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

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ryan Holiday. He's a podcaster, marketer, and an author. Stoicism is like the hot new goal 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 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 favourite episode that I've done with him. Maybe it's 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 2,000 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 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, Apple podcasts, or wherever else you are listening, I would very much appreciate it. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ryan Holiday. I've collected some of my favourite 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. 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 will 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'm 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, it's even pressable call out 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, 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 know, you just do the thing. And then if people like it at the end, that's great. I mentioned that quote to Andrew Cuban. 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. So your philosophical artsy,

whine key 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 like what he was like his plans for sort of world domination, like all the things he's 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, 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 from completing the thing by talking about it so much before he's completed. Yeah. And it was so good at entertaining people about it and making it feel real and making it 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? And in his mind, he was never like it was like I could have. I just chose not to or maybe even sort of blurring in his mind that he did do it, right? And so it's this very seductive and cityist thing where the more you talk about it, the more real it is. But by definition, it's actually less pushing you further away from it. 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 one hour making that thing closer to reality. And so I have an aversion to it. I just found that so like so gross and then I saw what it was doing for him. But but in my own practice, just like, hey, I'd rather just do the thing. And I have the other the other side of it that I have found is that whenever one of the hardest parts about doing a book is that you usually have to sell the book, the idea from the search to finish before you've done

any of it. So you have to have this vision of this thing that you can actually really have a vision of because you haven't done it. And you know, when you when you make contact with the enemy or reality, it changes, right? So this part of talking about it is really awkward and weird because it's not 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 and then you know, describe a project working on this idea I have and then people go, what about this? What about this? You know, they they 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 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 loses. When people compete, someone loses. So go where you're the only one. 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 Epic Tidus said something

very similar about 2000 years before Peter Teal. He said, if you only run races, we're winning this up to you, you'll always win. Right. If 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 impulse. So somebody blows past you or whatever you go, I've

got to keep up with this person. I got to beat this person. And then you really you have no idea when they started and you have no idea when they're shingh, you're 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 just like some cop out where you you make, you know, you're 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 Teal is also saying that 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, like this is where restaurants tend to go in this town. And so they just go where everyone else goes. And this feels safer and 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 is the red ocean blue ocean. If 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, your experiences 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 seem to 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 here, all of you who want me to blur 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 now work. And then

not long after that, those same people are copying you. 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 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 that are trying to hold me down?

I got to prove them wrong or is it there? Nobody knows anything. I'm the only one that knows. I saw this in American Apparel that Charlie did this built 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 do you know to go like first off,

let's not trust that reaction. And then second, let's wait it out. 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 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. 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 culprit job to become a writer maybe 60, 40. The certainty comes later. The truly life changing decisions are never simple. 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 wouldn't have been risks and they probably wouldn't have paid off because I would have been doing them from a place of entitlement or ego or certainty rather than a place of openness, self-awareness, humility, hunger. So, 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.

My some friends are getting together. Do you want to come or not? But when it's taking your life and you're like when you're deciding to move here, it could not have worked. And it ended up working out great for you. It's been crazy to watch. But like if you had if you had been a hundred

or a thousand percent certain that it was going to work. First of 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. 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 that the one thing you can never miss out on when you're setting up 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 the 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 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 going to 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 forward to the next day.

Sort of a long due confidence that doesn't reflect where you were at the time. This retrospective sort of glow up of your your discounting the lucky bounces. You're discounting the things that you actually did that determined how hard I have to work. This wasn't a fuck yeah. This wasn't an easy win. This was something that took blah blah blah blah. Right. Okay. That's totally and so and so it it 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 just 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 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 if 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 over emphasizing 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? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like there was some joke about the author I ran to wrote this book the virtue of selfishness and though the writer said something like is that ever been something people needed a reminder of like does anyone need help being more selfish like we're intrinsically intuitively that right. And I I tend to find for the most part that I need I need help stripping the ego away. Not that true. I wouldn't have guessed that about you.

Yeah. I think I think if you're ambitious, if you're talented, if you're driven, you are 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 and that's a 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 the faces. You know that 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 then tends to make you do those things. So 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. Like I know what I have done because I have done it. And I can see it and it's real. And like when people talk about trusting the process, 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 that's it. 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

10 years ago? I guess it depends on what we're saying. Like to me, belief is, you know, faith without evidence, right? I like I have an understanding of what I am capable of. But the paradoxical part is like how do you know you can do something that you've never done before? That's where it gets interesting. When I sat down to write my first book, I did 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 like 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. Is that my sense? 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. There was no way that you could fail. There's a great set of golden 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, if you're not afraid, you're not reaching. 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. 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 life things that I was doing. You've got some live shows coming up this summer. Australia. 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 a few drinks beforehand. And it was, I mean, I got like a 500 person standing of it, which was totally like, I mean,

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 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 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 30 second chat I had with myself in the mirror 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. And so that's a super valuable scope because now when you go up there, you're like, I got this, right? You want things can go wrong. The projector can stop the mic. And we did the show in a Vancouver.

And it was so much fun. That was another Friday night in Canada this time. It was me and James. And dude, it was the audience was great. venue was fantastic. Mike just kept on dying. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Car,

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 up tight. 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 like relatively unscathed or even not unscathed, right? Because you, let's say you just completely bought like it's just the worst. And I've had some. I've had somewhere, you know, like they told me the audience was this. So I built it around that. And then oops, we missed me. Like I've had to go really fast. 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 you know, it is what it is strategic learning. So having having the worst case scenario happened to you can be freeing in another way, which is you realize it's not actually that bad of a worst case scenario. In other news, this episode is brought to you by nomadic. Nomadic make the best backpacks and luggage that I have ever found. I managed to do an entire month on tour across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Dubai on just hand luggage. A carry-on

plus this puppy because hold luggage is a sionp meant to keep you poor and late. You can bypass it by actually getting a good backpack. Nomadic make the most functional, durable and innovative backpacks and luggage that I've ever used. This 20-liter travel pack is a complete game-changer. The bag that you use every single day makes a big impact on what you can carry and your quality of life. The amount of thought that they've put into every single pouch and zipper is incredible.

They're beautifully designed, not over-engineered and will literally last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. So this will be the last backpack you ever have to buy. Best of all, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. You can get 20% of your first purchase by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern

wisdom. Have you got any advice to people who are going through a difficult time, financially, emotionally, relationally, whatever it might be? And they're thinking, is there a way that you've been able to project out ahead 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 meta cognizant 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 and a year and 10 years and 30 years. And so why torture yourself in the interim? Right. 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 Moose to Europe was wife, he's writing in France, he's struggling as this, you know, this journalist writer, freelancer. And he has this meeting with this this this editor and he's meeting with him and he telegraphs his wife and says, Hey, like I need you to come meet me. This is Hadley. And so she gathers up all his stuff. She's thinking that that Hemingway is going to want to show it to this editor. And she

hops on the train. She stops in lions or somewhere in France and gets up the train for a second to grab a newspaper, whatever. And she comes back in the briefcase full of all of Hemingway's writing is gone. Everything he's 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's thrown away. So Hemingway loses everything that he had produced up until this point. And it's obvious,

like 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. 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 that,

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're not, you don't have to feel the same way. And you almost certainly won't feel the same way. And, and I like that Hemingway said, I'm not there yet. He got there, but he wasn't there yet.

So he's 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, like 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 the 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 like, when the Stokes say the obstacle is the way, like I try to be, you know, I'll get people to be like, Hey, you know, my brother-in-law just got diagnosed with cancer. Or, you know, my spouse cheated on me or my company just failed. I don't like give them the book and be like, this is awesome. Like really, you know, like really soaked this shittiness in. Like 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, 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 the absence of. I want someone who is not nuts. Like I want someone who is not nuts. And the problem is a lot of young ambitious people, they have shitt 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, you know, asked to participate in things is that that trust that, hey, this person isn't going to 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 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 regress 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. It sounds like there's

a sort of long-termism component in there as well. Yeah, I want to, 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, I want to 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 did. It's also more risky. You know, because you haven't put the requisite preparation and work in that whole, if you say ready, you don't have to get ready thing. But I got the opportunity before I had chance to get ready. Yes. Yeah, you, you, you think you want these things in your early 20s. You know, you want your first video to go super viral. You want your first show to get purchased. You want your first book to, you know, get a bidding war. You

want your first company to have all the VCs knocking on the door. You think that's what you want. If you get it, you're immediately behind. You know, you immediately now have to go retrofit or earn this somewhat misguided faith that they put in. You know, you have to, you have to, you know, you have to, you use a lot of catching up. I mean, you are speaking to me. So I signed with portfolio and a hot hatchet in the UK. Yeah. And

there's, they're expecting, they're expecting me to not fuck it up. Yeah. Let's say that. And I'm like, sat down with Mark a couple of weeks ago and I was like, dude, I'm, this is like, fucking a big deal. I've got, originally the summit, he'd 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. It's like, you can't do that. You can't do that. So we pushed it back by another

year, which is fine. But yeah, I'm, I feel that a little bit. And I think it's, it's, it's something people need to understand now more than ever because of how easy it is to potentially blow up. It's still this random blow up on you. Yeah. 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, like, you would have had to get vetted by all these gatekeepers before. You really would have had to

pay aduse 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 that previously would have taken years and years. This is so acquired. 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,

you know, be a child star and all the rest of it. But for the most part, the returns weren't so horseshoey, they weren't so just, you know, like insane. 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 all of the like weird protection strategies like, have you got the right people around you and can you deal with it? He's your first

red carpet. He'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-holes, bards, tick-tockification world, anybody can go. There's that dude that got went viral for drinking ocean spray, cranberry juice, skateboarding down the street. And then he put some 50-year-old song back in the chart, like just

52nd video of like 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 Dr. Drew is? He kind of. Yeah, he did, he was for many years the host of this radio show called Love Line in I'm a West Coast. And he gave this survey, he was in a position that most academics wouldn't

be able to do. He was able to like 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 like this narcissism questionnaire. He's basically looking at, are, does being a celebrity make you a narcissist or are celebrities attracted to, or narcissists attracted to fame? And what he found, what 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. Let's craft. So like a drummer, which is a very hard thing to become famous for, it would be tend to be less narcissistic than a reality television star. And so if your path to success is based on you getting good and 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 is genuinely generating evidence. Yeah, yeah, that also, so if the world is saying you're amazing, you're the best, you're a godskip, you know one, how many hours it took to do the thing. And then two, it's still hard. It's still hard to you, 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 cover

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 that's where you want to brew stick and so it's the same was taken away, the love of the drums would still remain. Yeah, brew stick and the lead singer of Iron Midden said, you know, fame is the the byproduct of creativity. And that that's, 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 chucks wood, that's a much safer place than you are famous because you are famous. And you were not exactly sure how you got famous. That's why audience capture is perilous in like a million different ways. 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. But I think that's true. It's also if you got famous for saying something that maybe you didn't fully believe, the word 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 is very hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. It's hard to 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 odd you wake up and you go,

what does my audience want? Which is not the way that you should not instinct. It's not curiosity. It's not wonder. It's not all. 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 and private the things that I was saying in public. 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&P is now good. In the past, you said it was crypto and now he'd be like, you want to be able to change your mind. Yeah. And he had to live up to

and private the things that he was saying in public. All right. Next one. If it makes you a worse person, it's not success. If starting a business has 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. 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. So the audience capture thing comes into. 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. I'm not a positive contributor to humanity. 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. Almost, 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. 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, because the best game in the world is money and job title and the way that you luck. But what is it that you actually do in trying to bifurcate that's the 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 imposes 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 they're a 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? So 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 about that. So yeah, we we 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. Yeah. And it's Neil Strauss was sitting at a couple of weeks ago. How is the best? I first time I met him, we got on super well. Like he's he's a real one. And he told me, do you know what the title of his next book is?

It's called The Power of Low Self-esteem. Fucking awesome. I've texted him a bunch of times because I do. I just want you to know how sticky that idea is. The Power of Low Self-esteem. You know, the courage to be disliked is 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. Yeah. 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 was he's got this letter from his father when he doesn't make it into Sandhurst. Have you heard this letter? Yeah. It's just so fucking phenomenal. His father sort of

accuses him of being risking being a social waste role. One of the many upper class tops 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, you know, 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 30th,

1945, something like that. I bet that, you know, he had this brief relinquishing of the internal tyrant. Yeah. 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 Sun 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. And yeah, if you think doing all these things is going to make dad finally proud,

you're going to be very sorely mistaken, right? Because he's supposed to be proud from the beginning. And he's supposed to be able to make you know, Mr. Rogers would say like 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's 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 fuel that destroys the engine. It's a one-way trip, you know, 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. I wanted to make more money than my father had made any year, then in a decade, then in a lifetime, then in a lifetime

in a day. And then you tell your dad, he's like, 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. And 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 wronged, 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. It's kind of like those rockets, you know, they're dropping fuel tanks and engines as they go, because 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 you, the sooner you realize, you're never

going to get the satisfaction that you want. They're never going to admit they were wrong. You know, you're never, it's never going to be satiated the better, right? You have this moment where you get the thing that you want. 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, you win a gold medal, you make the varsity team, you, 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. And 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. Like the work didn't change. The only thing that changed is someone recognized it in some way or or and it almost certainly was not the person or the people that you've wanted it the most from. So in that moment, you know,

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 eliminated 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 it's not that I won one. I have to win the most Super Bowl. 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 goldposts keep getting moved. 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. There I think there's some I've not held this a lot in a football like here. Here's the thing. So it's not hopeless. Like people who are listening this and they're like just this is easy for you to say I've never done. I get it. You're going to 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. Yes. So you don't have to come to this same hard one 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 a there's this experience you have where you read something and you either 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 new piece has 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 going to be the final piece of that puzzle. Yeah. It's all later. It's so funny man. I'm glad that you said I think it's essentially impossible because I've kind of arrived at that as well. It's far easier to achieve

our material desires than to renounce them. And that goes for status full validating a pick, 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. I do genuinely believe it. Yes. Yes. I genuinely do. And are you still going to pursue that thing? Yes. I am. Like it's one of those lessons that you want you want to face palm yourself to like implode

your own head that hard because you go, I knew this and I believed it. And I still had to go through that. 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-understand.

Like 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 market 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. Like 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 go 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 like 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 like just the fundamental level to decide

what you're going to be great at. There's a quote from Mark Strelis, which I love because he's writing this in meditations himself. He goes, a better wrestler question mark. Like because he that was his hobby. He liked to basically do an ancient form of mixed martial arts. He's like a better wrestler. He says, but not a better friend, a better forgiving 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 and getting better. But where am I working on just being a good friend or a good human being? 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 a tension 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. 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 post. Yeah. What's easier? I'm obsessed with this whole sort of section. I must have thought about it probably more than any other topic for the

last few years. Yeah. So what are you optimizing for? What do you sacrifice? 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 hot. 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 and show me someone for whom that went well. It's like, look, you want to be, you think you want to have all these natural resources. Like 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 going to all go right. And so when you get those moments of struggle to just, but this is actually what I asked for. Like this is, this is what I need. You can, I can make the best of anything. That's kind of how I think about it. 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 that? I'm working on it all the time. I mean, I go to therapy for it. I build a routine around it. I build, you know, I built my life around it. It's, it's understanding like my desire to control things or have them be a certain way is, is a recipe for misery. You know, that it's like my, my, like, it's, it's usually the expectation or the,

the desire that gets you into trouble, right? Like, like, I, I need it to go this way or it will be stressful. And what I notice in my own life, what I'm working on is I, I noticed the way in which this is where you know you have a compulsion about something, like, it's one thing to just be like anxious. Like, hey, it's a sky going to 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 where I set things up in a way where they need

to go a certain way. And then 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 that up the stress. And the only reward is that there's some moderate release of the stress. Yeah, yeah. All of a bookman calls it productivity debt. Yeah. He says you start each day at minus 10 and the best that you can hope for is to get back to zero.

Yeah. You don't start at zero and good things take you to plus 10. Yeah, 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. Right. And that's it. Yeah. Take me through the highest return routine things that you do.

You know, it's weird. I'm very routine oriented person. A lot of what I'm trying to do and having kids has been really helpful slash also awful in the sense that your control over that goes away. And so, you know, 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, so realizing when 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, you know, been a cycle that's, you know, let's say tolerable for me slash rewarding for me is now in conflict with this other

thing that's important to me, which is like the happiness of me household. Yeah. And so, I don't, 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 by like realizing like, oh, I've created this like 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 like, 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 10. Yes. You shouldn't wake up at plus 100. You know, that's probably delusional and not conducive to doing good work or, you know, being a nice person.

But like, if you can't get to a place where you feel good, where you feel full, from that, probably more 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, I was like, we've got to go, you know, like, let's wrap this up, guys. And he's like, we've got, he goes, 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, it's sadder. 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 controlled, controlled, 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,

right? But like, the cost is born by this person who's never been to this restaurant before, or you know, or has to be in school all weekend. This is his weekend, right? So realizing that, like, yeah, the reward is not, look, the reward should 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, right? Like, you should, you should be coming at it from a place of enoughness,

rather than the same sort of compulsion or empty-ness of the cycle. Exactly. Because it's objectively not true anymore. 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- 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. 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, like, hormonally and biologically and logistically, you know, it just changes you in every way. And so all these things that you could only consider a contemplate before are now real. And you also have this thing of the consequences of your decision. 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. Innocent person. It's 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, you know, we're prepared to torture ourselves in a way. But the second that we have this external thermometer type thing that says things like we've got nowhere to go

and nothing to do. Will you done any inner child work? I'm going to leave from here to go and do some. I've been doing it every twice a week for a couple of months now. It can be, it's been a transformational thing for me, but I was very stuck understanding who and what that child was. Like 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 child. Like most people either really good or really bad, they know what they were feeling when they were six or 10 or 11 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. This is who, 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. So if you've got a surrogate you in front of you, and you also have this benefit, this reality of like you can see that seven-year-old interacting with your own parents. And that's also illustrating. Because they're like, oh, okay, I see. 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 thing. 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 church notebook I was talking about where he's sitting talking to his son and his daughter-in-law. And he just hit some, 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 are the memories. Do you remember when we went to the thing in this did fish and chip shop and that happened? There's none of that. And so you don't know what's real or not?

You don't know what's real. There was never a 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 same kind of a way. And yet there's no nothing to compare and contrast against. Like that's just childhood. Yeah, 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 and this is just

absolute. Yeah, how fascinating man. I'm I'm 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 really what a gift as well that you're unknowingly that your son is able to give you, you know, 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.

But it's a choice you make, right? Because you go, hey, get in the fucking car, right? You could like like I can you can you can see the the choice that parents make and I see this because I do this thing called the early dad, which is like a parenting email every day. And you can see like I basically cannot look at the comments anymore because the the shitty dad energy is so like triggering for me, you know, like the things that people manage to disagree with, you know,

it's interesting. But yeah, you you can decide to I just hit me at some point I go like think about the pro 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 had been passed down generationally and then the decision to go that the default is that that happens again. And so if you wanted to go differently,

the amount of work that you have to do is considerable. I think it's a really heroic thing for guys, especially, you know, we're going to get onto it when we talk about justice, but you know, 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. 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. Yeah. This is the end. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or I'm going to do my best to make it not as mostly as it most the end. Right. Yeah,

but no, no, that like yes. Again, we tend to think of justices like, okay, like philosophers want to debate like the trolley problem or let's discuss whether we live in a computer simulation or not or, you know, 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 know, you want to

talk about multi-generational impact. Chances are 95% of the work that all of us do will be very quickly forgotten. But like, 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 that the decision to focus on that sphere just as much as you focus on the other is like a is a critical responsibility to assume. In other news this episode is brought to you by

Momentus. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that their top quality but few can actually prove it which is why I partnered with Momentus. They have the most rigorous testing and production standards of any supplement company I've ever found. One of my favorite supplements from them are their sleep packs which contain an evidence-backed

blend of magnesium L3 and 8, Apigenin and Elthenein in research-backed dostages. If you are struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime stay asleep throughout the night or if you are not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, this is a great place to start. Dr Andrew Heubman is actually the scientific advisor for Momentus so if you've ever wondered what supplements he uses or

what he would design if he could, this is the answer. Right now you can get up to 32% off site-wide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom. A checkout that's live M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. Check out. You're in the middle of the four-stoke 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? 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. 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? What is the talk to me about the relationship between justice and the other three? Mark Zurelis's 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. I keep my word. How do I treat other human beings? What ethics do I operate under? How do I run my business? How do I 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,

to be participating the issues of our time. So that tension, the balance of those two is how I would define this idea of justice, like what the right thing is. And then the other virtues are in pursuit of that. Like courage, 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 Martin Luther King or Agondi, 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, but the courage and the tenacity with which they brought that thing into being. And then we throw the fourth, the luredness and the astuteness. In some cases, the political genius of them,

this is where the discipline of wisdom comes in. So they're these inseparable interrelated virtues that for the most part, you cannot separate 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. 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, I don't know about you, but I didn't spend a lot of time in the book in these 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 with 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. I wanted to try to do 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 going to be really rich in that. I'm going to be

a philanthropist where I'm not a garbage person. How many people make that turn? We don't make the turn. So that's where I was coming at it from. Florence Nightingale pursuing actually doing a thing, competence pursuing justice. What was the story though? So she gets this young girl in England. She has rich parents in Victorian England. The expectation of a girl of her stature is not just there's no expectations. There is an expectation of no expectations. You are not

to do things. Here's 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 and her parents are like, are you out of your 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. Like, can you turn them on? You're looking at KFC or something. Yeah, dirty, rowdy, soldiers. There's all this immorality

applied to it. So she based on 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 like, there was no place more dangerous in 19th century England than a hospital. Like, 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 keeping a window open or treating wounds or washing your hands, not 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. But you have to develop like actual competence in the thing you want to do.

And the good you are trying to do. Because without the competence, what real impact are you able to have with your good intentions? Yeah, she says it only in medicine, what we have to come up with this idea of first to do no harm. Because that was not the status quo at that time. 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, you know, rancid meat might they just survive. And so she sort of reimagines medical care like from the ground up. And she becomes like there's this famous long fellow poem about Nightingale and she's this, you know, apparition in white and it's beautiful. 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 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 have 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 say 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 a legal for them to protest. It was a very deliberate tactic to seek conflict with the police just as Ghani was doing for the police to morally undermine their authority by enforcing unjust laws. We'll get back to talking to Ryan in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90% of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. We know that

food is always first. Many of us eat well some days, even most days, but no one has the perfect diet and signs keep showing us that our bodies need more nutrients and that we need this support consistently every single day to build a truly healthy body and operate at a high health baseline. AG1 provides daily nutrients and gut health support in one. No confusion, one thing that works and works for you. Plus it's NSF certified for sport, meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it.

That's the level that it's tested to. Best of all, there is a 90 day moneyback guarantee. So you can buy it, try it and use it every single day for three months. And if you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. You can get a year's free supply of vitamin D3, K2, and 5 free travel packs plus that 90 day moneyback guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink AG1.com slash wisdom. That's drink AG1.com slash wisdom.

Yeah. What was the, what was the Gandhi story? I mean, Gandhi understands, the British were laughably outnumbered in India. 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 the, 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 one's self. 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 like kind of defeat them, but humiliate them. And the political astuteness with which he operated is again, something we don't understand that non-violence was both an invention, like some

attack that did not exist before. And 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 like 20-day march from the interior of India to the coast to gather salt, which was forbidden without paying attacks. So first off, just a 20-day slow-moving caravan is itself this media story. 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, you know, 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 he's exploiting, he's shoving it back in their face. This

is who you are. This is what's being done in your name. Fagiveness, grace. How you treat them the meek. And so Gandhi has a political strategist. We don't think about enough, which is one of the things I got really excited about in the book. We're 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. A large, a good person. Yeah, there's lots of corruption in the world. Other people don't need to or choose to not play by these rules. They get some advantages. So the expedite success, avoid failure, do the thing, look cooler or all the rest of it. Why should we play by the rules? Yeah, look, keeping your word is expensive, giving the shit about how your decisions manifest themselves in the environment or other people. These are all these all add costs to the bottom line.

Right? Like the idea of caring about whether your employees get a make a living wage or not is in some ways, like self-destructive. Right? Like it in a fully capitalist society, it's a bad call. But I think there's I think you can make two cases for it. The first would be like what John McEath-Hole Foods would say is that like, you know, when everyone wins actually the business does much better. The idea of thinking about you're 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, right? Like when there's not a lot of transparency or visibility, you can get away with things that I think are increasingly less possible. The Stokes talk about not doing anything that requires walls or curtains, you know. A full transparency from what you do, what you say, what the public appears to see you on. And certain environments, there are walls

and curtains. But in an media world that can go away like that. So the thing 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? And then you find out in this thing that you thought was saving you 12% a year on your margins is evaporated in one singular PR crisis. That's the first thing. That's the first. The second is, well, what kind of person are you?

Like 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 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. 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 warming its way into who you 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 the 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. You end up making the decision or the decisions that there is a 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, a new offling 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 in my life? 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 you've done it, you're kidding yourself. Like if you're a thoughtful person, this is a land of autonomous says loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to a tone for a certain

complexity of mind. 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 a tone for a complexity of mind. And one of them is that you cannot hide things from yourself in the fog so much anymore. 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? 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, what he had the way that he behaved. How did the most powerful man in the like fucking known world avoid the temptation of not keeping his word? 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. So Marcus Aurelius, he has this, 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 like notoriously honest. He had like no filter. And Hadrian actually nicknames him like the truest one. It's a play on Marcus's name, which in Mad Men true. And so he's just like this 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 them in this palace, this sort of pleasure palace is 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. This is moment of goodness, this powerful, influential politician just helping out another human being because this is the guy. So he he annoins Antoninus as his successor on the condition that Marcus has to be Antoninus's successor. So these three

people who are not related set in motion, this incredible transition of power. And Hadrian probably thought Marcus would, or the 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, in a father, in a human being. And so he has these two models of what he wants to be. And like, I think there's this war in Marcus,

this battle, which 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 successes, successes, 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. Like why doesn't he just, like why does he,

why does he create this transition plan? Yeah. And so, so yeah, he sets in motion this plan. And you can see in the beginning of meditation, Marcus is riffing on Antoninus always. There's 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 a limited 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 a, is a, the formative influence on Marcus's life. And we, this talk is talking about we have to have that in our life. Who is that person or who are those people? Who's 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 input. And when we have these sort of hard wrenching decisions, what do we have? It 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, that's such a critical part of being this person we want to be. You've read some stuff about John Boyd, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, 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, 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? And these things are in conflict with each other. And the sooner you make that choice, the better. And, 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 decision to realize you can't have both. What was that story of Marcus Drusus? Oh, the, oh, yes, yes, yes. So there's this, there's this famous Roman politician. He's powerful and important. He has friends and enemies in this architect notices his house on Capitol and Hill that is partly visible to pass or spy. And he says, Hey, you know, for about

five talents, which is an extremely large amount of money. I was basically saying for 500,000 or five million, I can make your house totally private. And he says private. He's like, I'll give you 10 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, you know, 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. Yeah, but they may be tempted to do. Yes. So 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 inhabit setting challenges are so useful. And I've found this with the show and I very first started it. Almost everybody is able to be unregalous 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 records 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 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 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 I'm 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. There's something about philosophy, 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, doesn't quite do. So yeah, there's obviously,

as a creator, you always want to be worried about hypocrisy. But also like, you should be falling short of what you're saying because you should be creating an aspirator ideal that is hard to live up to. What was Harry Truman's perspective on honor and ethics? Harry Truman's 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 had ever go to college. But he had kind of a very clear moral code, which actually he literally derives from Marx's Relias, the sort of Forrestoke virtues. There's a copy of his meditate of his, his copy of meditations is there with his underlines of like these things. So you have this guy that studied these people historically as this fan of history and, and then he's finds himself there. Suddenly like 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 was, 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 is 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 like 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 because like it's more convenient to have him far away than they're in Maryland. And then he becomes the Senator and, you know, basically doesn't have the same political ambitions as all the other senators. So he gets made vice president. And, and, and then suddenly finds himself president. It's just like remarkable

trajectory where you had 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? Like, and he was, and they asked this guy who was the, 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 isn't, doesn't work in politics, right? It doesn't, but it does. He gets in there and, 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 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, decepticism that can be useful as being a controlling mechanism.

But much of the things that we do are just in private, it's whether or not you do through a letter on the ground, whether or not you say this thing, stand up for whatever you 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 de Prima, and she's this aspiring female poet. She's at this party in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It's all the New York, all the beats are there.

You know, Ginsburg is there, Carrowac is there, all the, it's where you want to be. The coolest movement, the coolest artist all in one place. And, you know, the party's just getting going and she gets up to leave like nine o'clock and they go, where are you going? You know, nobody leaves a party like this. And she says, I've got to go relieve my babysitter. She had a young kid. And Carrowac 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 in, 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 backed by a certain time, right? Like that the babysitter, hey, I'll be backed by it. But she also knew she gave her kid her word when she had her, right? That that 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,

the breaking of the word and the breaking of the discipline are the same thing. So that the same, the same commitment when you say, hey, I'm going to get up at 9 a.m. tomorrow and write. Or hey, I'm going to finish this by this date because I signed a contract with the poet. These are all the same commitments, right? And so I just, I love that story because, you know, again, we think of justice as this high, pollutant, fancy, abstract notion. And it can be, you know,

all manner created equal and, you know, saving the less fortunate. But it's also just like who we are in these day to day decisions. And when we make these, when we do the harder thing, when we do the thing that's better for someone else, but worse for us, you know, that's usually a sense we're kind of on that right track. When we're not acting in our own naked self interest, but we're, we're considering what the stokes would call the common good or something bigger than ourselves.

That, that to me is, is like a check against that. But I just, I think like is, is what's the easier thing here? You know, 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, you know, and asking yourself, Hey, am I acting out of expediency here or am I acting out of principle? These are the kind of of decisions that the virtue of justice to me is all about. Not, you know, should we provide

weapons to Ukraine or not? You know, what, what, what, what, you know, should we pass this law? What's what's the best political solution to this problem? Again, all of this is extremely important and, and part of the virtue just, but it starts with these sort of 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? Yeah, 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 these act opposite thing. So there's this, I need to sort of engage the front brain and then turn it off.

Well, it's like, it's the same with like thinking faster, slower. We have like, we have these massive, incredible cognitive tools. And then we also have these embarrassing, preposterous cognitive biases. They find like even baby, they've done studies of babies. This is psychologist Paul

Bloom. Like even babies, he has a road book called Just Babies, like, Justice Babies. Like, that even in infants, they can do tests that like, indicate fairness or unfairness or, you know, basic sort of illustrations of moral principles that in a way that a baby, 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 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 like the hunger and the thirst for righteousness. Like, there's our inherent sort of moral capacity. It's there. Programmed into us. And then we have these things on top of it, right? We have, 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 know, like, you know, and 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. It's on stage. Obviously, he's preached about nonviolence. He's talked about nonviolence. He's giving, he's giving this talk in a neo-Nazi storms the stage and just begins like 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 foot 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 would that is whatever training goes into being a great fighter, that's a level of training above that thing at a at a transcendent like spiritual level. It's it's also crazy. But the point is he's saying like, 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 when he's 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 them like they would train like the the sit-in protesters who would sit in the segregated lunch kind of as they knew they the people 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 then they someone would go to the ground. And the next thing was that they all had to jump on like that they would practice how you would defend like human igloo. Yeah, how you would defend without using violence someone from violence. And this practice as it as it's like,

you know, 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 it's not ruthless and watched. And that that the person who wins the bout of violence ultimately loses in the realm of public opinion and probably leaves second. You know, like you can't senselessly beat a person for sitting at a lunch counter without it having some effect on your soul.

And also the difference in how that's interpreted. If that person fights back, it seems like a much far fight. Yes. As opposed to it being this completely disgusting one sided aberration. Yes. And and so I'm just 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 it's it's not simply that they were right. You know, 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 the thing that at the beginning of the civil rights movement or at the beginning of Gandhi's campaign, not just get not just his campaigns in India, but first his campaigns in South Africa. If you would ask someone was changing this possible. Was this outcome flash forward 10, 20 years was the outcome? Is that possible? Was obviously impossible.

Fundamentally you fundamentally transformed society and that that comes from that. The afterward book. Oh yeah. You talk about the adoption of stoicism by young men. Yeah. Struggling with meaning and 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 representative of the thing I did not invent 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 you know, 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 stoics 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 or that you can tap into or wave you

want to surf. And I can I sense that energy and I see people, you know, we talked about to be or to do I see people going, hey, is that is that what I, is that and and and I'm very sensitive to

that and I'm very, I'm very not interested in in becoming subservient to that. Like I, I understand the frustration and the grievance, I get it and I get that there are problems in our society, but I, but to me, stoicism is a philosophy of self, of taking responsibility for the self, but then acting like fucking adult, like who tries to make the world better as opposed to wanting to see it burn. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean this culture of cynicism is something

that I've railed against North a 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 densities way higher, weather's way shitter was surrounded by water. We've got this sort of weird heritage, which means that all of the ossified social classes are in there. 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 instead. Earnessness has a kind of a sincerity and a realism as well. Realism and a kindness to it and an openness and an honesty to it that I love.

But you know, the they call it sort of brosism 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. And I think early in my life and my career, so I relate to it. 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 Epicurians retreated to the Garden 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. Sure, people. Yeah. And they say, who's supposed to run things? You know, who's supposed to be involved? Who takes the responsibility upon themselves? And so, I think stoicism as 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, you know, toxic stoicism of your, like sort of Andrew, like the idea that Andrew Chate 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, like I just, that's not what the philosophy is about.

Well, I think stoicism kind of has a certain areas that lend itself to the sigma male, like lone wolf grind set mode type thing, which is this kind of 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're running an international webcam ring of exploited women, right? Like it's not to help you not have

to feel human emotions because you're exploiting or manipulating people, right? Like, and that's obviously an extreme case, but the decision of like, you know, 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 that I think we both see this a lot where it's like, this person is obviously unwell, but they make good copies. So I'm going to bring, so just the 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 cuts through the gordian not, don't have to think about it. You never have to worry, just optimize for whatever. Yeah, and by the way, all the stuff in stoicism is don't care about what other people think, ignore the critics, whatever. It's not to shield you from the criticism that you're getting

for doing awful things, right? Like that's not, 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 just, 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 20s, 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 tried to do a lot of work on myself about understanding what those motivations were, understanding what those, 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, you know, in the marketplace and they see him and he sees them, and they're, they, they blush very heavily and he goes, you should probably not spend time with people whose face changes color when you're, who makes your face change color when you're seen, right? The idea of like, 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 a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments before he wrote a wealth of nations. And it's based large 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, what would I do here if I had it if someone was watching is, is a, is a check against these sort

of the expedient or the self-interested impulse that we all have? Alia, Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen, Ryan, it's, 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. So thank you for constraining the sort of x-fuck by 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. DailyStoke.com, DailyStoke on pretty much all platforms, and then if you're a parent, you want to apply some of this wisdom stuff to your family life, daily dad, same on all the platforms, and then the new book is right thing right now. But any of the books in the series, hopefully all, get you going. Alia, Ryan, I appreciate you. Thanks, man.