history to discount the fact that thing they did was a choice, that they knew the easier way or they had all the reasons not to do it, and then they did the hard thing anyway. And then I slam on the brakes and I got a turn around and then I got to try to find where I was when I passed it. And then I got to take time out of my day to pick this thing up. And then I got to find a trash can and throw this rusty nail away.

But if I don't do it right, somebody else is going to run it over or I myself am going to run it over. There's something self interested about doing the right thing, too, I think. But the idea of just deciding, hey, I am an adult. The future of the world rests on at least partly on my shoulders. It's my job to solve problems, to make a positive difference, to not kick the can down the road.

It's on me. This is what we're talking about. This is the first step in this sort of life of justice, or this virtue of justice, is the decision to get involved and to see yourself as someone with the capacity as well as the obligation to make a positive difference, even if it is a very small one. Yeah. And speaking of people who had the world sitting on their shoulders in the chapter to stand before kings, you depict a critical moment in history where President Truman met his moment amid global turmoil.

John R. Miles
If you think about that time, there were so many significant challenges that he was facing during his presidency. How did his personal integrity and his humble origins influence his decisions at those critical moments? Yeah, I think Harry Truman might be my favorite president of the 20th century. You have this wonderful experiment in democracy where basically an ordinary person becomes the most powerful person in the world and does a remarkably good job. He makes a lot of these really tough decisions.

And as it happens, Truman had been influenced as a young man by the Stoics, specifically those four virtues from Marcus Aurelius. And we know this because he once showed a reporter his copy of meditations with the passage on the four virtues underlined. I think what Truman saw was that a number of tough decisions about the future of civilization had to be made. And he didn't shy away from making those decisions. He didn't pass them on to committees.

He didn't pass them on even to the voters. He didn't let his own election prospects make him Question whether he should do it or not. And he just made those very tough decisions. And again, the reward, similar to Carter, the reward, was when TrUmaN left offiCe. He was one of the least popular presidents in American history.

But making the hard right decisions does tend to age well, and TrUman's reputation has, I think, slowly and steadily recovered. But again, I called him an ordinary man. One of his cabinet secretaries said, I keep hearing that TrUman was a, was an ordinary man. He said, actually, he was one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived for precisely the reasons that we're talking about. He had a strong sense of right and wrong.

He didn't let political considerations or expediency get in the way of those decisions. And I think most extraordinary about Truman was the way that he evolved and grew. I mean, here you have a man who was raised in MissouRi by parents and grandparents on both sides, who had owned slave slaves, fought in the Civil War, who, you know, every single one of his friends and business associates joined the Ku Klux Klan. He himself flirted with or temporarily joined. And not that long into his political career, this southern politician, this southern Democrat, is the guy who desegregates the armed forces.

He's the first president to address the NAACP, does so on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. He refuses to moderate his position on civil rights, even at the cost of angering a good chunk of his party, and puts us on the road to eradicating the great evil of Jim Crow within about a generation of that time. And this is a result of his reading, of his learning, of his willingness to have his mind changed, to be open to new experience, and to understand the moral obligations of the office that he held. So I just am endlessly impressed by him, and it's why he's, you know, one of the main characters of the book. Yeah, I think it's interesting when you look back upon the presidents, and we've talked about a couple of them now, and how at the time, people viewed them as weak or not popular, whatever it may be.

John R. Miles
But as you look back in hindsight over history and you understand the difficulties that were facing them and the decisions that they made, sometimes this, as you just described it, completely changes the perspective over time. Yeah. And look, that's not always the case. I think Andrew Johnson was a horribly unpopular president whose reputation has only gotten worse since. I mean, there, there are sometimes that people are unpopular or widely criticized because they are doing an awful job and they are not worthy or dignified to hold the office.

And I think we've seen that play out in recent history as well. But, so just because something's unpopular doesn't mean it's the right decision. But I think what great leaders do is they make hard, right decisions even though they may be unpopular, and they trust that either they'll be vindicated eventually or they don't value their own political career over what is obviously the right thing. I think that's what's such an interesting part of our political situation right now, is that you and I've had the privilege of talking to a number of politicians who've read the books, and, like, in private, they'll all say one thing, or in private, they'll complain about how much they dislike the job and how they would like to do something else. And then when it comes time to make even the simplest of unpopular decisions or to cross their own party in any way, they're like, well, I just can't.

It's just, it's strange that you would see people who have distinguished themselves in much more dangerous decisions. They've had incredible physical courage. But then when it comes to the moral courage of, say, having to take an unpopular stand on a political issue, they struggle to do that. And I don't mean to be judgmental. I think we're all guilty of that in some ways.

It's easier to, say, drop out of college or leave a corporate job to start a startup than it is to speak up to our boss or something like that. Right. And so we can be courageous or righteous in one aspect of our lives and then another, all of a sudden we're listening to all those sort of councils of cowardice. Yeah, I know. You're absolutely right.

John R. Miles
I think the last person I saw make an act like that was Senator Romney during Trump's hearings. But it doesn't happen very often. No. Unfortunately, no. Well, Ryan, earlier this week I was lucky enough to go see the Tampa Bay Rays play the Boston Red Sox, and I wanted to talk about another story you have in the book, and that is the story of Frank Robinson.

Can you talk about his self imposed fine and what led him there? Yeah, it's one of my favorite stories in the books. Robinson hits what he thinks is going to be a home run. He's so confident in the home run that he does what you're not supposed to do in baseball, which is that he doesn't run it all the way out. He just, he lags on his run to first base.

As it happens. It bounces off the wall and he ends up having to settle for a double. Now, if I'm remembering correctly, the team wins by a number of runs anyway. He's the undisputed mvp at this time. Regardless.

He's a team captain. NoBody's going to bust his chops ABOut Having not split, sprinted and PotentiallY eked out a triple. But the manager of the team is stunned when Robinson comes in after the game and slaps down LiKe $200. And he says, I'm finding myself. I know what I did wrong.

And a little backstory that's not in the book. Robinson is famous for what they would call these kangaroo courts, which is the baseball players on the teams he was on. They had this sort of player led system of justice where if somebody didn't do something or somebody made a promise or somebody violated some bit of team etiquette. The team would assemble a kangaroo court and they would all be the judge and jury, and they'd vote some sort of fine. And so what Robinson was doing here is subjecting himself to a process that he himself had subjected other players too many times.

And this idea of being your own referee is a really powerful thing because so much of what actually is a matter of right and wrong is actually not a matter of legal or illegal. It's not a matter of public concern, really, either way. So the ability to cultivate a set of standards that you observe things you are willing to do and not willing to do, and then to enforce that on yourself, that is such a big part of being a really admirable person. It's what's part of being a leader. I mean, at the core of stoic philosophy is this example of Marcus Aurelius.

Well, Marcus Aurelius is an all power, all powerful emperor, king. There's no one who can tell him what he can and can't do. And yet what he is doing in meditations is some version of the finding of oneself that Frank Robinson was doing. He was holding himself accountable. He was being his own referee.

And that that's something we need to practice in our own lives. Yeah. Ryan, have you ever interviewed Dacre Keltner, professor at UC Berkeley? He is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done on the show. And I was introduced to him by Susan Cain and Scott Barry Kaufman.

John R. Miles
But he wrote this book on awe. And I'm going to tie this into your book. Okay. As he was doing the study of what causes us to feel. Most people think it's the birth of a child or looking at some painting or some piece of nature.

Sure. But what he found examining prisoners at Sam Quinton, who you wouldn't think would have any emblems of, was that we find it the most common when we're either observing someone else performing an act of service to someone else, or we ourselves are performing that act. And in today's society, we spend so much time being individualistic that we rarely look outside to help those in need. And I think we both feel that this needs to change for the greater good. What is something that people could take away from our discussion today to take that step, to make that change?

Well, first off, I really like the point that you just made. And I think I've talked about this a little bit before. Just, we were talking about the Confederacy earlier. I'm a big believer in the necessity of removing most of the confederate statues that went up not immediately after the Civil War, but in the early 19 hundreds, and then actually a good chunk of them during the civil rights movement or during the height of Jim Crow, as a protest, effectively, of federal power to integrate society and to uphold the ideas in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Independence.

All of which is to say, while I believe most of these statues need to come down, I think it also says something about where we are as a society, that we struggle to put new statues up of people that we admire, of people whose works of service or greatness or courage or sacrifice bring us to that point of awe. I was just in New Orleans, as it happens. I remember I was in New Orleans visiting when they took down the statue of Robert E. Lee in what is called Lee's circle, one of the more egregious middle fingers of the Confederacy or the lost cause mythology, the idea of putting that statue up. But here we are now, several years later, and there is just a giant empty pedestal pointing up in the sky with no figure on it.

As I took my two boys to the World War two museum, which is just about a block or so away, it struck me that museum was filled with the stories of people who deserve to be up on that pedestal, countless men and women. What we need to do a better job of as a society, if we want people to act with justice, with courage, with self discipline and wisdom, is to do a better job celebrating the examples of when they got it right. And, of course, also talking about the examples when they got it wrong. And so one of the things I'm trying to do in this book and in the whole series is just find those examples and celebrate them, put them up in a way that the choice of Hercules that they made can be held up for review for the rest of us, so that in our own smaller moments, our own smaller crossroads moments, we can make a similar choice. And so maybe that's a good place to start for people, is just who are some of your heroes, and what did they do?

What were the values that led them, and how are you integrating that into your own life? And how are you modeling your own decisions after the example that they have left for us?

John R. Miles
Well, Ryan, it has been such an honor to have you on the show today. For listeners who want to learn more about you, you're relatively easy to find. But can you tell them the best place to go? Yeah, if you want to get one piece of stoic, inspired wisdom every day, you can sign up@dailystoic.com dot. It's a free email that goes out now to almost a million people all over the world.

And then we do social content on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and all the platforms you can imagine under daily stoic as well. But yeah, if people want to start there, that's probably the best spot. Well, congratulations. 10 million books is almost incomprehensible to me. You're telling me.

You're telling me. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. This was awesome. What an incredible honor that was to interview Ryan Holiday.

And I wanted to thank portfolio books and Ryan for the honor and privilege. Of joining us on today's show. Links to all things Ryan will be. In the show notes please use the. Website links in the show notes to purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.

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I never considered myself a creative person, and I think it's really about giving yourself permission to dream to a certain respect. Because what we're doing is there's no rules to it. It's very open, right? A 3d printer can make literally anything that fits inside of it. There's no bounds, really, on what you can do.

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Ryan Holiday on Why You Must Do the Right Thing, Right Now EP 466

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1: Introduction

2: Deep Dive into Stoicism

3: Historical Influences

4: Stoicism in Everyday Life

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