"Andrew Tate Is Not A Good Man!" - Why Men Should Admire Marcus Aurelius Instead | Ryan Holiday

my heart absolutely aches for all the people out there that feel lost and inadequate people try to look good on Instagram They Don't Really worry about who they actually are I want to compare and contrast to two people okay uh one being Andrew Tate where many people considered the Pinnacle of modern masculinity the other being Marcus Aurelius known as the last of the five Great Emperors of Rome who should people be looking up to and most important why I think it's hard to be a man in the world these days where as we have corrected you know mistakes of the past some of the things that sort of would have been reassuring or purposeful or even just Mooring like tie you to who you are and why you're here for men has gone away right less people go to church than ever before less people work at the same job their whole life than ever before you know all these things that would explain who you were how you should be why you mattered those have fallen away and so I don't I'm not surprised by the fact that from that sort of emptiness or vacuum people would be attracted to someone who both tells them what they want to hear and sort of sets down kind of an aspirational model where yeah you're good with women you're financially successful you seemingly emanate power and confidence I get why all that's attractive but I find him to be repulsive wow well I mean first off he's a sex trafficker and uh what if he was proven innocent because I I would love to set that aside because if he is that and God knows some of the things I've seen make it seem like it probably it's it's dark no matter what and it may be just unbearably heinous but I I want to address the part that made people like go to him because I think that that will break the spell if it ends up being true I think he'll just disappear yeah but prior to that there was the sense of strong could fight very articulate tons of money um seem to be the kind of guy that people wanted to be around so I'm using him as a stand-in for hyper masculinity or the the modern model yeah and I think you make a good point let's say perhaps he's innocent it still doesn't change the fact that the business model from which his wealth has been derived is about uh the sort of a modern form of prostitution or pimping right like this is I don't think this is the the Stokes don't have any problem with making money right being financially successful Seneca says uh what does it matter if the philosopher is rich in so far is that his money is not stained by Blood right and so I think it's great to be successful to make money I think how how you made that money is more important than how much you have or don't have right so I find I find the Enterprise to be uh repulsive let's let's I just want to stipulate that but if we're sort of contrasting some of the sort of hyper masculinity manosphere red pill kind of maleness with uh some of the ideals in stoicism I think that's a fascinating contrast because there was actually a recent maybe it was the American Psychological Institute or there were some medical uh institution that was sort of laying out what they thought the primary attributes of toxic masculinity were and one of them is stoicism like they're laying out stoicism as in non-emotional as in unemotional invulnerable sort of suppressive which I think is obviously a fundamental misreading of stoicism but but I do think the the contrast between those two things is interesting there's like maybe what people call would call lowercase stoicism and uppercase dose and I'm obviously interested in in the sort of the actual philosophy of Doses and the Market's a realist version of stoicism it's interesting you you pointed them out as one of the five Great Emperors actually the the historical term there is he's the last of the five good Emperors which which I think is an important distinction because he is great I mean you don't become the most powerful man in the world without some form of greatness there you don't stay the most powerful man but he was just appointed so you definitely you could his son for the love of God was a tyrant psychopath but what's interesting about Marcus is how he gets there right but pointing out that great and good are not the same thing and then a lot of people aspire to be great uh but don't really care if they're good in the process and I think to me what's truly impressive what true greatness is is both it involves both being Talent and masterful and powerful and successful but also fundamentally decent and generous and honest and fair and uh kind of all these other attributes that can sometimes get lost in a Cutthroat ambitious real world scenario right but Marcus's story is so interesting because he's more than just appointed right so what's so fascinating about the five good Emperors is basically for five consecutive Emperors there is no male Heir I think we all agree a hereditary monarchy is not a great system it doesn't tend to create good leaders so why do you have five in a row it's because the emperor was not simply naming his eldest son his successor so what happens is Hadrian who is two Emperors before Marcus is without a son he's probably gay you know sort of an eccentric interesting guy he's a pretty good Emperor he's flawed in a lot of ways but he's a good Emperor right no one would say he's a great a good man but he was a he was a great emperor and he's starting to look around who's going to succeed me and he looks at this boy marks realist is is pretty young then he doesn't come they're not related anyway but he is from a prestigious Roman family and there's something about this kid that strikes Hadrian he nicknames him uh verismus or the truthful one so he has some fundamental honesty or decency to him that makes Hadrian think like this kid has potential he's smart he's philosophically inclined quite early doesn't want to be Emperor right which is I think also a positive sign in a leader like the leader that wants the power the most is the one you have to be the most worried about so Hadrian decides hey there's something in this kid but he also knows that the worst thing you could possibly do is make a kid a king you know and so he has to set in motion some training program that would make this kid a great emperor and so he realizes he needs like a stop Gap he needs like a placeholder before Marcus is ready and Marcus not having a male relative who could do this Hadrian settles on this guy named antoninus who's the most powerful politician in Rome at that time who's sort of worked his way up through the ranks honest decent good and Hadrian's considering maybe he's the successor and he the story is that he notices one day uh antoninus helping his stepfather his elderly stepfather up a flight of stairs no one's watching and he just sees this moment of kindness or goodness in a person who is otherwise a very talented ambitious powerful politician so what Hadrian does is he names antoninus his successor in exchange antoninus has to name Marcus Aurelius his successor and so Hadrian probably thinks Marcus will reign for that antoninus will reign for three or four years or ten years right life expectancy there is not super long and antoninus ends up ruling for like two decades and he and Marcus have this incredible relationship where he seems to actively be interested in teaching Marcus and modeling good behavior for Marcus and Marcus in turn doesn't see this adopted stepfather as arrival in any way as an impediment in any way but has someone to learn from someone to model himself on and so for 20 odd years antoninus leads while preparing this kid to to succeed him and that's what ultimately ends up happening and I think a testament to antoninus's uh tutoring and to Marcus's learning and inherent decency the first thing Marcus does when he becomes Emperor is he names his step-brother co-emperer right so the first thing he does with absolute power is give part of it away which is you know unprecedented in the annals of history and so all of this is to say what makes Marcus great is not just that he's a great leader he's a great military campaigner that he's smart that he's good at communicating that he knows how to broker you know compromises but that sort of fundamentally there is a decency there a goodness there a a sense of community-mindedness in it and meditations he talks about the common good 40 or 50 times right like what what what's in Marcus that makes Marcus I think a worthy model for young men and for young women is that you know he's not corrupted by the power that he has he doesn't feel the need to prove anything to anyone he has this sense this inner code that he's trying to live by and he wants to be great but he he doesn't necessarily want to do it through the piling up of wealth or honors or accomplishments but by you know making a positive difference in the world all right what I want to talk about is that inner code so what I find interesting about this whole setup is all right so uh I don't know a lot about Andrew Tate but it does seem like he had quite a dysfunctional relationship with his father Yes fatherlessness is tied to a lot of bad outcomes part of the question because and that's for boys and girls part of the question becomes why what's that Dynamic but what what I find interesting in life if if it's all predetermined and you either are just born a good person and you're going to be fine or you're born a sociopath and nothing that happens to you is going to make any difference legitimately close my company quit because the whole point what's the point yeah yeah for me literally it's called impact Theory because I really believe that there are a set of ideas that you can give to people and if they deploy those ideas it will make their life better and so all I am trying to do is actually articulate these ideas now they get extremely complicated you and I were talking before we started rolling for me this is really gone in three phases and that's kind of how I want to walk through this today so phase number one for me was the inner code so I needed to build a belief system and that was the beginning of my show was just that I was just trying to help people Cobble together what I called mindset if you get the right mindset which I now probably refer to as frame of reference so you build a frame of reference intentionally most people do it completely on accident yeah but I would want them to take control of that process so you're building a frame of reference from beliefs and values what is what do I choose to believe is and then what ought to be yeah then once you have that you go into phase two which is deploying it in your immediate life so I'm going to deploy it in my relationships in my career and my personal finances I'm sure a lot of the things because honestly I came to stoicism not by reading stoicism but by going what works yeah sure and so you end up and then you hear it for the first time you're like whoa like this is exactly the kind of thing that I've been steering myself towards and then phase three becomes what I'll shorthand to the reality Distortion field portion of your life you get to the point where okay I've I've built the right lens through which to view the world and myself I've deployed it in my immediate region and now I want to see how much I can really push this out into the world now originally I would have thought of it as creating the world that you want but as the modern world ratchets up and throws more Temptations more ease at people I find that a lot of what I think about is knowing what to resist what not to do what to turn away from so walk me through what what is that inner code that somebody who's aiming at the the I'm going to call the the ease of Tate right get rich quick uh fast and flashy not necessarily about long-term relationships and then comparing to somebody like Marcus Aurelius that's really about self-denial anchoring not giving into Power I remember I I I understand that position very well because I wasn't wasn't that long ago that I was there I remember I was 19 years old someone had recommended that I read Marcus aurelius's meditations I was sitting in my college apartment it arrived in the mail I went and I got it and I sat down and I read it and here you have the thoughts of the most powerful man in the world sort of explaining like his code how a person should be what a person should do what greatness was what goodness was what virtue was and I remember being struck so much by the this sense that like no one had ever talked to me this way before my dad hadn't talked to me about this way I hadn't really heard that in church or in school or on TV you know there there is this sense I think that like kids will just figure it out people just figure it out or that you know it's obvious and it's not obvious people need guidance they need structure they need advice like it's it's absurd that you would just expect them to figure this stuff out by trial and error because you can end up going down these blind hours it could take you years to find out that hey this trait you picked up this way of living isn't actually the right one or isn't working for you it's not as meaningful as you think it was so what so struck me about the Stokes was that it answered this same question that I think people are feeling like the Andrew Tates or random YouTubers or tick-tockers are are answering which is like how should I be like what is the good life right what do I need to do in the world to get ahead or how do I prevent myself from being taken advantage of or being weak or or failing right like how do I deal with this hole that I have inside me and I think it's a shame that we don't think of philosophy as a way to address those existential questions because that's fundamentally what philosophy was from the very beginning today we think of philosophers as like somebody who works in the philosophy department at Harvard or we think of some unpronounceable German name but you know Socrates is walking around trying to answer the questions about knowledge and wisdom and insight and goodness uh diogenes you know famously walks around with his Lantern and he's he says show me a good man he's looking for for for that kind of person the founding of stoicism Xeno is this successful young Merchant he inherits the family business suffers a shipwreck he washes up on in on Shore in Athens having lost everything and he walks into this bookstore and the Bookseller is reading the works of Socrates right one of the dialogues of Socrates and he says he walks up to the Bookseller and he goes where can I find a man like that and the FL and the Bookseller points to this this uh cynic philosopher named crates and that sets Zeno on this mission right he's lost everything he doesn't know where to go he doesn't know what to do and philosophy is that light it is that North Star and so I really put a point on that for a second because as I was researching for this episode I took a whole bunch of sort of Journal style notes on the idea of philosophy yeah so I think that we all have a god-shaped hole in US yes and it has been I I'm not even sure how to categorize what's happened to religion because in some ways we're like becoming more religious but in other ways it really does feel somewhat empty and it feels like there's a huge fragmentation and so there is no one galvanizing sense of who you ought to be and what you ought to become and religion is political now as opposed to a guide To Living in the world which is what it was supposed to be you know uh 2000 years ago you think of the Ten Commandments right it's like do this don't do this right um and and philosophy and religion were intertwined right aren't they one and the same it's just one is backed up by a deity and one is not I mean what I what I mean this more literally like uh Paul is known as Paul of Tarsus Saint Paul is was known before he becomes Saint Paul's Paul of Tarsus and Tarsus is the center of stoic philosophy it leaves Athens and it goes to Tarsus and he studies stoic philosophy right and and uh Christianity absorbs a bunch of the ideas from stoic philosophy which I think because I lost the threat a little bit but like you said what is the code right what is the code for living that philosophy teaches us well so we're we're back with Zeno he's been on the Shipwreck the reason that I wanted to really drill that point home is so I started this by saying my heart bleeds for the people that feel lost and inadequate yeah and why does my heart believe from them because I've been there I know intimately what that's like um for me I found taoism and then business forced me into something probably more like stoicism but you when you begin to create a category of thought in your mind about how things ought to be how you ought to be and you start steering towards that then you can create meaning and purpose in your life yes and so now all of a sudden and I mean look this is a straight uh quote from the stoics you can't control what happens to you but you can control how you react yes and so that's what's so fascinating about that moment is you've got this guy that had everything loses it in a shipwreck and whether it's apocryphal or not like he's I'd imagine dripping wet as he walks into the bookstore you know and is like how do I reconceptualize of my life now yeah it's the moment in Fight Club when his apartment gets blown up and he loses every and he's having to look at life with new eyes for the first time and Xeno would would say later he would joke he says you know I lose everything he says I made a great 4 Fortune when I suffered a shipwreck because he lost everything financially he lost everything as far as his identity goes his work his his sort of family's Legacy and what he finds his philosophy he finds this code of living and Zeno is the first of the stoic philosophers to articulate the four virtues which stoicism is built around courage self-discipline Justice and wisdom which also any Christian would recognize as the cardinal virtues so stoicism and Christianity share the same underlying operating system if you will one says that God gave it to us and maybe the Stokes would say it's from the gods or they would say it's from you know our ruling reason our rational sense I I think it doesn't really matter what matters is that those are four traits for Bedrock values that you can build a great and a good life around out courage self-discipline Justice and wisdom every situation good or bad in life every moment big or small one or all of those virtues is appropriate is demanded right everything The Stokes would say is an opportunity to practice one of those virtues so you know famously uh when Marcus really is talking about how the obstacle is the way he's not saying that hey this shipwreck is awesome he's saying that this shipwreck is an opportunity to practice one or more of the stoic virtues this betrayal by your business partner is an opportunity to practice uh one or more of these four stoic virtues right this loss of a family member this horrible warrior in the middle of right also this incredible success you've just become the emperor of Rome courage self-discipline Justice wisdom all of that and more is demanded of you and so like the stoicism isn't a list of Commandments do this don't do that but it is these sort of four Bedrock values which you're supposed to build your life life and your decisions and your individual actions around and towards you can unlock ad-free videos downloads and background play with YouTube premium I am a psycho for this I use this all the time I cannot recommend it highly enough with YouTube premium there's nothing getting in between you and your favorite channels you won't have to wait for ads you can keep your videos going in the background and download them to watch anytime anywhere plus you also get premium access to the YouTube music app where you can play all the music you want ad-free offline and in the background get everything you love about YouTube with background play downloads and no ads try YouTube premium today click the link in the description if you click the link I may get a commission the thing that I find um so I don't believe in God but I so relate to the idea of that that sense of there is a hole in me and I need something to fill it and for me I think all of this whether it's religion whether it's philosophy what it's trying to get at is evolution has planted these drivers algorithms in your mind and there's just no escaping them and the reason there's no escaping them is they are the things that you have to do in order to survive long enough to have kids that have kids yeah and so the the Epitaph on my Tombstone ought to read you're having a biological experience and what I want people to understand is death is a biological it's a hundred percent yeah and whether uh God gave us evolution in the body whether this is all a simulation none of it matters sure what what it boils down to is the the way that you interface with life the way we interface with each other the most importantly the way we interface with ourselves is pre-programmed like you you are going to feel some kind of way you are going to be prone to love you were going to be prone to jealousy you are going to be prone to uh Envy Joy all of it like the The Human Experience as varied as it is is so narrow when you compare us to other animals and and what they go through and once people realize that and you realize okay there there is no way to escape certain pressures yeah and so now whatever philosophy that you have ought to align with the things that are going to make you I would say fulfilled yes so I'll round it to human flourishing right so to me uh something you've said and the note that I took even before we started is you need a North star there needs to be something that you're aiming at and so you know I hold up Andrew Tate and Marcus Aurelius as two potential North Stars as a bundle of ways of approaching the world of deciding what's a value of deciding what to believe but which one of those you choose one is going to be more aligned with the the algorithms that you already have running in your mind and thusly are going to lead you to a lot life of more fulfillment it's probably worth me defining what I mean by fulfillment so to me fulfillment is the only neurochemical state that is pleasant and can survive something like grief because Joy or happiness does not survive grief you cannot be joyful and grieving at the same time but I think curious to see if you agree with that yeah I think that you can be fulfilled and grieving at the same time so I think fulfillment has a recipe and that recipe is you must work really hard like that nature is going to ensure that you work really hard and that that is pleasurable and that you have a sense of disease if you don't because otherwise you're going to die in an evolutionary context so you must work really hard to gain a set of skills that you enjoy for whatever reason that allow you to serve not only yourself but the group yeah and so that recipe to me is everything the whether it's stoic whether it's taoism whether it's Christianity Islam whatever it's the the one that's going to win is going to be the one that most aligns you with the things that make you feel grounded like you have meaning and purpose you feel secure and worthwhile all the things that I lament for people that feel lost and inadequate what's interesting how Timeless this discussion we're having is I mean Marcus would have recognized it himself right um in meditations Marx surrealist talks quite a bit about the other Emperors who come before him right this is an elite club he's in some are more famous than others but you know he talks a lot about Alexander the Great right who was sort of the historical model for manliness and greatness and success and ambition is the greatest conqueror that ever lived you know one of the great military Minds how far before Aurelius was he Alexander the Great dies not long before Zeno makes his way to Athens so it's a long time and we're talking 500 years or so it's interesting how we we sent we tend to think like the ancient world is so compressed Mark surilis quotes poets in meditations that were further away from his time than Shakespeare is from ours whoa so this goes back this is a long tradition and and the debates about greatness uh and ambition and power it's there you know the Xerxes the Persian king who wanted to conquer the world Alexander the Great who does conquer the world you know Alexander the Great he is this great brilliant conqueror and you know he makes it to the end of the Earth and his men finally Rebel like we want to go home we've been doing this for you know 20 years and he says what are you gonna he's like are you gonna go home and let it be said that you left Alexander the Great alone to finish conquering and they they were like yeah and and there's some argument that his men killed him um but Marcus Aurelius tries to talk to himself in meditation you can't compare yourself against this guy he goes he's like it's important that you remember that Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and they were both buried in the same earth right that death is this great equalizer that you don't get to take these accomplishments with you and so to be insatiable in life is really a kind of an emptiness kind of a torture that that doesn't pay off the way that you think it does right and and so in the ancient world they were constantly looking at these figures and there's this famous exchange I mentioned diogenes earlier diogenes is this great philosopher sort of a predecessor of the Stokes and he meets Alexander the Great Alexander the Great's a big fan he's a he's a student of philosophy himself and uh you know he comes across uh Alexander Alexander comes across diogenes who's you know like laying by the side of the road just sunning himself and Alexander the Great sort of walks over him and he says um hi I am Alexander the Great you know what can I do for you thinking that you know he can bestow favors on this man and impress him and and diogenes looks at him and he says you can stop blocking my son and the idea that the contrast the reason the Angels would tell this story was was to say that actually diogenes is greater than Alexander the Great because diogenes is self-sufficient diogenes has reduced his needs to zero diogenes doesn't need to prove anything to anyone um and he he had sort of taken a different path in life and I think there's probably a middle ground between these two that we want to embody but um you know Stephen pressfield right yeah Stephen pressfield uh writes a great novel about Alexander the Great called uh uh the virtues of War I think and there's a scene a fictional scene between Alexander and diogenes and he sort of renders another one of their meetings and I think it illustrates his tension you know Alexander the Great goes to diogenes and says I have conquered the world what have you ever done and diogeny says I have conquered the need to conquer the worlds right and so I think it's it's great to to be driven to try to do things but the Stokes would say are those things driving you or are you driving them right are what are you a slave to right who's actually in control of your life and so I think oftentimes the people that we hold up as heroes or that we admire if you actually get up close with them and you see that they're not as free as you think they are they're not as powerful as you think they are they're a slave to something or someone even if it's just like their over scheduled calendar and so you know what's beautiful about meditations is you have this immensely powerful man trying to get to the root of what it actually means to be powerful and I think he settles on the idea of being in command of yourself is actually a rarer thing than being in command of an army or an Empire or a you know a a great legacy or you know whatever whatever one is after in life okay so this idea of being a slave to the things that you're into that's one of the things that I worry about a lot with the modern world so you have uh porn beginning to skew people the idea that you could see more uh attractive naked women in a single session than most men would have seen in their entire lives sure uh is pretty crazy only fans which is a a whole thing I don't even know how to conceptualize with that that's when I had my head down and I was just working for her you know whatever two decades I look up and only fans is the thing that I don't necessarily I'm fully grappled with what that means drugs uh just food like there are so many things I mean you can get on a plane for 200 and travel basically anywhere you want right at any time like the it's wonderful how accessible and uh real real like technology and capitalism has made things but it also makes it hard to be self-contained to be self-sufficient to be in control of your life and not controlled by the endless urges and temptations and distractions and Pleasures that are out there are the pleasures bad well the Stokes would say that pleasure isn't bad per se but they would ask you know how do you feel the morning after right they would ask uh what what regrets come from it right what negative consequences come from it masonous Rufus is one of the great Stokes he's the teacher of Epictetus he says you know when you work hard on something it's painful but the pain passes quickly and The Virtue or the accomplishment remains but he says when you do something for pleasure the pleasure passes quickly but the shame remains and so when I think about the things that people do whether it's drugs or drink thinking or sexual stuff or or just any of the pleasures that we chase you know it's fun in the moment it's rewarding in the moment but the costs come later and and you can't separate those costs you can't you can't go I had an awesome time drinking last night without integrating the morning hangover into that cost benefit analysis but that's kind of the problem that we do right it's like you're eating whatever you want you're not exercising because it's hard well you don't see the consequences of that until you look in the mirror six months from now right and vice versa when you decide to work out and to eat clean and to push yourself and to be disciplined you know you don't see the benefits of that until later and and our inability to deal with that I think is big part of why we're not the people we want to be or the people that we can be I have a thesis yeah many people need to be chased by a lion and you know obviously as a metaphor in order to have their life focused take on meaning because then it you you have a thing to deal with you have a thing that provides that structure yeah and so when I look at the Modern landscape the thing that I really worry about is that there is no like you can in a modern context you can live in your parents basement until you're 35 and there's really no major consequence for that right and what do you think about that so like what do you make of something like only fans where when you know I've been married for 21 years I will often give relationship advice or have relationship guests on the show and one of the comments you will see in the thread is one person will be like oh I think you should listen to Tom's advice he's been married for 21 years then somebody else would be like yeah he got married 21 years ago there was no social media uh there was no swiping right like one you'll see a lot is women women would settle back then so I was like thanks guys yeah yeah you know and like what do you think about that what what is the thing that has broken that has left men spending inordinate amounts of money yeah on a woman they're never going to meet right who almost certainly is uh they're not actually talking to them you're talking to like probably a guy that's running their account all while and here's where my brain broke all while you could go get free porn yeah so this isn't just about masturbating like that there's free stuff that you could do you don't have to pay for what the like what's happening yeah I mean I don't think one thing broke I think a lot of things broke right and so what are those things well I mean first off yeah the the an unlimited amount of high definition pornography it's an incredible temptation to any lonely person right I get porn far more than I get only fans I mean at a certain point watching pornography is lonely and unrewarding because human beings desire and need Connection in relationships but if you have been Left Behind like we talk about people who've been left behind like workers right you're a factory worker and now uh that that job can be done cheaper in China or it requires way more education than you have you're left behind but I think a lot of people are left behind when all of a sudden the dating Market is so much more efficient right where um the competition is so much more uh severe right where people don't have to settle like you're saying because they have access to unlimited fish in the sea and so this means if you don't have your life together if you're you know not taking care of yourself if you don't have the emotional wherewithal and skills like I it's it's always been hard to be a person and to find your people right it I by that I mean friends and I mean potential spouse or life partner it's always been hard but then you know what we ask of people to day is so much greater we demand emotional awareness like I I've young kids the emotional awareness and the uh the load that I'm supposed to carry and the level of involvement I'm supposed to have in their lives is enormously bigger than my father had and incomprehensibly bigger one to two generations back right and then you think about the technological prowess that a person has to have you think about um how expensive things like it's just hard to be a person and so people are left behind and so if suddenly you can fool yourself into thinking that this beautiful adult actress or sex worker is into you that illusion is going to be more comfortable than facing the hard reality have you ever watched the the MTV show Catfish no you know what catfishing is right it's it's actually a really revealing show um about intentionally catfishing people no no the show is is people who think they're being catfished and then they come and help them investigate to see whether they are or not and I think it's actually a really revealing look into what it it's like to be one of these kinds of people in the world because these kind of in cells what are we talking about incel's a strong word but somebody who is struggling like struggling to find real people in real life right and invariably the person has fallen for someone that is not just out of their league but but obviously out of their league to everyone but them right it's like and so cognitive dissonance is a powerful force and so when this male or female model randomly slides into your DMs on social media and falls for you an unemployed person working in your parents you know living in your parents basement and they're really successful but they don't have a phone that works so that's why you can't FaceTime like they're not seeing what's obviously there because to see what is there would mean despair right to see that they have been wasting their life or that the world is unfair or unjust or you know much you know more difficult than they would like it to be that's a hard that's a hard truth to face and I think it's easier to turn to Illusions like falling in love with some you know random person who's tricking you and ultimately going to take money from you and and you know a lot of what's happening on adult websites or or only fans is just um a slightly more ruthless version of that same thing they're they're creating a parasocial relationship with someone um where you feel like it's a two-way street and it's fundamentally a one-way Street and uh you would rather live in those delusions than go to the gym go back to school go to therapy you know deal with the unfair or awful hand that life dealt you but it even if it is unfair even if it is is unjust it doesn't change the fact that that's what you were dealt and you got to figure out what you're gonna do with that what would the stoics say to an incel oh no I don't know I mean it's hard it's hard to it's hard to think about what that is because I think it's it's such a complicated it's psychological and it's economic and it's you know the sort of radicalization of the internet but I I do think the stoics would say like look uh all the things that you don't like about the world all the things you don't like about yourself uh you know being mad at other people about them you know resenting them uh lamenting them it's not going to make it any better for you and so how do you focus on what you control here on what you can do here and I I do think you know at the core of stoicism although it has this reputation for being sort of resigned the core of stoicism is this strong sense of agency that you don't control a lot of what's happened before or in the future but you control who you are right now what you do in this moment and the decision to to be a responsible adult Joan Didion famously said you know the decision to take responsibility for yourself in your own life is the source from which all self-respect Springs facts and facts totally and and the the decision to go this isn't my fault but it's my problem this sucks but I don't want to live a sucky shitty life so I'm going to do something about it I'm not going to blame other people for the fact that I am undesired that I am unhappy that I am unsuccessful I'm going to do something about that that is the first choice that is the number one thing that is up to you let's say you're Quasimodo yeah I don't know the Hunchback I actually don't know the story so I don't know what the punch line in the movie is but uh because the the black pill Community I've I've not engaged with much I I know very little about it but when I think about these things um if I'm Quasimodo and like it really is out of the cards for me like I I am broken in a way that nobody is ever going to find attractive um I feel like look that's really brutal and I would never want that to be true but at some point you either say okay that part of my life is dead and I'm gonna have to go find something somewhere else um or it's going to drive you mad like I couldn't let that become the core of my identity there's no doubt that that would be a part of it you can't get away from that you don't want to pretend that it isn't what it is but at the same time like I when I think about again this all comes back to frame of reference for me what do you believe is true about the world and how ought the world be yeah and I would say though okay what is in that moment I'm not going to find a traditional relationship where physical attraction is the the first um thing that's going to lead me down that path but the world ought to be such that people fill that need for love and being loved with something with some kind of contribution like you need to go do something dude go work at an animal shelter it's not romance but it it is being loved and it is companionship like I that's where my mind goes like you have to find an outlet for that otherwise you end up in despair man yeah and you know when I think about people getting to the point where they believe they can never be happy again and suicide is the only option it's like whoa whoa whoa like I'm not here to say that there aren't major problems but I am here to say knowing what I know about how the mind works you still can point your mind to something that will give you that sense of fulfillment that that recipe that I was talking about you you can get to that point but it does require you to force that North Star upon yourself I mean first off I would say you're not Quasimodo like you're almost certainly not right like uh so much of what I think people are down about themselves when you when you look at people who are in true despair they've written themselves up there's there's ironically a kind of ego in it right it's this sense like imposter syndrome right imposter syndrome at the root of it is incorrect in the sense that it presumes anyone is thinking about you at all right nobody is thinking about you um but there is this sense I think when you are down when things are not working when you're unhappy that no one has ever felt the way that you've ever felt no one has ever had it as hard as you have it and that your situation is unique and it's not there's a great uh James Baldwin quote he says you know you think you're suffering in your pain is so special and unique and then you read right and then you realize you you are opened up to a world in which people have had it so much worse than you right um have been dealt incredible hands of adversity and suffering and disfigurement and loss and pain and those people got out of bed every morning and tried and worked on themselves and even the people that you are jealous of that you think have it so good are often dealing with secret pain and baggage and loss and so the decision to go hey I'm going to stop making this so much about me I'm going to stop making this so much on what has happened or what I am worried is going to continue happening and I'm just going to focus on what I can do here and I love your idea you go work in an animal shelter you you get a job you uh you meet friends like you you stop trying to get get this one thing so bad and you just focus on things that are much more attainable and easy and you you find in life that momentum is an incredible thing and that oftentimes we despair of some destination some far-off change or transformation because we don't see how we're going to get there when really we should be focused on like what the most immediate attainable realistic next thing is you know if you're 200 pounds overweight imagining yourself you know ripped and yoked is probably inconceivable but like you could lose five pounds you could lose 10 pounds you could get up and go for a walk um you know you you you haven't uh been touched by a member of the opposite sex and however long well you can still say hi to someone in line you know what I mean like that you you have to start so much smaller than you think and and the stoics talk about this they talk about how like no one can stop you from doing that they can stop you from some far off outcome but they can't stop you from doing that immediate next right thing and it accumulates Xeno who we can imagine Zeno he loses everything right it's seems utterly hopeless that the idea that he would become this world's changing world-famous philosopher in his own life he sought after by Kings and you know rebuilds his life and his fortune and his relationships that was inconceivable to him at that moment when he's penniless and broke but he says later he says well-being is realized by small steps but it is no small thing and if if we can understand these small steps these little things that everyone talks about that that are very well established you know just basic best practices of Life they add up in a big way and they create something that is big and transformative what are the small steps of well-being I just mean you know like some of them are cliches but it's like you know wake up early go to bed early eat well you know like I try to do something hard every day like physically hard every day um why because I like the challenge of it and more importantly I like being a person who has is has a track record of doing hard things that I don't want to do the Stokes talk about they say you know we treat the body rigorously so it's not disobedient to the mind I want to cultivate the practice of I'm a person who pushes through hard stuff I'm a person who decides what I'm going to do and do it right and I wasn't always that way no one is actually born that way it's a it's a culmination of doing it of building the Habit building the practice which becomes a ritual which becomes an identity which becomes a fact right like um those basic practices like you could get it off any random Instagram account any diet book you know any self-improved this is not rocket science but it is hard work and it's the work like of a lifetime you know waking up early three days in a row that's not going to magically make you who you are who you want to be but the decision to wake up early focus on what you eat you know to challenge yourself to put yourself out there to do the thing you're afraid to do these are you know habits that compound and they they you know they they shape you as you are shaping them yeah this is why I want people to understand they're having a biological experience so I want to remove all the sort of hoity-toity-ness of why one ought to do that the reality is there's in your brain that is messing with you and you are going to feel a profound sense of disease if you don't do hard things yes like the reason you should do hard things is not because it makes you a better person it is because there is a a subroutine running in your brain that is saying you're a piece of because you don't do hard things now I wish that that thing wasn't there your life would be much easier if you weren't being chased by a lion that you could still be all right but the fact is that you it will just niggle at you because that is what evolution has had to program into us to make sure that back when you were going to get potentially eaten by a saber-toothed tiger that you still went out and braved it time and time again to move forward to make a better life disease is a great word that you're using there on Wii would be another one you know there is this sense it's not just that you you dislike yourself because you're not doing hard things but you also have an anxiety or an insecurity because you know things could get worse you know things could happen to you at any moment and because you haven't tested yourself because you're not actually sure if you're strong you're worried right you're worried about what tomorrow could bring Seneca famously would practice poverty he was very wealthy born to a wealthy family we was successful was powerful and you would try to spend like one day a month he would like wear his worst clothes you would he would he would you know walk the streets he would you know survive on bread and water and his point he said the purpose of this practice was to be able to look at like abject poverty and go this is what you feared right like he he could go through life taking risks because he wasn't concerned about his ability to handle a reversal of Fortune right and so when you do hard things whether it's running or uh you know getting up on stage or you know lifting heavy rocks like whatever it is what you're cultivating is the the uh kind of resilience and a kind of confidence like I have a cold plunge right um and there's supposedly a bunch of health benefits to having this thing right what temperature do you set Yours at 39. oh that's cold it is cold it is cold it's on bars down to like 50 52 and that hurts it's awful at 52 it hurts 39 is like a whole nother level of suffering it is an unpleasant experience right but there's also makes me feel like a wuss over here there's all sorts of research that you know it helps your circulation and it helps your immune system and it helps your whatever right and you will feel different and and I trust you know that the research is legitimate but I actually don't give a right like yeah it could all be disproven tomorrow and I would still do it fast because the the the benefit is the sliding in and the unpleasantness for the first minute or two minutes when you're like this was a terrible mistake this is deeply unpleasant this is not natural I shouldn't be doing this and I go no I decide I decided before I got in how that I was gonna do it and how long I was going to do it for and that's what I'm cultivating what do you do does your mind scramble when you hit the cold water it I feel like a flurry and then one of the exercises that I'm practicing is I want if I'm gonna do it for three minutes it's not three minutes of gritting my teeth and just enduring something unpleasant but I also want three minutes of presence so like Define that for me like I have my you know it's got a leading arm I am are you I'm hyper aware that I'm sitting in the cold or are you trying to be like cold is just the thing I don't need to sort of be captured by it well one of the core things I'm trying to do in that moment is not look at my phone which is telling me how long I've been in it right right like I want to sit and just be for as long as I can trying not to distract myself trying not to count and to just actually be so I try to I try to combine the cold or the plunge experience with a couple minutes of sort of present mindfulness okay so I want to know more about what present mindfulness is for you so I'll I'll give you a description of what I'm doing in the cold tell me if this is anything like what you do so I hit the water and my brain it it is screaming danger it's actually telling me you're being injured get out right now and so there's a almost a sense of electric confusion where I can't even tell what part of my body hurts anymore it's it's just weird like I couldn't it's almost like I'm blinded for a second because it's so confusing and it's so cold and it's just like I just want to get out and so my thing is how rapidly can I get to the point where I feel at ease yes so I'm not tense I'm completely relaxed I'm not trying to get out of the water in fact this is what's that guy's name game something's Paradox who's Paradise stockto Paradox stock doe Stockdale Stockdale yeah stockdale's Paradox he said the people uh Vietnam uh concentration camp no what do they call them War can't prison camp uh prisoner of war prisoner of war so he's a prisoner of war in Vietnam and somebody asked him like who struggles the most in a prisoner of war camp and he said oh that's easy the optimistic people right because they think I'm gonna be home by Christmas I'm going to be out in a month and then they're not and when he was drifting down in his parachute he's like okay I'm gonna be here for years like at least seven years this is gonna suck I'm almost certainly going to be tortured this is going to be very painful and in that like okay I just completely accept what's happening and you sort of relax into it like admittedly cold water is not a pow camp but it's that same thing of like this is where I am and I'm going to force myself to be completely calm in the face of my lizard brain screaming at me to get out yes it's it's a minor attainable way of practicing or flexing the muscle that people have had to flex in real adversity and real difficulty right and so the sense for instance you know when you get in the cold that it's going to be unpleasant and you're going to want it to be over quickly but your mind is going to tell you that time is going faster than it is right so if if I'm sitting there and then I glance over and I'm expecting like seven seconds yeah two and a half minutes through and it's actually been 23 seconds you know I'm going to be disappointed I'm going to be crushed it's gonna be harder so it's it's just the ability to to sort of you get in and like you said your brain scrambles and then you want to re-assert control reinsert sort of presence and then for me the next step is not letting my mind wander or drift into something like work or a grudge I'm nursing or an anxiety I feel about some other thing or the sense that uh I need to finish this and then get in the shower and then I need get home to beat traffic to do X Y or Z right and to just be this is all I have to do for the next few minutes it's going to be hard it's going to be unpleasant but I'm not going to die I've done it before I know I'm going to come out of the other side refreshed so I'm going to just do what I have to do and and I didn't put your locus of attention while you're doing that or is it on like for me I do it on the breath yeah and am I relaxed it can be it can be breath and sometimes like I'll cheat and I'll count but not to record time or just like the the counting of the in and outs of the breath right um and the reason I I like this again the health benefits ancillary secondary it's his bonus but the metaphor of this is also the process of starting page one of a book that I'm writing or learning a new skill or moving to a new place or anything that you have to do in life the practice of it's gonna be hard uh it's gonna be unpleasant I'm gonna doubt myself I'm gonna have Dark Knights of the soul but I'm a person who pushes myself to do hard things I don't give up I don't cut Corners I don't make excuses for myself I push through and I'm proud of who I am on the other side of it that's the meta skill that's the metaphor that you're trying to build in your life and in your mind because it's the most transferable and beneficial thing there is so I like the in fact I looked this up um the definition of stoic the actual word uh uh did I put it down it's the the definition of stoic itself is is the thing you were saying earlier that people weren't going to like I'm convinced I have it here did you look it up there it is yeah so sorry read that again a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining yeah so I love that I like the idea of being in control of my emotions I don't want to and people that have only know me online they don't know whether what I'm about to say is true or not but it is true I don't stuff my emotions down I process them I think it's very important to process pain and um insecurity hurt all of it grief grief for sure you have to process it um when my dog died as silly as that is I was ruined for days and but at the same time I want my emotions to have their place yes and it is very important to me that I have a healthy distrust of my emotions I don't just assume when I get in cold water that I need to LEAP back out I don't assume when I'm starting something new and I feel like an idiot that I need to stop and give up I don't assume when I started this YouTube channel and we had to go around to the seven people in the company say hey could you please subscribe because we only have four there's seven of us and we only have four subscribers so the awkwardness of being bad or not visibly successful at a thing is a very underrated skill like I people want to be a famous YouTuber or be a best-selling author like I'll hear people they want to like hire me to consultants and book project and I and I go so show me some stuff that you have published and they're like well I've never put they've never put a single thing out right and so they want that the outcome but they they're totally paralyzed and intimidated by the process of being a nobody at that thing for a long period of time which is what it takes right and that that ability to be like I'm gonna start this channel even though some people think it's weird even though some people I went to high school with are going to be talking about it amongst each other and making fun of me um and to think not only that not only to do it because you think it will be successful in the future and you're just you're just willing to put up with it that is outcome dependent I like it that you're doing it because you are interested in doing it you want to get good at it and you think it's important right and and that's that's a a very important skill because you can't get you can't get good at anything if you're not willing to First be bad at that thing right and people aren't willing to be bad at that thing and so they would rather be on their couch a lonely incel than to go strike out trying to meet people right they would rather continue to be the thing that's making them miserable than to experience some new form of discomfort or misery that is trying that is failing that is getting rejected and you have to be willing to do that you have to have the courage and the discipline both of those things in concert with each other to be able to get better what say you though to people that don't want men to be stoic like that's you know we started with that that that's really become part of the definition of toxic masculinity whereas I would say man or woman if you are the slave to your emotions yeah that's just as bad as being a slave to social media or pornography or whatever it's it's just the idea that the stoic is emotionless is to Totally Miss what the philosophy is and I think there's a big difference between being emotionless and being less emotional right would you say is is it less emotional because I will say it's about being in control of your emotions meaning if you have uh if you spark Rage which let me just tell you running a company there are times where someone will do something and anger Wells up inside of me sure now just because I'm feeling angry doesn't mean I'm going to act angry and I don't think people have enough distrust of their emotions like literal distrust that I shouldn't be angry right now I shouldn't be hurt I shouldn't be upset I shouldn't be wanting to cry if I really want to get under somebody's skin so yeah I think that you should be like yeah maybe this isn't a time to be weeping if we can make the distinction between stuffing the emotion down and then processing it I think we're in a great place right I think people if you think stoicism is you don't feel it you pretend it doesn't exist you think it's weak to have it um then yeah I would I would agree that's wrong but if stoicism is the processing of the emotions the questioning of the emotions the talking through the emotions the having the emotions for a brief period of time and then going I'm done with that and I'm moving on then I'm all for it right like there we don't have a lot of stories about Marcus Aurelius right like not a lot of stories about who he was as a person but we have three that involve him crying three so we've got to imagine that this is not an utterly emotionless person um there's a moment early in his life where he loses uh his favorite teacher his teacher dies and one of his stoic teachers goes to him and says you gotta stop crying like this isn't what men do and antoninus his stepfather says let the boy be human he says philosophy and Empire don't take away personal feelings right so he's letting the kid have this emotion we know of Marcus crying uh while he um Mourns the victims of the antonine plague millions of people die in this heinous tragedy and then the other one in between these two which I think is also really revealing she supposedly cries when he learns he is going to become emperor and sad tears he's he's overwhelmed by the enormity of the responsibility that's about to be thrust upon him and he doesn't know if he can do it he was said to be crying at the thought of all the bad kings that had gone before him which I think is important like if you're like I obviously have this I'm the best I excel at everything to me that's a person who is almost certainly going to fail because they're not taking it seriously they're not intimidated by what should be an intimidating thing responsibility is difficult being responsible for people is a scary thing but you know so he he breaks down he cries about it and then that night he has this dream he has this dream he says later that his shoulders were made of ivory to me what that means is and what he said it meant is that he was stronger than he thought he was he was stronger than he knew so he has this moment and then he works through it and then he wipes away the tears and he goes to work do you know what I mean so to me that's the essence of what the philosophy is you know he didn't cry and run away he didn't cry and try to wiggle out of the job right he didn't suppress the the tears and then go get mad at someone or you know indulge in Pleasures or distractions like he was overwhelmed he understood he was overwhelmed he dealt with it and then he got back to it and so this idea that the stoic you know would never cry I think that's an important one that we talk about because like it's funny like we we say like men shouldn't be emotional but we are very indulgent of men's tempers right like if you get so angry you punch a wall you have been overly you've been utterly overwhelmed by your emotions right um we don't tend to categorize that as weak or as the same weakness as crying because your dog died and I would argue I just put my dog down on my 16 year old dog and I wept like a baby like uh the not just because of the grief but the emotion that the the responsibility of having to make this decision for this helpless thing that was now lying there and was not going to be alive anymore it was a emotionally overwhelming experience I didn't run from that experience you know I did what I what I had to do and there was regrets and you know um uh mistakes you know caught up in it like there was a lot of emotions right so I felt those emotions um and then I moved on I don't need to I don't need to have fewer of those experiences in my life but I've never lost my temper and then been proud afterwards do you know what I mean so it's it's funny that we tend to criticize it's very gendered which emotions we we sort of criticize as emotional and then other emotions jealousy rage you know lust Etc we don't lump in the same negative category but if I had to choose I'd much rather someone you know feel sad than someone be an because they're not in control of their temper this this is a very complex topic so um I one I agree with you wholeheartedly that I am just completely unafraid to cry if that is what the moment deserves now I'm not a big crier so it's very rare unless it's a movie I will be honest like movies can really get me uh but it's very rare in my real life that I cry but when something is traumatic like that then of course and and when I say I don't even have a mild compunction about crying like I'm not weird about that does not bother me in the slightest but at the same time I get why this has become gendered and I don't want this to get lost and this is where someone like Andrew Tate becomes complex again I I want to take him as an abstraction prior to the the trafficking stuff but when he first came on my radar I was like here you have a guy ten percent of what he's saying is bang on and nobody is talking about the need to be tough the need to strengthen yourself to be ambitious is okay to be aggressive is okay and ninety percent of what he said I'm like he's just going out of his way to say it in the worst conceivable way humanly possible and it could just be that he's dark tetrad all day and he really is just a sociopath but even if he's not even if he's just playing a character um it's still dumb and I don't want people to get lost in that but I also don't like I was really pushing back on what I'll call the hyper feminization of men and I think that that's also problematic and so when I look at okay well how did we end up here with these gendered Notions I think there's an again you're having a biological experience so there's an evolutionary reason why like I don't know if this is the same in your house but if somebody like the number of times that our alarm has gone off in the middle of the night my wife has actually Fallen back asleep as I'm creeping around the house to see if somebody's really broken in or if it's a false alarm and I like lock the door behind me and I'm like you stay in here I'm gonna go do my thing sure and that to me like when you talk about how the world ought to be that falls in my list of ought to be like I think guys should be tough I think that that a hundred percent is their responsibility and part of that is meaning and purpose part of that is there there is I need a North star I need to know I mean let's go back to the four virtues courage self-discipline Justice wisdom right so I think regardless of sex all four are bang on but when it comes to physical danger or even just discomfort in my life if if my wife and I um if there was going to be hardship around food for one of us for whatever reason one of you had to suffer and not the other 100 out of 100 times I would want to be the one that suffers and not my wife and it would really bother me if she stepped into the role to suffer on my behalf yeah you know I so I have a six-year-old he's a boy and I I feel like a lot of the traditional masculine stuff it's just there it's in the air right in the sense that I work hard um he sees me working out he sees that I'm ambitious um you know she trains in in Combat Sports he does Brazilian Jiu Jitsu um the sort of St you know stereotypes of what a man should or shouldn't be but we were going through he just switched schools right and um I said you know hey how are you feeling like are are you sad about not getting to see your old friends and your teacher anymore and he was like I'm fine you know like I'm fine uh and and like he may have been fine but I wanted to I wanted to make sure he knew it was okay to not be fine right do you know what I mean like it's not like I'm trying to make him sad about something but I I was concerned that his impulse maybe from me or from something else or some random stereotype or you know thing he saw on TV or YouTube video that he had internalized somewhere that it wasn't okay for him to be sad or to miss these people or to not like what happened right so I want I felt like I mean I watched it have the the impulse that it was he was fine like he wasn't it shouldn't have the emotion that was there but it there needed to be the extra conversation about it's okay like if you feel sad it's okay and sometimes you know you watch this too like like it'll fall and they'll hurt themselves and there's already at a very early age some sense that like uh Boys Don't Cry or cover it up or don't tell anyone and I don't think that's a particularly healthy thing either so I I just like the I understand I just like the idea that you're trying to create a well-rounded person that has the full tool kit The Full Experience the full Human Experience um and and you know it is funny like one of the early stoics talked about how yes of course there's some things that men and women are different at but he said you know like you don't care he says you don't care what sex your hunting dog is or the gender of your horse you just care if it can catch the rabbit or run fast in the race and I think overall when I think of stoicism as a philosophy I do think about it as something that's not masculine or feminine but that it's something human and I think there are you know there are men who need the courage to be more vulnerable right about their emotions right as opposed to cultivating more martial courage on the battlefield maybe they already have that and they what they're struggling with is the pain they feel or the grief they feel or the inadequacy they feel and they're they're afraid to tell someone about it just as conversely there might be a woman who is um needs the self-discipline or the self-command to you know deal with uh an over abundance of emotions right and what we're trying to get to is is a is is is the sort of moderate or the apotheo the moderation or the the middle ground the golden mean of The Best of Both Worlds to me that's what stoicism is about very interesting so let me ask you um I was playing soccer one day when I was a kid and the ball hit my thumb just right and broke it yeah cracked it right down the middle and how should my father have responded my dad was the coach of the team yeah I'll tell you in a minute what he actually did but what in that moment I come crying to the sidelines I got hit yeah my thumb hurts well I I remember I fell off a skateboard when I was in fourth grade and I hit my wrist I landed on my left wrist really hard and I probably cried I know I was in a lot of pain and I told my parents that it really hurt and what my parents did in that moment was chastise me for going on a skateboard and then sort of not believe me that it hurt as much as it did and they you know they like to save going to a doctor they asked their doctor friend if it looked broken and he said no and you know a week later I'm like guys look this really hurts like I need to go and of course it was broken right and and one of the things I took from that was not hey you should be tough you know hey what I took from that is like my parents don't believe me right my parents uh say they care a lot about me and they want nothing bad to happen to me and then here I was in physical pain and they were thinking one of saving money or two of um you know doubts right so I don't know what your dad should have done and exactly in that situation but I think it's really easy as a parent as a person to get to to not just focus on the individual instance in front of you which is like this kid says their thumb hurts let's just figure it out and to think well if I make too big a deal out of it they're going to turn into a x y or Z right like there's a lot of extrapolation that I think is harmful for parents one of the things I think about with my kids is I try to think about most things as individual instances right like my toddler is throwing a temper tantrum they're probably throwing a temper tantrum not because they suck not because they're bad not because I'm bad as a parent but because like we forgot to eat earlier or they're coming down with something right um and I'm just gonna deal with this instance in front of me instead of going well if I reward this bad behavior then they're going to turn into a kid who does bad things and thinks they can get away right the extrapolation I think is so often the enemy of what is usually a pretty Common Sense low stakes situation so I'm guessing uh because I think it's been the historical Norm that your your dad probably uh did not take it very seriously yeah so it was walk it off yeah like go back in keep playing and the problem is that in that instance what I walked away from it with was I told you so and I told you it hurt and I told you that you should take me out of the game but as I got older and got into business and realized oh I give up too early as soon as something hurts as soon as something is difficult my temptation is to turn and run and so my journey of success has been one of getting tough and so when I look back I wish what my dad had done was take a more holistic approach to me as a kid and help me create a frame of reference around pain and suffering so that when my thumb is broken I know hey this isn't normal yeah you need to take me out but because I whined and cried about everything they couldn't know like uh because I used to whine and cry just the same when the ball would hit my cold leg which I grew up in in Tacoma where it's like in the winter it's actually cold and so when that ball hits your leg and it leaves the imprint of the soccer ball like that really does Sting but not remove me from the game sting and so what I didn't understand as a kid and feel like you know when we think about stoicism when we think about how ought 1B how what should you be aiming at it's like you need to understand that things are going to get hard you are going to suffer if you want to do something great you're going to have to push through this and by all means by the way if you don't want to if at any time you don't want to play don't but just be honest about why you don't want to play it it hurts too much you're not interested whatever instead of like oh this is some unusual amount of pain and you should always move in the opposite direction of pain that's something my wife and I talk a lot about it's like hey that is an important lesson that has to be taught is this actually the most appropriate or the most suitable lesson or opportunity to teach that lesson right like um when when you um when your kid wants to quit something right they're playing the piano and then they come home one day and they go I hate playing the piano I want to quit you go well I got to teach them that you can't be a quitter in life but we have to zoom out and go wait did I force them to play the piano was the piano ever one of their interests or is this something that I forced upon them and now they are asserting themselves to want to get out of something they don't want to do to put energy towards something they do want to do right and so you know is this an is this actually an important opportunity or an appropriate setting to talk about whatever this sort of meta lesson or virtue or value that you're so concerned about and again I think about this with Tantrums it's like yeah of course you can't just throw a fit anytime you know you don't like something but is that what's actually happening here are they actually thinking that the world revolves around them and if they lie on the floor and Screen they'll get what they want or is this a four-year-old who is been overwhelmed by hunger or sickness or some other thing that they don't understand and they can't separate because they don't know what they're feeling from like wanting this toy and the fact that their body feels like it's falling apart do you know what I mean and and realize you actually do though I try to just deal with the individual situation you let them freak out like let's say you're in a restaurant they start melting down yeah what why do we need to be in this restaurant do you know what I mean like this we don't need to be here we don't need to do this we can go outside we can talk about this and if we go outside and talk about this you're not going to be as overwhelmed or embarrassed about what's happening I'm not going to be feeling the pressure of I don't want to be the kind of parent that has a kid that does this like I think so often what what really hurts parents is not what the kid is doing or not the reality of the situation but their perception of how other people are thinking about them or their um their sense of what whether they're a good parent or not and that's totally unfair that's all baggage that you're bringing to the situation right like one of the you know nobody likes to be on a flight with a crying baby right but one of the things you realize as a parent is like this isn't a reflection of me you know what I mean this is the fact that I have a baby and the baby is crying I'm not doing anything it's not a credit or a discredit to me if they're not crying because they slept the whole flight that's not a sign that I'm a superior parent that's just the luck of that situation right and so when you stop caring so much about other people anything to do with that I mean sometimes you do I mean you obviously chose to be on the plane or not but like sometimes the baby's upset sometimes they're not true you yourself though have said a lot of people are a lot of people have kids but not a lot of people are parents sure I'll tell you a story uh flight child story so and this is an international flight I am on my way to England I am in coach bro this is not current me this is past me and I am going to see Lisa who lives in England at the time and this little kid I'm waiting in line to check my bags and there's this family with this child kids probably I don't know four or five and he's losing his mind yeah losing his mind throwing himself on the luggage knocking it over shrieking wailing and they they don't even say anything to him and I was like Whoever has to sit next to that kid oh my God I feel terrible okay so get on the plane you know whatever an hour and a half later and I'm I'm watching them come on the plane and they're like coming towards I'm like oh God oh God oh God ends up sitting next to me now these Ryan holiday it goes there's these are the four rows right so goes uh Dad Mom child me I'm like I'm sorry what like Ichigo parent child parent me uh but they put him next to me yeah and he is losing his mind yeah like losing his mind like what did somebody poke him with a like a poker like a hot poker like he's he's just really going bananas I I just can't fathom yeah and they don't say a word not to him not to me and then part way through the flight I don't know we're probably up in the air 30 minutes with him shrieking and I'm like in in at the time I would have said like my Taoist pose I was just like it's all good I'm gonna be totally chill with a little kid nothing you can do I can't go anywhere there's nowhere else for me to sit and he puts his head on my lap holds my hand and goes to sleep doesn't say a word not hi I'm Timmy nothing and I'm just like the parents don't say anything and they let this child fall asleep on a stranger yeah and in that moment I was like now bro apparently yeah this is partly the parents are like the fact that they didn't put him in between them yeah that's an awesome choice and that he felt comfortable with me he leaned on me he didn't lean on them and so I was like whoa like this kid does not feel comfortable with them for whatever reason and does with a total stranger and then he ends up being an angel through the whole flight man it was surreal well you realize with kids that 90 of it is so hungry or tired right like it's one of those two things and so one of the things I've taken out of being a parent is just so much more empathy for other people period right like it's like I know my kid is fundamentally decent and good so when they're not being good right the the expression is like your kid's not giving you a hard time your kid is having a hard time right but this is also true for all people in the world right like you know your kid is acting this way because you skipped nap or you know they got woken up in the middle of the night or whatever but maybe that's why the person in front of you in line is being rude right and and so the practice of looking for a reason or looking for something to understand or pity even in other people is a practice I've taken out of being a parent it's helped me in the world right to just understand people are going through stuff kids especially are going through stuff and then it's hard to be them and so yeah to take from your story like man what what must it be like to be a kid who's not comfortable around their parents that's awful and that's not their fault that's not something that they can do anything about and so how can I I can't change that I have no legal recourse or it's not appropriate for me to intervene in that situation but I can let that open me up make me better more understanding more patient more understanding of both this individual and then also all individuals and so I I think being a parent has changed me in that way it's made me more empathetic more patient more understanding more present you know um in in the sense that I don't extrapolate everything out or go if I just let this person cut me off in traffic well then am I the kind of person that just the world walks all over and does what you know it's like none of this matters this is an individual instance which is forgettable in the bigger picture of things and so I'm going to treat it as such or I'm gonna go this person is going through something this person is struggling this person is not winning they may be cutting me off here but I have a way back I'm getting a way better end of this deal and that I get to be me and they have to be them and that that has helped me just as a human being in the world where do you draw the line though how do you know that that isn't just cope and you're not really being a doormat like do you have a line I yeah I mean I think that there is some line but it's almost always never the thing that you are getting triggered by or upset by do you know what I mean like are you ever gonna meet this person again is anyone watching um you know how fragile are your values you know that like letting this thing go I don't know that people's values are fragile I don't think they Define them I don't think people know what their values are like when are you being petty yeah and when are you having a standard you you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today yeah look I think about this as a writer right like you get your notes back and my first reaction is always like who the are you you know um or how dare you you know because like I'm good at what I do I've slaved over this and you're gonna return it to me like covered in red ink um and then you know I sit with it and I think about it and with time I come to accept that actually the vast majority of the notes have Merit some of them are incorrect In substance but they're in the ballpark of something being wrong and I'll I'll take I'll take the fact that this was flagged and I'll come up with my own solution to it and then there's the other percentage of of those notes which I have to have the confidence and the sense of self or this the sense of what I'm trying to accomplish to go you think I should cut this chapter but actually this is the most important chapter of the book and without it none of this other stuff works or without it it doesn't mean to me what I want the project to mean and so I'm going to be comfortable just reject you know like so you accept some of the things and you reject other things and knowing what yeah what's important and what isn't I mean that's the that's the hardest thing to do in life um you know being the person who is principled and strict about what matters and what's right and wrong is important but also so is compromise in collaboration right and I think most successful talented people probably are already over indexed for control and like the wanting things to be a certain way and having a strong opinion about that you're almost always needing to correct in the other direction yeah this is this is where a lot of this stuff gets really complicated and I think people struggle is they don't take the time to even Mark out what their value system is yeah um when you when you don't have a Target you're going to miss it every time and so this is why phase one of uh mindset trying to make your life better is always going to be defining that stuff like actually writing down what are your beliefs what are your values so that you have something to aim at yeah and you know when I think about where we started this conversation and where I want all of this to go there there is a milieu that people are in now in the modern world where we don't really know what to aim at things get very distorted on social media the way that information in fact here's here's a a concept I'm trying to get my head around maybe you can help me there's something about the rapidity with which ideas transmit now that I think has a deranging effect where something will start as um a good idea and it rapidly becomes like a cliche and then it becomes like a post-modern um oh God what do they call it deconstruction you know of all of it and so then like everything becomes cringe and you know what I mean like there there suddenly isn't a a sincerity to wanting to be better or be good or there's some term of value like uh or or of worth like gaslighting and now everything is gaslighting right it's it gets used and used it repeated and and its meaning stretches uh its definition stretches to the point where it has no definition it has no meaning and so yeah I agree it's it's it's difficult everything has a label everything has a term everything actually means this or then someone's saying that means the opposite of this and it's very difficult to keep to get and keep your bearings and and so when I was trying to be empathetic to like what it's like to be a young man today I that's one of the things like it's disorienting it's confusing and one of seneca's great lines is uh if you don't know what port you are sailing towards no wind is favorable and I think this his other line is he says you know uh you're on this path and he says you know tranquility and peace and greatness is is is the sense of that path and this is not being distracted by the past that crisscross yours this is even from people who are hopelessly lost so if you don't know what your values are if you don't know what you stand for if you don't know what you're trying to get and then you're just scrolling on your phone and the algorithm is just serving you up what's most engaging what's most provocative what other people are looking at it's really easy to go down rabbit holes to get red pilled or whatever that is and you don't want that to happen it's disorienting it's it it it can take you very far afield from where you want to get where I think another great example is like if you don't know what you're working towards and why you're doing it like you don't know where you're trying to end up as a human being you just default towards what makes the most money what other people respect the most you know what everyone else is doing what's popular right now and that's probably not a good long-term prescription for either success or happiness like why not well first off if everyone's doing it the chances of there being long-term viability in it it's probably low right and most of the things that you do in life solely optimizing for the financial return you know are probably not the right things and it's probably not actually sufficient motivation or purpose you know um I talk to people and they're like you know uh I want to write a book I go oh that's awesome well why well it'll be good for my speaking business or you know oh like I want to be famous or oh people actually say that yeah or that they don't say it's when you when you ask this when you start to look at what they're evaluating that success as it's not I wrote something that matters I did my best you know I made something that had real impact they're they're just thinking how many copies did it sell how big was my Advance was my Advance bigger than some other person that I heard got in advance and those are not great North Stars right the great North Star is this is what I was put here to do as a human being no one has done this thing before this needs to exist this will help people right and if if um if all you're doing what you're doing for is money the chances of you ever getting enough are very low and the chances of you meeting someone who makes you feel very small for what you have is very high you know you could work your whole life be incredibly successful at what you do and meet someone who made in one day what you've made in your entire life you know you could meet someone who inherited more money than you will ever have and then are you gonna let it if if the money was why you did it and what constitutes success then all of that was just taken from you yeah yeah it's crazy man so uh I live in a ridiculous house that I uh earned and I can still myself up with a single YouTube search of like the coolest houses in America and you're like oh those houses are cool man mine's like whatever it is so ridiculous it is so self-evident to me that it's ridiculous but nonetheless I'm like wow there really is like some bizarre lizard part of my brain that cannot help but compare myself to others and whenever that comparison comes up empty like it it takes conscious effort to reorient myself but it's in those moments that I realize if I did not have a North star that I can write down and be like this is what I'm trying to do this is what I choose to judge myself against uh I would be in despair yeah and I'm very grateful that I learned quite early that money didn't change my insecurities sure and that I can't fix extra you can't fix internal feelings or inadequacies or doubts or insecurities with external accomplishments or accumulations just will not happen and it is very hard to recognize that without going through it yourself which is the sort of hilarious thing about life but once you learn that then you can start putting yourself on a better path but my punchline is there is a better path but no one's going to end up on it by accident yeah you know Gabor mate right all right so I want to go back to the idea of addictions and how people end up getting trapped because if I can get trapped that easily in comparing my house to other people uh I know how easily other people are going to be getting trapped sure Gabor mate talks about addictions in life they are covering up a trauma just period end of story yeah I don't know that I agree with that I think that there might be something deranging in culture and look I think life has always been hard so I don't I'm not saying this is a uniquely difficult time I just think it's difficult in a unique way if that makes sense yeah and so no matter in fact I would rather be born now than any other time in human history buy a country mile despite AI Ai and all of the insecurities and everything that we're going to know but having said that I do think that there are these sort of weird deranging things that lead to things like death of Despair drug addiction only transport ah um social media Doom scrolling my question is what is that thing like do you subscribe to Gabor mate this is trauma and you're just trying to mask it or is there something else going and to really complicate this question do you know about ibogaine no okay so we'll get to that in a minute but so what what do you think leads people to these modern addictions both explanations are probably simultaneously true which is that everyone has some kind of whole or trauma that they're trying to address and fill and then we also have biological urges an evolutionary desire to accumulate to experience to do that it makes sense that Evolution would turn on and evolution never really had to worry about how and why to turn them off right like um Evolution would create in an Alexander the Great desire to conquer right because this would have all sorts of benefits to one's uh evolutionary success but would it have a reason to ever make him feel enough right to go this is sufficient I have gone far enough no not really because for probably most of evolutionary history you died before you ever got to that point also that guy that has that push like you're just gonna keep going I not a conqueror obviously but in business I have that same sense of it's just and I don't think this is bad but it's never enough and you I've heard you quote I forget what language it what language it is I think it might be Haitian where it's like beyond the mountain is only more mountains yeah well I think that's true in life in in not just about like uh opportunities it's also just there's always difficulties right I think to me that's what that proverb means but I I think even with an Alexander the Great there's the hey this is why one is compelled to become a conqueror but then also he's got daddy and mommy issues uh his dad is King his mom is ambitious his dad neglects him mom Smothers him with affection it creates a potent cocktail that creates an extraordinary person but also probably a person that you would not actually want to trade places with and so the work of my life has been look I have this set of skills I have these interests I have these ambitions the same time how can I try to be as good as I am capable of being without being a slave to those things How can I be a normal person inside of those things and by normal I I mean sort of what we were talking about earlier can you be good and great at the same time right um have you heard the term an art monster yeah from you but yes it's easy to be an art monster in the sense that you turn off all the other things and you only leave the drive the ambition the the talent on and I think that's that's not just a an unbalanced way to be I don't I don't think when you look at the lives of those people you're like it's fun to be them there's a there's a Roman general named Marius who is like the Conqueror of conquerors he was the Rome's leading politician and Seneca says about him he says you know Marius commanded armies but ambition commanded Marius and his his point was that at the end of the day this guy's not actually in charge like the the the demon is in charge or the drive is is is uh is in charge and I think self-sufficiency be operating under your own power that's a that's a better place to come from I think it actually creates better work I think it creates less harmful consequences to the the outside world right Alexander the Great Napoleon like Europe is littered with the bones of the victims of those men right like their inability to just deal with the fact that Dad was never proud of them sacrifices hundreds of thousands of people in these pointless Wars right it's not a consequenceless decision to be insatiable as much as you think it is it hurts other people what's the barometer so if we're trying to craft a North star if I'm a young guy and I'm trying I'm I'm listening to this debate I've got Andrew Tate on one shoulder I've got Marcus Aurelius on the other shoulder um what's the barometer like Andrew Tate has Bugattis and women and is having sex with whoever wants theoretically as multiple kids all over the place and women that are willing to stay with him even though he's Unfaithful and he's a high value guy and makes tons of money and the at one point the most searched person on planet Earth um but you know why he's the most searched person on planet Earth you know why his stuff blew up online right it's not because it's good his stuff blew up because he started a a pyramid scheme that incentivized young kids mostly like young boys to upload hundreds of his Clips to the Internet so he makes viral content that is provocative and challenging and you know sometimes speaks to hard truths that people do need to hear a lot of it also confirms biases and prejudices and sort of plays to our lowest common denominator you know Wicked narcissism yeah which which is attractive and and uh do you think narcissism is attractive or just plays reads his confidence and that's I think it reads as confidence but it's also there's there's a re we like bad boys we like people who say effed up things that you know uh we wouldn't say we we'd like mischievousness we like anti-heroes right so he makes content that people want but then he took hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars of other people's monies uh other people's money and then in exchange tricked them into propagating his content right and so like I think one of the tricky things about narcissists and egotists is that it's not an accurate picture of reality you know I'm sure you have I've met some extremely wealthy extremely successful extremely powerful people I don't see them driving Bugattis I don't see them bragging about how many people they're sleeping with um I don't see them anywhere actually right like most of the power the truly powerful people in the world want to keep as low profile as possible right to your boy Elon Musk homeboy is like out there I I would argue that something broke in that guy's brain and that I wouldn't I wouldn't want to trade places with that guy for all the money in the world um you would get all the money in the world if you enjoy the place with them so it's true uh what's the barometer so if it isn't money and women yeah then it's yeah it's are you making I I think I think a couple things I sort of evaluate my life or measure my life built around a couple things one am I realizing my potential like what the unique DNA circumstances experience talents I have so get as good as you can possibly get yes what is the thing you were put here to do and can you extend that out as far as it can reasonably go right am I making a positive impact on the world right like if everyone was doing what I was doing uh would that would that work right you know what I mean like am I part of the problem or my part of the solution that's kind of one of the metrics that I look at right like but even that makes a huge leap around this barometer so making the world a better place so just to keep challenging this idea I don't know if he actually believes it or again if he's playing a character but uh Tate is going to tell you that he has made the lives of countless people better sure but if in if it balances out with the fact that you keep women locked in a house and uh you know take a percentage of their sex work sex you know sex worker earnings you know see that's where I think we can get really specific so the the thing that makes Tate all an illusion for me and why I just do not encourage people to listen or to follow that path is that the the thing that he monetizes is vice Laden in and of itself and so when you think about okay like is only fans gonna be the thing that you want to help people get better at knowing that the people that are using it are in the darkest Place possible in their life yeah and so if I step back and look at that that's where I go okay my internal barometer is take for instance what we did at Quest it was like I was showing up every day for my mom and my sister they had been morbidly obese my entire life I wanted to make food that they could choose based on taste and it happened to be good for them and I made sacrifices that cost me a lot of money to make sure that if they ate those products that they really were going to be moving in a better Direction and that was hugely important to me and it became the way that I really looked at things same thing at impact Theory right I've always said look I'll slide to neutral yeah because I want everything that we put out to be empowering but I would slide to just entertainment if that meant I could avoid going out of business but I would never go to the point where I felt like if somebody takes the advice and this is just how I think about it if you take the advice of one of our Mentor characters it should make your real life better yeah and if if that is anything other than neutral yeah like you're not going to see me do stories about somebody where if you were to emulate their behavior your life is going to be trash so at some point like you have to have a thing yeah that is like okay this is my barometer of whether I'm doing the thing that I wanted to do in fact here's how I explain it in business boys and girls at home hear me when I say that you have to when you're trying to do something Grand with your life you must call your shot say I'm trying to do this thing yeah and this is the metric by which I will judge whether or not I have done that thing you need to say it ahead of time so that you don't fool yourself and start bullshitting yourself about whether you're doing that thing or not because it's very easy if you're failing and you didn't lay out a metric am I really failing because I didn't have a metric you know so for me it's like impact theory is here so that if you take our advice the advice of our Mentor characters on the entertainment side or in these interviews uh that it will actually improve your life as determined by that formula that I laid out for fulfillment yeah I think this is another part of it it's not just in my part of the problem or solution but like am I acting with honesty good ethics uh decency uh uh you know how am I doing what I'm doing right another problematic character but I was at American Affair for a long time and I remember someone was proposing the dove that he could like move the factory overseas and you know make more money or something and he said if all I cared about was making money I would have become a drug dealer and I remember thinking about that because it's true like you chose what you chose because you cared about something other than just making money right or you would have chosen the kind of things that make the most money right like for me to choose to be an author I've already made a decision that like making lots of money is not my number one priority and then to write about an obscure School of ancient philosophy I've now doubled down on this choice right I'm not saying I can't be successful at what I do I have been successful at it but but there are I made a bunch of choices that put a fine already that put a large Financial ceiling on what I'm what I'm doing in way that I'm totally good with because to break through that ceiling would require me to do things that I'm not comfortable with that I don't think are right so I have like a little note card on my desk because I it's in it's what's unusual about what I do is I write about this ancient philosophy that I did not create that I don't have any ownership of and that I don't see myself as adding anything new to but as as explaining and popularizing and uh making accessible that's what I feel like I'm good at doing right I'm not I'm not trying to read Marcus realist and I couldn't but I've read your books and they're super helpful that's what that you what you just described is me succeeding at what I set out to do so that means a lot to me more than selling lots of copies or getting a large Advance that's what I had an experience with Marcus to realize meditations that touched me personally and I thought I want to give people that experience that that they couldn't get by me just saying read this book right and so I have a note card on my desk and it says am I being a good Steward of stoicism yes so the videos that I make like there's videos I could make that I know would do better than the videos I am making I don't make those videos because I don't think it's appropriate it's not what I want to do it's not what gets me excited I could have people on my podcast or I could write my books in a certain way or I could sell things or Price things at different ways that would allow me to make more money but would not be being a good Steward of this thing that I I wouldn't say I was entrusted with because no one gave it to me but that it has fallen in my lap and so I think about this with like who makes the products that I make where what where is the factory right how much am I charging what am I what is the pitch right like am I am I uh hitting triggers that manipulate people into doing what I want or am I just persuading them to do something that's good right like there's all these ethical questions about how one does what they do not simply what they do and how much they're trying to do but but how you do what you do and I think that's a really important part of the barometer because you could do things that make you more successful that make you more well-known but you're eroding your sense of self in the process you're eroding your ability to look in the mirror and go I'm proud of who I am and what I do and I think that's a that's a short-term trade-off with real long-term consequences let's look at it in terms of the um building a YouTube channel is a great example since we've both done that so uh before we started rolling we were talking about audience capture and how quickly you can become a servant to the algorithm or a parody of yourself or a parody of yourself wow really well said um I have frustrated my team three times now as I've moved from phase one of mindset to phase two and now into phase three because it it really does like the algorithm gets confused who are you making content for and um in any one time the headline and thumbnail that we might have created especially as we moved into phase three um it became very easy as I became truly obsessed like I'm not faking in any way shape or form I think we are going through the most disruptive time since World War II and I think most people are going to get caught off guard and they are going to get left behind and there is going to be a tremendous wealth transfer as the New World Order takes place and whether that's a rising China whether that's a move to bitcoin whether it's AI taking over whatever all of these things together I I am I see myself in the following way I cobbled together a bunch of ideas that ended up being taoism meets stoicism basically and through business was like oh this is how you take control of your life and in doing that I realized oh when I the so I taught a business course for a while an impact their university called business decision making the reason that I taught that course even though it's the worst title of all time is because um what people think they need is the 100 million dollar copywriting course but the reality is if you want to be an entrepreneur you have to be able to solve novel problems yeah that's it yeah like that that's life man so what what is impact Theory the show what is impact Theory the video game that we're working on all of it it is trying to teach people the set of ideas that will allow them to solve novel problems not just problems that they've never encountered before problems no one has encountered before sure like AI yeah so anyway in in building out my YouTube channel and moving into phase three we were like every title was negative and they were crushing yeah and in any one I was like yeah that actually is my feeling on that I'm I'm worried about this that or the other and then as I step back and looked at my channel I was like oh it's it's like really making me uncomfortable that it's just getting so negative yeah and so you get into the if it bleeds it leads thing so how does one avoid falling prey to that how do you not become a parody how do you not be income audience captured how do you not become a servant to the algorithm yeah every once in a while I'll write something I'll send it to the email list and and someone will be like why did you say this you must have known this was going to piss people off or you know why did you have to get political or why did you have to touch this you know third rail or whatever and and sometimes that reply you know if I'm feeling cheeky about it I just go I didn't build this audience to not say what I think I built the Audience by saying what I think what I think needs to be said and that's what I have to keep doing otherwise I don't have the audience the audience has me right like do I make YouTube videos uh or does YouTube make me make videos you know like I make what I'm interested in what gets what lights me up what excites me obviously I then think about what is the way to to have that reach the most people what is the way that um will you know not be forgotten or missed like you you do have to understand marketing and promotion and public relations and just presentation like an author that goes don't judge a book by a cover by its cover that's an author doesn't sell very many books because like the cover is there to be judged right that's what its job is and the thumbnail and the title and you know the description these are the these are rules of a medium or of a platform you don't have to be a slave to them but you do have to understand them and so I kind of I try to start with what lights me up with what's exciting to me what I think needs to be said and then then I try to translate it in the medium that it is I do you know sometimes I'll find myself I was being emotional I was reacting to Something in the news I was being petulant or judgmental about something and when I go back and do the edits or read it for the podcast I go this is probably more incendiary than it needs to be right and so I can adjust that so I'm not needlessly alienating people that I want to reach um but then once I have confidently done that I also have a wall around me that makes it so I am insulated to a degree from the feedback I'm not reading the comments the emails are not going to my inbox I'm not constantly refreshing to see how many retweets or likes or comments something got because that's going to mess with my barometer with my compass like those people don't know what I'm trying to do those people aren't consuming the whole of my work they're just getting this one snapshot of a thing and what ultimately matters is my sense my the path that I'm on not all these people crisscrossing me or not what other people are doing that's the other mistake it's not even a feedback that you've gotten it's you're doing this and then you look over here and you see someone else is doing it differently and then you go should I not be doing this should I be doing that and one of the things I'm a big heavy metal fan a quote that I heard very early in my career that sort of formulated for me the lead singer of Iron Maiden which is this unique band that that makes kind of weird music that's never been super were popular never been sort of of the moment but somehow is they've sold 100 million records all over the world they're they're almost 50 years into this as a band totally sort of independent own their um she said you know like he said we have our field and he said you can only plow one field at a time so it doesn't matter what the neighboring farmer is doing on theirs right and so if you go yeah it doesn't matter that other people are doing it this way or these people are doing this way how do I think it should be done what's working for me what are best practices and then I leave everyone else to what they're doing you know like I can't look at what some other author even if they're a friend of mine even if I really respect their work I can't go but but Mark Manson sold this many copies the first week I mean we write totally different things in a totally different style we put out things at different times right um the idea that that I would judge myself against him is not fair to me or to him and so you got to be able to go this is what I was trying to do this is the long-term race that I'm running and I tune out everything else how how do you frame that and I'll I'll give you some context of where what I'm trying to get to um I want to be the greatest that ever lived at whatever I approach and I have the receipts to back up that I'm very very very good at what I do yeah but I'm not the best at anything and so before me is the temptation to think less of myself because I'm not Elon Musk or because I'm not Joe Rogan there's always somebody who isn't a little ahead of me they're way ahead of me and so I realize that I'm uh you know in the grand scheme of things so far my career while impressive from somebody that hasn't achieved what I've achieved it's going to be forgotten and so that requires me to do framing of my Pursuits so now I think I have the bulletproof way around it but I'm very curious to know what you do I mean first off it's all going to be forgotten everyone is going to be forgotten and if you aren't it doesn't do you any good right Marcus Rios and meditations he goes remember you won't be able you won't be around to enjoy your posthumous Fame and he says it's also worth pointing out that people in the future will be the same idiots that are alive now right like different idiots but the same right and so the idea that you have to create this Monument of greatness to impress people in the future to last the longest to have the most is a false Race So what I think about is I don't go hey Does Elon Musk have more money than me has insert author sold more books than me is so and so married to a more beautiful person than me um you know it's to so and so have a nicer house than me I think I was dealt a hand I was I was born to certain parents at a certain moment in time with certain you know unique DNA with unique interests I've had unique experiences I was drawn to a unique Lane and the vast majority of that stuff was not in my control what is in my control is did I get the most out of that hand that it was possible to get out of that hand right Elon Musk was born to a dad who owned an emerald mind were you born to a dad that had an emerald mind you know were you born with his natural genius at science or math right a whole bunch of things so it's it's insane that you would be comparing yourself to this person not just because you started at different places like you didn't start at the same Finish Line as you didn't start at the same starting line but you're also aiming at different Finish Lines right and so I what I think about what I think the race is it's to realize your potential it's to make the most out of what you have so I think success is or you think about your Tombstone it's like he did everything he could with what he had you know and you have you know what I mean like are you going to compare yourself against someone who has a bigger podcast but didn't start a multi-billion dollar Nutrition Company you know like that's a CR that but that's insane that's true that's insane right you're comparing all of what you're you're comparing part of what you've done to someone who's only done X right and that's that's not what you were optimizing for that's not the race you were running it's interesting I don't get my wife reminds me of that all the time and I don't get any alleviation of my drive from that so here's how I look at it okay so I I make a moral judgment that if you're going to do something you ought to strive to be the you have to strive to be the greatest of all time knowing that you almost certainly are incapable of becoming that so to avoid that from being a torture chamber you have to separate out the willingness to to play at that level from the outcome so one even if you become the greatest of all time it will be a miserable experience case in point look at Michael Jordan who I don't know him I cannot say for sure but I'm pretty sure he's an alcoholic like just looking at the jaundice of his eyes and stuff like that like something I don't know about that but I think he would stipulate that he got a great gift and a great burden in that greatness it's been hard to be him it's not all been sunshine and roses and victory parades he has a thing that makes him great that he also cannot turn off yes and what I think happens to people like that is they let their their ability to love themselves to like themselves be tied up in the outcome and so the one thing that I told myself I learned very early on the success can't be guaranteed but the struggle can and so if I reward myself for playing all out leaving it all out in the field trying to make the most of my hand playing this as well as humanly possible 100 asking my talents knowing that I have different limitations that I think of it from a biological standpoint so I look at Elon Musk the emerald mind whatever like he's just brilliant at understanding first principles thinking engineering Etc et cetera I I don't like to put limits on myself but I've never found that engineering comes easily to me mathematics is very much like a black box that I don't understand so what I what I judge Myself by is did I show up and sincerely pursue the thing not did I get the outcome that I wanted not did I become the greatest of all time and this is part of why I don't let myself think about Legacy people ask me what Legacy do you want to leave I'm like I don't think about Legacy I think about living right now I think about optimizing for fulfillment right now I think about doing something that positively impacts the lives of other people partly because of how that makes me feel right and just it feels awesome I think about my marriage right now I don't think about like and this is part of why I don't have heartburn over not having kids I don't think about like what that will be like Beyond me I don't need my DNA to go into the future I I won't lie that I don't think most people should follow me in that path I think it is a way higher risk path to walk sure I think having kids is better for a whole host of reasons but because I don't think about Legacy because it's not part of how I value myself it hasn't been the troubling decision that I think it would be for especially people that can't have kids yeah I think that's right I mean did you leave anything did you hold yourself back in some way did you not do something that you could have did because you were afraid because you didn't think you were adequate because you didn't want to learn something to me those are those are things that are in your control right whether you were born in the right moment whether it was appreciated you know when you did it those are all things that are not out here in your control and so what are you going to focus on I think that's the ultimate question and I try to focus it on that I think what's interesting is like it's it's inherently subjective who is greatest of all time anyway like Michael Jordan doesn't have the most rings he doesn't have the most wins you know he he has some records but he doesn't have all the wrecks he doesn't have the most points right there's a whole bunch of facts so so you're already saying that some intangible ineffable uh subjective thing so the idea that you would compare yourself against other people or that it's somehow a ranking you know it's it's it's a it's a it's it's a dead end it's just a dead end I mean like again we're talking about money like if you go by whether you have the most money in the world well that's not a known fact right this is like what are you relying on you're relying on the Forbes list or something which other people are Lobby like this is like the the anecdotes about rich people upset that they're at seven instead of five or the financial shenanigans that they they show Forbes to try to get higher on the list like this is a very well-known thing just like my version of that is the best seller list is not at all representative or a remotely accurate depiction of who is selling the best basically the Bible in Harry Potter yeah and it's it's it's not even a reflection of who's selling the best over a long period of time it's who's a reflection right now which is irrelevant the second it happens and so you know deciding what metrics you use to measure whether you're succeeding at what you do is a really critical decision and then the ability to once you have made that decision to tune out the things that are not part of that decision to be kind to yourself in that regard to not go well I know I said this is important but I'm insecure because so-and-so has more you know that that's that's a recipe for misery why'd you have kids if the point isn't to be remembered if you know you can't enjoy your posture Miss Fame or the posthumous love of your children why make such a sacrifice I don't I don't necessarily see it as a sacrifice uh what in in the sense that like what it's cost me isn't that meaningful to me like I still get to do all the things that I like to do um and I also get this wonderful experience that's opened me up in so many ways it's challenged me to get better in so many ways that's forced me to be responsible both two and four something um I just I just haven't experienced any part of it and this could change I mean because you're young but I haven't experienced any part of it that hasn't been a net positive and the things that I lost were things that were not actually that important or I wasn't really doing anyway so to me the meaningful thing about having kids is the opportunity it presents for you to give what you didn't get to be better than the people or the generation that came before you to to try to make someone uh a you know a a good decent contributing member of society is uh you know a profoundly meaningful and difficult and heart-wrenching thing but it's just it's just been an incredibly rewarding and and beneficial in all these ways when you think about uh stoic life or putting together a philosophy that's going to allow because ultimately all of these philosophies are about the self Society becomes Downstream of the self which I think is really important is a big thing I want to get across to people um where does kids fall in that is that an intentional thing that you think most or everybody should do like how do you craft that that well-made life there was this stoic name hierocles who said you know every person is born self-interested born selfish you care about yourself you care about surviving you care about advancing and then he said that's like sort of the first Circle the first ring and then there's the Ring of your family members your Offspring there's the people who live near you the people who look like you you know there's your country there's the the continent you're on there's these sort of concentric circles that get bigger and bigger and he said the work of philosophy of life is about pulling these outer Rings inward write about caring about and contributing to more and more as you go and I I found that to be really meaningful and purposeful that yeah you have this inherent selfishness this biological urge towards self-preservation and self-advancement and you could build your life around that I guess I don't think that works out super well I don't think that gets you where you want to go the decision to have kids or to be a there's there's many ways to to sort of have a family right um they don't have to be your biological children they don't have to be children at all right but the decision to go like these are my kin and then to also expand the definition to expand the circle outwards to include more and more to include animals to include nature to include unborn Generations that is is the work of stoicism and it's that's where this key virtue of Justice comes in like you owe something to those people to that future um that's kind of how I think about it what do we owe them to leave it better than you found it you know have you heard that Greek expression uh Society is great when men plant trees in shade they will never know you know did you kick the can down the road or did you plant a tree that would make things better for the future I kind of think about it like that how do you navigate when people don't agree on what a better future looks like so you've got somebody like Elon Musk who wants to go to Mars and they think interplanetary species absolute must then you have other people that are like how the can you justify thinking about going to Mars when we have issues to solve here on planet Earth we got people starving to death and you're spending billions of dollars trying to get us to another planet what the hell I think one thing we have figured out that's why we live in a free market capitalist system it's the worst best system is that uh and you need a you need a portfolio Theory you need a lot of people working on what lights them up on what they think the solution is and that Collective distributed uh uh process or collaboration is the way that we have breakthroughs the way that we solve problems the top-down singular person knows what's best for everyone the central planning Authority has solved it is uh has not worked well historically right and so I if that's what he thinks he should be doing that's what he should be doing you know um and if uh you think you know raising money to distribute malaria Nets in Africa is the best way to alleviate human suffering and you have a talent or affinity for doing that like that's what you should be doing and uh I know what I feel like I should be doing and I hope everyone can figure out what they think they should be doing and that's what we need everyone to be doing that's the only way you can screw up is by doing the opposite of what you deep down know what you should be doing or you don't do anything you feel like you don't have a person you know you do I believe it's a great quote along those lines I forget who said this but ask not what the world needs ask instead what makes you come alive because what the world needs is more people who've come alive that's right I think my students a lot uh and impact their University with that line like you know I'm just so grateful that they come there to invest in themselves that they're trying to find that thing that that lights up their day and that they spread that now what do you think about the divide in the country where we're getting the sense of like no no the way I think is right the way you think is wrong and there's like this real sense of othering yeah I mean I guess that's probably always been there I think that's why we have a political system that makes it very hard to get an overwhelming majority right and what that's supposed to force is compromise right it's supposed to form it's supposed to create the need for coalitions and compromising and it's supposed to create a system that doesn't stagger to the left when you have a Democratic president and staggered the opposite direction to the right when you have a republican one but that for all the the changes it it actually stays pretty stable and I think the founding fathers were very very Genius Like gridlock is a feature and not a bug of the American system and I think you you saw during covid the flaws of the American system but then over a long enough timeline we did pretty good you know um sure it was easier for China to do certain things but then it made it harder for them to do other things and and and I've come to understand that that's how the American system works and that there's basically been no moments accepting a few very grave crises where it ever really worked in the sense that like it's easy to pass laws easy to make changes easy to reimagine and change things it's not supposed to be that way um now there are I think some very real problems and we are facing uh a real erosion of democratic Norms I mean that in the not in the political party sense but in the sort of fundamentally how the system's supposed to work and what some of the unwritten rules are and what good faith in that system is even when one has disagreements that I'm worried about and alarmed by for sure um but I also have some faith that over a long enough timeline it corrects why did Socrates hate democracy Socrates lives in a time of 30 tyrants right basically Athens is at war with Sparta Sparta ultimately wins this War uh it's a topsy-turvy Time in have the evidence that we have now of not just the flaws of the other system but the sort of long-term durability and viability of the democratic system that it is the best worst system you know um there is something fundamentally crazy about democracy that says hey everyone brilliant people and idiots deserve an equal say in how things go right that that's crazy um I'm writing about Harry Truman right now in the book that I'm working on now and like really Harry Truman was basically a regular ass dude from small town America that ended up the president of the United States and it was a remarkable test of the system also a remarkable test of virtue this is a guy who has he the remarkable test how did he become president I mean he's a he basically was County judge then he ran for Senate he's kicked upstairs he basically is Anointed to the Senate by a corrupt political boss who was tired of dealing with Truman's honesty at the local level he thought if I can get this guy out of Missouri he will cause less problems for me than if he is here so Truman gets sort of kicked upstairs to the Senate he has couple sort of moderately you know unremarkable moments and then he's picked as FDR's running mate he never went to college had no formal training in anything he's a veteran in World War one he's still paying off his debts from a failed business when he's elected to the U.S Senate um which he felt honor bound to continue to pay never takes a bribe never is engaged in any sort of the corruption of the times and cheat on his wife it's just an honest dude it's PR FDR probably picked him because he thought he wasn't a threat and then FDR suddenly died and now this guy is not only the president of the United States He is the sole possessor of atomic weapons at the most pivotal moment in U.S history that's insane that's like the fact that Marcus Aurelius is uh you know the emperor and the server it's not what I just described to you about Harry Truman is is not that much more or less insane than let's just pick the firstborn son of the current leader to be you know what I mean like it's insane it's insane um and yet it seems to work less bad than the other ways of doing it um but I just think it's important when we look at the Ancients and we look at their political theories like these were people who'd not yet come to the conclusion that we didn't come to here in America until the 1860s that it's wrong to own another human being or that women are equal to men which took like another 100 years right or that um you know people should be able to say what they think without fear of consequence or that people should be able to do what they want to do with their life like that you shouldn't have to do what your dad did that you should be able to move where you want and live how you want and love how you want these were it's important that we realize although the philosophers sometimes hinted at these were like hard-won hard fought Innovations like we didn't become a true multi-racial democracy in this country and I know we're not technically a democracy but we didn't become anything close to a one-person one vote you're free to do and live and be how you want until the passage of the Civil Rights Act and if you were a gay person you know much later than that we're talking like within the last 10 years could you legally marry the person that you want to marry or within the last 20 or 30 years have access to certain kinds of birth control or uh move and live how you want like these this is an ongoing process it is a procession of torch passing and breakthroughs and changes um that that is shockingly new and continues and it's not necessarily a straight line I mean we stagger backwards and fall you know it's and I think if we see it that way it also becomes imperative for us to be engaged and involved I was just going to ask that's sort of my the the culminating thing so part of the takeaway that I have with Socrates and why he hated democracy was they voted to kill him so that's obviously you're you're gonna have certain beef with a system that can do that where it can create a little bit of mob rule especially if it's a true one-to-one democracy versus like a representative democracy like what we have um so as far as I can tell his beef was like wait if you're gonna vote on something you need to be educated on that so if I'm right and culture is Downstream of the individual what you know going back to sort of what is that ideal life what do we educate ourselves on is education sort of a moral obligation how do we make sure that that's done well well in the teaching of philosophy and the propagation of myths and stories and morals was the one thing that they got pretty well in the ancient world you know and that tradition that great conversation I do feel has atrophied you know we don't study the greats we don't know these myths you know when you would have when you would watch soccer when you would watch Shakespeare you would understand he was borrowing from Plutarch and when you would listen to Lincoln you would know that he's alluding to and making references two lines and ideas from Shakespeare and from the Bible there was a common set of texts and ideas and shared assumptions um now was it predominantly sort of Western and Christian um yes and there were benefits to that in the sense that everyone was on the same page but it was also insufficient and artificially constrained in that Eastern wisdom was uh either suppressed or unknown right and the stories were overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly you know X Y or Z and it's it's actually wonderful that it's expanded because we have more to choose from and more to learn but if there isn't a shared sense if there isn't a shared familiarity with a core set of ideas or principles it does make it hard to have both the individual barometer and the collective social barometer yeah I think this is a big part of what we're going through now this is a big part of why I asked the starting question is you know in in a lot of ways what Tate represents is the hyper fragmentation the breakdown of any sort of shared morals or sense of how things should be and when that all begins to break down then you get this unmooredness of people not knowing what they should be aiming at we not having a common sense of things ought to be this way and part of what I worry about in the modern world is is that velocity of ideas that I was talking about so when you get a breakdown of religion which again I'm not religious but I recognize the danger in not having shared narratives yeah so you get a a world where ideas travel with Hyper velocity they very quickly become sort of cynical takes on and I don't maybe there's a name for what you're talking about earlier but that sense of everything has a name and by giving it a name and I can put it in a neat little box I feel like I understand it but in reality I've given a headline to something that's actually truly nuanced and by cramming Nuance into a headline there there's a breakdown of something that I haven't quite wrapped my head around but that I really worry about and as somebody who feels like my lot in life the hand that I have been dealt is that of solieri do you know the okay so my poor listeners have heard me talk about this so many times uh there's a movie called Amadeus which is about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and he had a contemporary this is real guy and solieri in the movie anyway he laments to God and the fact that you know Mozart but you don't necessary that that already sets you up especially when I tell you that I'm the guy that you know wants to be the Michael Jordan uh so solieri laments to God and he says why have you made me just good enough to realize I'll never be as good as Mozart yeah why couldn't you have made me bad at music so that I could be like everybody else and just love Mozart or be as good or better than Mozart but to make me just good enough to realize I'll never be as good is like this deeply troubling dissatisfying thing and so when you get this idea of okay there's all this tremendous Nuance in the world we are all grappling with um trying to understand the Nuance but if you're like me you're solieri and so you're just good enough to realize I don't know if I can comprehend all of this nuance and I'm cramming things into headlines and in cramming things in the headlines it becomes easier to hold on to but it becomes more difficult to navigate the real world which is truly complicated and so as I think about this you know phase three of how I am really trying to handcraft a life that is fulfilling and just to really put a fine point on it um you constantly butt up against reality and we've talked about a lot of these things so you're building a YouTube channel you don't want to become a parody of yourself but at the same time you want to get as much reach as humanly possible so how do you master the algorithm while still maintaining true yeah um to what you're trying to put out and for people that don't know you wrote a book called trust me I'm lying which is actually how I came across you uh and it's about media manipulation yeah and so seeing you I'm sure you know still be a thoughtful marketer but yet abandon some of those uh less Savory you know tactics from your Youth and so just because you can and you should yes very true and so anyway getting back to this this idea of hyper fragmented you've got the breakdown of religion hyper fragmentation you have headline the headlineification of nuanced complex ideas that manifest as these caricatures of somebody like Tate so when you compare Tate versus Marcus Aurelius to me it's cram everything into a headline that's easily digestible in a clip on social media versus a guy that writes meditations which is him writing to himself about how to be a better person and so in the final analysis for me it's like all day every day I want to go back to this ancient wisdom of Marcus Aurelius to get back into the complexity of what real life is to get into from my frame of reference to get into the messiness of biology to understand that I have these subroutines algorithms I'll call them running in my own brain that really dictate what the outcome will be of the ways that I move in my life and if I align them and look there are ancient philosophies whether it's taoism or stoicism those feel like they are somebody going what are the things that make me feel calm and centered in myself that I have been good that I have contributed and the reason I harp on the biology is the biology is the reason you want to do those things yeah because if it even even if you look at at a normal house cat it will toy with a creature as it kills it and then maybe it maybe just leaves it for dead like can you imagine like going and doing that to like a a seven year old like I'm just gonna break his arm and like drag him around for a while and then uh like when I get border he's dead or whatever like dude you'd be the biggest sociopath in the world and so knowing that there are like we're we're there but for the grace of God go I right so we're we're like one minor step removed away from all that stuff and so anyway getting into the complexity of a life will live knowing that you have these biological drives and understanding that we're living in a time that's pushing us towards an agitate when in reality we need to find a way to get back to these anchored things that are in alignment with this this sort of long Arc of life being a good person being in alignment with your biology well what I would say to someone who's young and sort of trying to figure out their place in the world someone who's sort of dissatisfied disillusioned feels like the past generation is filled with Hypocrites it feels like the system is breaking down feels like the certain truths aren't true anymore and you want purpose and you want meaning and you want guidance and you're trying to figure out who you should be and who you should listen to like some flashy random person on the internet uh is probably not it what you need to know is that the smartest people who have ever lived have been asking themselves those same questions and that all the things that you're feeling about this moment in time are not as modern or as rooted in technology or shifts or the economy as you think they are this is what human beings have been wrestling with since the Advent of Consciousness right since we crawled out of the trees and the bushes or the water or whatever and we're like what you know we have been wrestling with these existential questions about who we are what we do with this life we're given and what does it mean to die what does it mean to suffer and what does it mean that people suck and are awful and are evil that that the good guys don't always win you know that it feels like we're in Decline this is that that is what they were talking about in the Renaissance Sons that's what they were talking about in the American Civil War that's what they were talking about the founding of America that's what they were talking about in the Dark Ages is what they were talking about in ancient in ancient Rome and ancient Greece as long as there have been humans there have been people asking these questions and the great philosophical texts the great thinkers have so much to teach you and you should Avail yourself Seneca says you know only those who who make time for philosophy are truly alive he says and only they are truly wise because he says they Annex into their own life all of the wisdom of the past right like you are struggling with these questions you're not going to figure it out by yourself and and if you do it'll take your whole life you you want to learn from the experiences and the struggles of others and someone who's trying to get you into a pyramid scheme or telling you that it's going to be easy or that it's somebody else's fault like that also existed in the ancient world they called them demagogues right they're retirants in the ancient world there were Liars in the ancient world there were sophists in the ancient world which were a kind of philosopher who could make clever persuasive attractive arguments but they would argue one thing to one group and then the next day argue a totally different thing to a different group and that this this battle between truth and what you want to hear what's easy and what's hard you know the higher self and the lower self this is the Battle of The Human Experience and that philosophy is there to guide you towards dealing with that and towards human flourishing or the good life or any no so say living in accordance with nature like what you were meant to do how you were meant to be that's what philosophy is about and that's what I try to popularize and make accessible in my work but really what I'm doing is going check out what these people said don't ignore the noise that's happening around you right now ignore you know the attractive flashy controversial thing right now and and go to what's Timeless and true and then you know wrestled with for centuries well said have you seen the TV show The Bear of course so I'm not surprised you say of course uh that to me really represents stoicism the sequence I think if you're not with me yet you will be when I remind are you caught up I only watch the first season oh my God no wonder you're not convinced yet all right watch season two um I without giving away the episode I'll abstract it so I've often been asked uh hey Tom I'm really struggling with my kid like they're 15 16 they're just not doing anything productive with their life like what do I do and I'm like look there's only one way that I can think of to get somebody who's truly adrift and get them back on track you're gonna have to kidnap them you're gonna have to take them to a desert island or whatever put them with a group of people whose respect they want to earn yeah and then they will conform to the group and if you can and part for people that don't know the bear the bear is an amazing show about uh the best chef basically the best sort of Young Living Chef he is at a three-star Michelin restaurant and his brother this is all the setup to the story so I'm not giving anything away his brother passes away and uh leaves him his like sort of shitty local Town Restaurant yeah a family sandwich shop yeah in like a terrible neighborhood in Chicago and so he decides to go back and run it and he then brings with him the discipline of an ultra upscale fancy restaurant which you see and you're like whoa this is like really militaristic and but it starts dealing with discipline and and all of that and dude season two is going to blow you away if you like season one you are going to love season two um what you wrote a book called discipline is Destiny yeah why what you're talking about there is what I mean when I say discipline is Destiny it's not that discipline will make you great it can right if you are disciplined and dedicated and you work hard and you have high standards it radically increases your chances of being successful but what true discipline does true Mastery self command does is it makes whatever you're doing great while you're doing it right so there's a there's a story about a you know this this um successful General who gets too powerful in Athens and so they punish him by the people that fear Him punish him by making him like head of the sewer system and this is supposed to degrade and humiliate him and he ends up taking to the job and he gives it everything he has and he cleans up the whole system gets it operating properly and then then it becomes this highly coveted position right because it's a culture of efficiency and Effectiveness and it people see the effect that it has on the health of the city and all this stuff and basically the lesson the philosophical lesson was you know a person a job doesn't bring dignity to a person a person brings dignity to the job right and so how you do anything is how you do everything what discipline is is not a secret or a shortcut to success although it is those things discipline is the end unto itself I work very hard every day on my books I'm getting better as a writer I think that contributes to their success but it's also great and meaningful and why I get out of bed every day independent of whether it leads to any outcome at all because I could get hit by a bus tomorrow but what matters is when I show did I show up today and was the thing when I saved the draft and was done with it was it the best it could be with the time that I had for it that's what discipline is to me uh or discipline at its most meaningful and important it's not oh I eat well and I work hard you know or whatever that that's part of it but real discipline is that it's the command of oneself can it be built of course uh certainly we know it can atrophy can be lost right so we've we see it happen you can sense it in yourself if you I can't sense it in myself Ryan you take that back over there uh you can see it in the before and after pictures of just about anyone that's ever done anything so yeah of course of course I think are there is there a natural affinity for it sure it's more impressive if that if it isn't how you were built or how you were wired so how do you build it day by day minute by minute action by action Aristotle it says you know virtue is not any different than being a builder you become a builder by building things you become generous by being generous you become Strong by doing things that require strength you know you you become disciplined by making disciplined decisions little ones to lead to big ones which add up in a big way so what do you say to somebody in this modern world they're Doom scrolling they've got six only fans subscriptions they're you know on porn instead of building relationships for people that are struggling um how do they pull out of that how do they get it going in the right direction I think you start small you start with something you start with something you know I'm gonna stop this this like this is why I think you know sober January is so great it's like don't try to quit alcohol as a whole what you may need to do but I'm going to quit for one month and then I'm gonna first learn that I'm capable of quitting for a day in two days and three days and four days and five days until I've got a streak of 30 days and then I'm also going to get the evidence the information that says hey I feel better when I don't do this thing I'm better at X Y and Z when I don't do this thing now obviously look there are certain people who have addictions or you're at Rock Bottom you got to quit cold turkey right now you don't have time for a thing but I do think there's something about starting small and building learning once again the power of cause and effect and the power that you have to bring about cause and effect and oftentimes when you see someone who is broken apart who is failing who is struggling they have lost their faith in those in that thing you know they have lost they it's been a long time since they had any evidence of their own human agency their own power over their own life and you got to start by re-establishing that somewhere however small I love it where can people follow you and drink up more of this wisdom daily dad is the parenting thing that I write every day so you can go you can get that for free at dailydad or listen to it as a podcast and then the daily stoic is the same thing free every day goes out to 600 000 people all over the world every single morning and then if you're watching this on YouTube we're at Daily stoic I love it yeah all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace to explore these ideas even more check out my most recent conversation with Sam Harris there was a pretty gnarly one-two punch between covid and Trump that I really think caused a sense-making apparatus to fall apart in some way yeah and when people act in a way that I don't understand

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 195,218

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: gzNLzqI5oTE

Length: 169min 18sec (10158 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023