Ryan Holiday on Why It’s More Critical Than Ever to Be an Independent Thinker

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with somebody who i am so obsessed with i know i say this every time uh but hopefully in my consistency people will see just how true that is ryan holiday welcome to the show man thanks so much it's uh it's always awesome to talk i feel like this is the only time that we end up talking yeah it's kind of sad like especially now in this world where everybody's getting isolated um i am deeply distressed that we're not actually sharing space while we record this as this has always been a a great excuse this is i think the third time fourth time like you've been like yeah i don't remember so it is um it's always been a great excuse for us to to come together and actually be in a space so very sad that this one is virtual but super excited to get into some of the cool things that you've been working on with your new book lives of the stoics and i want to immediately put it into context of what's going on right now so i've been i've been shaken by what i'll say i'll round to the sort of culture wars which i never ever thought that i would think about or spend any time i'm like there are people smarter than i that that should be engaged and then i started to feel like a coward because part of why i was remaining silent as i saw this sort of what i will call a madness reaching a crescendo was i was doing it for business reasons i thought i'll just keep my head down and like you know keep doing my thing and i thought [ __ ] if i come out and start telling people sort of where i'm at what i'm thinking through it could be bad for business and so that propelled me to start talking about it because i didn't like the way that it made me feel like a coward and as i was reading lives of the stoics it seemed to have immediate implications how do you think the stoics would interpret this or even you having sort of become a stoic if i may uh interpret all this i i'm really glad you said that because it's it's something i struggle with too like on the one hand as someone who makes work you're trying to make work for as many people as possible not not just like for financial reasons but the whole point of having something to say is that you want people to hear it and then so there's this kind of tension between well if i talk about these safe things i'll reach as many people as possible and then over here there's like this unpleasant issue and then over here there's perhaps this you know politically divisive issue and if i touch either one i'm going to either turn people off or i'm gonna get a bunch of nasty emails about it and so there's this sort of dilemma i think we fantasize that it would be wonderful to kind of be above it all like oh i'm just this kind of personality i'm just kind of uh you know i just focus on this like for me i'd be like oh i i just talk about ancient philosophy therefore like it's not relevant to what's happening right now and that i think what i've taken from the stoics like i think my early writing about the stokes i was i was primarily looking at at these things the way you do which is like how does it make you better how does it make you more resilient how does it make you smarter better stronger faster and i think the more you study the the true greats you realize that they weren't just trying to get six-pack abs or to make a few million dollars like the whole point was to have as much imp to go to the point of your show to have as much impact as possible and and by impact they they weren't just thinking about sort of external you know superficial success but like really making a difference in the world and so as i've as i've gone deeper and deeper into stoicism you realize like oh these people were deeply politically and culturally engaged and i got an email from someone yesterday they were like how dare you talk about politics like and they said you know what would seneca what would marcus aurelius think about what you were saying and and look i i i hadn't even said anything sort of super political but i said you know i i got a little upset and i responded i was like what would seneca the senator cato the senator marcus aurelius the emperor you know uh rutilius rufus the the the governor uh uh junius rusticus the mayor you know diogenes and and and um antipater the diplomats like what would they think about me making a political statement i mean they would they would be totally fine with it and i think this is the other part that we're losing culturally even if they disagreed with my political statement they wouldn't get butt hurt about it because they understand that people have differing opinions and it's in the discussion about these things that that progress is made so i'm i'm struggling with that myself and i think where i've gotten with it is like i'm gonna say what i think and feel and if people don't like it that's not my problem you know what i mean i i'm i'm not gonna you know i i the the response that i got the other night was from someone who responds i send out this this email every month where i recommend books and they said why is your opinion in this and i said this entire email is my opinion that is literally what it is based on i'm not gonna keep my opinion out of it because you are too sensitive to hear that opinion yeah that that is a question i find very bizarre so if you were a journalist and your job was to sort of present facts to let people know what was going on i could understand although journalism obviously um has morphed into something different and and i won't even make a judgment on whether it's good or bad it just seems to have become very different than maybe where it was 20 or 30 years ago and the like doing a show like this what the value that i get out of watching shows like this is that people are helping me think through a problem and if they aren't presenting how they're processing it then it becomes harder for me to make sense of my own world and so you know the the weinstein brothers yes the weinstein brothers um will talk a lot about the sense-making apparatus and you know podcasts have largely become a part of that and it's like look i'm i'm going to walk you through how i'm thinking through it not every like there are people way smarter than me um and by all means if you resonate with where they're at and how they're going through it then seek them out my thing is for a certain type of person that thinks in a certain way i might by um showing how i process something might be able to add some benefit and also there's this quote i heard and i forget who said it but i i speak not so that i can be understood but so that i can understand and a lot of the dialogue is just me trying to figure out what the [ __ ] do i actually think like this [ __ ] is crazy but in in reading your um most recent book one of the notes that i took was that you're um reading on stoicism which i resonate with very very much and it's what you just went through but um said maybe slightly different is that stoicism is essentially a philosophy of action and not a philosophy of talk and to me it's like when when i get on that vein like i want to jump grab things bite them scream yell so that people understand like to me it's that utility utility is what matters and getting people thinking about the world in a way solely to inform how you act like the only thing i care about is your behaviors the things you actually do and so when i think about um people sort of pontificating in a realm of above the realities of the world um theoretical notions it's not very interesting like i want to know what does this look like down in the mud well so two things pop up to me so one you know in the ancient world and this this is something i talked a little bit in the book that the sort of the two rival schools were the epicureans and the stoics and in truth the epic you know despite what the word stoic means and epicurean means this that's not what the philosophies were about in fact the philosophies were very very similar but the the sort of core methodology of the epicureans was they sort of they retreated to what was known as the garden that was this sort of beautiful compound that epicurus had and they kind of focused on their their own internal self-development they they went it's like they left almost like a monk going into a monastery they went there they looked inward they improved themselves and they said the world is broken the world is dysfunctional people suck i'm not gonna get involved in that and the stoics said we agree with all that but we feel obligated to contribute to play a role to make a difference and so like that seneca sort of surmising the difference between the school says you know epicurus says in you know if you can and like he basically says unless it's an emergency don't get involved in politics and uh he's saying zeno says uh unless there's an emergency exemption you have to be involved in politics and so i don't think that just means like you know you should be watching fox news or msnbc and following these meaningless squabbles over these tiny policy issues but the idea that that democracy is this thing that just happens and you just live in it is ridiculous like it's a it's a thing that requires participation from everyone not just voting but but the decision to say like hey you know like citizens are complicit in what their governments do because the government's power is derived from the people's consent and so if you you know if if you see this happening outside your door you see this happening on social media and you decide well i'm not going to get involved that that's not me uh i think you're you're falling down on the job you're not doing your duty and i think the other thing i struggle with and i'd be curious your thoughts i'm i'm on sort of like a text thread with some authors i know and one of them was saying you know like hey you know what and i won't say what party he was talking about but he said hey you know what causes are you donating to this year uh as part of the election and and i sort of replied and these are all good guys i'm not like throwing them under the bus or anything but i said like guys like the last election was not actually decided by money actually the candidate that won raised less money than the candidate that lost so um but what did happen is a lot of people had opinions that they didn't talk about because they thought either the result was a foregone conclusion or they thought it wasn't their place or they didn't want to be attacked by trolls or whatever it was i was like all of you guys have enormous platforms and yet i've seen you say nothing about any of these issues like the place for people who are thought leaders or contributors or sense makers as you said is to help people walk through that process and and that's been an interesting thing i've experienced it's like you know people follow me because i'm good at breaking down history because i understand life and people and and all this stuff and then the second i say anything about you know somebody's character who holds an elected office suddenly i don't know what the [ __ ] i'm talking about it's like literally this is what i do this is like i am a world class i'm not saying you should just absorb my opinions because they're my opinions but like i'm pretty good at sizing these things up and seeing where they go and suddenly because it now challenges the identity that you picked up from your parents and their political party you know i'm a i'm a socialist or something it's ridiculous that that's the one of the things i think is most important to look at and when i think about identity politics what freaks me out is a how enticing it is to be on a team because once you're on a team as long as you're spouting the party line your team is always going to have your back the problem is when when you do that it's the same fear that i have around just dogma in general that you're no longer open to new information and this is all predicated on a belief i have that your current belief set your current skill set has already taken you as far as it's going to take you and that to advance you must advance you must actually improve you must learn something new have a breakthrough gain a new skill something that's going to allow you to go farther than where you already are and so if you allow this stuff to to crystallize into we think this way they think this way and that's the very thing that puts us in a camp so if i unless i want to lose my belonging which of course we all have this very intense desire to belong unless i want to lose my belonging i just have to take the good with the bad right and that's where i get scared is like now now we're gonna pathologize now we're gonna we're gonna really break and once you're no longer listening once you're no longer trying to go oh where am i wrong i know i'm wrong somewhere so where am i wrong and when you have both cam saying where am i wrong and trying to find a better more utilitarian something this useful approach to life then this it starts to get really weird when they don't have that so as you look at what's going on now how do you think about that like is there do you think it's a problem that people are adopting identity politics for the reasons i just laid out um yeah and if so like what's the way out yeah i think i think uh you know paul graham talks about the more identities you have the more stupid you are you know like if you say like i am blank you've now handed over a set of beliefs to this like institution or party or group of people instead of asking yourself what you think about each thing right and you know the people that i admire have you know a bunch of independent beliefs about different things and you know maybe they're liberal on some issues and conservatives on other issues and sometimes they vote for this party and sometimes they vote for that party like and the weird thing about where we are right now politically is that like i think so much of the issues we're having are not even political right like um you know i'm gonna say that the the dangerous name uh it's probably gonna piss people off i'm not opposed to donald trump because he's a republican i'm opposed to donald trump because he's a [ __ ] [ __ ] and a bad person do you know what i mean like like and i i think that can be said zooming way out if if he was a character in a shakespeare play he would be the villain you know if he was like i was i was a i live on a dirt road in texas just as an example and we can get off politics anytime you want so cut me off if you think this is not where you want to go but i live on a dirt road and all the neighbors have to chip in and work on this dirt road right and now i've been i've been fortunate i've advised people in washington i've been to washington i've talked to business people that know donald trump everything i know about donald trump says like and i got this great neighbor who does most of the work on the road and i watched him put up this big donald trump flag the other day i was like dude you tirelessly work on this road it's not your responsibility no one pays you to do it you're being a good neighbor a good person you are you you are solving a collective action problem donald trump is the kind of person that doesn't pay his bills that stiffs contractors that that always asks what's in it for me so on and so forth if he lived on this road he would be the one doing the most damage to the road and helping out everyone else the least amount right and by the way probably complaining about it the most and so my point is it's not a political issue it's an issue fundamentally of character and and i think you can look at all these other these other things whether it's looting in the streets or whether it's police brutality or whether it's you know income inequality these are not really political issues these are do you feel obligated to help other human beings right does it hurt you inside when you see other people are hurting now there's lots of different ways to solve that but the point is i think where we're really struggling not just in america but in the world is agreeing that other people matter and that we should care about those people like the mask thing to me is such a great example of this like p or let's let's even do that a college kids partying on campus right now uh it's fun what that fundamentally at the root of that is an inability to understand how your actions affect other people and i think we're really struggling with that as a society and and and the human being the human species have always struggled with this but what philosophy is therefore what the four virtues of stoicism for example are therefore is to help walk you through why you can't give in to those impulses and why you have to create a framework that lays out your sort of duties and obligations and ethics as a human being otherwise the whole thing falls apart you know and i think we're looking at a system right now that's falling apart because people fundamentally don't understand how you know their actions impact other people and that's that's where we are you know what i mean i do it's interesting as you were talking um to the thing that as i've gone into this and really looked at how the [ __ ] did we end up here like i had no sense and this is just like when lisa got sick with a microbiome issue i didn't even know what the microbiome was and then one day the microbiome changed her life for sure and so as i look at this and i start thinking about you know um like what's going on and what exactly happened and i start doing my own research and looking into um you know what what is this sort of frame of reference from which people are coming at this um i began to realize that we've hit some sort of threshold event and just like with lisa's microbiome where it was like all of a sudden there was this radical change in her life and then by proxy my own life and i realized wait a second the microbiome exists and she had been having problem problem problem problem problem but none of it spilled over into it actually being something she could notice and then all of a sudden it hits a tipping point a threshold moment and boom it explodes everywhere and that that's what has happened to me so now i'm having that same moment of where i'm going what what is the corollary of the microbiome in this moment what is it about the way that people are thinking because what i see is okay you've got identity politics getting on a team okay that seems like it's going to lead to competing versus cooperating that seems like an inherent problem and then looking at what the actual teams are so one we've lost this idea of that the magic is in the friction between the two sides and when people hear me talk about this one of the complaints i get is that you know i'm saying that humans fall into a binary camp i'm not saying that i think human so let me define where the friction is the friction is between people who their primary virtue is what you just laid out which is compassion worrying about other people then on the other side this is this is just from an evolutionary standpoint then on the other side you have people that say don't take advantage of me okay so you've got these two camps and when you look at it from an evolutionary through an evolutionary lens you realize you need both you don't want to leave the members of your tribe dying on the [ __ ] streets and at the same time that if you just give give make sure everybody's safe you get the person who's parasitic and then just like game theory tells you that the parasitic nature will bloom until there's a punishment against it and so equilibrium i think what you're talking about is equilibrium and and and and so of the the four stoic virtues are courage uh justice wisdom but the key virtue in the ancient world is moderation right and aristotle talks about this moderation is one of the four virtues yeah moderation self-discipline it's sort of a temperance as the other as the other rendering but aristotle says says that all virtues are a midpoint between two vices right and i think that's an important way to think about the friction you're talking about so it's like you know you have if you have fear on one hand or cowardice and then you have recklessness in the middle is courage right in the you know uh it's good to be generous but if you're uh sorry it's not good to be greedy but if you're overly generous you'll give everything away so actually generosity is somewhere sort of right in the middle right and i think one of the things i think we're losing and i'm actually encouraged again i don't agree with a lot of his politics but i think it says something about where we are politically that joe biden is painted as a radical leftist by the right and then by the left he's despised for being a moderate right like moderation is a good thing right like it's good he he's not radical on either side and that's actually what you need especially in the american system and and moderates i mean the the moderates of a mitt romney is just as important as the moderation of a joe biden you need uh someone who understands that the entire american system is predicated on the fact that almost never will one side get a majority or let alone a super majority that you need to pass legislation and so what is required is coalitions and compromises right and so the problem is when one side starts to be very immoderate the other side has to be more immoderate too because they don't want to comprom that you know what i mean it's so it's getting further and further and further and then what the middle suddenly looks more and more radical right and i think we have this to me moderation is a key virtue of life you don't need to be you know you don't need to have the most out of everyone you just need to have enough for you right and and so i think we're we're losing just that political virtue of moderation which is like i'm pretty sure i know what the right solution is but i'm not going to be so conceited or egotistical to think that i know everything and that i need to dominate the other side like we're we're entering a political system where one side thinks they need to own the other side and you gotta dunk on these [ __ ] man exactly dunking is the worst political trend you can imagine it's like i think you know even even like how we've come to see the supreme court the supreme court is supposed to be an impartial body of of legal experts who you know consult the constitution and help us solve our most vexing legal questions the idea isn't you win enough elections you stack the judiciary then you ram legislation through and then because you've bought the referees the other side is screwed when a case becomes comes before the supreme court you know like like so even you see this now besides our justices and it's like no the justices belong to everyone and so you know it's just a it's a weird system where we've lost that moderating impulse of like well i'm gonna take the best of this one and the best of this one i'm gonna come together with the solution that kind of pleases everyone and then we're going to make progress from there yeah so bringing it to something you articulated incredibly well in lives of the stoics you talk about this notion of preferred indifference yeah and i that to me was very compelling and that they got into this argument of and i i love this quote and i think this quote is [ __ ] profound which is nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it makes it so and and forgive me i forget some of the the guys names but there was one guy who was like no no nothing is good or bad truly like don't even waste time thinking about it like and your life will be happier for it whether you are sick whether you're healthy you're just indifferent to it all and it becomes a sort of breaking point and you you have this huge falling out in the stoic camp over like this idea of look there are some things we just [ __ ] prefer like being healthy sure there are moments where being healthy could get you sent off to war and so it would have been better to be sick in that moment because then you don't end up dying in war yes but jesus like on balance you're we all prefer to be healthy and that that notion of like can we just [ __ ] decide what we actually want because my thing is this i'm not left or right i am goal oriented so what the [ __ ] is our goal like the moment we agree on what our goal is now everybody's idea is just a test i'm running an experiment and does this left experiment work does it right experiment did it [ __ ] move us closer yes or no and if it doesn't i don't give a [ __ ] whose team it was whose idea it was i have a goal which i can [ __ ] articulate and we're now in a place where i feel like we can't even not only can we not agree on the goal nobody's even attempting to articulate the goal i think i think that's right and that that concept of preferred indifference to me encapsulates a really great problem in philosophy and in politics which is that we get so convinced with like extrapolating things out to their their natural logic that we end up in fantasyland that's not good for anyone right so yeah one of the early stokes was like there is no good or bad it's all in our heads uh or or that only good is good and only bad is bad and there's no gray area and and you end up kind of in this almost like religious dogmatic point of view and that and and seneca sort of cuts through this the the this knot and he just goes like look guys it's probably better to be tall than short most of the time it's probably better to be rich than poor most of the time and he's saying that that's not he's he's saying i'm not saying if you're poor your life sucks and you can't find happiness um or that you can't do anything about it he's just saying that generally this is what we'll prefer and and he's saying a stoic is going to try to make the most good out of whatever it's born you know like he's saying like look like a stoic would rather have both eyes but if they lose one of their eyes in battle they're not going to be like life is meaningless like i should you know what's the use of continuing and so so this idea of preferred indifference to me is great it's like look i i'm glad that i've been successful um but i'm i'm also and i'm gonna enjoy the fruits of that while i can but i'm also not going to become so dependent on it that um that uh that the thought of losing it racks me with anxiety or makes me do unethical things in order to maintain it so the stoics are trying to get to a place of sort of independence and i think that's really important but independence from what independence from from externals right so that like the happiness and when he's saying preferred indifference i think he's meaning like that that hey if it if it if you wake up today and it's raining here's your plan for a rainy day and if you wake up and it's sunny and beautiful here's a plan for a sunny day but you don't wake up and the weather determines the quality of your day you know and and i think that that's a thing a lot of people struggle with and and i think politically look obviously if you're if you lean uh right or left you hope that your party is in power but like you should also get to a place where you're like here's what the line is right and so that i would much rather have someone i disagree with like i think about this in business like look would you rather the ceo of the company you work for generally agree with your vision for the company and support exactly the direction that you want to go yes you also though you need to have someone who's ethical who's competent who's reliable you know who who's who's you know um does all the things you need in a leader that are not really political or directional in any way you know what i mean like i'm gonna jump in here and say that the i think this is the first step on a slippery slope to where we're at now what i would say is going back to everything should be an echo of your goal so i literally lived what you're talking about in business where i had ideas they ended up being bad ideas it was very emotionally gratifying to have my ideas be the one that the ceo took and moved with and then we hit a day where i knew i was arguing for an idea that was bad but for ego reasons i needed to be right i just needed that the the salve of like okay finally i'm not stupid like i've got something working for me and even if it's just being able to win the argument that alone made me feel smart but there was a voice in my screaming in the middle of my convincing arguments this will move you away from a successful company and so i have this moment of crisis around what the [ __ ] is my actual goal what do i want right just be honest don't [ __ ] [ __ ] this is a private moment you and yourself just be honest about what you actually want so you can move through the world in a way that actually moves you towards your goals and i realized i had these two competing goals i wanted to feel smart meaning even if i drive the company into the ground and then i wanted to be successful and they they were actually coming into competition and so i had to figure out like a way to tease those out so that's why i don't think people need to they need to be very tense if they're saying to themselves i would generally like the country or the company to be run with the people that see the world my way you should want the people running the country that have the same goal and that are accurate in their ability to assess what's moving you towards that goal now that i'll get behind all day left right center up down you know whatever the qualifications of the ceo i don't give a [ __ ] and this is why like in my own company i'm always telling people i will not i'm not capable i don't have enough time and i'm not intelligent enough to think of all the right ideas to move this company forward so i promise you one thing i'm a slave to what moves us towards our goal so here's our goal it's both exciting and honorable to get to your point about virtues and all that so this is something that uplifts not only myself and you guys but humanity in general okay so it's exciting and it's honorable now i'm gonna be beholden to that so whoever's got the right idea if you think i'm doing something stupid i want you to say the words i think this is stupid don't try to be nice don't try to be kind just [ __ ] tell me the truth because now we can battle the ideas and if we can think through them and not have to actually test it great if we can't then and it seems plausible then we'll run that test now that may oh god i really hope like that people hear the distinction between those because i'm not trying to split hairs that to me is like is is is the first step in a direction either leaning into the i have my world view my world view is right and therefore i want people to crystallize around my world view and i'm gonna vote for people that that are there versus what's your goal and who's going to help actually get you towards that goal now if you have a pathologized goal that is [ __ ] sinister or or ignorant and will actually lead to our downfall and you just can't see it that's a whole nother can of worms well so so the stoics had this expression character is fate and and so my point is i'm saying obviously you want someone to be aligned with your goals but i would also be okay being led by or working for someone who maybe we actually do have different goals is provided i get to do my sort of basic thing but what i'm never going to do or never want to be in a position and i've been in this position before where you're working for someone who actually maybe you do share a goal but but fundamentally they're uh they're flawed as far as character goes or ethics go or they treat people poorly or they have some vice or addiction or or flaw that it doesn't matter how talented you are it doesn't matter how good the goal is or even how good the plan to get to the goal is eventually that person will destroy themselves and you and the organization and so you know i think we see this in business all the time and business is always less loaded you'll have the right company the right vision everything but they still fail why do they fail it's because some that there was something culturally flawed in the organization that's usually stemming from the leader so i think what and this is something that stoics talk about over and over and over again that like look at they're like the reason that that a leader needs to study philosophy is that philosophy is about the development of character and that no amount of competence can make up for a deficiency in character and whether you're looking at you know companies going into the financial crisis or you're looking at enron or you're looking even at uber where uber was this great company but they'd sort of created a win at all costs culture that eventually meant that they were sleeping on a sexual harassment issue and some legal issues and a whole bunch of things that were eventually a ticking time bomb that ended up pushing the founder out of the company and you know wework's probably another great example of this you you have to ultimately think about the the the pathology of the person in charge or if you are in charge the pathology that's motivating you or you know and this is why i wrote ego as the enemy it again it doesn't matter how brilliant you are how talented you are how right you are ego will eventually tear your team organization you know uh your your business apart because it's fundamentally a a bad form it's a corruptive corrosive fuel and i think you know even if the republicans or the democrats bring this back to politics are right if they're if they're pursuing a strategy because its primary purpose is to wrestle power from the other side or to dominate or to shove it down somebody's throats that's a that's a bad reason for doing a good thing and it will eventually come back to haunt them if they're doing it because it fundamentally helps the most people then you know again i'd rather i'd rather live under a regime that's passing laws or policies that i disagree with but i think are being done for good reasons than you know my fantasy country but that is you know a shield or a an excuse for some ominous you know bad actor okay so this is really [ __ ] interesting so um i am way into this idea that philosophy is about developing character i think the character is absolutely critical because to me what you're pointing out with um say uber you've got somebody who's playing a finite game versus an infinite game so in a finite game there actually is a finish line to cross and cool okay just ignore the sexual harassment [ __ ] whatever huh we finally got across the finish line and now we're good versus if you realize this is an infinite game this is something there is no finish line there is only like what are you trying to become what does that journey look like and all of us are you know lives will get cut short before the sort of finish line of you know the universe dies a death you know of there's no more energy left in the system and it all collapses down in itself um so that like when if you make the the right distinction of this is an infinite game my goal is to have character and by the way back to my obsession about utility to have character because in a group of humans that is the thing that you need to not wake up one day with a knife in your [ __ ] back and that when when you're not just thinking about yourself but you're thinking about other people i think it actually is critical that you also think about yourself you're trying to empower yourself become a total [ __ ] badass that's my language i get that but like you're trying to make the most of yourself but all the while not doing it at the expense of the group and if you do those things so you're building character through philosophy you are playing the infinite game but you also are taking a tremendous amount of personal responsibility and saying like the systems can't do this for me i must do it for myself going back to your idea of living in a democracy you don't just get a roll up and be like yo this democracy's rad glad i get to take advantage of it it's like you are part of the people by which the government is able to rule so getting getting in that headspace and then saying okay well if i've got somebody that is there so i'll point to mao's china and and i will say i'm i am at the edge of what i understand and so nobody nobody need think that they have to chastise me in order to get me to dig farther into this like this is a time stamp right of where i'm at in in discovering all this going back to the whole culture wars and all that to me was is the microbiome i'm just now beginning to learn it even exists and that i need to pay attention to it because it actually has things in my life but i i will say that on paper like what they were trying to do sounded pretty cool like i get how people go yeah yeah like this should be how we should approach things and yet the the cultural revolution of mouth china ended up killing ungodly number of millions of people right so he may have killed them with the best of intentions but like i still don't give them a pass i'm like of course it's one of those things that you can just say certainly now maybe he didn't have the historical knowledge to be able to say oh i get where this goes it's like you you may not want to extrapolate into candy land but you do want to extrapolate enough to be like where does this go even if i have good intentions does this end somewhere well no i mean look they as they say the road the road to hell is paid with good intentions and and when you look at a lot of those utopian experiments at the core of them is one a fundamental denial of what robert greene would call human nature right and a a violation of all the laws of human nature it's it's projecting uh an idea of the world rather than reflecting back what the world is and and and then there is also a stridency and a certainty that that like you know mao's china fails as as all totalitarian regimes eventually fail because um they cannot brook dissent or debate and they have to eradicate their enemies because you know they fundamentally don't have an answer for the enemies i i think to go back to this idea of character and it's i i'm really glad you compared it to an infinite game i wrote that down character is what you need for the infinite game of life and you know that if we look at like religion like christianity christianity is basically saying like look you need to have good you need to have good character you need to treat people well don't sin don't do this and that and they're and they're saying this basically they're like because jesus says right they're saying like if you don't you'll go to hell right and that and and that's a convincing argument right i get that um as someone uh who i think i i tend to to focus more on the philosophical thing so philosophy is sort of my guide what the stoics are saying is they're saying look character and being a good person and and doing all this you're not doing it because there's some reward at the end you're doing it or a punishment at the end they're saying if you if you live without character you will live in hell your life will become a form of hell and so i think that's something that we don't talk about enough and that's one of my the things i love about marcus cereal is you know here you have this guy with absolute power and so he sort of he suddenly becomes king and he kind of looks around and we have this idea absolute power corrupts absolutely he's like what what happened to all the people who sat in this chair before me why did they why did they become so evil and bad and how did that happen and and was it worth it you know was it worth it to be alexander the great or whomever and he basically sort of realizes like these guys weren't having a good time that it wasn't it's to be insatiable to have no ethical bounds for for your behavior to be entirely you know focused on the self to be obsessed and and validated only by winning you know to have no cause that you truly are committed to other than your own advancement he basically is saying like first off all these people died just like everyone else right and then he's saying actually it was a miserable lonely awful way to live and and so i think we need to we the the reward for virtue is the virtuous life right like and and the the reward for vice you know hurt the the they call this the sort of the choice of hercules the decision to take the easy road seems easy but in the end it's actually the worst miserable most hard and difficult road and the the road of virtue is more challenging and there's less immediate rewards but it's ultimately much more fulfilling and and and peaceful and happy and and and all of that so i think you know we character is not just this thing you're doing because uh somebody said you should do it it's it's something you're doing it's the best strategy yeah so i love that let's talk about being insatiable let's talk about zeno you open the book um lives of the stoics with zeno and it's a very interesting story and it sums up like the one person in the book maybe that i resonated the most with was zeno in that here you have this guy's very successful and then he loses everything and in a [ __ ] shipwreck like it's crazy like you realize this is some og [ __ ] they did not have insurance there was no way to like easily get back in the game and so this guy goes from like riding highs doing great and then poof it's all gone and now he's got a like one one of the most and i imagine it would have been even harder back then in the story you tell about him i think it was him that had to carry the lentil soup and to like embarrass him because that's what poor people ate and so that his [ __ ] teacher made him like walk this whole city after he's lost everything people are already basically making fun of him for being poor now and now he's got to walk with like the thing that just shows he's [ __ ] poor and he smashes the thing and he's got you know this poor person soup all over him and he's literally shaking at least as as you retell it and and i thought okay this is [ __ ] interesting he has this uh sort of epiphany of like okay i can't invest in this and i can invest in being a rich person and the way that other people look at me into your idea of independence and breaking free of what other people think so here's how i look at it now i have chosen to value greatness not saying other people need to do it i'm just saying it's something i have chosen to do which in our the last time we talked we differentiated between success and greatness and i think success is sort of personally defined like whatever makes you feel the way you want to feel that's success greatness is like your name echoes through the annals of history right just people are so blown away by what you accomplish it becomes like this thing to aim at so anyway i dig that i'm into it but that's my like moment pre-shipwreck but the good news is i'm constantly having shipwrecks so i'm striving towards this thing and i'm building up um you know whether it's a steam or accolade or whatever but it's inevitable that i i [ __ ] up and i do something wrong and now i bounce back and i have truly embarrassed myself and that's happened to me a thousand times i mean maybe that's an exaggeration but it happens so often so anyway i think of these like i probably think of them as as two petals or maybe two buckets that i can alternate between so i'm like i want to be insatiable i want to actually value myself on pursuing greatness like not at all costs because you're right i always say i will do anything within my code of ethics to achieve my success now that within my code of ethics thing is critically important i think you would translate that as character so there's this i want to be a certain kind of person chasing this [ __ ] but every time i fall i go ah it's all good i don't value myself for actually being that anyway i only value the pursuit well so here's what i would not push back on but here's here's a way to think about it to me greatness is a very elastic flexible idea and and you know uh zeno may have been great as a merchant and that may have been what he was called to be great at and he was great at it in the moment and then fortune intervenes and he loses everything and then he becomes greatness in another form so epictetus who's like you know all the stokes talk about adversity but but epictetus is a slave for 30 years and he's horribly abused and he's broken and like to be a slave in rome is like you know you're you're as expendable as expendable can be and you know he has this line he says the podium and a prison are the same place and what he means is that the podium like where the emperor stands or a senator stands and then a prison they're both opportunities for greatness right like so so marcus aurelius is great because he happens to find himself the emperor of rome and he's great because per his code of ethics the power doesn't change him he fights for the little guy you know he keeps roam together he heroically leads rome through the the antonine plague which is a 15-year pandemic so on and so forth but epictetus is born as low as you can get in the roman empire and his greatness is that this does not break him there's a scene where um epictetus master grabs his leg and is like basically torturing his slave just for just for the pure sadistic pleasure of it and he's twisting the leg and he's twisting the leg and epictetus just looks him in the eye and he says you're going to break my leg you're going to break my leg why are you doing this you're going to break my leg and then finally the leg snaps and he just looks him in the eye and he says i told you that was gonna happen like that is that is [ __ ] human greatness at a level that is actually to me more impressive than marcus aurelius leading uh you know the troops in battle it's great because it's purely self-contained and resolute and unbreakable and unbeatable and and so on and so forth so meaning i want you to go deeper on that meaning that he doesn't become emotional about it it's it's one he's he's complete master he's like that monk lighting himself on fire to to uh protest the vietnam war he's transcended the limitations of his human of his human form but i think more importantly what the only thing he's retained is his sheer defiance you know his his giant middle finger at the institution of slavery right like this experience he walks he walks with a limp for the rest of his life this could have made him bitter he could have committed suicide you know he could have uh you know become an addict you know he could have he could have done anything and instead he perseveres through and he says you know he's lameness or a limp he says is an impediment to the body but not to the spirit and and so the the point is it's it's it's epictetus is great on the level of nelson mandela being great in his prison cell now nelson mandela also after prison then becomes great as a leader you know as a leader of a nation but but the idea for the stokes is that you can be great anywhere in anything and that greatness and excellent like they would call this irritae excellence is worth striving for it's the only thing worth striving for just you want to get to a place where you don't conflate excellence solely with external accomplishments or fame or money which is what a lot of people do you know what like like i'll give you another a more modern example a few a few years ago they found that one of the actors on the cosby show had you know sort of bounced out of acting and he was working at trader joe's and somebody snapped a picture of him and they were sort of making fun of him and but to me like the greatness of being like well i can't be an actor anymore i gotta provide for my family i'm gonna [ __ ] work at trader joe's and i'm gonna do a good job of it is also greatness because it contains all those same virtues that we're talking about and so i think when we're talking about being indifferent what we're talking about is being indifferent to things that are not in our control like you could have you know you could have invented or let's say you're a mathematician you come up with some brilliant new theory that fundamentally changes mathematics um but you die in obscurity and it's not until after your death that that that your genius was discovered and appreciated that doesn't to the stoic that doesn't make you any more or less great the greatness was the act and the fact that society didn't understand is irrelevant i want to go back to epictetus i clearly do not know enough of his story um one i want to know i want to go a little bit further into the why it was great that his leg was broken and trust me i i agree with you i want to actually articulate it um and this notion of being able to transcend your emotions and to not give in to them not let them steer you and i know you get pushed back on that um is is that to you like the when you say the podium and the prison are the same what is the element of greatness that the stoics would say you can cultivate is it the four virtues is it so so uh james stockdale admiral stockdale is a fighter pilot in vietnam he and he's shot down over vietnam he's uh the highest ranking prisoner uh in american prisoner taken prison uh taken prisoner in in uh the vietnam war and he had studied epictetus in college that's he'd gone back for a degree at stanford and he was introduced uh by his professor to epictetus and he he had epictetus like in his bunk on the ship and and as he's parachuting down he's he says to himself i'm going to be in here for a long time he says i'm entering the world of epictetus and what he meant is that he's leaving the world yeah it's so it's it's an incredible story one of the great heroes of the 20th century um and and he he's parachuting down and he knows that he's you know far removed from his fighter jet he's far removed from the great powerful country that he's from he's far removed from his family he's far removed from all the things that he'd accumulated in his life up until this point but he's saying i'm going down here and there's going to be other soldiers and my greatness my duty is going to be surviving this ordeal and doing the right thing inside this ordeal and so he's actually uh first off a little interesting trivia i was talk i was speaking to his son not not long ago and his son was like actually my dad wasn't the highest ranking prisoner he was the the highest ranking prisoner who stepped forward and assumed a leadership role there were other prisoners that for whatever reason said i don't want to take that heat and he took it right and from from basically day one he institutes sort of a culture of defiance inside this prison like for instance they they they sent their their they're gonna put him on national television to show that the prisoners are being uh uh treated well inside this prison which is not the case right and so so they send him into this bathroom they say look take a shower here's a razor i want you to shave and then uh we're gonna put you on camera he walks into the bathroom and he grabs the razor and he just cuts a giant gash across his forehead so he can't be used for propaganda purposes um and they come in and they're like oh my god what have you done like you know and and and so they go to get some bandages and stuff and he realizes that as hard as he tried they're probably just going to be able to to bandage his cut and put him on television anyway so he grabs a stool and he beats his own face in right and and they come in and they say uh what are we gonna tell the commander and he says you can tell the commander that i'm not [ __ ] going downtown you know like and and so so this is this is how this is basically you know he's he's imprisoned he's shackled in irons he's beaten he's tortured at one point he realizes because he's become kind of famous you know because of his position there that that they that they can't afford to lose him right that like it would it would be bad for for the the north vietnamese if something were to happen to this pig but they're still torturing the prisons prisoners anyway so uh one day he's he's he's his hands are tied behind his back in this in this room it's the only room with a window in the prison and uh you can see down below they're torturing other american troops and so he hobbles over in the chair you know like you can imagine him doing this and he shatters the window and he grabs the shards of glass and he cuts his own wrists knowing that uh he's basically saying like if you don't stop this i'm gonna kill myself and you and you're gonna have a world of hurt so so what i'm trying to say is that they're all for different forms of greatness michael jordan has a form of greatness you know bill gates or warren buffett have a form of greatness elon musk has a form of greatness but but at there's also just the core resiliency and determination and unbreakable spirit of the of the human race that's also a form of greatness and the stoics wanted us to know that that we are descended from those people too and that you know like seneca is this great line he says if they can force you to do it you don't know how to die and his point was jesus his point was that the tyrant uh you know doesn't actually have any control over you right so so this but this is where the stoics are complicated so seneca says if you if they can force you to do something you don't want to do it's because you don't know how to die right now that is that is [ __ ] badass that's like a movie badass right and yet seneca ends up working for several years as nero's right-hand man one of the horrendous tyrants of rome's you know long history of horrendous tyrants and so again what the stoics present i think is a is an impossible ideal that that maybe people manage to briefly touch for a few minutes and ultimately seneca does end up dying he dies loosely implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate nero but the point is it still the greatness of seneca uh as a writer to me is actually less impressive than the other stoics who resisted nero more courageously and and and you know i would trade all of seneca's beautiful writings for just one or two of those anecdotes of james stockdale in that prison camp because you know that's that's greatness indeed versus greatness in in words is james stockdale still alive he's not he uh he died in i think 2005 or 2006. he won the medal of honor i've been lucky enough i've spoken at the stockdale center at the the naval academy but he is but so two things i i think you'll love so one he's one of the great heroes of the of the of the navy and of american history but uh you've if you remember why you've heard of james stockdale he's ross perot's running mate when ross perot runs for for president in 92 or whatever and dennis miller has this great line so so when when stockdale runs for vice president he's he does the debate and he doesn't do really well in the debate he's not a particularly photogenic guy he kind of makes some gaffes here or there and dennis miller talks about how sad it is to go to your point about politics um he's like look this guy was the first guy into vietnam the last guy out of vietnam he was courageous insensitive and brilliant and wise and all these things and he's like but he committed the one unpardonable sin of of our times which is that he was bad on television and so the the point is that i think that true stoic greatness doesn't translate as well so we don't hear about it as much but to me that's that's true human greatness jesus dude yes like that is i now need to like really lean into reading about him so i read long walks of freedom nelson mandela's book i've talked about it many many times and it was it's one of those moments where i can tell you right now this makes me sad um i'm not as hardcore as nelson mandela i'm definitely not as hardcore as james stockdale like that's i i aspire to be and i'm not saying i i forever accept that but i know if i were uh captured right now by somebody i don't think that i would be able to to smash my head into the glass slice my wrists just so that they'll leave other people alone i'd heard the story about beating himself with the chair before um but man when you realize it as sort of a pattern of behavior that this guy was just that [ __ ] hardcore like and that is a hardcore that i aspire to that to me really like when you tell me a story about him and then you tell me a story about somebody that has business success like i am infinitely more moved by and i i consider it much harder like if you said hey you've got two people as close to just sort of middle of the road as you're ever going to get you've got to make one into a great business leader and or you have to make one into you know somebody that can be that hardcore in a prison camp i give me the business guy i'll try to make somebody into a business person all day like that [ __ ] is so much easier than having just the internal fortitude to to suffer like that well and and in case people think i'm just some like you know crazy leftist which i'm not i mean i live on a ranch in texas so that should give you some some sense of it but like john mccain is in that same prison camp as as stockdale and and because he because we saw mccain as a modern-day politician we forgot that he was also the embodiment of human greatness in that camp like people don't understand so so john mccain's shot down also goes into the prison camp but his father was the theater commander for the navy in the vietnam war so imagine if you're a prisoner of war uh camp and you get the son of the guy who's leading the like imagine what you would do and so so first off you can imagine they they subject them to all sorts of torture and horrible things and then they then they decide a different track and they say um you're free to go home they tell john mccain he can leave and now the the armed forces have a very strict protocol about prisoner of war and it's it's uh uh first one in first one out so like uh there's no special treatment for rank or for fame or you know just because one guy has kids doesn't mean he gets to go home before the guy that's been there longest right and so they go to mccain and they say you can go home and and they're they're trying to let him go home to hammer in the point that uh that vietnam was a was a rich man's war but a poor man's fight they wanted to embarrass the the united states by saying like look they let this the the general's son go home because you know that's all they really care about and so so they give mccain a chance to go home and and he says no so so he stayed for seven years oh w camp where he was tortured where he permanently loses the use of his arm uh where where he undergoes all sorts of torture that gives him ptsd and you know uh that he very easily could have died from he doesn't see his family he did that fall in in a sense voluntarily because he would not exempt himself from the rules or take special treatment because that special treatment would come at the expense of someone else and so again when and as it happens john mccain wrote a book called characteristic the point is only someone of incredibly strong character could be able to go you're giving me a get out of jail free card literally and i'm not gonna do it because that's unfair to other people and so again to me that's what greatness is and it's i i get really inspired talking about it and then you as you you as you said you have to have the humility to go like wow i just i don't think i could do that i don't i don't think i'm there yet but to me that's the kind of greatness that we should be aspiring to just as much is if not more of i would love to sell a company for a hundred million dollars do you know what i mean like we we celebrate almost the easier superficial successes and then these other things you know we just we just don't even talk about oh man that is interesting why we don't talk about it so the preferred indifference thing is is why like the reason i tell people no matter how many billionaires commit suicide there is a reason that people will continue to pursue money because money has it actually lets you do something so it is a great facilitator it has tremendous value now it doesn't have the value that people think it has which is that it will make you feel differently about yourself because you've obtained it um you know and and part of the reason that rich kids end up so sort of emotionally um in a dark place is that you've been given something that you didn't have to work for and there are just innate psychological ramifications of that in fact one thing i want to talk about is like what is human nature and i would say the the doing hard things to achieve something that matters so self-worth to me is predicated on doing something you believe is worthy and if you don't do something you believe is worthy you will never have self-worth nobody can love you to self-worth you can never earn your way to self-worth financially you you can only earn your way to self-worth by doing something that you think is worthy which almost always is born out of doing some really hard [ __ ] and so that like that idea of this is what we should be aspiring towards i'm with you a thousand percent because it lines up more than any other kind of success it lines up with human nature with what you have an intrinsic program to value now the question is why don't we talk about it and i'm gonna guess part of the reason that we don't talk about it is it isn't sexy it's making you look at something that's hard and gnarly and i think like me i if i look at that i come up wanting i come up wishing i were that badass i come up having to confront that i'm not that badass yet and that is probably deeply uncomfortable do you think there's something else at play as to why we don't celebrate that yeah i i think i think the big reason is that it's it's sincere and it's it feels a little cheesy and a little lame to to be like i was just writing about this there's this great uh doris kearns goodwin who who uh biographized theodore roosevelt she says you know uh theodore roosevelt was the kind of kid that grew up reading books about you know the great men of history and decided he would be just like them and when she says that i detect a little bit of a sneer like a little bit of some condescension do you know what i mean like it's like it's like believing in fairy tales right and and so i think we've we're a society that's that's ironic you know we're a society that's sarcastic and cynical and we're not a society that like the ancient unlike the ancients that celebrates those heroes right like even now when we look at history and look i agree there are things in history that need to be pointed out inescapable facts and tragedies and and and inexcusable occurrences but we look at history primarily today to talk about how shitty everyone was that this person was a racist this person was a slave owner you know this person you know didn't take care of their workers and you know we we look through history almost exclusively to judge the past by the present and and to almost tell ourselves this narrative about how crappy we've been to each other for a long time and it didn't always used to be that way i mean people people recited the odyssey because odysseus is the hero right and they and they they told the the stories of the 300 spartans and and all they told themselves these stories because um that's just that that's how they passed on these lessons to the next generation and i mean i see all the superheroes behind you but it's like we now own like superheroes are the only characters art or entertainment that are heroic you know what i mean everyone else is is your don drapers or your you know everyone else is this sort of twisted dark bad brooding you know anti-hero we i think we've lost the ability to be like this is what greatness looks like this is what every man like just because the heroes were all male in the past doesn't mean that that men and women can't be can't aspire to be like churchill during the second world war just because churchill was also wrong about india about women's rights you know about all sorts of other things doesn't mean that he wasn't great in that moment you know the the vietnam war was a war that probably never should have been fought but that doesn't mean that stockdale and mccain weren't great in the instance that they in the moment that they found themselves in so to me a big part of it is we're just so damn cynical that we don't talk about heroes and we don't talk about greatness and then we wonder why people don't have it yeah man that that is i think a very um decisive very insightful breakdown of why we look away from that um that's what i try to do in my books but like what i what inspi what gets me excited is writing stories about these people i feel like i get to have a conversation with them and i get to live in their in that moment of greatness a little bit and i'm not saying i'm ever going to be in a situation like they are but it does help me you know if i'm deciding between this or that am i going to say something you know go to your point earlier am i going to keep my mouth shut for business reasons whatever it is these examples you know forged in much more severe circumstances help you go like i was i was writing about this this morning like there's this anne frank quote about hope and courage and i was just like if this little girl could be courageous living in an attic hiding out from the nazis who in a matter of months are going to break in and murder her that's what happens if she can have hope what [ __ ] excuse do i have to be jaded and cynical because you know i think uh i think the world is going to pieces do you know what i mean i think we draw these examples really do make a difference if you let them yeah cynicism is something i didn't realize was an actual school of thought and i want to cover that in a minute um don't let me forget all right but thank you but there is another idea when you were talking you talk about you know um one that we're trying to it's almost like this desire to erase history which i don't fully i can articulate to you the motives that people are using but i don't understand the emotional impulse that people have and i just haven't thought enough about it but seems very unwise you i've either heard you say or you quoted in the book i can no longer remember which this notion of i think it was seneca or one of the stoic philosophers says you know i will quote a sentence from a bad writer if he has something profound to say um and i think that that that is very wise like instead of looking for reasons to rule people out look for do they have some nugget of wisdom that you can glean that will actually help you with something but then you also said something about um you know most of the heroes are men have you read soldier soldier nitzin's book the gulag archipelago duty says something in there something tells me that um if you dive into that period of history in russia that what may come to the forefront is a certain thing that women have that i find really fascinating when she said that the people who ended up dying for their beliefs that that wouldn't just finally hit a point where they'd be like yes fine like i i denounced them and and they're full of [ __ ] he was like the only people that would just keep going and going and going saying no i will not i will not i will not until they're dead was women and there was this sense of like there there is a and look these are distributions so of course there are going to be guys that are willing to do that but like as you go to the extremes and you start looking at you know in these crazy scenarios it just like most of the violent offenders in prison are men does not mean that there aren't violent female offenders it just means you look at overlapping graphs overlapping graphs as you get to the extremes then you get sort of that tail so anyway that my gut is there's a a a thing that happens around like i won't relent i won't give up i won't something that women have and i see it in my wife so it's one of those things where i'm like my wife actually like i think i'm pretty [ __ ] hardcore but there is some band of thing where like my wife just leaves me in awe of like where she just isn't going to back down like it's it's pretty inspiring no it's it's super inspiring and so one of the things that i was really intent on in the book is that this i would not let the book be 100 men it's it's about ancient stoics so of course the vast majority of the characters are men that's that's that's not because men are superior that only men were allowed in many cases to do a lot of these things but cato who's one of the sort of towering stoics decides to teach his daughter philosophy which is you know a pretty transgressive thing at the turn of the of the of the millennium and and so she becomes just as stoic as he is and and so for people who are familiar with the story of the assassination of julius caesar you know you think brutus uh you know you think the senators you don't realize that actually uh brutus wife is porsha cato's daughter and that she was the steel backbone behind the whole thing so so brutus is kind of thinking about you know he's thinking he knows you know caesar's a tyrant he's destroyed the republic he's a dictator he knows he wants to do something and he's thinking about it and his wife just like my wife and i'm sure your wife she just senses that something is going on that he's not telling her and she realizes that he's probably has a secret that he's afraid if she knows uh not that she'll tell but that in rome uh if there was a conspiracy uh anyone who was suspected to be involved would be subjected to extreme torture to uh to confess and so she realizes that what he doubts is her ability to withstand torture which of course is absurd because anyone uh who has seen a woman go through childbirth understands that women are like 500 times stronger than men and can endure like like if men gave birth every man would get an epidural like two seconds after you walk into the hospital do you know what i mean like no man would ever give birth naturally uh it would it would not even be a question right um so so anyways she realizes that he doubts her and so what she does and she realizes like actually i don't know how i would stand up under torture so she stabs herself in the leg with a knife and then with a pen knife and then she says i'm going to see how long i can just take the pain and so she does this she hours and hours she just sits there and endures like a gaping leg wound and then when her husband comes home she caught she's like look at this you know i she's like if you think she's like is it not enough that i'm cato's daughter is it not enough that i'm your wife is it not enough that i have proven to you that i can withstand the worst pain imaginable that you would not tell me and and he does tell he not only does he tell her but in shakespeare's play about it you know he says something like now i have to live up to my wife's courage you know like he has to he realizes that you know she's stronger than he is and so yeah we have like we have this sense of like history being all these big you know strong men doing this this and this and in a way the more i think about it it's actually it's the women who are more stoic because not only did they endure most of the same adversity and difficulty and loss but uh but they didn't demand any credit or attention you know like you know what i mean like to me the most stoic thing of all is just to is to quietly endure you know pain and difficulty and not let anyone see you sweat you know and and so there i think there's this element where we've we've misunderstood the absence of women from a lot of the historical events like sure uh you know pioneers crossed you know the american west but the whole family it was a whole family affair you know what i mean and just because uh we've heard the names of this man or you know this this other one it doesn't mean that there wasn't someone else sitting in the wagon right next to him dude we're we're about to go into a really interesting time we're already in the thick of it so growing up with the notion of behind every great man is a great woman and that that was to be celebrated and that there wasn't a big push you know for women to step out front but now there is right now there's the i bought it myself and i control my own destiny and i am very curious to see what happens to men as that dynamic begins to break down because i will speak from my own experience that i would not be the man that i am today without lisa and i say that not and like somebody wants to say something nice about their wife i say it in that my wife was like yo [ __ ] you said you were going to do something with your life hop to it and not in a mean way and she always gets very defensive when i i categorize it like that um but she was obviously loving and warm and that was what drew me to her but she didn't [ __ ] around and so i'll give you i'll give you the lamest example ever there was a moment where i was eating less than i'd ever eaten in my life and i was getting fat and i was very frustrated because this was a low fat thing so i cut fat out and of course you replace it with sugar and so and that was like all the hype and the craze and that's what everybody said you should be doing and so i'm now going in the wrong direction i come from a morbidly obese family and so i'm like getting real paranoid that i'm you know headed in a bad direction and i'm like [ __ ] my genetics have just given up like this is my fate but i was really unhappy about it i discovered low carb and i'm like oh maybe this is the answer i just need to cut out carbs now for anybody that's gone from a low fat high sugar diet to a what i did was basically high protein low fat no sugar it is brutal you go through a period of headaches and like all this stuff and i went to my wife one day and i was angry about the fact that this was such a hard transition and i was like if i had a cookie i would just feel better and she was basically like it is the way it is so you're gonna keep whining about it are you gonna see this root you said you wanted to do it what do you want me to do right now you want me to be like boohoo and cry with you or are you going to recognize on the other side of this headache is the thing that you seek now my wife did that a thousand different times all these moments of weakness where she helped me become the person that i wanted to become that i professed i was attempting to become but it was she would kick me in the ass when what i needed was a kick in the ass and so she and i went through this period where she was finding her greatness through me by helping me become the person that i wanted to be she didn't have any interest in going out into the world to do that she thought she was going to be a mother and like she was good with that and she was going to pursue her art but she wasn't trying to you know sort of be out in the world and be an entrepreneur sure but then we flip and now 10 years into our marriage she decides she does want to become an entrepreneur she does want to step forward she does want to go on that journey um by herself and i think [ __ ] what if she had been running her own race when i was trying to become something and i didn't have somebody to that that i wanted to sleep with quite frankly that i had all this like you know i had every reason you can imagine to want her to find me powerful and attractive and sexy and so [ __ ] you better do the work to become someone worthy of her attraction and that was a huge thing for me and now if women aren't playing that role i'm not saying that they should have to like i told my wife i am here to help make sure you have whatever life you want i will give whatever up i need to to make sure that you can become the person you want to become but i think there are going to be consequences i think there will be consequences but in a sense like i think it just means it's it's more on the individual so like this is something i've never really understood by a lot of these like you get these sort of alt-righty figures who are like you know like uh you know now there's women in the workplace and and then they're there there's all these different races and it's not fair and it's like dude people actually say that [ __ ] yeah what what what i'm saying you get what you what i think you're seeing politically is a resentment like it's like when you're used to what they say is like uh when you're used to privilege equality feels like a punishment right it feels like you're losing something right and you don't real like you think like go go back 50 years if you're a white person in this country you have 15 to 30 less let's just say 15 to 50 percent less competition right it's like if women are kept out of certain industries or if black people are kept out of certain industries or if you know did different there's less competition like why is college harder to get into now it's because it's a global competition now people from china are trying to get into harvard too and their smart kids might be smarter than you right and and uh and and uh and so so what what we're existing in now is a world of a lot more competition right like where everyone has an equal shot suddenly the meritocracy is not so fun because if you don't have what it takes you don't have what it takes right and so when i see people you know you see some someone every once in a while express one of these kind of regressive beliefs and and what i see in those beliefs is fear as fear of not being able to cut it right like like uh you know those those protesters at chancellorsville or whatever who were like uh charlottesville who were like they will not replace us i'm not worried about getting [ __ ] replaced because i know i can cut it and if you tell me that hey this was okay 20 years ago and that was the rules everyone was playing by um and now the rules are this i'm gonna adjust you know what i mean like all the like you you hear these old guys who are like you used to be able to tell a woman this or you used to be able to make these kind of jokes at the office and now you can't it's like you you are the one that sounds like a little [ __ ] you know what i mean like you are the one that sounds like you cannot adjust to changing realities or changing like like i think i guess what i'm saying is what i'm not afraid of and i think what is at the core of a lot of uh people's fears is a fear of change and the reality is sure yeah society is changing that the the women used to not have a lot of options and now they have a lot of options and that changes things and that's going to require people i think to adjust and there there's going to be pros and cons i'm sure but i think if you really have what it takes you're gonna find a way to thrive in this environment just it's like it's like they change the rules in football uh do you quit or do you go oh okay this is what a pass interference looks like now and uh i'm not gonna do that when i'm defending a wide receiver like to me it's not that complicated but i think again what stoicism is is about look i don't control that so i accept it i come to terms with it and by the way in this case obviously very much agree with it but it's like i i don't control it i'm going to accept it i'm going to make the most of it because that's what our job in life is to do all right you want to you ready to take this somewhere dangerous all right let's do it once we're we just were somewhere pretty dangerous we walked up next to the third rail now we're gonna like grab a hold of it and lick it a little um so the everything that you just said i'm totally on board with and i think you're right it's fear of change it's people don't think that they can cut it um it's also they have the wrong value system in my opinion because they value themselves for being something for ranking in a certain order instead of sincerely pursuing something because look i don't if i were going to play basketball i would say my pursuit is to be the greatest of all time and i'm pretty sure that physically i just don't have what it's like you're you're only able to build on something right so my favorite quote uh you're not able to make a racehorse out of a pig but you can make a really fast pig so but if i'm trying to become a really fast pig i i think only that i'm going to become the greatest racehorse of all time and i know in that effort i will probably top out at a fast pick so you've got that idea and i think people should think more like that and not value themselves for whether or not they become the greatest and then also to further complicate issues if i felt that i was the best at something and somebody whispered in my ear you're only the best at this because you're not letting some people play all the emotional wind that i felt from being good would evaporate and so to me the goal of life is how you feel about yourself and you're by yourself so even if i'm in the number one position but everybody knows there's somebody better that i'm just not letting play i wouldn't feel good about that so what the [ __ ] this is the point all right so the real dangerous thing is as we look at um okay all these new people are coming into the space and we should be giving everybody equal opportunity i hear people saying basically out they don't use these words but this is definitely the sentiment which is you know there's calls for white men to give up their jobs so a woman or a person of color can come in and have that opportunity and that's where i'm like [ __ ] that like one thing i used to say in business was never ever ever ever say slow down so i can lead so i love it bring every [ __ ] into this game let's make sure everybody has equal opportunity meaning that you don't hobble them with a [ __ ] [ __ ] education like get these [ __ ] literally the thing i'm focused on is making sure no matter where you live that your zip code does not determine your success so i am somebody putting my money where my [ __ ] mouth is about making sure everybody steps to that starting line ready to [ __ ] rock nobody's been hobbled so but my thing is i love that [ __ ] i look around yeah i'm so [ __ ] excited you guys are all here we're gonna go [ __ ] hard for this cake but i'm gonna go hard too and if you can beat me [ __ ] yeah i'm never gonna throw a banana peel and try to slip you up and if i come in last i come in last like cool i will then flip my mind in a very stoked fashion to being like at least i get to live in a world with all these rad [ __ ] people so i'm totally cool with that but i'm gonna play [ __ ] hard and i would want everybody else to be in like a fun way like we're going for this right no no i i agree look uh chrysippus is one of the early stoics and and one of the the ones who we know the most about his athletic pursuits so he's a he's a distance runner but they he he ran in this uh insane distance race they would do it was a state i think the the distance was called the stadia and you know which is i don't know it was like 200 yards or 300 yards they would do like a five or six mile race of 300 yard wind sprints basically so they'd run to one in touch back like this so imagine running five miles of wind sprints it'd be an incredible endurance sport and you're doing it with other athletes right and so so um again what i love about the stokes is that they weren't these like guys in robes just kicking around ideas they they were runners and wrestlers and generals and and and politicians and so they knew about competition and knew about fighting and and he talked he's like look when you're in a race you want to do everything you desperately want to win and you're willing to do anything and everything to win and it's honorable to do that in so far as you never negatively impact someone else unfairly so he calls they call this the no shoving principle so you can say whatever you want to psych someone out you could engage in some philos you know some strategy where you're you're sandbagging it first and then you put on the gas or you know you could do whatever it takes to win but you can't push someone over right and i think um look the reality is we've had a system for a long time that whether we knew it or not whether you and i engaged in it or not was predicated on people being pushed over like i i've talked about this on another podcast it was like my my grandmother uh grew my yeah my grandmother and my father's side grew up in arkansas so you know she went to high school then she went to college uh great but and and i met her and you know my parents would talk about her she died when i was very young but it's like never did anyone say did ever did anyone in my family go you know grandma's high school was segregated black people were not allowed to go to the high school and they and if they'd applied to go to if they'd attempted to uh attend uh college with her they would have been murdered right like would you watch the the the the video of those first african-americans trying to go to college in the south in the 1960s well my grandmother went to college in the 40s so like never did this come up so i think one of the things we've not done a good job of wrapping our head around is just how real and how recent the shoving in the system was right so i agree i think it should be an even playing field everyone should compete uh and and you know the let the let the winner uh be the winner it's it's a little hard obviously to go hey i'm not shoving anyone uh it's not fair you know it's not fair for you to say i have an unfair advantage when your ancestors have been shoving every single person up until you know like 10 minutes ago and then you're like well it's a totally fair thing so i think we can i think it's perfectly and again let's talk about moderation i think it's perfectly reasonable to go like hey the system's been unfair for a long time we have to acknowledge that here are the steps we're taking to rectify or make amends for some of the abuses of the past and here's what we're gonna do to ensure an even and level playing field going forward may the best man woman race whatever win and and so i think i don't think those are mutually exclusive points but people try to simplify it and make make sure that it is do you know what i mean yeah i had a guy named vuci tempacueo on the show um south african black guy and grew up in apartheid and talking about like all right [ __ ] now what like now there is no apartheid and you ultimately stop looking to the system to like you know equal everything out so that everybody's equal he was like you now are able to enter this race become a badass like that is your only option and my thing is goal right you have this goal of you want everybody well i'll say i have a goal where i want everybody to have equal opportunity don't [ __ ] up their education no shoving all that [ __ ] but now i expect these [ __ ] to roll up and shine because i know they can and that's my thing like when i see people the road to hell is pay for good intentions they want to like help everybody mollycoddle all that and never make demands like if you're going to help somebody you give them the bowl of soup you [ __ ] break it you cover them in the soup and you make them march through town so that they get [ __ ] tough so they know like how to proceed and get better and do their thing and that because ultimately that is what a human must do is go inward find the internal fortitude build the skill set so they can go and [ __ ] dominate now it is always this is why you need that friction there's always the but some people are not going to thrive and what the [ __ ] do you do with that and i would say you want systems that take care of them and you don't want to leave people um dying in the streets but at the same time you don't want to try to get a quality of outcome which becomes tyrannical basically no i mean i think there's an expression i forget who said it but they sort of called it the soft bigotry of low expectations and i i think that's that's certainly real um at the same time uh when you look at the numbers and you go okay why is the uh why does the average black family have a lower you know net worth than an average white family well a lot these things are hereditary and they're built up over generations so you when you say hereditary what do you mean that makes me think what i'm saying is that you know my father uh started at a level higher up that like uh if you look at black people in the united states the vast majority of african americans would have started you know as equal citizens not even after the civil war but like legally could not vote until 1965 right so the idea that that that uh like um the to go to this point uh ruby bridges who was the in that famous painting and photograph the first uh uh black little girl to go to school and i forget what state she's like 65 right now do you know what i mean like like could not go to school a regular elementary school you know properly budgeted with good teachers working systems she's in her 60s right so this is all very very recent and so the point is obviously like what what advantages she inherited financially and just as far as like my parents went to college their parents went to college my i don't know if my great-grandparents went to college but the point is here's a great example my grandfather fought in world war ii and came home and got access to uh the gi bill to go to college and he got access to fha loans and all sorts of things that the same black veterans in the same war did not get so if you were to compare me his grandson to a random person of a different race in a different city with very similar uh you know arc one would have a greater financial and cultural advantage than the other right so my point is those things exist and you can't deny that they don't exist and you can't pretend that it's a perfectly even playing field so so i think you can you can uh stipulate all that and then say still the situation is the situation the stoics would say you don't control what's happened but you control what you're gonna do about it it wasn't fair that jackie robinson was up against all these other advantages uh disadvantages as a as a player i think jackie robinson was hit by like 60 pitches for instance in his major league career but he still chose to comport himself with self-control and dignity and most of all he [ __ ] shoved it in their faces by being one of the greatest baseball players of all time so i i think it it's possible to again hold two semi-contradictory ideas in your head at the same time which is that the system has been uh systematically unfair for generations and that's created real deficits and disadvantages and each of us wakes up today in the world and we're forced to figure out how to make the most of the situation and and i think it's important to also stipulate race and uh gender are not the only disadvantages that people get in life like you were saying you come from a family of uh of obese people that was a real obstacle that you not only had to struggle with but you know learned patterns and and behaviors from that you're we're all dealing with [ __ ] and i think at the core of it we have to decide are we going to be defined by it or are we going to transcend it and be made better for what we've what we've you know experienced yeah i like what you're saying there in that i was once asked by i was doing a talk at google and a black guy asked me hey tom do you think that things are and this is years ago do you think that things are harder for me because i'm african-american and i said almost certainly yes like even just just look at the math of the situation so you live in in a majority white country and the one of the imperatives of the human mind is to seek out um things to categorize as us and them one of the most obvious and apparent is just physical appearance and so you it's what i call the school of fish phenomena you always see fish with the same type of fish right and they swim in all these schools and and that's just that so inevitably you're going to have the sort of soft like oh it is immediately apparent just on like a glance i don't know you or anything about you and so i'll sort of automatically categorize you into you're not like me now it doesn't mean that the person automatically has hatred or anything like that but that just being in a country where you're not the majority is already going to be difficult sure so my question to him was and now what so you have a system that's working against you let's just say like i'm perfectly willing to say that either for the historical reasons that you very clearly laid out it's very clear that things are against you if um what you inherit from your family matters a lot to the success that you will have in your own life then you're clearly at a deficit because you don't have to go back very far like you said to run into one of your real near ancestors was going to have been completely hobbled now i'll i'll argue that t-shirt to t-shirt and three generations is something to consider in that most most families are not passing on financial legacy in the way that people think they do now i do think they pass on a mindset and the mindset to me becomes far more interesting than the amount of wealth my parents did not pass on on any wealth to me but they made sure that i got educated so that's big so to me like making sure people get educated is critically important but going back to this question he was asked and i said yes for sure there are things that are working against you but now what now what he can control is he gets to you know in the a very stoic response he gets to decide how he reacts to that he can't control the way the world is it's too multi-factorial but he can control how he responds and so to me like that that is a moment of excitement it's a moment of excitement to me that no matter how much kobe bryant said booze don't block dunks so i'll say racism doesn't block success right you can get so good look at booker t washington who is becoming i don't understand this i i really don't and maybe there's an argument that i'm just ignorant to but i think it was obama that said like don't put me in that booker t washington camp of like pick yourself up by your bootstraps but booker t washington was a [ __ ] slave and ended up building a school that still lives on today he that's oh [ __ ] amazing and so if it couldn't stop him like there there just is it the human ability to change and grow can reach a level where you are so good at something that people can't stop you even when they want to now i'm i'm talking in a world where you're not getting shot or lynched or like all that [ __ ] is real i'm not trying to diminish any of that i'm just looking at today we've gotten from a legislative standpoint i am unaware of any racist laws they may be there and again maybe this is ignorance but like it feels like from a legislative standpoint we've said okay we're we now have a a sort of basin in which to play that is colorblind possibly even now beginning to spill in the opposite direction you have been historically hobbled depending on how much that feeds into your abilities right now today but you still get to own how you come at the world and to me like that should be exciting like people should be like okay cool it may be harder for me but it is still possible for me to do red [ __ ] i i'm i'm fascinated by booker t washington i have his uh right here i have uh up from slavery right here it's one of my favorite books he's a hero of mine uh but the knock against booker t washington is and it's an interesting one so booker t washington this is this is uh early 1900's late 1800's early 1900's it's sort of post reconstruction he's basically saying look um the way he's basically saying like look the world is so racist and so [ __ ] up that the only the only way that he's basically saying look black people have to earn their respect and their rights right so that the knock if you look back on it you're sort of going well you were accepting a status quo that that perhaps legislatively should have never existed right he's basically saying like look he's like black people we don't need to worry about education uh although obviously the tuskegee institute but he's saying we need to we need to focus on like learning how to farm and learning how to build things because that's the only way we can prove our worth to society which i understand was a very pragmatic take the argument is just sort of like um well you should have never had to be in that position to begin with right and this is like the most stoked moment ever agreed and i won't even say like maybe it never should have been it never should have been it's [ __ ] grotesque it's one of the gnarliest things to look back on is like how gross humans can be with the like how long slavery lasted in all cultures ah it's but this is the tension of stoicism this is one of the knocks right so when does your individual acceptance of adversity difficulty uh [ __ ] up status quo become uh resigning your the society's collective agency over that problem so epictetus right a slave he accepts the slavery he he does basically in rome you could be you were a slave for 30 years and then you're freed so he does his 30-year bid and comes out but even in epictetus is writing he never questions the institution the institution of slavery none of the stoics really do ever say like they sort of go this is gross it shouldn't happen but they they never say slavery is wrong and if we all come together we can do something about it so so the knock on stoicism is that it's it's somehow resigned that the stoics because we focus like what you're talking about is the individual's response to a [ __ ] up situation how hey hey here's all these disadvantages uh and i by by the way i just read a book about someone you would love a guy named major taylor who is the greatest bicycle racer in american history he's a black guy in the late 1800s better than lance armstrong better than jackie robinson better than jack johnson an incredible athlete worthy of study we've sort of forgotten about him but but the point is at what point does just going this is the [ __ ] up rig game i'm gonna figure out how to how to participate in myself limit our ability to come together as a society to fix an injustice or a change right and so what i try to write a lot about is is understanding that that's not actually what stoicism is about there were stoics who were who were engaged in in revolutions in rome cato bands together a bunch of stoics and tries to resist julius caesar there's a there's a translator of epictetus who leads a black regiment in the in the in for the union cause in the civil war uh toussaint le ventura uh the the revolutionary in haiti who defies napoleon uh is is a is a is a black reader of epictetus but the american founders thomas jefferson and and george washington and benjamin franklin and john adams it was stoicism that inspired these guys to come together and say we can start a new nation we can change this and so i think it's important like this the tension is when does an individual resigning themselves to facts out of their control become complicit in the propagation of the status quo when if everyone got together and said collectively we have power and could change it so that's kind of that i think is an important tension it kind of brings us back to where we begin you can't just say hey this police brutality issue is [ __ ] up and it has all these different causes and no one individual can make a difference that's that's history proves us wrong an individual can create change but an individual has to has to try to make change and obviously has to bring other people on board with them so you know i think that that's an important thing that that i think in our this time of cynicism and pessimism that we don't we don't lose sight of all right so i have a direct idea um on that so the here's and this was going back to that guy that had asked me the question at the google talk it's exactly what i said to him is some people are called to fight the system and that's there and i use called specifically like there's something in them that compels them that that is the way in their life the things that light them up to give them more energy that make it worth it for them that they feel called in that way and i'm very grateful that they exist and for anybody that feels called to address the the system amazing um there is another side of that coin though and i want people to understand that i very much doubt if you sat down with booker t washington he's not going to be like not complicit to this i look at the problem the state of the world and i say given the things that light me on fire and what i'm capable of doing and how do i think that i can do this is i'm going to you've got people that are now legally free but they don't have a skill set that allows them to control their own lives to hold dominion over themselves and their family and by giving them those skills they can't be re-subjugated and so i could give you a fiery speech about how that is as important if not more important in fact if every single person suddenly became like our our man in the concentration camp how the [ __ ] would you ever enslave them is never going to happen they're never going to go backwards because there is nothing they won't endure when you come at them personally like [ __ ] it they they will just go all the way there's no point in and going back to the gulag archipelago as he said every time you turned a blind eye you didn't say something you didn't stand up for yourself you thought let me just keep my head down that was the problem it wasn't just the system of like this government came into control it said nobody said [ __ ] off you just snatched timmy out of his bed in the middle of the [ __ ] night with no explanation and then you snatch me but if then sally's like you [ __ ] took tom and timmy what the [ __ ] is going on and then when sally gets snatched somebody else speaks up suddenly you you realize oh [ __ ] like we actually can't do this so you've got people that are called to the to address the system i'm so grateful they exist and then you have people that are personal responsibility on that side they're like if you get good enough people cannot [ __ ] take advantage of you it's that simple and if you look at what jay-z has done literally like 20 years ago maybe more he realized i have to own the masters to my own music and so he went on a quest to get it he ends up getting the masters through his own music and it's no surprise that he's as freakishly successful as he is because he knows how to think within the system he doesn't go in and say oh i'm going to try to tear down the entire music system he's not posting tweets of the contract that he has he just [ __ ] says okay cool to win in the system i need to own the masters i'm going to go on the masters he gets the masters and to me it's like not only does it show other people what you can do but it puts him in this incredible position of personal power and my thing is just don't ever leave that chip on the table if you have an insight into the system don't leave that chip on the table [ __ ] voice it fight for whatever you feel called to do but don't leave personal responsibility on the table because there's so much power in it no i think it's both and look i i'm my as big a fan as i am of booker t washington i think frederick douglass is one of the sort of great badasses of all of history this is a guy who who uh beats the [ __ ] out of his slave master he escapes from slavery he becomes one of the great writers of his time but but ultimately dedicates himself to the eradication of slavery and so i think this is a really important stoic idea which is the purpose of philosophy the purpose of the work the purpose of success is not merely to free yourself right like that that's ultimately a very empty thing to just pile up as many trophies or or wins or or or whatever as possible um you know jackie robinson had this great it's actually on his tombstone he says a life is meaningless uh in so far as its impact on uh other lives right like the the meaning of life is the impact that your life has on other people's lives and so the stoics that idea of justice was about impact was about helping others the epictetus wasn't just using stoicism to free himself mentally and physically from slavery but then he becomes a writer and a teacher and he not only does he propagate the philosophy all over rome but marcus aurelius is introduced to uh stoicism through the writings of epictetus just by the way as as abraham lincoln's views on slavery are fundamentally changed through his interactions with frederick douglass so like you it's not just about freeing yourself it's about making an impact on the world and freeing other people and they're of course in our modern world many ways to do that whether it's with writings or videos or or it's you know creating a non-profit or maybe it's creating a tech company that you sell for billions of dollars and then you then you use your power influence and some other there's lots of ways to do it but i i think it's really important that that the the purpose of greatness is not for furthering your just your own your own self right i'm with you but let's let's look at jackie robinson which i think is a great example and i admittedly only know what was in the movie so it's entirely possible i just don't understand the realities of it but in the movie it's presented that hey what i need from you is not somebody that can go out and confront these guys and you know shout them down it's i need somebody that's not going to react that's just going to be so good at baseball that it becomes undeniable that you belong here and of course he does that and that opens the door and so his his contribution at least as i understand it was through personal greatness by showing people by not reacting by not being violent back or anything like that by having composure that he's able to break that sort of break the back of the system that would have argued they don't belong or whatever and just showed if you want the most exciting baseball played by the most incredible people then you you just have to open this up and that to me is is what i'm saying is there is a flip side of that the the coin of solve the problem that has become either passe or people are outright hostile towards it which is go become a badass like become a badass [ __ ] and i'm not sure if people will um get the chills the way that i get the chills with what i'm about to quote if they're gonna be like this is [ __ ] stupid um but going back to jay-z he said i can't help the poor if i'm one of them i got rich and gave back to me that's the win-win and i thought like i get that like that to me is powerful you're doing something that serves you which i think is important but that also serves other people in a larger context and few people you know that i know of in that industry have done a great job of reaching out to other people to help them up um so i don't know to me that's super powerful i think i think that's totally right and and i think you can't you can't help other people from a position of powerlessness um at the same time just achieving power doesn't inherently help other people it's i think it's both and so we have these this again attention of obligations to ourselves and our own ambitions and dreams and then to other people and if you just pursue one you're probably going to be lopsided and not as effective as if you if you tackle it from both sides well said i hate that this is true but i have to rap now i will just say my friend you are one of the most important contemporary writers on the planet i am grateful that you do what you do lives of the stoics is amazing um we didn't get to cynicism and the school thereof but for anybody that reads your book they will they will learn the story behind all of that um where can people find you find the book all that good stuff no thanks man i love i love talking with you and it's so much more fun than than other podcasts where you just kick around [ __ ] uh so uh the book is lives of the stoics everywhere books are sold and then if you want an email of stoicism every day which i send out totally for free you can go to dailystoic.com email amazing brother i enjoy you as a human being i think you're thank you i cherish every moment we get to spend together uh i look forward to sharing space with you again in the future you got it man awesome everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care he was perfectly uh built to beat cancer but what he walked out from that was maybe some twisting of the wires in it in that uh winning itself was now living and losing