11 Stoic Rules For "The Good Life" - Ryan Holiday

I've collected some of my favorite quotes from you over the last year and I want to go through some of those and get your reflection talking about the thing and doing the thing VY 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 um there was this thing many many years ago it was this Twitter account that just collected tweets of people talking about the novel they were working on which they were obviously not working on or they wouldn't have been tweeting about it and look I'm not saying you do the thing for validation that's a bad reason to do things but there is some sort of light at the end of the tunnel that keeps you going right when you're doing a thing like hopefully people will like this hopefully it'll be received well hopefully they'll Pat me on the back whatever you don't want to take that on credit you want to earn it and so when I working on a project I wait until I am nearly done or done before I start to talk about it because what it does is it starts to make this thing feel real that is not yet real and that you are the only person that can make real so it's this sort of Temptation This bad I Stephen press call it the resistance the resistance wants you to go hey I'm training for a marathon and people to go that's so great I'm so impressed um but they're impressed with a thing you haven't done yet you know tell them after you run the marathon you know that that's when that's when you want that's when you want to cash in on the work that you've been putting in I think about 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 um the kind of character and determination that that takes and so my my projects are thankfully much shorter than that usually but you know you just you just do the thing and then if people like it at the end that's great I mentioned that quote to Andrew hubman and he told me that there is a uh neuroscientific basis for that too huh that you actually get little sort of titrated drips of dopamine when you do talk about doing the yeah so your philosophical artsy wanky Insight is also reflected quite nicely in the Neuroscience I worked for this guy for a long time and he had this habit of telling people like what he was like his plans for sort of world domination like all the things he was working on and I noticed that he would tell the story so many times in so many ways and it was always so smart and clever and bound to work but he would do it so prematurely that it would almost be that he would get tired of it right like he would tell it it would become real in his mind and become real you know reified as they say in these conversations that he would 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 it yeah and it was so good at entertaining people about it and and making it feel real and making it the genius of it so obvious that yeah he would he would just move on to the next thing and and in his mind this was never quitting right in his mind he he was never like it was like I could have I just chose not to or or maybe even like sort of blurring in his mind that he did do it right and and so it's this very seductive Insidious thing where the more you talk about it the more real it is but by definition it's actually less you further away from because you did you 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 I have an aversion to it it I just found that so like so gross and and then I saw what it's was doing for him but but in in my own practice just like hey I'd rather just do the thing and I've 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 start to finish before you've done any of it so you have to have this vision of this thing um that you can't actually really have a vision of because you haven't done it and and you know when you when when you make contact with the Enemy or reality it changes right so this 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 I'm working on or 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 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 pet to teal competition is for losers when people compete someone loses so go away you're the only one do what only you can run a race with yourself yeah uh that's a great line in zero to one that I've always loved um this the the essence of stoicism is this idea that you focus on what's in your control and epicus said something very similar about 2,000 years before Peter te he said uh if you only run races where winning is up to you you'll always win right if if winning for you is I have the most money uh if winning for you is I'm the most beloved I'm the most well-known I received the most Awards um if winning to you requires someone or something to deem you something uh 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 I've been a runner most of my life and that's one of the things you learn very early is that like you know you have these competitive impulses so somebody blows past you or whatever and you go I got to keep up with this person I got to beat this person and then you real you have no idea when they started and you have no idea when they're finishing you're you're almost ever 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 and this isn't like some copout where you you make you know you just sell yourself short you don't try hard yeah you're actually I think determining standards that are much higher and much harder but you are not allowing other people to do it and now what Peter te is also saying he's pointing out this thing that people people people almost instinctively go to welldefined 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 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 the red ocean blue ocean have you heard Rory Sutherland's take on no one ever gets fired for hiring McKenzie that's right yeah you do the thing that everyone in your position does and this is I mean you experience this with people in publishing right like the main thing is you don't want people to go why the hell did you buy that book right what the hell were you thinking giving that book a big marketing budget right and so um people go towards what's safe what doesn't feel you know obviously uh wrong or ridiculous but the reality is a lot of things that really do succeed seem to that way like an obscure uh book about an obscure School of ancient philosophy that would have been Preposterous to think it would go on to do you know my books would go on to do what they did but I was really interested in them I had a very sort of clear and set defined Market that I wanted to reach and I was really interested in it and that was it and then everything else was extra and it's funny now you know remembering going to my publisher with that idea for that book and them giving you know basically humoring me with it to now hear all the people who want me to blurb books that really exist only because they are trying to reach the audience that I have cultivated is is a real experience that's like you do this thing and everyone tells you it's crazy and it will obviously not work and then not long after that those same people are copying you how do you keep your ego in check when things like that happen how do you keep the chip off your shoulder not get bitter resentful self-righteous well but those are two different sides of uh the same reaction that can happen to this very common thing which is you did something that everyone said wouldn't work and then it does work so what lesson do you take from that is it [ __ ] other people they're trying to hold me down I got to prove them all wrong or is it um they're uh nobody knows anything I'm the only one that knows I saw this in American Apparel Dev Charney 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 um you know warnings from uh you know unwarranted criticism so like I try to ask myself like when I get feedback and and you get this thing in you that's like who the [ __ ] are you or what you know what do you know to go like first off let's not trust that reaction and then second let's let's like wait it out right like like uh this idea that who are you to tell me this is almost never going to be the right way to come at any kind of feedback it may well be that you should completely disregard this advice and this person doesn't know what they're talking about you just want to make sure that you're you're doing that calmly and rationally and kindly and then you can be more confident that you're not doing it from a place of fragility or sensitivity yeah yeah all right next one the idea of [ __ ] yes or no it's far too simple and is caused me quite a lot of grief dropping out of college I was maybe 5149 on it leaving my corporate job to become a writer maybe 6040 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 there 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 you I think hell yes hell no or [ __ ] yes [ __ ] yes [ __ ] no is a nice rubric for like do you want to go to this conference or not you know uh you want to have coffee or not some friends are getting together do you want to come or not but when it's taking your life in your hand like when you're deciding to move here that it could not have worked right and it ended up working out great for you it's been crazy to watch but like if you had if you had been a 100 or a th% certain that it was going to work first off you would have been willfully ignorant of all the reasons that it couldn't work and the things you needed to and most importantly you would have been therefore discounting all the things you actually had to do to make it work that's interesting so is it you'll belief that sufficiently big or complex decisions are always going to have so many things on both sides of the Ledger that the [ __ ] yeah is often very hard to reach yeah there's some historians said that the one thing you can never miss out on when you're studying a person or a series of events is that it could have been otherwise like it seems obvious in retrospect there was going to go the way that depression 1920s yeah but it it always could have gone otherwise and most importantly to the people in that moment it could have gone otherwise right it could have done they could have done this or they could have done that and so when you look back at your successes and your 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 midest 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 undue confidence that doesn't reflect where you were at the time this retrospective sort of uh glow up of your yes you're you're discounting the lucky bounces you're discounting the things that actually did that determined how hard I had to work this wasn't a [ __ ] yeah this wasn't an easy win this was something that took blah blah blah right okay that's totally and so and so it 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 uh they had a much humbler view of it and then it became this thing but then if you update your identity as Visionary revolutionary uh 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 try I I try to stay in reality not the narrative that other people make up or you make up and that when you do things that are in the public eye it's not just your own version of your story that you have to be uh careful of like because I was so young when I was doing a lot of the stuff uh early 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 I wanted to just be a person I was just trying to I was trying to strip that away and see it for what it was and I was always trying to in a way like actively give credit to the things that were not up to me so I wasn't overemphasizing the credit warranted by the things I did control yeah how do you maintain confidence when so much of what you're doing is kind of disparaging of that you know what I mean yeah like there was some joke about uh the author Ein Rand who wrote this book The the virtue of selfishness and the writer said something like uh 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 I tend to find for the most part that I need I need help stripping the ego away not is 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 and that's a that's a that's a a 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 uh I shoved it all in their faces you know that that to me tends to create superiority complex entitlement complacency Etc 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 it tends to make you do those things so to me confidence is based on the evidence of what you've done um but it is coupled with an awareness of where you could have done better what wasn't a result of your effort so that 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 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 um it's much easier to do when the process is paid off for you it's hard to trust the process when you've never seen it work but when you've seen it work over and over like I now know in my soul what it feels like for a book to not be coming together and I know how if you stick with it and you keep going it does eventually come together I know the rhythms of the process I know all the different Peaks and valleys of it so I don't think that much about it I just show up and I do the stuff right and and that that's a you're you the more you do it the more reps you get you just have this confidence of like I can handle anything cuz I've handled everything up until this point that that's 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 uh uh you know faith without evidence right I like I have an understanding of what I am capable of but the the paradoxical part is like how do you know you can do something that you've never done before this is where it gets interesting um when I sat down to write my first book I did I I was confident that I could do it uh 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 uh I I could not actually say sense it does I suppose the alternative uh to know that you could do it would be that the task that was in front of you was so unchallenging to you that there was no way that you could fail there's a great Seth golden bit about how uh impostor 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 impostor yeah if you're not afraid you're not reaching right and and and you're not you're you should be putting yourselves in in positions where you're not sure if you could do it you hope you can do it you have confidence that you're not someone who quits when things are hard and these are these are what allow you to to make a rational bet that it's not a totally Reckless thing to do you know what was cool I uh I 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 um and I did this last year and you know I had a phenomenal first show in Dublin on a Thursday night and it was classic sort of slightly Rowdy Irish crowd that had had a few drinks beforehand and it was I mean I got like a 500 person standing over it which was totally like I wasn't going out there giving a sermon but it was just very nice and a lot of positive encouragement and then the Manchester show which was the Friday I just ate [ __ ] and I it was a Friday it was a slightly bigger venue it was a bit brighter maybe my delivery wasn't quite there my mom 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 uh I at the halftime interval 45 minutes in uh I was like I just wasn't happy with how it was going and I went and I looked in the mirror and I had a little word with myself and I was like Hey 600 people came to see you in Manchester on a Friday night some of your best friends from your entire life are here and your mom and dad are sat four rows back like if you can't have fun with this as your second ever show and give yourself a bit of Grace that this is a great learning experience for you and also how can you turn it around how positive can you now come out in a 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 yeah is one of the things that sticks in my mind the most and that's an undeniable piece in my stack of proof that I can do the things that I say that I can do yeah and if it had gone the way if it had just gone swimmingly you wouldn't have had that sort of moment where you I think what you actually emerge from that with is a is a better thing which is you have the sense that it can you can lose your grip on it a little bit and grab it back BR back 100% And so that's a super valuable skill because now when you go up there uh you're like I got this right you you want things can go wrong the the Pres the uh projector can stop the mic and die we did this show in uh uh Vancouver and it was so much fun that was another Friday night in in Canada this time it's me and James and dude it was the audience was great venue was fantastic Mike just kept on dying 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 his mic kept on down 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 it was awesome so yeah I think um 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 sh 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 bomb like it's just the worst and I've had some I've had some where you know like they told me the audience was this so I built it around that and then oops we Mis like I've had it go really bad and it's not that bad you know what I mean like comedians talk about the 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 uh you know it is what it is Strategic Learning so so having having the worst case scenario happen to you can be freeing in another way which is you realize it's not actually that bad of a worst case scenario in other news this episode is brought to you by nomatic nomatic 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 and to buy on just hand luggage a carry-on plus this puppy because hold luggage is a scop meant to keep you poor and late you can bypass it by actually getting a good backpack pneumatic make the most functional durable and Innovative backpacks and Luggage that I've ever used this 20 L 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 life time 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% off your first purchase by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Nom matic.com slod wisdom that's Nom matic.com slod wisdom have you got any advice to people uh 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 uh 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 early 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 like we know not only is that true in a positive way but it's also just true in how the mind works like the the mind is really good at 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 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 6 months in a year in 10 years in 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 moves to Europe with his 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 uh this editor and he he's meeting with him and he telegraphs his wife and says hey like I need you to come meet me uh this is Hadley and and so she gathers up all his stuff she thinking that that Hemingway is going to want to show it to this editor and um she hops on the train she stops in Lions or so somewhere in France and uh gets off the train for a second to grab a newspaper whatever and she comes back and the Briefcase full of all of Hemingway's writing is gone everything he has done in his life up until this point just gone they don't know if someone stole it they don't know if she lost it they don't know if it was thrown away so Hemingway loses everything that he had produced up until this point and and it's obvious like when you hear the story you know okay yes this was the defining moment he reinvents his style he he comes back from we know how the story ends but there's this letter that he writes to Ezra pound um and he goes uh this is right after it happens he's telling him the story and he goes I know you're going to tell me this is all for the best it's all going to work out I should be grateful at 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 MH he got there but he wasn't there yet this understanding of the process this sort of acceptance of my own psychological fallibility but this hope in the future as well yeah and he does get there very quick like almost uh 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 when the stok say the obstacle is the way like I try to be you know I'll get people be like hey you know my brother-in-law just got diagnosed with cancer uh or you know my 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 soak this shittiness in like 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 sity I would say that the thing when I hire people the number one thing I'm looking for is I'm looking for something I'm looking I'm I'm looking for the absence of I want someone who is not nuts like I want someone who's not nuts and the problem is a lot of young ambitious people they have [ __ ] that they have to deal with first you know what I mean they they're they're they're too high strung they're too worried they're got bad boundar like they're not I I I was very cognizant early in my career of like not giving anyone the creeps not not having bad energy and that 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 [ __ ] 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 they want you to not [ __ ] it up so anyways I I just try to I was try to work on my [ __ ] and and I I I did have a lot of momentum early in my life uh 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 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 [ __ ] it up that's like the main thing it sounds like uh be quiet work hard and stay healthy it's not ambition skill but sanity it sounds like there's a sort of long-termism yes component in there as well yeah I want 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 I remember I listened to someone once say they were like if you stick around long enough you'll get a shot everyone gets a shot just don't [ __ ] the shot up and that's to me I felt very fortunate to get those shots early so it was actually more imperative that I it's also more risky you know because you haven't put the requisite preparation and work in that whole if you 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 uh video to go super viral you want your first show to get purchased you want your first book to you know get a a bidding war or 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 or earn this somewhat misguided faith that they put in you know you have you have to there's a lot of catching up I mean you are you are speaking to me so I signed with portfolio uh and hard Hatchet in the UK yeah and there's they're expecting they're expecting me to not [ __ ] it up yeah let's say that and uh I'm like sat down with Mark a couple of weeks ago and I was like dude I'm this is like [ __ ] a big deal I've got I originally the sub he nearly killed me the submission date originally was August this year he was like if you try and do that I'll come and [ __ ] 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 um yeah I'm I feel that a little bit and I think it's it it's it's something people need to understand now more than ever because of how easy it is to potentially blow 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 your dues and build these 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 to acquire there's something I read this really phenomenal um uh breakdown from ginda ble about how everything is 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 do all the rest of it but for the most part the returns weren't so horses shoy 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 what all of the like weird protection strategies like have you got the right people around you and can you deal with it here's your first red carpet here's your second red carpet maybe you go through some of those before you get the equivalent of an um and yeah on an egalitarian no hsbs Tik Tock ification 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 this 50c 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 ECT that he would have been there's another layer on this you know who Dr Drew is kind of yeah he did uh he was for many years the host of this radio show called Love Line in uh on the 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 every day multiple times a week he had uh famous people in the studio so he gave them like this narciss ISM 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 it was interesting that um the more craft oriented what you did was the more protected you were or less likely you were to have some of these narcissistic traits what's craft so like a drummer which is a very hard thing to become famous for it would tend to be less narcissistic than a reality television star and so if your path to success is based on you getting good at an extremely good at a very hard thing you have this safety mechanism which is it's always kicking your ass so even if the world permanently generating evidence yeah yeah that also so if the world is saying you're amazing you're the best you're God's gift you know one how many hours it took to do the thing and then two um 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 Bruce Dickinson if the fame was taken away the love of the drums would still remain yeah Bruce Dickinson the the lead singer of Iron Maiden said you know Fame is the the byproduct of creativity and that 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 um you are famous because you are famous and you're not exactly sure how you got famous that's why audience capture is perilous in 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 I think that's true it's also if you got famous for saying something that maybe you didn't fully believe or that you were just riffing on or whatever not you got well known for saying these things that you believe in it's hard for you even to know what you believe and the you know the expression it's very hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding it's hard to it's it's hard period to know what your beliefs are but it's very hard to maintain beliefs uh in the light of those beliefs either cost in you money or um another belief being better for you financially so you get in this place where you're like what is the a you wake up and you go what is 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 uh I went to a retreat last summer and this guy who used to create a ton of content online was there and I asked him why he'd stopped and he said because I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public he was making these PR izations 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 Hawk hypocrisy thing to be able to say you you're saying that the S&P is now good in the past you said it was crypto and now blah blah like you want to be able to change your mind yeah and in he had to live up to in private the things that he was saying in public all right next one uh if it makes you a worse person it's not success if starting a business tears your relationships apart makes you bitter or frustrated with people then it doesn't matter how much money it makes or external praise it receives that's not success what do you want your life to look like right I think it's very easy to go these people are successful 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 uh it's very easy to lose your bearings very quickly cuz you're going to get offered things you know do you want to go over here you want to do this you want to do that it's where the audience capture thing comes in too you are doing what makes rational sense or is in your immediate self-interest but it may well be taking you much much further away from where you want to go or where you should go then you wake up one day and you know your spouse leaves you you wake up one day your children hate you you wake up one day and you go oh wait I'm the bad guy you know like I'm I'm not a positive contributor to humanity and so I think being really clear with yourself about what success looks like is is really important because it if you start to get it it becomes this rocket ship that you're riding on and 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 we 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 uh how much you don't need to work uh and we'll trade that for an increase in salary we'll trade an increase salary for a longer commute which Dan stream from that how much more stressed are you less time with your kids and blah blah blah blah blah blah because the best game in the world is money and job title and the way that you look and but what is it that you actually do and trying to bate 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 competition impulse is so Insidious you go like IAL 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 uh I know that they just pulled this number out of their ass there's no there's no reason that a specific number is a goal like you're so they've already said that their goal for the project it's not to write something amazing it's not to write something meaningful um and also what time line are we talking about you know um are we talking in in a year or are we talking 50 years right so there 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 them so yeah we we um 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 I'm obsessed with that question yeah and it's Neil Strauss was Sting that seat a couple of weeks ago oh he's the best I first time I met him we got on super well like he's he's a real one um and he told me do you know what the title of his next book is no uh it's called The Power of low self-esteem [ __ ] awesome I've texted him a bunch of times cuz I was like dude I just want you to know how sticky that idea is the power of low self-esteem you know in the courage to be disliked the subtle art like it's kind of in that that sort of oxymoron kind of way but um I'm beyond obsessed with thinking about the price that people pay to be someone that other people admire yeah like um 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 uh Winston Churchill uh was he's got this letter from his father when he doesn't make it into uh Sandhurst have you heard this letter yeah it's just so [ __ ] phenomenal his father sort of accuses him of being a risking being a social wastal one of the many upper class toughs 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 vday when remember it was June 30th 1945 something like that uh 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 rest bite from his degree of low self-esteem and that was why I was like dude you [ __ ] there's a great book called Churchill and Son about Churchill's relationship with his own son which was so much better than his relationship with his own father but still fundamentally you see the the just generational wounds that being a shitty parent can have on a person and yeah if you 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 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 uh I like you as you are um and sure it's a it's an incredibly powerful motivator to not feel that way um it's also an incredibly tragic motivator and and ultimately destructive form of fuel it's a but toxic fuel yeah it's fuel that destroys the engine um it's it's a it's a one-way trip you know you you can't come back from it you can't adjust and um it it ruins all the things that you end up achieving 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 they're 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 packed blend of magnesium l38 appenine and Eline in research-backed dosages if you are struggling to fall asleep on the 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 hubman is actually the scientific adviser 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 sitewide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Liv mous.com slod wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's Liv m m n us.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout 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 in a year then in his in a decade then in a lifetime then in a lifetime in a day and you know just sort of you tell your dad he's like well what about this you know it it never happens but one of the things that I quite like from him which is like kind of like Alchemy with this when you're at the start of any Journey you're going to have bitterness and resentment and a point to prove and a chip on your shoulder and all of those things and I think that what you really just need is activation energy to get started and I think that in the beginning using like it's a toxic fuel that you can't use for too long it's potent but toxic in the long term like that's the framing for me I'm like you know when I think back to the reason I started any of the things that I started it was to prove all of the people from school wrong to you know get out of this culture that I didn't really like all of the rest of it and I'm like right okay I don't need to necessarily feel ashamed of using that fuel I do need to transcend it and know that I can't keep on relying on it but I also think look if you're somewhere that you don't want to be use what you've got sure and just not for too long it's kind of like those Rockets you know they're dropping fuel tanks and engin as they go because you need different Rockets to to escape different levels of the atmosphere yeah it's very hard it it's very hard to go from nothing to something without some kind of motivating factor but you've 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 you're never it's never going to be satiated the better right you you have this moment um 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 what does it feel like it feels like [ __ ] nothing it feels like nothing uh 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 wanted it the most from so in that moment you know you win the Super Bowl uh do you go okay I've now eliminated this fallacy this idea that if I do this I will feel good CU you don't feel good that sadness or emptiness or weirdness you feel you either eliminate it as a person as a possibility and then you can continue doing the thing from a new motivation or a new understanding because you actually like doing the thing or you want to have some positive impact on the world or you just want to see how far you can take it or you go oh it's because it wasn't I got to do it twice I got to prove that it wasn't a fluke I got to prove it wasn't a fluke or I well oh it's it's not that I won one Super I have to win the most Super Bowls right it's not that I made a billion dollars I have to make the most money there is I have to I yeah I have to I have you go oh it's just the dosage wasn't enough the gold posts 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 some with this a lot ineffable like here here's the thing so it's not hopeless like people who are listening to this and they're like just this is easy for you to say I've never done I get it you're 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 so you don't have to uh 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 um you don't have to discover it on your own just take it let it sit there there's a uh there's this experience you have where you read something and 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 was about the Pieces come together and a lot of what you're doing early on in your career and life is just accumulating those things so you don't know that this is going to be the final piece of that puzzle until later it's so funny man like I 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 MH uh and that goes for status full valid pick pick your domain of of of pursuit of choice um 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 and do you 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 it and maybe that's just like the cost of doing business as a human look it's it's very hard to to become successful at something to to make a lot of money to master a craft but in many ways it's easier to do that than to have self-awareness and self- understanding like like there's an expression it's easier uh to be a great man than a good man like it's easier to win public office uh build in an institution Make Your Mark in history than it is to to just like be a good dude uh be a good human being and I would say the rare thing is to have both like how many people can um be great at something or be world class at something uh maybe it's impossible to be the number one alltime goat at something and be balanced but to be like in contention uh in in the league and have a balanced normal family life be a 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 that's a worthwhile Mountain that's a mountain that uh has a positive impact on the people around me that and so like I just did this book on the 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 going to be great at there there's a a quote from Mark cus which I love he goes he's writing this in meditations of 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 forgiver of faults a better citizen a a better human being and so he's saying like look why am I working he's like I'm I'm working at getting better at all but where am I working on just being a good friend or a good human being what am I optimizing for yeah and and 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 [ __ ] significantly better person yeah dud much easier I'm obsessed with this this whole sort of section I must have thought about it probably more than any other topic for the last few years so what are you optimizing for what are you sacrif 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 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 on the new book uh what do I love from these this is good stop wanting things to be easy and prepare for them to be hard that seems pretty straightforward uh I 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 you know show me someone for whom that went well uh where you build it 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 um 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 and so when you get those those moments of struggle to just go this is actually what I asked for like this is this is what I need um 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 I'm working I'm working on it all the time uh I mean I go to therapy for it I build a routine around it I build uh 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 uh is is a recipe for misery you know that that I it's like my my want 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 I 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 is this guy 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 or 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 up the stress and the only reward is that there's some moderate release of the stress it's never good yeah Oliver burkman 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 and it's a very fragile place because all these things have to go right for you to feel not shitty not like hey if everything goes right you're like what an awesome day but if everything goes right you feel like you kept everything perfectly balanced correct and that's a yeah take me through the uh highest return routine things that you do you know I'm it's weird I I'm very routine oriented person a lot of what I'm trying to do and and having kids has been really helpful SL also awful uh in the sense that um 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 till 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 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 my household yeah and so I 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 but like realizing like oh I I've created this like cage that I'm in and that seems like a strange reward for being success uccessful 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 you shouldn't wake up at plus 100 you know that's probably delusional um 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 um from that probably more is not going to get it's like a negative honic 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 a 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 uh he was like we've got I was like we got to go you know like let's go let's wrap this up guys and he's like we've got he goes uh 7-year-old goes you know we've got nothing to do and nowhere to be and he was totally [ __ ] right you know we we it's satday bitched by a seven-year-old it's Saturday there like there's nothing on the schedule there's nowhere we have to do be there's nothing we have to do and yet what I'm doing is the the thing that served me so well as a person which is control control don't waste time do things efficiently go to the next thing squeeze one more thing in yeah um you know first off uh it's nonsense and second um I get rewards from that right but like the the cost is borne by this person who's never been to this restaurant before or you know or has to be in school all week and this is his weekend right so so realizing that like yeah the the if if the reward is not the 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 emptiness cycle exactly CU it's it's objectively not true anymore yeah yeah I uh 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 uh 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 is not going to be you have to you have to just do it the forcing function of the child is ultimately going to be the thing because it changes you like hormonally and and biologically and logistically you know it just changes you in every way and and so all these things that you could only consider or contemplate before or now real and you also have this thing of the consequences of your DEC you you realize the the willingness with which you would subject yourself to abuse or Consequences to your decisions and just grit your teeth and bear it um you have to be a real [ __ ] to not be affected by watching the consequences of the decisions or habits or lifestyle that you have manifest in a child an innocent person isn't that interesting that uh it's kind of like that I think on average people finish 50% of antibiotics courses but they make their dogs finished 95% um 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 have you done any inner child work I 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 transformal a transformational thing for me but um I was very stuck understanding who and what that child was like my my memories of childhood are not great which is not a great uh let me fix this thing I can't remember well which is not a great verdict on your childhood like most people either really good or really bad they know what they were feeling when they were six or 10 or 11 and you're just like I don't really remember that's a that's IND indicative in it of itself but um when you have a physical manifestation of you at every age and every day it's you one day older it's this isn't a reason to have kids but it's a very um 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 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 you can have compassion and feel like the part of what child work is as I understand it is about loving and reparenting that child um who if you're disassociated from that person that can be difficult to do if you've got a surrogate you yeah in front of you you're like you know and you also have this benefit just this reality of like you can see that seven-year-old interacting with your own parents and that's also illustrative cuz then you'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 a powerful who knew that having kids was the ultimate therapeutic tool that's what should be prescribed we don't need psilocybin therapy everybody have a couple of kids and just watch them like a hawk there's a a scene in that Churchill book I was telling you about where he's uh sitting talking to his son and his daughter-in-law and he just hits him and he goes I'm pretty sure I talked to you this evening more than my father talked to me in his entire life cumulatively and so that's an Insight that you can only really have with the Next Generation Well I think certainly for me I'm an only child so there's no split test yes there's no one there that anchors other memories do you remember when we went to the thing and this the fish 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 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 uh and yet there's no nothing to compare and contrast against like that's just childhood you know it's just that's just the way that it was you have no idea is this normal abnormal better worse like there's no there's no such thing as relativity in this it's just absolute uh yeah how fascinating man I'm uh I'm really happy that you're using holistically healthily using uh raising a kid to also improve yourself and sort of work on yourself as well that's a really I mean what a gift as well that you're unknowingly that your son is able to give you 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 there's a choice you make right because you go hey get in the [ __ ] car right you like like and I can you can you can see the the the choice that parents make and I see this because I do this thing called daily dad which is like a parenting email every day and you can see like I I basically cannot look at the comments anymore because the the shitty dad energy is so like triggering for me you know um like the the things that people manage to disagree with you know it's it's it's interesting but yeah you you can decide to I it just hit me at some point I go I 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 have been passed down generationally and then the decision to go that the the default is that that happens again and so if you want it to go differently the amount of work that you have to do is considerable I think 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 know really if you're Millennial uh 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 MH yeah or I'm going to do my best to make it not as bad mostly ends it mostly ends yeah yeah but no no that like yes again we tend to think of justice as like okay like philosophers want to debate like the trolley problem or we 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 it's all very interesting but I 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 multigenerational impact chances are 95% of the work that all of us do will be very quickly forgotten but like I'm a Ed by choices that my great-grandfather made uh I'm 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 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 science keeps showing us that our bodies need more nutrients and that we need the 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 money back guarantee so you can buy it it try it and use it every single day for 3 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 five free travel packs plus that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink a1.com wisdom that's drink a1.com wisdom you're in the middle of the four stoic virtues at the moment I think maybe the only one less sexy than Justice is temperance um so why say that Justice is the most important like what happens without justice justice is 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 uh a socially destructive end or a nonsensical end because you've had your brain scrambled by things that you watched online um it's funny Temperance Temperance is not sexy so I render it as discipline uh and it 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 and definitely need the most Justice to me though is the North Star the value that unlocks the others if you don't if you don't have a code a moral compass a sense of you know what's right and wrong or or why you're here or not here what is what is any of it for what is the talk to me about the relationship between Justice and the other three Marcus's line is is the fruit of this life is good character and works for the common good I like that definition of justice so first off like just the things that you control do I keep my word how do I treat other human beings you know um like what ethics do I operate under how do I run my business how do I you know do I litter or not litter you know like the 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 you know the impact that we try to positively have in the world in the political sphere the social Fe sphere the things we write the things we say do we participate in the issues of our time so that tens that the the balance of those two is is how I would Define this idea of Justice like what the right thing is um and then the other virtues are in pursuit of that like courage it if we lived in a perfectly just World it wouldn't take any courage to pursue these things but we don't right in fact most of the people that we admire say a Martin Luther King or a Gandhi um 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 way the courage and the tenacity with which they uh they brought that thing into being and then we throw the fourth this like the the the learnedness and the the astuteness in some cases like the the the the political Genius of them this is where the discipline of wisdom comes in so that there're they're these Inseparable interrelated virtues that for the most part you cannot separate you know knowing what the right thing is and doing the right thing are very different things and so even the virtue of Justice just having a good conscience is in and of itself only so valuable 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 like I didn't spend a lot of time in the book in these sort of incredibly complex philosophical discussions about you know should you do this or should you do that I tend to find at least in my own life knowing what the right thing is is usually pretty obvious to me should I say this or not say this should I go with this or that should I work with this person or not work with this person should I refund this money or keep this money you know uh should I buy this or buy that like 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 um and so that like I I wanted to I wanted to try to to just say do the right thing felt to me insufficient it's doing it now you know like we tell ourselves hey I'm G to I'm going to go do all this stuff that I'm going to be really rich and that I'm going to be a philanthropist where I'm not a garbage person you know and then how many people make that turn we don't make the turn and so that that's sort of where I was coming at Florence Nightingale pursuing actually doing a thing competence pursuing Justice what was the story there so she gets the she's this uh young girl in England she has Rich parents in Victorian England the expectation of a girl of her stature is it's not just there's no expectations there is uh an expectation of no expectations like you are not to do things and so she she just hears one day she hears this call that you know from above that she should find a vocation that she should help the less Fortune she gets called to nursing and her parents are like are you out of your [ __ ] mind uh you cannot do that it was like it's considered almost worse than prostitution that like a a young rich white woman would would be in the same room as these like Kim working at KFC or something yeah dirty Rowdy soldiers it's it was there's all this immorality applied to and so she you know based on the the sort of the social pressures of her time she ignores the call for eight years eight years later she gets the call again so 16 years go by of her just ignoring the call and then finally the call becomes much more explicit and again to her there's a religious connotation to this call but the call is um are you going to let what other people think deter you from being of Serv service or being in my service and she finally decides no and 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 she 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 her hands all this was not there and so she realizes I I think this is another important part of this idea of doing the right thing she realizes that doing the right thing isn't just this place or this thing you come at from your heart that you have to develop like actual confidence in the thing you want to do in 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 would we have to come up with this idea of first Do no harm because that was not the the status quo at that time that like most of the things were well-intentioned but ultimately harmful and so she actually starts to study these things and she's like hey maybe actually none of this [ __ ] we're doing matters if we just fed people better if we stop 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 Longfellow poem about uh night Andale and she's this you know Apparition in white and this beautiful and and one of her aunts who Volunteers in the hospital with her was ultimately that's the thing when people have the courage to pursue something they often bring people along with them and she says like I I hate this poem because that's not what the job is at all she's not going with 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 standard she was like it's this incredibly un sexy 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 were morally correct but people who had the political will or the Strategic mind or the organizing capacity or the the pr Mastery to change public opinion about a thing or to build a movement from nothing um we see this now you know young people get upset about stuff and they're like let's protest because the Civil Rights Movement was based on protest but do you know why the Civil Rights protesters protested it's because it was illegal for them to protest it was a very deliberate uh tactic to seek conflict with the police just as Gandhi was doing for the police to morally undermine their Authority by enforcing unjust laws yeah what was the what was the Gandhi Story I mean Gandhi understands uh G the British were laughably outnumbered in in India the could could he have led a Guerilla movement against the the rule of the British almost certainly could he have led like a violent Uprising against the British almost certainly but he he understood that it wasn't just about the it wasn't just about uh sort of self-rule in the political sense but it was about self-rule in the spiritual and uh economic sense it was about becoming independent masters of ones self but we don't give gly 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 that nonviolence was both an invention like some a tactic that did not exist before and then also a genius tactic in a world of mass media which he operated in that 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 gandi proposes this campaign where they 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 a tax and the CL so first off just a 20-day slow moving car Caravan is itself this media story um and you know this is also the beginning of uh cameras uh like video cameras but but mostly radio and newspaper reports and and 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 what Gandhi fundamentally understands Christianity and what its levers are and he's exploiting M he's shoving it back in their face this is who you are this is what's being done in your name forgiveness Grace yeah how you treat them the the the meek uh and and so G Gandhi as a political strategist we don't think about enough which is one of the things I got really excited about in the book but given that there's lots of corruption in the world why play by the rules when other people aren't what do you mean oh we're talking about Justice here we're talking about doing the right thing largely why be a good person yeah there's loads of corruption in the world other people don't need to or choose to not play by these rules they get some advantages so expedite success avoid failure do the thing look cooler all the rest of it why should any why should we play by the rules yeah look keeping your word is expensive uh giving a [ __ ] 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 the idea of caring about whether your employees get a make a living wage or not is uh in some ways uh uh like self-destructive right like it it it in a fully capitalist Society it's a bad call um but I think there's I think you can make two cases for it the first would be like what John Mackie at Whole Foods would say is that like you know when everyone wins actually the business does much better the idea of things about your expanding your definition of of stakeholders um actually creates a more sustainable uh and um viable business um 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 um The Stokes talk about not doing anything thing that requires walls or curtains you know with full transparency from what you do what you say what the public appears to and in certain environments there are walls and curtains but in a media world that can go away like that so the thing you thought you were getting sure the sweat shop in China is abysmal but China's many thousands of miles away and nobody cares and they don't care till they care right then you find out and this thing that you thought was saving you 12% a year on your margins is evaporated in One Singular PR crisis so that's the first thing that's the first the second is 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 um 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 a hell where you have to live in denial of the consequences of your decisions on other people so um the 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 things but to what end what do you do what 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 uh like 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 you've set up what you do is inherently exploitative or merciless or toxic I think it's very unlikely that that is not worming its way into who you the person that you have to be to turn those things off inside you I think ultimately comes back around and I don't I'm not just saying that in a Karma way I'm saying that the blind spots that you have to develop the indifference that you have to develop sets you up for a kind of catastrophic failure or collapse you end up making the decision or the decisions that there there is a there is a seed of Destruction in that even in a less um utilitarian transactional literal way yeah most of the people listening to this if they're an hour and 40 minutes into me and you waffling on about bro psychology bro philosophy they already think and reflect and ruminate they consider they they are asking themselves questions like is this the best that I could be doing with 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 yeah you're kidding yourself mhm like if you are a thoughtful person this is Alanda Boton says um loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind and the loneliness side I've got a sort of mixed opinion on which I've changed recently but certainly there are taxes that you have to pay to atone for a complexity of mind and one of them is that you cannot hide things from yourself in the fog so much anymore I think that's right that or or the things you have to do to maintain the fog yes become increasing elaborate danger 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 you know eventually you end up destroying yourself what was Marcus aurelius's 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 the way that he behaved how did the most powerful man in the like [ __ ] Known World avoid the temptation of not keeping his word well this is why the study of history is so important so Marcus Reus is 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 mark is 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 hadrien and he's just like notoriously honest he had like no filter and uh hadrien actually nicknames him like the truest one it's a play on Marcus's name which in lad meant true and and so he's just like this the Purity and the honesty of this little boy and hadrien senses something in in him in that but hadrien was a degenerate destructive sort of everything that you think that being having absolute power would do to a person it does to hadrien he gets worse over time and and towards the end where Marcus lives with him in this Palace this sort of pleasure Palace Monument to his greatness surrounded by sycophants and a secret police uh he's haunted by the ghosts of the the people that he killed it's a terrible sad destructive end but hadrien does one good thing which he he sees something in Marcus and he wants him to succeed him but Marcus is too young so he uh he chooses his successor this man antoninus who becomes known to us as antoninus pasus and why does he choose antoninus we're told that he watched secretly one day as antoninus helped his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs just his moment of goodness this powerful influential politician just help out another human being he goes this is the guy so he he anoints antoninus as his successor on the condition that Marcus has to be antonin's successor so these three people who are not related set in motion this incredible transition of power and hadren probably thought Marcus would or that antoninus would live for a few years he lives for 20 years so Marcus has this handful of years with hadrien the who you don't want to be how how bad it can go and then he has in antoninus everything you would want in a ruler and a 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 war in Marcus's battle which whose vision of him is he going to fulfill right which which one of these Heroes is he going to follow at least from what you've said there it sounds like maybe hadrien even had a degree of self awareness about his own flaws and he saw Yes in his successor the seeds of his success is success is success I think so and and maybe even saw how corrosive and destructive power was and the idea that you shouldn't get it too early like what why doesn't he just like why does he why does he create this transition plan yeah and and so so yeah he sets in motion this plan and and you can see in the beginning of meditations Marcus is riffing on antoninus always just this he's trying to live up he's trying to live up to this model always I think he's asking himself in many cases what would antoninus do here so when he found himself he has unlimited power he can do whatever he wants but there is this check against him always which is this sort of person he doesn't want to let down it's like an ideal yeah this this person who 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 The Stokes talk about we have to have that in our life who is that person or who are those people whose standard we are trying to bear and that can help us in these moments where okay if I make this decision people are going to hate me but it's the right decision I'm going to make this decision it's bad for me financially but it's right for my community or for my employee and when we have these sort of hard wrenching decisions what do we have that sort of swings Us in the right direction out of just is this good for me can I get away with this what will the reaction be to me that's that's such a critical part of being this person we want to be you've read some stuff about John Boy right uh-huh yeah he's got that quote about to be someone or to do something to be or 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 Northstar to have positive impact to serve your country to make uh people better or is your Northstar rank power influence money Fame and these things are in conflict with each other and the sooner you make that choice the better uh 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 decisions you realize you can't have both what was that story of Marcus drusus uh oh the oh oh yes yes yes so there's this there's this famous Roman politician he's uh powerful and important he has friends and enemies and this architect notices his house on Capitol line hill that is partly visible to passers by and he says hey you know for about five talents which is an extremely large amount of money it was basically saying for I don't know $500,000 or $5 million I can make your house totally private and he says private he's like I'll give you 10 talents make it entirely visible and he's not an exp exhibitionist what he's saying is that he doesn't want the walls or curtains that Mark 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 uh 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 manufactur ERS too because they allow them to not get away with things yeah that they may be tempted to do yes well 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 in habit setting challenges are so so useful and I I found this with uh the show and I very first started it almost everybody is able to be unrig and inconsistent with the things that they say yeah because like Mom isn't talking to girlfriend isn't talking to boss isn't talking to football team captain about your view on anything and you can kind of just sort of flip-flop between it and one of the things that I really loved I have a prescription that everyone should do a fake podcast with a friend once a week record for 30 minutes on their phone about an idea uh and the reason that I think it's useful is it causes you to be very rigorous with the things that you say it's good for communication it's good for other stuff but it's like hey for I actually need to make sure that what I said last week and what I said this week and what I'm going to say next week is in line that doesn't mean that your opinions can't change but that if they do change you have an anchor that tells you oh I 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 [ __ ] up when people do X and now and now later you find yourself in a position to do X which you didn't have the Temptation or the opportunity to do before and now you've gone on the record so to speak and it's a little more real and and I think that's important uh there's something about philosophy as something you talk about and do and write about to 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 aspiration or ideal that that is hard to live up to what was Harry Truman's perspective on honor and ethics Harry Truman was one of the most incredible presidents in American history because basically you have a regular guy just suddenly the most powerful person in the world and a guy who had struggled one of the last Presidents had never go to college um but he had kind of a very clear moral code which actually he literally derives from Marcus aelius the the the sort of for stoic virtues there's a copy of his medit of his there's 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 uh and then is finds himself there 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 it's this remarkable story because with Truman he literally comes up in one of the most corrupt political machines in American history uh the Kansas City M basically is controls the 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 they make him Senator because because like it's it's more convenient to have him far away than they're medling and then he becomes the senator and uh you know basically doesn't have the same political Ambitions as all the other Senators so he gets made vice president and and and uh then suddenly finds himself president it's this like remarkable trajectory where you had this fundamentally decent human being um one of uh there's this amazing quote uh 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 said I wasn't worried he's like that kid is all right from every direction from his [ __ ] 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 like it it doesn't but it does he it 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 UN popular 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 is that they age well we spoke about sort of transparency between you out to the public this sort of scrutiny the skepticism that that can be useful as being a controlling mechanism but much of the things that we do are just in private whether or not you do throw litter on the ground it's whether or not you say this thing stand up for whatever blah blah blah how do we know if we're doing the right thing the my favorite story in the book is this story about there's this poet Dan 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 all the New York all the beats are there you know Ginsburg is there kowak is there all the it's it's where you want to be the coolest moovie the coolest artist all in one place and uh you know the part's just getting going and she gets up to leave like 9:00 they go where are you going you know nobody leaves a party like this and she says um I've got to go relieve my babysitter she had a young kid and caroak looks at her and goes if you don't forget about that [ __ ] babysitter you are dead as an artist and you could imagine a person without a lot of confidence or without a moral compass this is where you are inducted into the pantheon of talented artists who are shitty people you know like here's a much more successful powerful person telling you that success is built on selfishness and partying and hanging out and you know the scene and she has the grit she looks at him and she goes if I don't go relieve the babysitter I'm dead as an arti arti and she walks out and what she would say later is that she knew that she had given someone her word that she would be back by a certain time right like that the baby said hey I'll be back by but she also knew she gave her kid her word when she had her right uh 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 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and write or hey I'm going to finish this by this date because I signed a contract with the public these are all the same commitments right and so I I just I love that story because you know again we think of justice as this High volutin fancy abstract notion and it can be you know all men are 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 the and 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 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 of justice 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 tried to go to sleep having done or not done this thing so there's this degree of instinct and and releasing and sort of just allowing for this to come up and then there's also the Temptation for that for some of your instincts to do the exact opposite thing so there's this I need to sort of engage the front brain and then turn it off well it's 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 is this psychologist Paul Bloom like even babies he has a wrote this book called just babies like justice babies like that even in infants they can do tests that like indicate fairness or unfairness or uh you know basic sort of the illustrations of moral principles that in a way that a baby a child would understand and that babies instinctively know these things that these these Notions of right and wrong fairness and unfairness are are there in 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 they get angry about it you 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 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 um is this who I want to be you know like you know am you think about something like the practice of nonviolence the incredible discipline required to not do the most human thing there's this famous story of Martin Luther King he's on stage obviously he's preached about nonviolence he's talked about non violence um he's giving he's giving this talk and a Neo-Nazi storms the stage and and just begins like beating the [ __ ] 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 like you're watching this man be beaten exact and and and instinctively his hands go up and then they said it they would never forget it the rest of their life the 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 the point is he's saying like uh 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 is the the Neo-Nazi is ultimately grabbed is is he goes don't hurt him don't hurt him and he goes backstage and he talks to and so this was the culmination of years of study and practice and this is something we don't give the suffrage enough credit for the Civil Rights protesters enough they trained themsel like they would train like the the Sittin protesters who would sit in the segregated lunch cters 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 top like the 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 a 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 Mach aelian um political genius behind it because they also know it's being F it's not Toothless watched and um that that the person who wins the bout of violence ultimately loses in the realm of public opinion a and probably leaves sickened 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 fairer fight as to it being this completely disgusting one-sided aberation 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 suit of the thing is what changes the world and it changed a thing that at the beginning of the civil rights movement or at the beginning of Gandhi's campaign not just again not just his campaigns in India but first his campaigns in South Africa if you had asked someone was changing this possible was this outcome that 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 of the book oh yeah you talk about the adoption of stoicism by young men who are 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 um 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 I am in this incredibly strange position of being associated with and credited as a kind of a representative of a thing I did not invent and that I 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 with it in that I feel um 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 um and so I have this little note card and the not 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 stoks 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 a strand of sort of nihilistic angry disenfranchised sort of group of mostly young men but I I guess it 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 could tap into or wave you want to surf um 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 um I'm very uh not interested in in becoming subservient to that like I I understand the frustration and the grievance I get I get it um and I I get that there are problems in our society but I but to me stoicism is a is a philosophy of self of taking responsibility for the self but then acting like [ __ ] adult like uh who who uh 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 an awful lot and it's one of the reasons that I was so happy moving to the US there is a a big tall poppy culture in the UK uh it is a a cynical crabs in a bucket style mentality uh population density is way higher weather's way [ __ ] was surrounded by water uh we've got this sort of weird Heritage which means that all of the aifi 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 out to America and it's like everybody here has got permanent firstline Cocaine Energy like everyone's so [ __ ] enthusiastic about what's going on sure that can be parodied and annoying at times um but for me I seem to flourish around that and I want to make enthusiasm great again I like I think to me enthusiasm is one thing I'm a big believer in earnestness instead earnestness has a kind of a sincerity and a and a uh it's a realism as well a realism and and a and a kindness to it and a an openness and an honesty to it that I love but you know the they call it sort of broism and there is a version of of talking about and writing about and reading about stoicism in which you only focus on what it does for you right and I think early in my life in my career so I relate to it I'm not you know I'm not judging anyone um uh it oh sto helps me wake up earlier it helps me do hard things it helps me manage my emotions it's all great stuff but it's not it's not the full the the the virtues are much more inclusive than that and they ask more of you than that in they offer but they also ask you know and and what they ask is that you care about other people they after you've mastered yourself with this philosophy how can you use that Mastery to help other people yeah the in in the ancient world the epicurian retreated to the Garden not for pleasure but for their own selfimprovement and development because the world is messy because people are shitty uh because things are broken and stoicism said that's all well and good the the self-improvement self-mastery stuff but if you abdicate your responsibility who steps in in your place usually a worse person people yeah and and and 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 is a philosophy that gets involved that gets engaged that tries to make a positive difference again not always by becoming a senator or something but by how you choose to run your business how you choose to run your life how you choose to show up and do things for your family for your community for your neighbor who's struggling um to me that's the stoicism that I'm interested in not the sort of like manipulated you know uh uh toxic stoiser your like sort of Andrew like the idea that Andrew Chate would be a a a hero to someone is so laughably uh Preposterous to me when you actually see who that person is and what they do um to say nothing of the sort of marketing techniques of it like I 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 uh this massive amount of self-reliance this sort of odd uh self-righteous sense of nobility about doing hard things and about leaning in but that is only one quite paraded element of a much broader philosophy the philosophy is not there to make you a better sociopath it stoicism is not a philosophy to help you suppress the pesky emotions that come up when you are running an international uh uh webcam ring of exploited women right like that it's it's not to it's it's not to help you not have to feel human emotions uh because you're exploiting or manipulating people right like and and that's obviously an extreme case but the decision of like you know hey uh 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 [ __ ] or um hey I know I think we both see this a lot where it's like this person is obviously unwell but they make good copy so I'm going to bring so so just the de these decisions about these are hard decisions these are hard choices um these are it's not that there's no right or wrong but what I'm saying is that they're complicated stoicism is not a cuts through the gordian KN don't have to think about you never have to worry just optimize for whatever yeah and and by the way all the stuff in stoicism says don't care about what other people think ignore the critics whatever it's not to Shield you from the uh the the criticism that you're getting for doing awful things right like that's not so there there's this way you can pick and choose choose from stoicism to enable you to do things that are not good that are not right and so that I I just I I I talked a lot I 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've tried to do a lot of work on myself about understanding what those motivations were understanding what those uh the impact was trying to atone for those things but try trying to set your 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 uh this boy and his lover you know in the marketplace and and he see they see him and he sees them and they're they're they they they blush very heavily and he goes um you should probably not spend time with people whose face changes color when you're or 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 this book called the theory of moral sentiments before he wrote uh a Wealth of Nations and it's based largely on stoicism and he said operate as if you had an impartial spectator on your shoulders at all times and to make the decisions and go hey what would I what would I do here if I had if someone was watching uh is is a is a check against the sort of the expedient or the self-interested impulse that we all have hell yeah Ryan holiday ladies and gentlemen Ryan it's it's really fun I 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 straining the sort of X [ __ ] Bo that I used to be uh where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing uh daily sto.com daily St on pretty much all platforms and then uh if you're a parent you want to apply some of this wisdom stuff to uh to your family life uh 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 will get you going hell yeah Ryan I appreciate you thanks man thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Ryan you will love my fulllength 3our Long podcast with Alex hosi which you can get right here go on