Ryan Holiday On How To Overcome Fear | Rich Roll Podcast

(dramatic music) We think about courage, it's like we all know what it is, we all admire it, we all know what it can do, and yet it's relatively rare. Like it's one of those weird things where it's like we're all in agreement that courage is important, and then we're all sort of looking around and being like, "Why aren't people more courageous?" We seem to ask ourselves that question less, right? You know what I mean? We all have strong opinions about the lack of courage of our elected officials or public figures or whatever, but we're very rarely holding ourselves to the standard that we're asking about. (upbeat music) Hey, everybody. Today we're gonna talk about virtue. More specifically, the virtue upon which all other virtues sit. And that is courage, the ability to rise above fear, to act in the face of fear. A skill I think is important in helping us navigate our increasingly fear-based world and a practice that is absolutely essential, crucial in the pursuit of living a meaningful life. My guest for this discourse is none other than Ryan Holiday, returning for his fourth appearance on the podcast. Ryan is best known for pioneering Stoicism to mainstream adoption and is considered one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His expertize is coveted by some of the world's most successful people. And his books, which include "The Obstacle Is the Way," "Ego Is the Enemy," "The Daily Stoic," "Stillness is the Key," and his latest offering and the focus of today's conversation, "Courage Is Calling" right here have sold altogether over four million copies. I always relish my conversations with Ryan. He is a compelling thinker about things that matter. This one is chockablock with practical wisdom and essentially is about what we can learn from philosophy and history with respect to virtue to live better, more meaningful lives. So, let's do it. This is me and Ryan Holiday. Right on. Ryan Holiday in the house. Good to see you, man. Yeah, it's been two years. Has it? It's been two years. It's a weird thing where time seems to move really slow and really fast simultaneously. So, I can't remember things that happened yesterday and things that happened two years ago feel like yesterday. Yeah, there's a James Salter novel in the title, it's like his memoir. I guess, is a memoir. But the title is "Burning the Days." And that's like a phrase I've thought a lot about during the pandemic, that it just feels like they're all just like burning together kind of. Like it's like it could be last week or it could have been two years ago, and it all feels roughly the same distance from each other. I feel like this deep sense of irony, in that the last time that we spoke, it was about your book, "Stillness Is the Key." And in the wake of that conversation, we were met with the pandemic. And that compelled us into this forced repose, where we had the opportunity to engage with stillness, to really reckon with what's most important, to discard that which no longer serves us and all of that. And you would imagine with that, that we would emerge better human beings. And yet I feel like we're more divided, more separated, more acrimonious. I feel like we're teetering on kind of like social collapse at the moment as opposed to what we could have kind of learned throughout this period. Well, people are often very flippant about like meditation, for instance. Like everyone should meditate. And you realize like that spending time alone with your thoughts, may be like the absolute worst prescription for a certain type or a group of people. And so, while some of us used the last 18 months to reflect and grow and like reevaluate lives and priorities, you can tell that a lot of people came, I sort of liken it to it's like you catch a flash of truth or yourself inside, and you can look at it and face it, or you can turn away and run the opposite direction. And I think some people, as the world slowed down and they were forced to look at like everything, decided, "I don't wanna look at that, because if I look at it, then I have to make changes." And so, maybe that's why they went down this rabbit hole or they got consumed with this. I also think it's why a lot of people moved or quit their jobs or got divorced. It's just like anything to not have to sit quietly with your own thoughts. Which is terrifying. Yeah. I mean, there's that Blaise Pascal quote. He says, like to sit quietly in a room alone is like the hardest thing that a human being can possibly do. Right, or is it he said something like maybe it's the same quote, that the summation of suffering can be drilled down to man's inability to sit alone with himself. Yeah, I think that is the quote. It's like instead of... Like doing nothing is actually like the hardest thing in the world. And so, people found, I mean, some of it is positive, they learned how to bake bread, but also- Yeah, but that had its own shelf life. We're quickly tired of that. I think you also have to layer on top of that, a very real fear of getting sick and then all of the stressors and anxiety that gets packed into the uncertainty of the moment, which, of course, without tools is going to manifest in bad behavior all across the board. Well, I think at the root of all unstillness is that sort of vague floating fear of death. Like what does it all mean? How long do I have? Where do I go after I die? And so, there's nothing quite like a deadly virus floating through the air, randomly picking off people, people that you know, people that you've heard of, in enormous statistical numbers that are posted online every day to sort of stir up all of those feelings of restlessness and fear and anxiety. Yeah, and of course, fear expressed is anger, resentment, all the kind of discord that we're seeing being sown across every kind of sector of humanity. Well, yeah, it takes an immense amount of self-awareness to go like, "I'm feeling discomfort because of X," or, "I'm feeling anxious because of X." I think that was something for me that I found in the pandemic, where suddenly, I wasn't doing anything. So, I wasn't having to get to this plane. I wasn't stuck in traffic here. I wasn't having to prepare for this or that. And so, you'd think that my anxiety would go way down. That suddenly you'd have a lot less to worry about. And then actually, that's not true. And then you realize, oh, the anxiety has nothing to do with any of the things. It's actually, Marcus Aurelius talks about this in meditations. He says, like, "Oh, the anxiety," he says, "I escaped anxiety." And then he goes, "No, actually, I discarded it." And he writes this during a plague, more or less. But he goes, I discarded it because it was within me. And then so that was a breakthrough I sort of had. It was like, oh, I thought I was stressed and anxious and worried because of all of these very reasonable things that cause those things in your life, work, family, stuff. And then when all that gets paired down, you realize it's like, "Oh, no, it was me." I'm the common variable. Yeah, the anxiety is free-floating, right? And when you occupy yourself through travel and work and all the things that we do, those are ultimately distractions from the anxiety and not necessarily the thing that's provoking the anxiety. The anxiety exists independent of that. And left to our own devices and compelled to sit still, reckoning with that becomes a challenge, right? Yeah. Yeah. And when suddenly you can't express yourself through accomplishments or dizziness or activity- And your identity being wrapped up in that, I plead guilty to that. Of course. No, again, to have to slow down, I think for me, it was like to have to slow down and just do the work. Like just do like it's like, oh, I am... Weirdly, the good part about the pandemic was I was much closer to what I should be doing day in and day out, which is like wake up, spend time with my family, take care of my health, and write. Write books. Yeah. Not almost all the other stuff was impossible or if not illegal for short periods of time, right? And it's like, okay, so I can do that. And it's funny, though, because now, it's like I want things to go back to normal, that's what we say. And like normal is what caused this. Yeah. But now I think we're all understanding that we're never gonna return back to that idea of normal. We're gonna have to frame a new normal. And what we're contending with is something that is probably going to persist and be some component of our life or lifestyle for who knows how long. Yeah. And I mean, I think the thing that people struggle with the most when it comes to Stoicism, it's often associated with like sort of resignation. Like the Stoics use the word ascent. Not like ascend up a mountain, but A-S-S-E-N-T. Like I ascent to this. Which I actually think is a really important and poorly understood concept. Surely in the ancient world, we had a lot less agency over things. Like we were born in a certain class, you lived in a certain place. Your life expectancy was much lower tragedy, tyranny, all of these things, these larger forces than you exerted a lot more influence over your life. So, as we've rightfully broken out of that, you can get to a place, and I know you know this from recovery work, which is like you start to think like not only is there no higher power, you are the higher power. Like you're in control. And so, you get you have trouble with the idea of ascent. And I think even as we were looking at this with COVID, there was this brief moment not that long ago, where it was like, we have beaten this, it is going away. And now we're reckoning with the idea of like, no, it's endemic. It's here forever. And I've been thinking about that. It's just like, first off, the unpleasantness of it. Second, the unfairness of it. It's not my fault. I feel like I made all the right choices. I did what I was supposed to do. And yet here we are, that idea of just like, and so it goes like this is it. You just have to assent to it. Yeah, it's a graduate course. In what in recovery parlance is called surrender, right? Which on the subject of ascent being misunderstood, the idea of surrender being likened to giving up, which is not the case. It's really just an honest reckoning with what you have control over and what you don't have. These are the facts on the ground. Yeah, the idea that when you look at it objectively and truthfully, there is almost nothing that you can control. All you can control is how you comport yourself, how you respond to the world around you, how you react to the environment, the thoughts that you entertain, the people that you choose to surround yourself with, and everything else elude your ability to manage. And I think really embracing that creates a certain kind of freedom that makes you stronger and more capable. And that idea, which was very difficult for me to understand and learn as somebody who was relying on self-will for everything throughout my whole life, and in addition, they call it self-will runs riot, it took me a long time to really not only intellectualize what that meant and then to start living it, but when you're able to do that, you become so much more competent in every facet of your life. And it segues completely with the idea of Stoicism. Yeah, well, it's also just a resource allocation issue. So, like if I wake up tomorrow and I'm like, "It's unfair that it's this way. It sucks that it's this way. I wish that it was this other way." Or it should be a certain way. Yes, all of that is just not being directed at. I actually gave a virtual talk this morning. I was sort of stumbling over, and I accidentally I was like, so. And then I was like, so what? And I was like, so what are you going to do about it? Like it's just that's sort of how a stoic would think about it. It's like you can list this long list of problems and then like so what? And then so what? And then so what are you gonna do about it? That's where this idea of ascent intersects with will, because it's not like you want no will, no self-will. You have to have some of it. You wouldn't be where you were if you weren't able to make the most of the things you do have control over, but that the sort of intersection between what's up to you and what's not up to you, and then what you do with what's up to you, that's the whole thing. Right. Well, one of the things that you've done over the course of the past year that I'm really interested in hearing from you on is this bold pivot, which I think you could characterize as sort of a courageous step. We're gonna get into courage in a little bit. Okay. Is opening up this bookstore in a small town in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, we did our version of that by moving into this studio. Like when everyone is zigging, you zag, you try to find the opportunity in the setback, so to speak. And you've told the story of the bookstore on YouTube, which I've really enjoyed following. But tell me a little bit about the thinking behind why you decided to do that and how that's been. Well, so actually, when I saw you last, this is when I was thinking about doing it. So, when I was on my book tour for "Stillness," one of the things I was... I'd seen the space that I was interested in. And then I was like, "Well, I'm gonna go around all these bookstores, like I'll do some research." And my wife and I had been thinking about sort of setting up shop like literally in the sense that either I worked out of my house or at an office in Austin. We live a little bit outside Austin. And we needed something sort of more central. But then also that was like a hub for all the stuff that I do. And we sort of made this crazy leap in I guess we closed on it, like in December of 2019, and then started getting serious about it in January and February of 2020. So, like the absolute worst timing you could imagine. I think we hired the first person for the bookstore, like two weeks before like everything shut down for the pandemic. But it sort of goes to also the idea of ascent, right? You chose to do something, you wrote the check or you sign the contract and then life's like, "Oh, you thought it was gonna be this hard? Well, now it's 20 times harder. What are you gonna do?" Like you started the race and then you lose one of your shoes or something and you have to decide like are you gonna quit, or you're gonna be like, "I'm just doing it this way now." But I think for me, the idea of a bookstore is like I love books and I think they're important. I love physical books, most of all. How could I with the success that I've had, make like sort of a positive contribution to a place that I both love and I'm a resident of? So, we opened this tiny bookstore in the main street, about 30 minutes from Austin in the building that's been there since the 1880s. Yes, like this historic main street. Yeah, it's basically like Mayberry. Like it's this tiny little town. My son, when we were going to school, was like right up the street. It's just this old school sort of Americana thing. And I think I do hope there is something. Like I am seeing it more commonly, where like people whose lives, like yours and mine that's like so internet-focused, so like scale-focused. Like you do a podcast, you reach millions of people. You do a YouTube video and it reaches millions of people. Your books, even most of the sales are digital, right? Yeah. And they're all over the world and you don't interact or see any of that. And I think part of it was just like, what if we did something like real? It could be at a much smaller scale, but it was real and physical and it actually like involved people. And then, of course, a pandemic comes around and says, "Actually, no, you can't have any people." So, that's been sort of a struggle and adjustment, but it's been cool. Well, the thing about it is that it can be this HQ for all this stuff that you do, as you mentioned. So, you need a place to work, to write. So, you have that there. You're now doing a podcast, which I wanna talk to you about that a little bit. You can do your podcasts there and you have this retail store. I think you didn't use sublease like the other half of it so that you could like kind of alleviate the overhead cost of the whole thing. Well, the other half was gonna be like events. That's what I was gonna use before. (Rich laughs) And like, so that's not happening. And we rented it to this really cool vinyl record store. So, it's just cool to be like looking down from my office and it's like books, music, people in this little town. And I think the nice part about having this stuff at scale is it subsidizes the cool physical stuff. And to be able to, it's also just been humbling to do something that's like smaller and less lucrative. You know what I mean? Like I know that sounds weird, but like, to be like, "Oh, hey, it made $500 today. That's awesome." Right. It's crazy because like for no capital, you can put content up on the internet and reap financial reward. And this requires a tremendous amount of capital with almost no remuneration. Yes. It's symbolic, I think. And it's consistent with who you are. But it's cool. Like people will come in and they'd be like, "Oh, what should I read?" And I'm like, you should read Rich Roll's book, like to physically be able to be like this book. And like they wouldn't have been able to discover it otherwise. And then they like they take it home. Like there is something cool. Quentin Tarantino and the video store in Manhattan Beach recommending movies. Yeah, and again, like the math is more like does it not lose a lot of money? That like success is just different. It's not like how many millions of people watched this or came into this? It's like, is it supporting itself? Right? Because and it's subsidized by other stuff. But like, is it, and are you having fun doing it? Do you find that people drop in just because they wanna meet you and you're upstairs trying to write and you have to contend with that. There's a little of that. I mean, the best part about it was like for the, we basically, we were starting in January and we really didn't open until late January, the following year, because it just didn't make sense and we didn't need to. So, I just felt from a COVID perspective, like I don't need to force this to happen. So, like it was magical to have like 5,000 square feet to myself as I worked on the new book in this enormous bubble for a year. But yeah, people do come in and there are certain days or times where I'm like I'm up for that. And then it also forces me to practice the discipline a little bit, because it's like, oh yeah, I could come down and say hi. But if I did that 50 times a day, I would get nothing done. And so, I have to be like, no, I'm like, "I would like to, but I can't." I think that's something, as we do transition to whatever the new normal is, it's like, I really got, I really benefited from the can't of the last year and a half, or like shouldn't to the, I could, but I'm not going to. How does that frame how you're making decisions now that the aperture of the world is opening up a little bit? I mean, obviously, you have a book coming out. So you're putting yourself out there and you're gonna do a bunch of stuff. But in general, that calculus of saying yes or saying no, has the past year changed how you think about that? Well, it was a very vivid illustration of opportunity costs. So, like I, for instance, was under the impression I was pretty productive on the road. But to then not be on the road, now I have, well, I just didn't have a control variable. I didn't really ever have evidence of like what the difference was, because I would never go long enough without traveling. Like I don't know about you, but like I'd never gone in my life 18 months without getting on an airplane. Well, part of the whole reason for living in the part of the world that you live in is its accessibility to both coasts. Yes. Although also I live in the country because I like living in the country, right? And so, yet I was like very rarely there. And so, to be able to write a book where I did no travel, it was like not only did I think it's better, but it was easier and faster. So, this was the like this book was the least painful of all my books. And it- Because of the lack of distractions. The lack of distraction. And so, I was working every single day, which is great. But like I could work, like I felt like I was, I don't wanna say I was working part-time, because I wasn't, but it was so much more manageable because I wasn't digging myself out of a hole constantly. I was never like playing catch up. And so, to have a really clear sense of like this is what this is costing me. Like every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else and vice versa. And so, if all becomes impossible to say yes to a bunch of stuff, you now have a much better sense of like all the things that you were saying no to. Like I mean- Or the extent to which your mind will search for other distractions to fill the vacuum. And I'm pretty good about that. I'll start really doubling down on YouTube now. I'm gonna do a podcast. Although it's like, oh, okay, so you could travel or you could do a podcast from your house. What's a better sort of what's a less disruptive pursuit? And so, I think it was just very illustrative to me of what it was like. So, I flew like a couple of weeks ago, and I did do my first in-person talk. And like, I was trying to work on the plane, like I've always worked on planes. And I was like I couldn't think at all. And I was like, "Oh, I must have been pushing through this for the last 10 years of my career." So, it's like it's sort of like when, and I'm sure you- But also working on a plane was probably more of a necessity because your your time was so much more precious in comparison to what it is now. Yeah, but and you of all people know this, like when you cut something out of your diet and then you add it back into your diet and you feel disgusting and you're like, "Oh, but I was eating this every day." You're like, so it's not new that it's making me feel disgusting, it's that I had normalized that feeling. Yeah. And so, to take a whole bunch of stuff away, then put it back in and you're like, oh, I was like operating through a fog that clearly had real impact. And it's not that the work wasn't good. It's that I was having to work extra hard to get to that level. It's like sort of like you're operating with a headwind or something. Yeah, interesting. You are pretty conservative throughout this period. Like you really were at home. You weren't doing anything. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it was like just the decision to like it was working, so like why fix it if it's not broke? But I think a big part, I took it seriously in the sense of like, well, I can just do that. Like I don't have to send my kids to school. We can homeschool them. Or I don't have to travel. I can say no to things. And so, I did feel like there was some moral obligation. And I've been somewhat disappointed with people I know who didn't maybe agree with this, but I felt like there was some moral obligation of like if you can take weight off the system, like you should do it. And so, we did it. And like we because where we live and how our life is set up, it's like we had everything we needed. We had space. We went in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. And so, we were like let's just do this. There's something idyllic about it, too. As a young father, this opportunity to spend so much time with your kids in this bucolic kind of environment of, on some level, a working ranch, I guess. Like I've never visited, but you've got cattle, you've got some livestock, you've got a beautiful home and kind of tending to the land with your children, with your family, while also being a writer. Like that's kinda beautiful. It was amazing. I mean, very privileged, of course. But it was wonderful. And I mean, I'll never get this many consecutive bed times in a row. I certainly hadn't had them the first four years of my kids' life, but I'll never. I mean, it was like 550 days or something in a row. Yeah, I mean, as a father of older kids and I'm sure you're already aware of this, you just become so highly attuned or astutely aware of the fact that parenting is about the grabbing those moments and appreciating the mundane. It's not about crazy trips. It's about that little opening where your kid actually says something to you or confides in you. And having that kind of presence of mind to appreciate that, like now that my kids are for the most part, grown, I mean, our youngest is 14, you really like understand how fleeting it all is. Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld had this line that I think about a lot. He was saying like there's no such thing as quality time. He was like, give me the garbage time. Like 2 AM watching TV, eating cereal, like sitting in traffic, doing whatever. Like as a parent, I think you spend a lot of time being like, "Yes, let's plan this awesome trip," or, "Let's do this thing," or, "I got you this present." Like you think about like special things. And I think about that with my own childhood and was like how stressful it was to go on vacation, as if like that wasn't also time. It's like- And the pressure that you place upon it to be meaningful or exceptional, that kind of destroys the whole purpose. Yes, it's like so we're all yelling at each other or the kids are being yelled at so we can all go have a wonderful experience as a family. Like no, thanks. So, like I think just being together and not having anything or anywhere to go and that just being very normalized was as financially difficult and emotionally difficult and like negative in all the ways that it was, was also an incredible gift. And I think we just tried to like stop and go like, why are we rushing through this. We'll never have this again. The Stoics are also gonna be like, you know you're rushing towards death, right? Like and I thought about that very acutely with kids. Like my youngest has now spent more than half of his life in this. And so, you're like, "Well, we want this to be over with." And then you're like, but like when this is over, that means he's not this age again. So, you're kind of like rushing. It's like how we try to tell kids, like, "You don't wanna grow up. Like don't rush to grow up. This is great." But as parents, you are doing the exact same thing all the time. Right. Sorry to interrupt the flow. We'll be right back with more awesome. But I wanna snag a moment to talk to you about the importance of nutrition. The thing is, most people I know actually already know how to eat better and aspire to incorporate more whole plants, more fruits, vegetables, seeds, beans and legumes into their daily routine. Sadly, however, without the kitchen tools and support, very few end up sticking with it. 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Again, that's meals.RichRoll.com, promo code RRHEALTH for ten dollars off an annual membership. All right, let's get back to the show. I wanna pivot so that we can start talking about the new book. But I think in preface to that, I spent a lot of time ruminating on kind of sense-making how to make sense of our time. This national divide that we find ourselves in, a moment in which there's this dispersion of news and information in a partizan silos. There's a breakdown from my perspective, in healthy communication. And we kinda lost our tether when it comes to rationality, appreciation for nuance. Our sort of respect for one another has been supplanted with binary tribalism. There's an erosion of trust in institutions. Meanwhile, this ascent in conspiratorial thinking, a dearth of leadership where tribalism prevails over virtue, which we're gonna talk about. And we're more interested in taking others down than rising ourselves up. And I wonder how much of that is rooted in this American idea of individualism over community seems to be a somewhat uniquely American ethos. And a lot of people who, I guess, technically can be considered to be behaving, quote unquote, courageously, but through the lens of their particular strain of perceived truth. Well, we talk a lot about freedom and not very much about responsibility. And I think especially in the American system, the whole point of a system that gives or allows for a lot of personal liberty, was intended to be checked by private virtue. So, just because you can, doesn't mean that you should. Or just because it's legal, doesn't mean you should let yourself do it. And so, I think we are really struggling as a society and as individuals to wrap our heads around, like where sort of our freedom ends and our responsibility or obligations to other people begins. And that's sort of what I was talking about, where it's like, look, I'm young, I'm healthy, now I'm vaccinated, I could do whatever I want or I could have done whatever I wanted despite those things. But like this isn't I could make a lot of decisions and we all can, not just related to the pandemic, where the primary recipient of the consequences of those decisions is not borne by you. But so it takes some self-awareness and self-control and also courage to be like, I could do that, but that's not a good way to live. And that's not a fair way to live. And so, I think we're struggling with like sort of what our obligations are to each other. Like so people would say with the bookstore, they'll be like, "Oh, must be great being in Texas, very sort of conducive to like private." Like Texas has been like do whatever you want as a business, right? Except for some very hypocritical things that they limited businesses. But anyway, it's like we could have opened. We didn't have to have a mask mandate. We could have done a lot of things. But I actually don't find that to be a gift. I find it to be somebody in elected leadership passing the buck to somebody else. Because somebody ultimately has to decide, "Hey, am I gonna be part of the problem, or am I gonna be part of the solution?" So, I think that's really where our struggle is. It's just like here's what I'm allowed to do, but here's what I allow myself to do per my conscience and my sense of duty and obligations. Right. I think you really nailed it with this idea that all of the focus is on freedom, when in fact, freedom needs to be checked by responsibility, right? Like we're not talking about what our collective responsibility is to each other, and we're primarily focused on what we can do or what my rights are and expressing however I feel I want to be. And certainly there can be virtue in that. And there's something to be said for understanding that being part of this culture in America is the opportunity to be free. But we all need to shoulder our collective responsibility to each other. And I feel like we've lost that sense of community. And we see- We have a we have a particular responsibility that Stoics and say to the vulnerable and to the less-abled and to the people who can't look out for themselves. So, like a friend of ours' father who was vaccinated but was also a cancer patient, just died of COVID. Like where's that guy's freedom? Right? Somebody took that freedom away from him by their choice to not take a thing seriously, right? Or to not think about the consequences of their actions. And it's the person who touched the person, who touched the person, who touched the person, but the point is really stopping and thinking like what am I contributing or taking away from what the Stoics call the common good. Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor, the most powerful man in the world. Not that Rome was a particularly wonderful place, but he refers to this idea of the common good, like 50 or 60 times in meditation. It's like the thing he's constantly thinking about is sort of where, and he's thinking about this during a pandemic. Like what are the choices or actions I'm taking and how are they impacting the people around me? The Stoics have this idea they call the circles of concern. So, we have like first off, yourself, then you have your immediate family, then you have like your community. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it's everyone in the world. But the whole idea was like, how do you take the people on the far this ring and bring them closer to the center? Or how do you take the feelings that you have towards the people that you are biologically related to or genuinely sort of genuinely care about, how do you kind of radiate that outwards to as many people as possible? So, that's, I think, it's really easy to be selfish. It's really easy to just think about all the things you have going on and how things affect you. And I think one of the things we really spent some time thinking about was like, and it's hard. It was particularly hard not to do that when we watch the sort of racial reckoning that we went through as a country in the summer of 2020 to be like, oh, there's a lot of things that we haven't been thinking about or people that we haven't been caring about or just problems that haven't affected me that I don't think about. But by not thinking about, I am complicit in their continuation. Yeah, and I suppose the more power that you accumulate, the more ability you have and responsibility that you have to impact those outer rings, right? Like when you're lacking power, your influence extends not very far to just yourself and perhaps your family, et cetera. But Marcus Aurelius being an extreme example. But anyone who accumulates some level of power, I think the message is that they need to shoulder that responsibility and think more profoundly about the impact of their decisions as the kind of Venn diagram or these concentric circles. Well, have you noticed or thought like it's been weird to me to watch people I know with very large platforms just sort of sit a lot of things out. You know what I mean? And there's a balance, of course, because if your platform is based on X and you're talking about Y, you can lose the reason that people follow you, right? And there's something to be said about being a safe place where everyone can come together and not have to think about certain things. I totally get it. But it is interesting to me to watch the way, like certain pet issues, people feel very emphatic and be happy to use their platform to talk about over and over and over again, which might have a minuscule impact on humanity. But then they don't wanna talk about this because they know it will upset some certain vocal minority. Sure, it's complicated. Look, it's it's hard. And we are in an environment where if you say the wrong thing, the repercussions are very real. So, I wanna be sensitive to that. But I agree and I understand that. Like it is for a lot of people, a high-wire act. Like they don't wanna get canceled or they're afraid of, and this goes into courage also, like fear of others and opinions of other people and being criticized, et cetera. I mean, that was a reason why, I went through a little bit of that myself, and that was the reason why we did a pivot with the podcast. And we kind of do this different kind of show every two weeks where we talk about more contemporaneous events. Because it did feel weird and not right to just do an episode about the microbiome when like Minneapolis is about to burn to the ground. I just couldn't sleep with myself. So, I felt compelled to address these things. I felt the same thing with Stoicism. But I'm also compassionate to people who are afraid to speak their mind right now, because it is a culture in which we're not very forgiving of people's traggressions. That's true. I mean, I felt like with Stoicism, there's a whole bunch of sort of self-improvement elements to it right? Resiliency, sort of productivity, controlling your emotions. And I could spend my whole life just talking about those things. And those things are much less controversial than the other things. And I remember just thinking like what good is having the platform if you're only gonna use it to tell people what they wanna hear? There's a story about Lyndon Johnson after he becomes president. This thing he worked for like his whole life, right? Nobody like moved up the levels of power sort of more like slowly than Lyndon Johnson, right? Like he holds like every consecutive office on his way there. And he spends years as a politician before he eventually becomes president. And suddenly, there's this opportunity to pass civil rights. And one of his advisers says like, "Well, we should wait till you're reelected or like there's gonna be negative for the following reasons." And he says something like, "But what the hell is the presidency for?" Meaning, like we tell ourselves, like, hey, when I have X, then I'm gonna like use it for good. But then we never do it, because then we're like thinking about the next thing. And so, it's definitely something I've thought about. And it pretends to courage, too. But just ultimately, like what good is the success if it then actually makes you more conservative? And I don't mean that politically. I mean that in the sense of like you're now more risk averse because you don't wanna lose what you have. Yeah, well, I've noticed that you're pretty strident about this. Like you'll say something on social media and there'll be a litany of comments saying, "I can't believe you said that. Stick to Stoicism." Or, "How very anti-stoic of you." And then you get in and like you drag these people. Like- I've tried to actually stop doing that because it was making me unhappy. Yeah, I was like that part of it, I'm not sure is in your best interest. But I have noticed, and this is a good segue into this broader conversation about courage, like to have the courage of your convictions, understanding and knowing beforehand, if you say this, it is gonna provoke a certain kind of reaction that is gonna have ramifications in terms of the number of people who are gonna follow you or buy your books or whatnot. Yeah, it it's sort of, again, it's like what good is the success if you, it's like that line in the first season of "Billions," which says like, "What good is fuck you money, if you never say fuck you?" It's so funny that you say that, because I just rewatched the pilot of "Billions" last night. And so, I was thinking, when you were saying that, I was seeing Axe saying that very line. And I mean, he's using it to like basically enact like to pursue like a personal grudge. So, that's not what we're talking about. But he- And he's actually, he's operating at his peril in that moment. Yes. Yes. But generally, we tell ourselves, like, "Hey, when I have this." And I've noticed this. I've gotten to go to Washington a number of times and talked to people who would read the books. And like you think that this senator is powerful because like they're one of 100 people. And actually they don't see themselves as powerful because they see this as a way station on the way to another thing. And then they say, when I get there, then I'll open it up, right? But of course, you never arrive at that place. You never do. It's insidious. It's in the same way that you never feel like comfortable or secure. You never go like, "Now I'm willing to like do the unpopular, but correct thing." Right. There's many examples in the new book that reference that. The one that comes to mind is Nixon versus Kennedy in terms of which one of those guys decides to get involved in getting Dr. King out of out of jail. Nixon, I didn't realize that Nixon had this pretty robust relationship with King. They were friends. They were buddies. And he would call on him for advice. And yet when the moment came for him to act, he was reluctant because he felt he would alienate the South. Kennedy enters and does the right thing and ultimately wins the election by like half a point, right? Yes, almost entirely because of the black community. And but you can imagine Nixon telling himself, "I'll deal with this after I'm president." Right? He's like, "Just I don't wanna piss these people. I don't want to piss off the South. And so, I'm not gonna get involved, but I'll do it later." The irony being, because he fails in this moment of courage, he doesn't become president. Yeah, and the point being that the thing that seems like the conservative choice ends up being the greater risk. Yeah, and that we often understate the risk of doing nothing, right? Like Jeff Bezos talks about, he says, "I don't do bet the company bets." Meaning I don't act conservatively risk averse day-to-day, then you find yourself behind or boring or lacking in innovation, and then you have to bet it all on some moonshot. Not literally, but some crazy idea or risky venture, right? If you're regularly innovating and taking risks and being generally courageous in your life, if it's a habit, then it's not as scary. It's only when you have not gotten involved, not gotten involved, not gotten involved, that then to get involved is a huge risk. Yeah. This idea of courage is a habit. And the kind of athletic analogy to that is basically just being consistent. Like showing up every day and putting in the training and doing the hard work, not waiting until you're really late in the game and then having to go out and do a 20-mile run when you're ill-prepared for it, right? Like you're just gonna get injured. I think about it just kind of staying at your fighting weight, right? Like my sort of routine for writing is I'm just always writing. I'm not writing and then I'm done and then I go back to my normal life and then I'm intimidated by like going back into- That's really, I think, your superpower. Your ability to remain so consistent in your writing. Thank you. I mean, it's either a superpower or an addiction or probably a combination of the two. But I do just generally try to always be doing it so there isn't the sort of whiplash of like on, off, on, off. Right. That's painful. Because if you think to, there's a great expression I actually have a chapter about in the book, but like it's like the world is a narrow bridge. The important thing is to not be afraid. Meaning like if you're just walking, you just walk across the narrow bridge. Like you don't think about it. You just have to do it. If you're stopping resting and looking out over the side and thinking about it too much, that's when you fall. And so with books, it's like on this project, I'm doing not just one book, I'm doing four books in a four-book series. I'm just not thinking about it too much. Like, I'm just everyday showing up and chipping away at it. And I know that stuff will come out of the other side of that. But if I'm like, okay, here's the schedule and I have to do this and then this, like that's when I'll start to get in my own head about it. And also knowing what your next three books are gonna be. It's a blessing and a curse. And I would imagine, because it's a series on these four virtues, in the preparation or the research for, let's say the next virtue book that you're doing, you're gonna come across research relevant to the third and the fourth book. So, you're kind of are you writing kind of sort of on some level, all four of them at the same time in different stages. I'm researching all four of them at the same time. Actually the hardest part is, so, "Obstacle," "Ego," and "Stillness," the first trilogy that I did, it was accidental. Like I wrote a book, then independently came up with an idea for a second book and then a third book. So- Now you're operating like Marvel. It's the expanded Ryan Holiday universe. Well, the tricky part is the metaverse of ancient philosophy. Now that I look at those three books, there's chapters I would like to trade in the books. Like I'd like to move a chapter from "Ego" to "Stillness" and vice versa, or there's maybe chapters that shouldn't be in either the three books that would be better in this new series. So, like as I was working on "Courage," it was the first time where I had to go, here's something that's important to me to say I wanna say it, but do I have the restraint to not say it in this book and leave it for this book? And I've had up until all the way through galleys, I was moving chapters around and cutting them and stuff. So, it's harder in the sense that I'm having to think in like four projects simultaneously. And I can't not be thinking ahead, because I might put something in one book that then makes it impossible or either contradicts what I would say in another one or makes it impossible to then talk about that in the third book, let's say. Well, as somebody who's read all your books and is a big fan of your writing, in reading this book, what struck me is how confident it is. I think it's your most confident book. It's very strident in its directness. It's like a call to action, the whole thing. And I think like in thinking about your previous books, they feel a little bit more kind of observational or cautionary, like, don't do this, be careful of this. This one is very muscular. It's like an active verb. It's very aggressive. And maybe that's an act of courage in and of itself. But my sense was he's really like found his voice in this vein. And there was no, not that there was hesitation in your earlier books, but it just felt like it was very confident and kind of fully formed. Does that make sense to you? Do you have a sense of that? It does. Yeah, no, it makes sense. I don't know- Because it's kinda like do this and here's what you're gonna do and this is the way it's gonna be. And like and then it would end with a question like, are you gonna rise to the occasion? And I was like, "Holy shit!" (laughs) I feel, it's funny this a weird namedrop, but Matthew McConaughey was nice enough to read the book in galley form, and he made me get rid of most of the questions. Oh, he did? He was like, he gave you this really good note. He's like, "You're ending on a question as if it is up for discussion." And I said, "Oh, that's totally right." Take off the table. I love that you're getting notes from McConaughey. That's- It was a surreal. I sent him the book and I was hoping he would give me a blurb because I had blurbed his book. And I was like, and like you can blurb a book without reading it. Like so I was I was expecting that. And he gave me like full like chapter-by-chapter notes. It was incredible. But I do feel like you get to, it was a new feeling on the book, where like I felt like I had all the powers that I needed. Like it all come together. Like there wasn't any doubt in my mind that I could do it or that I thought I knew what I was talking about or not. Like it just it was like just the sort of process took over, I guess. Do you know what I mean? Like in the way that an athlete in like the fourth quarter just sort of goes into it like a different lane or gear or something, that just sort of happened. And I think it was partly the uniqueness of the circumstances of what was happening in the world. And so, like that's something I wanna preserve. But I also think it was just like I've done this now a lot of times. And so, all of the consciousness of it slipped away and I could just do it. Yeah, it felt like there was no, like whatever you were holding back in earlier books, the floodgates opened a little bit. I know, I guess I- Just because I think what's sort of unique about your books is they're sort of genre-fluid. Like they're they're philosophical treatises, they're books about history, but they're also self-help books. And I feel like the kind of the self-help vector kind of expanded a little bit in this one and you are not shy about like being direct in your counsel. The one thing that the unfair advantage of this book that I will have to find a way to compensate for in the other three books is that courage is like the most primal thing that like of all the virtues, of all the themes of history, of humanity, literature, courage is the most consistent and universal of all the things. And you're able to draw from the greatest stories of all time. And conversely, when you're talking about cowardice, you're usually drawing on some of the most infamous and shameful moments of all time. And so, there is something magical about that. Well, there's also, there's a kind of masculinity about it that I think informed the pros. I guess, although that was something I really thought about because we tend to think of courage as physical courage, right? Like courage, as you said, courage is often seen as a masculine virtue, although actually in Latin, it's sort of a a non-gendered word, like it just is. But that virtue just is. They're not different for men or women. And in fact, one of the cool things about Stoicism is the sort of great stoic teacher Gaius Musonius Rufus who teaches Marcus Aurelius and sort of teaches Epictetus and a bunch of the other great Stoics. He's like one of the first philosophers to advocate for like sort of equal training for men and women, basically saying like it doesn't matter. It's like virtue is virtue. What we do in our lives might be different. But like he's like, you don't care what the gender of a horse is. Like does it run fast? That's what matters. Does the dog hunt? It doesn't matter if it's a male or a female dog. So, there is a sort of universality in it. But I did really wanna make it clear. And how I pick the stories was a big part of that was like this isn't just running into battle or a burning building, though, of course, men and women both do that. But it's not just physical strength. That's not what courage is. And that's why I deliberately open the book with Florence Nightingale as the main character. So, it's not war that I'm celebrating, but like the person who is courageous enough and caring enough to focus on like that damage that war does and helping the victims of that tragedy just as much as like the people rushing into that cavalry charge. Yeah, we should probably like define our terms and explain what courage is. But the book basically opens with disabusing people of this idea that there are two different kinds of courage, physical and emotional, and yet in truth, it's one thing. It's when you put your ass on the line. So, walk me through like what the four cardinal virtues are, why they're called cardinal virtues, and why you decided to write this series of books on this subject matter. A sort of a well-known known fact, actually, so I open the book with this story of the choice of Hercules, which is Hercules comes to the crossroads. And he's basically given the opportunity for the easy way or the hard way, vice and virtue. What does he choose? And he chooses the hard way. And this is why he becomes great. But that story is actually, Zeno is the founder of Stoicism, gets in this shipwreck and he loses everything and he washes up in Athens. And he walks into a bookstore as the bookseller is reading that story. So, the inception, the beginning of Stoicism is actually that story, which I opened this book with. It's a story that I think it goes back to Socrates. But just the idea that we have a choice, easy way or the hard way. What you can get away with versus what you demand of yourself. And the four cardinal virtues is that when people hear the word virtue, they don't really know what that means. And they often think it's like a religious thing or they think it's like not having fun or something. For the ancients, particularly the Stoics, there were really four virtues: courage, temperance or self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the idea being that any and all situations call for one or all of those virtues, they all interconnect and kind of check and enhance each other. But when you hear that word, cardinal virtue, which is sort of their universal term, they're the stoic virtues, but they're referred to as a cardinal virtues. Cardinal just comes from the Latin word, cardo, which means hinge. So, the idea is like everything hinges on those four virtues. It's not a like a cardinal from the Catholic Church- Yeah, I always assumed that it came from the Vatican. Yes, me too. And then to think, oh, no, it predates this by like hundreds of years. Right. And the idea behind, like what got you fascinated in exploring this terrain in book format? I think what I love about the cardinal virtues is that it's as clear as we, it's as close as we get in philosophy to like the Ten Commandments, right? Like so much of philosophy is just sort of vague or general. It doesn't say like, do this, don't do that. And what I really like about the four virtues is it's inherently like do this, don't do this. Like act with courage, which means don't be a coward, right? Like do the right thing, which means don't do the unjust, wrong thing. Moderation, temperance just means like nothing in excess. Although sometimes not at all. And so, to me, what I really wanted to do in this series is sort of explore what each of those virtues mean and sort of in a demonstrable, like memorable way. So, going into this book, courage being kind of the preeminent of the virtues makes sense to start here. You can't have them. You can't have any of the virtues without courage. Without courage, of course. We all on some level, know what courage is. We practice it, we avoid it, we do all the things. What did you learn that surprised you about courage in this kind of deeper exploration? Well, we think about courage, it's like we all know what it is, we all admire it, we all now what it can do, and yet it's relatively rare. Like it's one of those weird things, where it's like we're all in agreement that courage is important, and then we're all sort of looking around being like, "Why aren't people more courageous?" We seem to ask ourselves that question less, right? You know what I mean? We all have strong opinions about the lack of courage of our elected officials or public figures or whatever. But we're very rarely holding ourselves to the standard that we're asking them. I think what happens is that we look at it and say, well, there's a misalignment of incentives. If the incentives were properly established, then people would be more courageous. But obviously, courage means acting in the face of incentives that perhaps are not aligned in your favor. That is what courage is. Totally. Like we'll go like, "Why won't this politician say what they really think?" And we go, "Oh, they're just worried about pissing off their base." And then it goes to what we were just talking about, which is you go, "Well, I don't wanna say this because it will upset my audience." Like, huh, there's a fun double standard, right? Like we regularly expect other people, like why isn't LeBron James speaking out about this? And we go, "It's because he's afraid of losing his endorsements." And it's like and you won't tell your boss the truth in the weekly conference call because you don't wanna get on his bad side. It's just easier not to. Exactly. So, we're all doing it on some level. I think the biggest kind of take-away or epiphany in the most general sense from the book is this idea that courage isn't some trait that we're born with or not, that it's, in fact, a practice. And it's something that we can cultivate through the doing of it. And the commitment to that practice is what, of course, breeds a deeper capacity for the doing. Yeah, Aristotle talks about how you acquire the virtues by doing them, right? Like you become a builder by building stuff. You become courageous by regularly acting with courage in things big and small. And you don't get it by criticizing other people's courage and you don't get it by waiting for some magical moment where like because it really counts now, you'll do it. Sort of, as you said, it's like in sports, like are you consistently doing it in practice, then you'll probably do it in competition. Are you consistently acting with courage in your life? Then if you do find yourself in some pivotal world-changing moment, maybe you'll measure up to the task. But the idea that you're suddenly going to do it after a lifetime of like the easy road is probably fooling yourself. Yeah. And we can't talk about courage or the practice of it without fully understanding the impediment to it, which is fear. So, the book is broken down into these three sections: fear, then courage, and then heroism. You open with fear because fear is, like reckoning with fear, understanding it, appreciating it, being honest about yourself to the extent that fear influences your decisions is a predicate upon which courage can be founded. I didn't say that correctly, but you understand what I mean? Like- There is no courage without fear. Like let's say, and I think there are some people, it's like a disorder or whatever. Let's say something gets scrambled in your brain and you are no longer capable of feeling fear. As you go through the world, are you being courageous? Like no. You're probably being reckless, but you're not, the whole point is that you're having to push through the doubts. That you're aware of the danger and doing it anyway, right? And so, fear is both the enemy, but also the opportunity. Like if you don't feel fear, if it's for certain, like if you're starting the business and you know it's guaranteed that you will be successful, like if you can flash forward in the future and know 100% it's gonna work out, there's nothing to regret, it's- There's no courage involved. There's no courage. There's no courage. Like it's the fact that it could go either way that makes it impressive, but also makes it meaningful. So, help me make sense of the difference between behavior that is provoked by fear, because we're seeing a lot of that right now. A lot of people behaving badly because they're being motivated by some kind of sure base fear versus the more noble action of courage in the face of fear. There's a great Faulkner quote where he says like, be scared, you can't help that, but don't be afraid. And I like that idea because it ties into what the Stoics talk about, which is like you're gonna be scared. This is like a biological thing, right? Like somebody jumps out from the corner. They scare you or you fail. You're gonna be scared by something. There's uncertainty and doubt and newness and emotion. But the question is like, what do you do after? So, I think the problem is we have a lot of people who are acting out of fear. They wanna either admit that they're scared or they've just given themselves over to that fear. They've become okay with it. And I think that's the problem. So, it's like you can be angry. Just don't do things out of anger, right? Like somebody hurts you or pisses you off or screws you over, it's totally normal that you would have a negative opinion about that. That Stoicism is not becoming this Buddha-like figure where you feel nothing about this, which isn't fair to put it, but you get what I'm saying. You don't become a robot. It's that you check yourself before you take actions primarily driven by that emotion. Right. Here's where courage and temperance overlap in the Venn diagram, right? Totally. Because just acting boldly but reactively isn't necessarily courage and probably isn't. Well, that is the tension between what's bold and what's rash, what's courageous, what's reckless. Right. Like being circumspect, understanding the risks, like the Bezos example that you gave. And you see this throughout the book, in the many examples that you offer, including examples of military campaigns, et cetera, where the risks are heavily evaluated. There's still fear. And the decision, the bold decision to move forward is with that awareness. Like the example that you give about MacArthur and Korea, I thought was pretty instructive on that level. Yeah, he's well-aware the odds are not in his favor, but he's also aware that the odds are not impossible. Right. So, just explain that scenario. So, when North Korea overruns South Korea, basically the U.S. is sort of caught off guard. And MacArthur proposes not just sort of this- He's in charge of that Pacific theater at the time. And he proposes not just like, "Hey, we're gonna battle them back." He proposes a sort of bold, visionary, like sort of encircle. And he basically wants to land troops at Inchon, which is like sort of behind the enemy. And it's an invasion, an amphibious landing that almost everyone is opposed to because success is not certain. And it feels like- And the port is so dangerous. You can't bring a ship. It's an incredibly narrow window. It's like at this time on this date, it will work. But if you miss it by 30 minutes, it's a bloodbath. But he actually says, well, this is why it will work. They won't. It's like too crazy for them to expect. And he says it basically hits like that line in "Dumb and Dumber," where he's like, "You're telling me there's a chance." And he basically sees that it's not impossible. And therefore, it is possible. And he believes in his ability to defy the odds, which is, I think, an important part. If you've done things that other people have said are impossible to do, it does give you confidence in your ability, gives you a certain amount of courage. Like to go to the idea of opening the book story, there's I think, two parts of this relates to. Number one, as far as risk, of course, it's risky. It could fail. But as soon as we decided to take the risk, the next thing we did was like, well, why do these things typically fail and how do we derisk this situation as much as possible? Opening, leasing half of it, starting small. We made a bunch of decisions that took a risky thing and made it less risky. But then also, like I have some confidence in my ability to do. I have blind faith, but I have confidence in it because I've done risky things before that people said was impossible or was likely to fail. And I have learned from that, and I've also learned from my own capacity and capabilities. So, it's like that is why making courage habit is important. You're like, "Oh, I've done a cliff dive like this before." It looks scarier than it actually is. If you've never done it, then the moment comes and you're totally unfamiliar with something like this. Yeah, I think it's also important to understand that not all courage is noble, right? Like this idea that you could be technically courageous in your action, but wrong-headed. Like I'm thinking about like the occupation of the capital, right? Like all of those people, there's a saying that like every man is right from his perspective. So, those people would, and the people that support them would say that those are those are courageous individuals. There's a real risk of death. Real risk consequences. They believe it was the right thing to do. And they adjust in with the cause from their point of view. But there's an important caveat, and this is the distinction in the book between courage and the heroic. Lord Byron has a great line. He says that the cause makes all that hallows or degrades courage in its fall. So, if you're beating a police officer to death with a blue lives matter flag, like you're taking a real risk. It's a real physical danger. But it's not just a horrible cause. It's a hypocritical, contradictory cause, right? So, the decision, I tell the story because I talked and researched it, obviously, for my first book, or sorry, my first sort of narrative nonfiction book, "Conspiracy," I talk about the editors of Gawker resigning on principle over this horrible story that they... No, they resigned on principle because the management of the publication had unpublished a story, right? And they felt like this was management crossing an important like church and state line between business and editorial. Now, that line is important and it is real. But management was unpublishing a story that outed somebody as gay who was being extorted by a gay porn star. Like it was a horrible story that should not have been published. So, the fact that it was unpublished, well, that is morally complicated. The actual principal on the line here is a story that shouldn't have been published. And we see a lot of that, right? Like one of the examples that really struck me during the summer was, you remember that horrible video of that man at a Black Lives Matters protests in Buffalo. He's like walking up to the police and this police officer shoves him to the ground. And you can hear that thickening, that sickening thud of his head hitting the ground. Well, that police officer was suspended for that naturally. But then all of the police officers in his unit resigned in solidarity. So, yes, the idea of brotherhood or commitment to members of your unit is important and it takes courage to resign from a career or profession. I don't think they quit their jobs. They just resigned from this one unit. But to do that takes courage. But again, your courage is in service of protecting a person who on video viciously assaulted an old man. So, the cause is everything. Courage in pursuit of crap, you go, I mean, were there brave soldiers who fought for the South? Of course. Were there brave soldiers who fought for Germany or Japan? Yes. But we instinctively know there's something meaningless about that courage because it was in furtherance of like the worst causes of all time. Right, so deployment of courage in the pursuit of a wrong-headed goal or a sort of ethically compromised aim really confuses the matter, because the person who's pursuing that aim is not under any confusion morally. Well, this is where justice and wisdom act upon courage. Right? So, if you have fallen prey to misinformation and then feel like what you're pursuing is right, well, it might feel right to you, but you're wrong. And if what you're feeling, what you are resisting the power of the state, let's say, like or your profession is trying to get you to do something that you don't wanna do. That's great risk to yourself. Yeah, your livelihood. Yeah, that takes courage. But what you're protesting is your right to infect other people with a deadly virus or like insert other example, right? Q1 on whatever. Yeah, you're valiantly defending not just something that's not true, but something that is largely negative or destructive. And so, these things all connect with each other in a really important way. Now, is there some room for someone being courageous about something you disagree with? Of course. And it's hard to definitively say what a good cause is about, but there is Lincoln famously goes like, "Look, the South thinks what they're fighting for is right." But he's like, "If you think what is right is stealing the labor and sweat and blood and tears of other people, I don't really know what to tell you." Right. Yeah. I think this gets at the crux of our kind of current cultural moral dilemma, because we're seeing the propagation of so much misinformation that is weaponized in many different ways and is now creating a situation in which it's becoming increasingly difficult to do proper sense-making and understand what's true and what isn't, and it's fomenting tribes of people who are very right-minded in their goals and their aims and are acting courageously. And it's challenging to take a step back and to try to objectively evaluate the landscape from a kind of global umbrella perspective. But ultimately, this is why courage is related to wisdom in that it takes courage to pursue wisdom. So, there's the great poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which is the poem about this sort of near suicidal charge by this British cavalry regiment in the Crimean War. And they're basically ordered to attack in a way that was impossible to win, over an objective that didn't matter. And when you read about that, it's this beautiful, beautiful, inspiring poem. But when you really study "The Charge of the Light Brigade," it strikes you that, so they they basically go on this suicidal charge and they almost all die. Few of them come back. Like 600 leave, like 100 come back. And like the men, instead of being angry, instead of being like what was that, they actually line up to like charge again. Like it was easier for them to just follow orders than to look in the mirror and question the orders, right? So, like when we go like, oh, yeah, this person on January 6th or this person who's in this conspiracy theory or taking this cause, they think that it's right. They also have doubts. Everyone around them is trying to give them the information. And there's this force called cognitive dissonance. The real fear, the real thing that they're being cowardly about is the admission of error or the admission of doubt, right? So, like people get in a cult. And then the court does something terrible. And then none of the predictions of the court come true. They can't go like, "Oh, man, I was fooled. I was an idiot." Yeah, the fear is you were wrong all along. And the courage then would be to step outside of that and recognize that. Yeah, the scariest thing in the world is admitting you were wrong or that you did something wrong. And so, you can't the idea of like, oh, they think they're right and they're just pursuing it with courage. Shouldn't we admire that? Not only is it like, no, it matters what are the consequences of the thing you've committed to, but also where they're really lacking the courage is the ability to pause and reflect and analyze and think about other people. Like what if everyone did this? Right. Stillness is the key. And then recognizing that the ego component in all of this, of course, right? This is the extended Holiday universe. Yes. (laughs) This is all the themes coming together. I know, right? One of the more impactful examples that you share in the book that I admit I didn't know as much about as I should was Charles de Gaulle. Like I didn't realize the extent to which he was this lone holdout and that the kind of odds that were stacked up against him saving France. Yeah, Paul Kix wrote this great book about the French resistance and this sort of singular figure in the French resistance, whose name I'm forgetting. The book is called "The Saboteur." But I remember I was talking to him about it. I had him on my podcast and he he said something like, "What percentage of France do you think was involved in the French resistance?" And I was like, "I don't know. Like 20%, 30%." This is like imagine like it's not like, "Oh, hey, there's this cause. I'm not sure." The Nazis take over your country, right? Like the worst cause in human history invades your country and occupies it. And like 5% of France was like, "This is bad. We should not go along with this." Like their greatest World War I hero is the one who negotiates the surrender and leads the Vichy state. So, we had this idea in retrospect, that like everyone is on the same page. It was all everyone is heroic. Everyone had courage. But it's like demonstrably not the case. And this is true. Like Martin Luther King wasn't a hero. Like we killed Martin Luther King. He was deeply unpopular. It was a small minority of people who saw then what we now perceive today and agree upon. And so, this will be the same for Colin Kaepernick. Again, like for most of these guys, we have to remember, they are deeply unpopular. During their time. Yeah, during their time. And de Gaulle was asked, "Weren't you alone in all the stands that you took?" And he said something like, "Yes, but I knew that one day that would cease to be so." And to me, that's what courage is. The willingness to stand alone and hold out the hope that you can rally people around you and make a thing of this. Right. And the theme that emerges from this idea, I can't remember exactly the language you use, but the idea of like one courageous person can create that majority. Yeah, one man with courage makes the majority, is what the saying is. And it's true. Like almost every thing that we now hold to be true was disruptive or controversial or persecuted. And it's I mean, we didn't throw Galileo a parade. Right. Right. And that story you tell about the signing of the declaration, like really like grappling with the peril that those people faced at the prospect of putting their name on this like document that was so transgressive. Yeah. And I forget which founders set it, but they were reflecting like 40 years after something. Because it's also amazing how young they were. Like they were all like 30 years old. Martin Luther King was like very young in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We think about these figures as we remember them towards the end of their life. They were very young and they had a lot on the line. But one of the founders was reflecting. He was like, "I'll never forget the awful silence in the room when we walked up one-by-one to sign what may well have been our death warrant. And it's true. Like they were successful. So, it wasn't that. But if they had failed, they would have hung like to a man. And I think we missed sight of that in the Civil Rights Movement, too. Like not only do we only really tend to recognize the survivors, but like because the cause was ultimately victorious, we think that everyone who participated got a good deal. We don't think about the sharecropper who was convinced by some door-to-door civil rights activist to register to vote and then got kicked off their farm. We don't think about the person who was shotgunned on some lonely street. Like I think about that James Meredith, who integrated, was at University of Mississippi, like the first black person is this huge controversy. He then does this walk. He's like, "I'm gonna walk from," I forget where to where. But he's just walking down a highway and a person drives by and shoots him like with a shotgun by the side of the road. So, we think mostly of the victorious people. We think like, oh, they came out of it the other side. But a lot of people sacrificed a great deal, so those survivors could survive. Sure. And that raises the kind of moral dilemma or the moral question of what is right action. Is it better to act courageously and perish as a result of that act or to mute your voice a little bit and live a long life and have kids that love you, et cetera? Like my sense from this book is that one should live courageously, and if you were to die in the pursuit of that courage, that that is a life well-lived. Well, where do you fall on that? I mean, in the highest level, yes, but it's almost seductive how, or it's a little insidious how we think about it that way, as if we don't live in the safest time in human history and are almost never having to risk something like that. Like, I think I had Alexander Venkman on my podcast. Oh, you did? Which was like an incredible conversation. Wow. I mean, a single person blows the whistle on a grossly inappropriate conference call with two world leaders and the president is directly impeached as a result of it. But he loses his military career over it. His brother is fired over it. He loses his quiet, normal life because of it. But at the same time, he didn't die, right? Like I mean, there were real risks, and I'm sure he feared for his safety. But the point is, what we're often afraid to lose is like a very first-world stuff. And he's an immigrant from Russia and went through real stuff. So, I'm actually, that was a bad example to bring up, because that was he was directly challenging the most powerful person in the world and made a lot of real enemies. But I'm saying, like I remember being so terrified when I dropped out of college. And in retrospect, it's like the worst-case scenario was that I would go back to college, right? Like I'm sure when you left your corporate life to do this, it felt so scary. And it's scary enough that most people don't do it. But it's like how many people would kill for something as dangerous as that? Right. Well, that goes into how you kind of unpack fear in the first section. This idea that fear comes in many forms, but predominantly fear of what other people are gonna think is a huge driver. I mean, it certainly is for me in kind of catastrophizing what will happen if you make these decisions that hold us back ultimately. And when you really are able to be still, you can understand that the risk perhaps is not as great as you might suppose. One of the quotes that hit me- But terrifying, in the same way, you feel like your life is being threatened. Well, it's clear that like we have strong impulses, so we don't like jump off cliffs and die. Like we have that fight or flight, life or death reflex. The problem is we apply it to scenarios that are not nearly so, so dangerous. And there's a quote from Mark Shields that I really love. Well, we're like, well, what if? What will I do if? Like what happens if? And he's just basically like you'll meet it with the same weapons that you've met every problem in your entire life. Like you would, like we think about it's like, "Well, I don't wanna get fired," but like if you quit, you wouldn't be like, "What am I gonna do?" Like one is in power and one is disempowering. But it's the same thing. And so, I think we often underestimate or undersell like what we bring to the table. Like you'll figure it out. You'll figure it out. You might fail. But our inclination is to wanna know all the steps to get there ahead of time, which obviously, keeps us in fear and paralyzed. So, you talk about that. And that's a very stoic thing. Like the path will be revealed as you take the step. Fortune favors the bold or the brave. And you have to move forward. That courage is in action. It is an active verb. It is a practice. And it is in the doing that you cultivate more of it. And in the doing that the next step will be revealed to you when you need to see it or hear it. Well, and you can't keep your powder dry forever. And also, what would the world look like if everyone was operating under this sort of like, well, I'll wait and see logic? Like I think that's really a problem. It's like somebody has to go over the top of the trench. Like somebody has to do it. And it's not a fun job. But like if everyone's like, we'll all be the same, like all all come in and clean up after, that it never happens. And I think this is really where we struggle. Like we have so many issues. I don't even think it was put, but we have so many issues as a society that we have to deal with. Climate change, income inequality, like homelessness, like the housing crisis, which is related to homes. We have like so many like intractable, difficult problems that whoever solves would be doing society a good service, but will probably, I don't wanna say it's a kamikaze mission, but it will eat up all your political capital, right? And so, people are like, "Well, if I eat up all my political capital, then I can't run for president, or then I can't do this." And so, it's sort of like, well, what did you get in to politics for exactly? Or what did you get into business for? What did you acquire this money fortune platform for, if not to apply it towards problems that need solutions? And so, I think we just we need, to me, that's a really important question. And I think it's Hillel. It's like if not me, then who? If not now, than when? Like if everyone just listened to all the reasons not to do it or looked at why the odds were impossible, we would never have progress or change or breakthroughs. Sure. So, when you yolk courage to service towards something greater than yourself, that's really where heroism comes in, right? Yeah. This idea, I mean, I just got this book yesterday. So, I did my best to read the whole thing. I got to page 190, which is like right where the heroism chapter starts. But my intuition is that heroism is courage, basically when it's about something greater than one's individual kind of aspirations or it's called serving. It's courage plus. It's like courage when you're not gonna be the recipient of the benefits, right? Like selflessness. And again, it's not always like throwing yourself on a grenade. It can be like, hey, I'm gonna like reduce my margins to pay my workers a fair wage. I could easily get away with doing it in China in a weaker sweatshop concentration camp. But that's not the right thing to do, so I'm gonna take the hit on that. That's hard. That's really hard. And I think we saw during the pandemic. But if I don't do this, sure, I'll be a vector for the virus, but that's bad for business. Is there a tension between like staying in business and the right thing? Of course. But can you on at least a regular basis, choose people over profits? Like I talk about Reed Hastings, the courageous decision to jettison the DVD business to- Netflix. Yeah, to become a streaming company. Immensely courageous. Then you have the streaming company. And Hasan Minhaj has an episode about the killing of dissidents in Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia says take this down. And you're like, okay. Like what good is having a company worth a trillion dollars if you can't stand up for people who get sliced into tiny pieces? Yeah, I had this conversation with with Bryan Fogel, who directed "The Dissident," and his struggle to get his incredible documentary platformed on any of these streaming services. And none of them would touch it for that very reason. Even Amazon, where Bezos has no love lost for the prince. I mean, it was his employee. Right. Yeah. So, still wouldn't take the movie because they're protecting their base. Because broadening their subscriptions worldwide is more important than somebody's movie, no matter how good it is. Right. But is it worth the risk. I mean, Bezos would say, "Well, that's just not a risk worth. Like, why should I? It's just one movie in my massive enterprise.' Right. No. No. And that's how we excuse moments of cowardice. We always have our reasons. And I don't mean to judge them specifically, because to me, what you take from that is like, well, where am I doing this in my own life? That's where we should take from this. But sometimes we use these examples as a way of sort of producing clarity that we can't see in our own lives. But again, what the hell is the point of being the richest person in the world if you can't flex occasionally over what's obviously the right thing? Again, we always have reasons why it's not the right thing. "But then I can't do this, this, or that," but it's usually rooted in I don't wanna put up with the consequence. Like I don't want the flak. I mean, he would say it isn't even a function of courage. It's just a risk analysis. Yeah. But at the core of it, what is being risked? Right? It's not you're going out of business. It's like a slight decrease in profits or it's a bunch of controversy or it's a giant pain in the ass, right? Like what we're actually, this is why we have to really get into what we're afraid of. Like, oh, it's a risk analysis, but what are you risking? Like the risk is nothing. And if you can't, if not you, then who? If you can't afford to risk it, like how can anyone afford to risk anything ever? Yeah, because you of all people need to lead the way for the rest of us. And so, throughout all of your books, you're always very careful to kind of avoid current examples, because you want these things to stand the test of time, et cetera. But casting your glaze on like our current moment, you mentioned Kaepernick then the men, like who do you look at or see out in the world and say that person is acting courageously or that person is acting heroically? Yeah, I mean, I think obviously, we have a whole bunch of heroes who've done, I mean, even you look at like the 12 or 13 service members who just died in Afghanistan. Like they knew that wasn't fun. They signed up for it, but they went into those crowds to do one of the largest evacuations and rescue operations in human history. I mean, like more than 100,000 people were airlifted out in a matter of days, but at immense risk to the people on the ground, right? And so, when I think we think about heroism specifically, it's people who like literally are putting their ass on the line. To me, that's the stuff that we study those not, to be like, oh, you have to enlist, but to be like again, if they can, if some 22-year-old woman like private in the Marines can walk into a crowd filled with potential suicide bombers to rescue women and children, like you're telling me you can't speak up about something you saw or you can't you can't put aside a salary to start your own business is too scary or like you can't get up in front of a crowd and talk. Or to see Afghan women in Afghanistan right now in Kabul amidst the chaos of the Taliban occupation, continuing to speak out. I mean, the amount of risk, like real risk that they're taking to do that is just unbelievable. Yeah. Or yeah, any time you're putting your wellbeing second to something bigger than yourself, that's like what gets me going. One of the minor examples I have in the book, I sort of throw it, but it's stuck with me since I heard about it, is like the decision of like CVS to stop carrying cigarets or like Chipotle can make more money with crappy ingredients in their food. Like when a business decides to be like, hey, and look, is there a certain amount of marketing to it? Sure. But like, hey, like our commitment to quality or ethics or our people is more important than like bringing profits out of this part of the business. I mean, Patagonia is a great example of that as well. Totally. I love that stuff. Yeah. And ultimately, it ends up being very much in their self-interest. It usually is, yes. Like in a very outweighed manner. That the irony is that like doing it the shitty conventional way is also boring and not particularly inspiring or cool. And so, like the decision to do the like to make art that everyone else is making is safer, but it's also like probably the least likely to be successful. So, going out there. Like getting out on a limb, like taking a risk is usually in your self-interest. So, if you have to drill down like the core concepts that you want people to take away from this book, what does that look like? Well, I like the distinction between like being scared and being afraid. Being scared is the immediate reaction. Being afraid is the rationalization or the thing you refuse to do because of that fear. There's a story I tell in the book about Theodore Roosevelt and the decision to invite Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the White House. And he talks about how because he hesitated, like because he thought for a second, like what will this mean, is like why he needed to do it. Steven Pressfield talks about how like resistance is connected to like how important it is. And so, if you're not feeling, that's probably a sign you're like playing it really safe. But what's really what's interesting about Roosevelt is his will to greatness was not, I mean, the Washington example is sort of standalone, but in the context of his presidency, he wasn't a president that faced dire circumstances that compelled him to kind of overcome or rise to the occasion. Like he willed it out of whole cloth during a period of relative serenity and calm, which makes it, to me, like even a more extraordinary capacity for like what he's about. Although the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, "Leadership: In Turbulent Times" is a great book, and she really focuses on the crises of his presidency that I didn't quite know about. I mean, he wins a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace between Russia and Japan, which I didn't really know about. He negotiates like a major strike between the coal mines and the coal workers. He faces down like massive corporate interests in the trust-busting stuff. So, it's interesting like, yeah, we often think like courage is like, hey, we're invaded or- Right, it's grown out of like some circumstance beyond your control compels it. I think it's also, though, like the courage to like not kick the can down the road. Like the courage to be like, "Oh, I'm gonna deal with this problem. It's not the sexiest problem, it's not the most glamorous problem, but like I'm gonna deal with it." Like to me- Yeah, that's another thing in the book, too, like owning it, like not shirking responsibility and like understanding that the buck stops with you and kind of being that guy. To me, that's like the impressive thing with Biden in Afghanistan. And I don't know enough to know whether he executed the withdrawal as well as it could be done. I don't think any of us do. And I don't think we'll know yet. It doesn't appear that it was executed very well. It does not, but, again, who knows? Right? But I think you can put that to the side and go like this dude gambled his presidency to end a thing that should have been ended a long time ago. Knowing it would be very unpopular and not without its consequences. That's right. And the thing that each one of his predecessors bore a far higher share of the blame and the responsibility for the poor execution. And so, to be like, I'm gonna own this. Like I thought a lot about George Marshall when I was writing the book, and I used your dad's book as a source. But his famous thing was like, "We're not gonna fight the problem. We're gonna decide it. Like we're just gonna do something about this. We're not gonna let it be somebody else's problem." That's what leaders have to have the courage to do. Because, again, if you're not, just don't be a leader. Like I mean, if you're like, "Hey, I'm not the kind of person who likes to deal with unpopular or difficult problems," that's totally understandable. You're not a good fit for being in charge, though. (Rich laughs) Like you know what I mean? No judgment, but it's like if you're like, "I don't like getting up in front of audiences," okay, don't be an actor or a public speaker. Those are bad jobs for you. You don't have to face everything, but don't pick a job in which success is entirely dependent on the things you don't like to do. Right. But also, courage is bred through repetition and practice. So, putting yourselves in those uncomfortable situations is the opportunity to grow, which is what we're all here to do. So, if there is a call to action out of this book, it is to understand that you can cultivate this by taking those tiny steps where the stakes are lower to habituate yourself to this type of behavior. It's like how do you think they got good at it? It's by doing it. By not- Yeah, I mean, the example is always like Laird Hamilton doesn't drop down on a 50-foot wave like on day one. He walks up to it over decades. Right. Right. And it takes courage to tackle it in a small way. But the nice part is that the momentum also builds courage. I love how you and my dad have this like relationship outside of me. (laughs) And one of the things that you guys are kind of united on or bond on is this whole thing about like statues. Oh, yeah. Like my dad is all about like getting this martial statue in the Capitol. It's like it's not going anywhere. Oh, it's not happening? I don't think it's gonna happen. But to me, that's a big part of it, because, and I did a piece we talked about responsibility earlier. I was talking about I wrote a piece for "The Economist" about how we need a statue of responsibility. But like who we celebrate as our heroes is really important. Like who we put up on display says a lot about who we are. And it also, I think, has a big impact on who we're going to be. So, does our sort of lingering racism and racial issues, is that partly rooted that a good chunk of the United States has on its public property celebrations of like people who were instrumental in defending and propagating those ideas? I do. I think they're related. Conversely, like is our inability to celebrate unifying figures whose courage is not in dispute and who did fight more often than not for just causes. Is that also holding us back, preventing us from. Is it preventing ample inspiration? Like I think about like who do I want my kids to like walk down the street and see me like, "Oh, that's so-and-so." Like that's a great a Longfellow's is the lives of all great men remind us we can make our lives sublime. I love the idea of like, who are we celebrating? Like, who are our heroes? And I think obviously sort of metal or bronze or marble is like a way to do that. Conversely, like who are villains? They should not be not be celebrated. Yeah, but the way that we define those is very much in flux right now. I mean, certainly, on the one hand, we have people who are defending these statues of Confederate heroes, et cetera. On the other hand, we have people who are calling for schools to change their name from Abraham Lincoln. And like the battle that my dad has been waging over the Marshall thing is that like Marshall was kind of a racist. Because he was a man of that era. And so, to what extent do we consider people in the context of their time and celebrate the great things that they did? And when do we need to pay attention to things that we have for too long, kind of persisted in our blind spots over? Well on the Confederate monument front, which I thought a lot about, and as someone who's fascinated by the Civil War, one of the things I've explained that like meetings and events and stuff, is like you're saying you don't wanna deny or forget history. The history is important. And I go, I agree. And this statue is not history. This statue is a lie about history, right? There's a Confederate monument down the street from my bookstore in my office that looks like it is coming down. But- Is that the one you put all this money behind? I did, yeah. The campaign to get it torn down. And it looks like it'll work. It looks like it's gonna happen, but you never know. But like that statue was put up in 1910. Not by grieving widows and orphans of veterans of the Civil War. By the way, in Bastrop County, it was one of the few counties in Texas to vote against secession. But like that statue was put up like two generations after the war by people who wanted to deny what the war was about. It was a piece of propaganda. It was a giant middle finger to the federal government, basically. It was done over the objections, naturally, of the black citizens of the county, of course, although it used their money. But it was an attempt to tell a false narrative about history. So, removing it is not erasing history. It is allowing the actual history to exist, right? Like the lost cause, as we call it, is not like a version of history. It is propaganda. It's a denial. It's an attempt to misinform about the worst thing that Americans have ever done to each other. It's like, hey, remember when we tried to destroy the country and 600,000 people died because we were not just fighting to defend slavery, but we were fighting for our right to expand and extend the institution of slavery. The statue was put up generations later to pretend that wasn't the case. Right. I got it. And so, as we insist on like not just the removal of them, but the putting up of a monument to like where lynchings have happened or signs about what actually happened, we're actually doing the important thing. We go to wisdom. We're having the courage to face the uncomfortable, unpleasant, painful, disturbing, ugly truths of history. And we have to have the courage to do that. I saw a great meme the other day. It was like if history, like studying history should make you uncomfortable. It should make you sad. It should make you scared. It should make you embarrassed. And if the history you're studying does not make you feel that, you're probably not studying history. Right, you're studying some propagandized version of history. You're being told that you wanna hear. Yeah. So, you know how Tim Ferriss always asks his guests, like if you had a billboard up, like what would you say on the billboard? Maybe the question for you is, if you had the opportunity to erect a monument in the nation's capital, like who would that monument be to or what would be the saying on it? Well, that's my thing. I've talked about New Orleans a lot, where I lived and I wrote my first book. So, they take down this giant statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Circle. The big monument in the entrance of the French Quarter. Well, that was like three years ago, I think four years ago they did this. And it's like still stands just like a 90-foot column in the air. There's nothing there. And it's like how many amazing contributions to American culture and world culture. Yeah, you can't put a statue of Louis Armstrong there or like I'd rather see a statue of Lil Wayne there than nothing. So, like we should be able to decide like who we wanna celebrate. I think if I had to put something, I mean, I like what I was just writing about was like we have the Statue of Liberty in the East Coast. And I think what the last year has showed us is that we don't really have a liberty problem in this country. If anything, we've got perhaps too much liberty. Because people think liberty is like now you can own 15 assault rifles and not wear a mask or whatever, right? Well, I think we have liberty is an issue and it's important that we celebrate it and that it be monumentized in world's eyes. But the idea in this, Viktor Frankl actually suggests it in "Man's Search for Meaning," that the Statue of Liberty be counterbalanced in San Francisco with a statue of responsibility. And so, if I could use my powers or get people to think about anything, it would be that. Yeah. And what would that statue look like? I don't know. Actually, Stephen Covey is supposedly put up a good chunk of the money to explore like some designs. And it's like a statue of two arms. It's like a 90-foot statue of two arms locking like this, which I like. I like the image of that. But I don't know, it strikes me as not iconic as the Statue of Liberty. Actually, the funny thing is, the reason I decided to write the piece is that I was reading a book to my kids. Dave Eggers wrote a children's book called "Her Right Foot" about the Statue of Liberty. And did you know that actually like her feet, like have you ever looked at the Statue of Liberty's feet? Probably, but I can't recall. So, one of them, they're raised. Like she's walking. She's not standing. Like when you walk in New York City and you see like the characters, they're like, that's not what she's doing. She's walking out into the harbor. You can't see her legs because they're obscured by the robes, but she's taking a step forward. That kind of changes everything. Yes, she's not only is she welcoming people into the thing, although the poem comes slightly after as actually part of the crowdfunding campaign, but like the I think the idea is also that liberty is on the move, right? Like liberty, it's facing the Atlantic Ocean, right? Like out into the world. So, I like the idea of I think the best statues are of people. Although, there's some amazing statues in America, monuments that are not people. But I would like it to be some sort of embodiment of a physical form of a human. Well, if you're interested in the nation's various monuments and you like looking at graves in cemeteries, you should follow Ryan on Instagram, because it's a never-ending tour of that. Every time you go out for a run, you never miss a moment to stop, take a picture of whatever monument you come across and- But that's primarily because my wife hates doing that. And so- (laughs) I can see how she goes like, "Really?" When you're driving cross country, do you have to pull over every time you see something like that? Yeah. So, like if we get into a new city, my thing is like I'm gonna go for a run. I'm gonna look at all those things, cross them off the list, have the little moment with them. Do you keep a list? No, I just often I'm like, oh, the big thing in this city is this thing. I wanna see that. And then I don't have to drag the whole family to it. (laughs) You truly are, I've said this before, but you truly are a man out of time. I would very much agree with that. You really you are a member of the great generation at its very like least modern age. Perhaps like, you would have been well-suited to have been born in 1904 or something. Although 1904, then your Spanish flu and both world wars. Yeah. And the Cold War. But in terms of a shared sensibility. I do. Well, I think what's shared is this, I think I actually think those are timeless things, and it's part of our problem is that we think we're either past certain things or like we look back. Like I think I say this in the intro of the book, is like part of the problem with virtue is that we see it as like traditional or old-fashioned. And it's like if it's three or 4000 years old, it's not old-fashioned. It just is. Like it's part of who we are. It's not like dated. It's dateless. Right, but as post-modern as we feel like we've surpassed it or that not only is it old-fashioned, it's anachronistic. We're living in a deeper time of enlightenment, where we can't be bothered with something as archaic as that. Well, I think we struggle with as we have knocked all those things down, we then were like, "Nothing feels meaningful." Like I think we are the victims of that. We are reaping the consequences of like what happens when you tear everything down and you replace it with nothing. And I think that is one of your copious powers. I mean, you're a great writer, you're a prolific writer, but to me, you're like a living reminder, as a young person, that these things are important. And your role or your responsibility as kind of this change agent is to remind people that these things matter. Yeah, I feel like my strength is that I can talk about them in a way that makes them feel not old-fashioned and also makes them feel accessible. That's like the trip that I feel like I'm on. It's like if you call me a popularizer, you're not hurting my feelings. That's like you just told me I was successful. (laughs) The guy who popularized Stoicism. There's worse crimes to be accused of. You shared the last time you were here, like you were telling Jordan Harbinger about your new book, and he was like, oh, is this the one where you use examples from history and ancient philosophy to explain truths? (laughs) Yeah, it's kind of my jam, man. (laughs) But it will never go out of style. Hopefully not. Hopefully not. I mean, we'll be in trouble. Solzhenitsyn said isn't the first sign of the end, a decline in courage? And I think decline in virtue is the prolog of the collapse of not just empires, but like all movements and moments. So, it's heady, it's important. Yeah, I mean, the stakes are, I think the stakes are high. Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. It's an honor as always. Appreciate your wisdom and your perspective on everything. And I'm at your service. So, if there's anything I can do to help you, please reach out. And you're always welcome on this podcast. Thank you. I appreciate it. If you wanna reach out and connect with Ryan, you're easy to find, @RyanHoliday everywhere. We didn't even talk about your burgeoning YouTube empire that you're creating. Ryan's gotten very good at talking to camera and offering advice and wisdom. It's definitely a must follow. So, find him on YouTube. You can find him at The Daily Stoic also. Yeah, dailystoic.com and @DailyStoic is where it is everywhere. Which is his robust community on all things Stoicism. And of course, pick up the new book, "Courage Is Calling," available everywhere. And of course, if you find yourself in Texas, show up uninvited at The Painted Porch Bookstore. And I'll pretend to be busy. (laughs) And he may be available, but probably not. All right. Cool, man. Thanks, dude. Peace. Nice. (gentle music)

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 74,002

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition, stoicism, stoic philosophy, ryan holiday, courage is calling ryan holiday, virtue, how to overcome fear, talk show, marcus aurelius quotes, marcus aurelius stoicism

Id: ALXDNVVtsOQ

Length: 122min 39sec (7359 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021