Every day A way up the breakfast Clubs.
Y'all done morning.
Everybody is DJ Envy just hilarious. Charlamagne the guy we are to breakfast Club Lawn. The Rolls is here as well. We got a special guest in.
The building, one of my favorite authors ever. It's a new book.
Wisdom Takes work, Learn, Apply, repeat, Ladies and gentlemen, Ryan Holiday.
Welcome back, Thanks for having me.
How are you feeling this morning?
Doing awesome?
The book is this number one, sixteen.
Fifth or six time he's been up here. Very good to me.
Yeah, now we like having you. Man.
The Wisdom takes work, Learn, apply, repleate, repeat, And in the book you argue that wisdom is the virtue on which all other virtues depend.
How did you arrive at that belief?
So the four virtues of Stoke Foster try to write about our courage.
Discipline, justice, and wisdom.
They're all separate, but they're related in that, you know, wisdom tells us when and how to apply the others. I think if you doesn't matter you know how good your heart is, if you don't have the wisdom the intelligence to know how to bring it into the world, or you know courage is important, but you could be courageous for something real dumb. So wisdom is the sort of layer on top that we have to apply to all other skills and assets.
Well, it's one thing to do to research with their specific moment in your life that made you realize it.
That wisdom was important.
Yeah, well, you know, I think we've all met some smart people that do dumb things. And I think we've all done dumb things. And you look at you look at wisdom as being the sort of the key to not just a successful life, but a good life. Right you can you can be really good at what you do and then you can blow it all up, or you can be profoundly unhappy, or you know how many smart people are lacking in self awareness. So I just think wisdom is this sort of that brings it all together.
And I think I think one of the problems is that we assume wisdom is this thing that just happens, right we go. Sure, school is important, but you know, experience is important. You know wisdom comes with age, not It's no guarantee. I've met a lot of dumb old people too.
Absolutely, I was always talking small people learn from the ol mistakes. Wise people learn from mistakes of others. I completely agree that wisdom is a lost art. I think you have a lot of smart people. I don't think you have a lot of wise people nowadays.
Yeah yeah, and I mean you need this not just to be successful, as I was saying, but like, how do you not fall for demagogues? Or how do you not fall for scams? How do you rise above the noise? How do you separate fact from fiction?
Wisdom?
I think is you know that there's this word discernment, right, the art of discernment, like how many people can really see the difference between good and really good, you know, right and almost right truths and complete nonsense?
That to me is the missing skin of our time.
We do so pack it up. We're not doing Yes, we are, no.
I think I think everybody eventually has something in their life that wakes them up to that, whether it's at a different like might be young, might be older. But you always taught you always thought that like wisdom comes with age. Yes that saying so you probably hate that saying huh yeah.
Churchill was joking about this guy he didn't like, and he said, uh that although he occasionally stumbled over the truth, he quickly picked himself up and carried on as if nothing had happened. Right, So people are I think life is always teaching you, right, but you don't have to hear it, and so life will sometimes whisper life.
Life will tell you.
Nicely things that you need to know, and then when we ignore that, it becomes louder and louder and louder, until sometimes you know, you have to learn from some kind of catastrophic failure or catastrophe, and so you know your point that that we can learn from the experiences of others, that's a cheap, effective, efficient way to do it, and then a lot of us go, no, no, I'd rather figure it out on my own, and that that costs not just them, but the people around them, like
the when we're late to learning lessons, that doesn't just affect us, but that affects the people that work for us, that affects our family, that affects the people who you know bear the consequences of that, you know, painful lesson that we chose to learn the hard way.
I think wisdom has to come from age, though sure, regardless, I mean, regardless of what the part you could meet a stupid old person, but there is some wisdom that comes from what they're doing, whether if they work at a plant, whether they whatever they do at the house, there is some type of wisdom that they can continue on to give to somebody else.
Well, you know, the root of the word idiot is somebody in ancient Greece who did not participate in public life. So you know, you can read everything you want, and you can read a lot, and that'll make you smarter than the average person. But if you're not engaged and involved, you're going to miss some things that you can only learn from experience. You know, Da Vinci would sign his letters a disciple of experience.
You have to learn by doing. You have to put yourself out there.
And that's why I say it's learn, apply, repeat, So you learn the things you hear, the lessons you study, you go to school, then you got to go out in the world and you find that a lot of what you learn now has to be applied, or a lot of what you learned you didn't actually understand it. And then you repeat that cycle over and over and over again each time that that's a positive feedback loop that's making you smarter and better.
And they talk about educational a lot of people. I'm seeing this a lot more, more and more and more, that people are not necessarily wanting to go to college. Sure, they feel like the education that they get in college, they can be taught more through life experiences, and they feel like the wisdom that those professors have might be outdated what they're teaching. What's your thoughts on them?
Well, look, I'm a proud college dropout, so I'm all about it. There is and always has been a difference between school and education. So I think the problem is if you don't know what you're trying to do, how do you know what the best form of schooling or education is for you?
I said that all the time. By the way, I think it's stupid that we force kids to get out of high school and say, go to college and pick a major immediately when they don't necessarily know what they want to do. If you know what you want to do, that's great. But there's been times where kids would like, I don't know, Like, don't make me pick a major and make me take these courses if I don't necessarily know what I want to do in life.
And that's the way I woulday when we live in a world where we're kind of preparing for a future that won't even exist for the AI going to be having all the jobs anyway.
Well, look, spending a couple hundred thousand dollars over four years is an expensive way to figure out what you want to do, absolutely, especially if at the end of it you find out that what you want to do is something that didn't require college. For me, I met Robert Green, our mutual friend, and then I realized that's what I wanted to do. And then I said, well, am I going to keep going to college or am I going to go directly learn from the person who's
done it. So I'm a big believer in apprenticeships and mentorships. You got to find your teachers. Sometimes those are college professors, sometimes their business executives, sometimes their you know, your neighbor down the street. But you got to find who can teach you how to do what you want to do.
And when When you started off as an apprentice with Robert Green, one of the first things he puts you on with forty power.
No, I've worked on the fiftieth law fiftie Like the first thing I did was transcribe before in a world before AI. I transcribed hours and hours of interviews between him and fifty and so that was part of my education is just listening, not just listening to it, but having to painstakingly type it all out. And so I got this masterclass and not just you know how he worked, but all the people around him. And but what I was actually learning was like how you put a book together.
And Robert showed me how to research a book and how to write, and then how to operate in the industry. You want to find the people who are further ahead in what you want to do and do it. Although to be fair, like in college, I think one of the most professors are professionals in what they do.
They're not just.
Teachers, they're researchers, They're experts there. You know, they had a previous experience where they did the thing. And you know every week they have office hours where they have to sit there and meet with the students and nobody comes.
So I thought.
The crazy thing for me is like I didn't go into the library at my college until after I dropped out and I was writing my first book because I was like, oh wait, this is an incredible free resource that I was too busy, you know, doing the college kid thing to take advantage of. So all this stuff is there, it's just you got to be self directed and self motivated.
You know.
In a Wisdom Takes Work you write that we live in an age where reaction and idle chatter are rewarded in restraint and thoughtfulness are unfashionable.
And you talk to these digital decays about what you mean that?
Yeah, I mean, look, social media is by definition talking and not listening. Zeno, the founder of stoicism, he said, we have two ears and one mouth for a reason, and when you're talking, what you're mostly doing is not listening. So we have this enormous sort of media culture that's about chatter and noise and it's not about thoughts and reflection. And I mean, even how much of what we listen to and talk about is what's happening right now, not
the historical context or the bigger picture. And I think it's not that there's anything wrong with news or podcasts or social media, but if you don't have like the historical basis, the larger context, you're not going to know what any of it means. You know, Truman's famous line was, there's nothing new in the world, but the history you don't know. And so most of what's happening now has
happened before. But if it's the first time you're hearing about it, you're experiencing, you're going to have the wrong read on it, because you think it's like, somehow unprecedented, But in fact it's very precedented.
Somebody is unprecedented. Though a lot of what we're seeing right now you think so, at least in America. I guess you mean, I guess if you can rely on historical context, that's.
What I mean.
Yeah, I mean this archetype you want to look at a Donald Trump. Donald Trump exists in half a dozen Shakespearean plays. He exists in Greek tragedies. There are historical precedent after historical precedent for guys like that.
I mean.
One of the interesting lines in Marx Sirelis's Meditations, he says that he thanks his philosophy teacher for teaching him not to fall for every smooth talker. So like the idea of the demagogue, the idea of the strong man, the idea of the con man is as old a
thing as there has ever been. And part of the reason I think people have trouble spotting it or seeing it for what it is is that they don't know that this has happened again and again and again, and therefore they don't know how badly this ends.
Is he a smooth talker. I wouldn't consider him a smooth time.
I mean he's not smooth in the sense that you know, he's particularly good at it, like he's this soaring order. But he's really good at telling aggrieved people what they want to hear. And that's what demagogues have always done and always do. They They point to the other and they say, your problems are not.
Your fault, they're these people's fault.
And I'm going to be your weapon of vengeance against them. That's as old as you know political strong men have ever been.
What's the second brain?
Second brain? So and I learned this from Robert Green The the the writer is like you have to be recording and synthesizing the knowledge that you get. So it's not enough to have a mentor it's not enough to read books, it's not enough to watch listen to podcasts or watch documentaries. How are you collecting and organizing this information. So, like, I'm reading book right now and I'm I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes. It's a big one. This is uh Joe la Poor History of the United States all.
It's a great book. And I'm gonna record this stuff.
I'm gonna read it, I'm gonna take my time with it, and then I'm gonna break this down into note cards, which I organize, and then that's what I use in my writing, in my videos and my talks. So I think, if you're not keeping a journal, if you're not recording the information that you're consuming or learning, where's it going. It's just going in a black hole somewhere. So that's what they call the second brain.
What's an information diet?
Oh well, what do you just like they say, garbage in, garbage out right, But what are you eating?
What are you consuming?
We understand that what we eat affects our health, affects our mood, affects, you know, our happiness, and yet people just consume straight garbage in directly in their ears, directly in their eyes all day And I think, you know, you definitely see this on the right. This just sort of depraved garbage information diet of like the worst slop and nonsense, whether it's coming from podcasts or Twitter where like like, if you're not protecting what's going in your brain,
you're going to destroy your brain. And I think we see this happening, like no one should watch as much cable news or spend as much time on social media as Donald Trump does, and so you're watching it degrede. I think the most telling example of this is like, at one point in his life, Elon Musk was reading Soviet rocket manuals to figure out physics and space and the aeronautics industry. And now he just spends all his time on Twitter, you know, mainlining memes, and he's insane. Right,
he broke his brain. And that's that's why your information die.
It matters. It's not just the quality, but it's also.
Like if you consume too much, your brain will break. You got to have some some discipline and boundaries too.
But if it's like that's if it's habitual, right, like, how do you why do you manage the diet after you already broke here brain.
I remember growing up as a kid and my friend's parents watched so much Fox News it was literally burned in the corner of the TV, and that's.
Not healthy, Like this is not healthy.
So you gotta say, hey, this is when I get my news, this when I get my information, This is who I trust to give me my information. And I think people consume way too much real time information and don't go back far enough. I think books are better.
I think conversations with real human beings are better. You're just you're there's this recency bias, and so much of what's happening right now is ephemeral and trivial and or developing, you know what I mean, Like you shouldn't be watching the news as it's happening unless you are a hedge fund trader or.
You hold elected office, like wait for.
Them to figure it out, then check in and get that information and check it against your larger historical sense of what things being and how the world works.
It just always feels like things are moving so fast sometimes, And for a person like me, when you talk about like how you download information, if I'm watching the news when things are happening, I retain it way better than if I have to go back and like sit with it sometimes because I feel like it's a lived experience. You think, so that I mean that is just kind of what I've been experiencing and working in news. Like I literally remember January sixth when they went into the
Capitol because CNN was on and I watched it. So when I was able to talk about it, I watched it, like I mean, I talked about it from me watching in real time, yeah, versus when I go back and read things. It's I don't know, it's just different.
No, I get that.
I think sports is a great example. It's like you could watch Stephen A. Smith all week, that's not going to change what's going to happen on Sunday. Like what's going to happen on Sunday is what's going to happen on Sunday, And so we sometimes conflate like speculating about what's going to happen, debating about what happened. You know, you know, rumors are this is what's happening, and that's
not the actual like nut of it. And I think we consume all this sort of stuff and commentary around it and not like the main thing.
Yeah, I could see that.
Can wisdom protect you from being influenced because I do agree with you with the information diet, but they're like I can look at a whole bunch of stuff throughout the week and not be influenced by it. Sure, I think it's the influence of it that I think is worse than just consuming it.
Yeah, and look, I think part of this comes down to media literacy, technological literacy. I mean, like, look, something like twenty percent of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Like, no, if that's where your starting point is, you're gonna have trouble, Like when you are reading a complicated news story telling you why something happened or what it means. So, yeah, you have to have a certain amount of intelligence and savvy to be able
to separate, you know what. And I do think that's why it's such a battle for attention, is that you know, some people are up for grabs and some people aren't. And I think you want to be one of the people that's not up for grabs because you you sort of know what's what. To me, that's like a good working definition of wisdom, Like I know what's what. I know what humans are, I know how humanity works, I know history, I know I know enough about the world
that that I can it. Look, we can all be made fools and suckers, but the bigger basis, you know, protects you against you know, the day to day barrage for sure.
I really know people that think chocolate milk come from a black.
House brown that is that is a that is a statistical fact.
It is nuts.
That is like, remember right, that's crazy.
It is crazy. But but you you realize.
That not everyone's working with the same toolkit. Yeah, and and that that that makes it hard to go through life.
How do you attack what book you're going to write about? Like, you know this was about wisdom takes work? How do you know? You know I'm going to go this way on this book and next next time it's about this one. So how did you pick this book? And what stood out about this that made you want to write about wisdom taking work?
It should be zero percent who's drinking milk either, But look it's a I've been doing the series I did.
Courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Those are the four virtues. So I knew that was the the arc. That's that's what stoicism is based on. Correct, But I wanted to save wisdom for last because it strikes me as the hardest and it strikes me as the thing in exactly what we're talking about this world not just of lots of noise and information, but also AI, like the most essential.
I think that's the interesting thing about AI is people are acting like it's going to be this magical thing that solves every problem or.
Can teach you anything.
But in fact, what you need not just to be able to take advantage of AI because it requires you to prompt it, which means you have to be able to ask it smart questions, but like if you're not, if you don't have some sense of wisdom, some sense of knowledge, you're going to be vulnerable to a thing that that, by the way, hallucinates the significant percentage of
the time, that's wrong all the time. So you're gonna like this idea of needing wisdom, needing a good bullshit filter is like more important than ever because it's going to eat you alive if you don't have uh, if you don't have a sense of reality.
People don't I agree.
Oh, another claim you make in the book, you say, cultivating wisdom requires mental struggle, and there's no shortcut for that. So what does mental struggle look like from a from a practical sense.
Well, look like books are basically free, you know, you can get from the library. The amount of wisdom in a book is incredibly cheap.
But it still takes work. You got to wrestle with the book.
You gotta read it, you got to put the time in, you know. I think it's not just the struggle to you know, make the time to do the work, to read, to go to class, whatever. But then it's also wrestling with big questions like if you think life is black and white, if you think it's easy, if you think everyone is trying to tell you the truth all the time, I think, again, you're going to find yourself pretty vulnerable. So it it It is struggle. It's a it's a battle.
It's a battle against ignorance, it's a battle against misinformation. It's a it's a battle against your your own biases. I think one of the things the Stoics remind us is that, like, your mind is not always your friend. We all have prejudices, we all have biases, we all have mental shortcuts that we do that that prevent ego being another one that gets in the way of us learning and.
Seeing what we need to see.
So you've got to struggle against yourself too.
Absolutely, And I like the subtitle to learn, apply, repeat, Yeah, like you're saying that it has to be a cycle, not a one time of it.
Yeah, Like you become a student when you're young, but that's all sort of forced upon us. But to me, the essential question is how long do you stay a student. There's a story about Marksreli. Philosopher King is the wisest man in Rome, the most powerful man in Rome, and he's seen leaving the palace and a friend stops him and he says, you know, sir, where are you going? And he says, I'm off to see sex. This the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know the man.
This is amazing.
Here we have the philosopher King still taking up his tablets and going to school. But that's why he was a philosopher King. And I like that he was going to the teacher instead of sending the teacher to So there is something about staying hungry but also staying humble, Like, you know, if you're a know it all, you're right, because if you're a know at all, you know all that it is possible for you to know. But if
you focus on what you don't know. If you focus on how much there is left to know, then you're always going to get better and that, you know, think about what the Socratic method is to asking questions. States doesn't go around Athens, you know, lecturing people. He goes around asking them questions, trying to find things out. And so this this decision to become a student is part one, but part two is staying a student and remaining a student all.
Of your life.
I was my ex with your books. It seems like your target or your goal is to allow people to think freely but like have an educated like base that they're pulling from. Yeah, how hard does it be coming for you to go around teaching all of this in this like time with this administration. I saw the thing that happened with you at the Naval base and canceling your lecture that you do.
Yeah.
I've been doing a series of lectures at the Naval Academy on the Cardinal virtues for the last four years, and the last one was cancel. I was supposed to lecture about wisdom and I was going to talk about Admiral James Stockdale was a famous graduate with there who famously took a course on Marxism at Stanford before he was shot down in Vietnam and sent to a Marxist prison. And the idea is, like, you want to learn from the enemy, you want to understand what they think, or
else you're vulnerable to brainwashing and propaganda. Actually, Seneca, the stoke fluster, said this. He said, we want to study like a spy in the enemy's camp. So I was supposed to give this lecture, and like a couple weeks before I went, they started removing books from the library at orders of the Secretary of Defense and the president because they were too woke or pro DEI and I own a bookstore. I can't get up there and give a lecture about wisdom as they're literally removing books.
From a library.
So I was going to mention it, and they found out and they said, look, if you got to remove those slides and you can't come talk here. Hey, And this is one of the universities in this country. These are people who someday are going to be piloting fighter jets or aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines like these are these cannot be sensitive little snowflakes, or we're in big trouble.
These are people who are gonna not just have to make highly complex technical decisions, but profoundly ethical and moral questions. And yet here we are protecting them, not just from from from you know, protect potentially political books. But Maya Angelou's Memoirs was one of the books that they that they removed, probably because no one in excess office has read it, knows anything about it.
He probably chat GPT told.
Him it was a woke book, so we wanted to remove it. So I felt I couldn't do that. And that's, by the way, where all the virtues are interrelated, because it's not just knowing that that book banning is stupid and reckless and dangerous. But then I have to decide, you know, do I want to preserve my access or do I want to say what I think is true? And also do you want to you know, actuary defense to be mad at you. That's where courage comes in.
But then also justice, like, hey, it's the right thing, so you do the right thing. But yeah, we are we are in a dangerous moment. Do you know the word cacistocracy? So like oligarchy, democracy, right, different types of
governmental systems. Cacistocracy is government by the stupidest and that's what we are facing in this moment, people who are who are not just not smart, but actively afraid of and angry at and resentful of people who have competence and knowledge because they're fundamentally threatened by it.
So we have to replace the term idiocracy.
Then, Yeah, I mean idiocracy.
It's a similar way to say the same thing. Okay, but I mean I don't think the American people are that stupid. I think we are in a moment where we have elected a number of officials who are actively stupid and deliberately ignorant. And uh, what you said is interesting.
You said they're resentful of people who are smart, And to me, I'm like, I don't think they don't.
I don't think they believe anybody's actually smarter than them.
There's a hilarious list of all the people that Trump has said he is smarter than and it's like basically everyone that's ever existed.
What I'm saying, Yeah, but it's this idea that.
Like, my feelings are more true or stronger than your expertise. So it's this antipathy towards expertise, credentialism, and look like the experts are wrong all the time. I'm not saying they're flawless, but but like, you don't want to be driving the smartest, most qualified, most experienced people out of the armed forces, out of the government, out of business. And that's the sort of bent that we're on. It's going to end very very badly.
Oh listen, I want to ask you about that distant if do you think the political climate made him feel that way? Because for the last ten years, all the political pundits in the scrap they've just been wrong.
They have been wrong like and that that. So it's like, do you know this idea of negative capability? Negative capability is the idea? Can you can you hold two opposing ideas in your head? So, on the one hand, the experts are wrong a lot. On the other hand, expertise is still really important. So you can't throw the baby out with the bath art. So you got to go, hey, why were the experts wrong about this that or the other? What what biases or tendencies do they have that you
got to protect against? And at the same time, you got to elect qualified people. You don't go, hey, that guy talks about the military on Fox News on the weekends.
Let's put him in.
Charge of the most powerful military in the world. I mean, he's not even qualified to be the spokesperson for the Pentagon, let alone running the Pentagon. And so, uh, you gotta you gotta, you gotta go. Hey, here's what I believe, Here's what I think is important, and then still respect, you know, wisdom, intelligence, credentials, experience.
I want to ask you, what role is listening more than talking play when you're in like a culturally diverse setting, or when you're sitting with somebody with a different ideology and you're listening to them. Yeah, but at some point you might be like, what else wrong with some bullshit?
You just keep listening to you in a jagular.
But that that idea of negative capability is like realizing, for instance, I have to think about this with my kids. My kids are never wrong about their feelings because they're their feelings. Now I might feel differently, it might not change. Hey, you got to go to school, you got to do.
X, Y or Z.
But like your opinion is your opinion. And so I think what strong people are able to do, resilient people are able to do, wise people are able to do is understand that people feel differently about different things, have different opinions about different things, and to be interested and curious about that without necessarily changing your mind all the time. So that I think diversity is strength in the sense that you want to bring as many different opinions and
viewpoints and worldviews into the equation. But at the end of the day, you do have to decide what you think, what you feel, what you're going to do, especially in a position of leadership, like the leader ultimately has to listen to everyone and then make and own the decision.
What it's based on, what their opinions are based off of. Meaning your opinion or how you're feeling could be a certain way, yep, but if it's based off of some bullshit that's not true, then you're feeling is kind of wrong.
And I think that's our problem with expertise is people are like, well, but I don't want that to be true, and it's like, Okay, that's great, and I respect that you don't like it, but it is what it is.
Wow.
Well, Ryan Holliday, Ladies and gentlemen, No book wisdom takes work, learn, apply, reply, repeat, It's available right now and thank you for.
Joining all the pleasure you pull up right, you're the best.
Thank you.
Time brings some chocolate milk from a brown cow.
I do have a brown cow. It does not make chocolate milk.
It's the breakfast club. Good morning, hold up every day I wake click your ass up.
The breakfast Club.
You don't finish for y'all done,