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Episode: What We Can Learn from the Ancient Stoics

Author: The Free Press
Duration: 00:57:15

Episode Shownotes

In the 2010s, Ryan Holiday was the head of marketing for the controversial clothing brand American Apparel, and the sought-after media strategist for people like the womanizing blogger Tucker Max. Then he wrote an exposé called Trust Me, I’m Lying, which lifted the veil on his world of media manipulation.

Now, he is an advocate of the ancient philosophy of stoicism, which he roughly defines as the idea that we do not control what happens but we do control how we respond, and that it’s best to respond with four key virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. His series of books on stoic virtues have sold over three million copies worldwide. His latest book, Right Thing, Right Now, is about the necessity of living justly—even when it is hard. Today: why power corrupts, how ego can destroy you, whether we should remain loyal to people even when they do abhorrent things, the limits of free speech, and how to treat people in our everyday lives. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'Honestly with Bari Weiss,' Ryan Holiday explores the teachings of ancient Stoicism and its relevance to modern ethical challenges. He shifts from being a media strategist to advocating for Stoicism, underscoring the notion that while external events are uncontrollable, our responses can be guided by virtues like courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. Holiday reflects on the complexities of loyalty, the influence of ego, and the implications of free speech in today’s society. Through historical examples, he illustrates how Stoicism provides a moral framework that can help navigate personal conduct and societal dilemmas.

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Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_03
From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Michael Moynihan.

00:00:07 Speaker_03
In the 2010s, Ryan Holiday was the head of marketing for the controversial clothing brand American Apparel, and a sought-after media strategist for people like the womanizing blogger Tucker Max.

00:00:18 Speaker_03
Then he wrote an exposé, Trust Me, I'm Lying, that lifted the veil on his world of media manipulation. Today, Holliday is best known as a philosopher. He's an adherent of Stoicism, an ancient set of ethics. He advocates its tenets in his daily life.

00:00:34 Speaker_03
His books on Stoic exercises and applications have sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. Holiday's latest book is Right Thing Right Now.

00:00:43 Speaker_03
It offers an antidote for the moral failures of our modern age, making the case for simple ethics like living justly and doing the right thing.

00:00:52 Speaker_03
I sat down with him to speak about how stoic ideals are applicable today, if it's just to be loyal to abhorrent people, and if people need to be told to be decent. Stay with us.

00:01:14 Speaker_00
Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline, especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.

00:01:29 Speaker_00
Mainstream media often have their own agenda, which leads, and we've seen this many times, to bias coverage, public polarization, and ideological bubbles that reinforce readers' opinions rather than challenging them.

00:01:43 Speaker_00
That's why Ground News is so important. Their app and website allow us to access the world's news in one place, to compare coverage with context behind each source.

00:01:54 Speaker_00
Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or ignored, so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind.

00:02:04 Speaker_00
Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage Plan for unlimited access. Ground News is subscriber funded. By subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime.

00:02:20 Speaker_00
Hey, Honestly listeners, I want to let you know about an amazing podcast called Unpacking Israeli History. If you read the headlines about what's going on in Israel, you're only getting a very tiny slice of a very long story.

00:02:33 Speaker_00
Shorn of depth and historical context, so much coverage of Israel can't even get the most basic facts straight.

00:02:40 Speaker_00
One of the things we try and do here on Honestly, and at the Free Press more generally, is to go deeper into the most important topics of the day as we try and get to the truth.

00:02:49 Speaker_00
And that's the mission of Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Dr. Noam Weissman. It offers listeners a journey through the events in Israel's past and its present.

00:02:58 Speaker_00
In a world where history is getting rewritten, the goal of unpacking Israeli history is to provide listeners with a nuanced, fact-based understanding of the state of Israel that's both informative and entertaining.

00:03:10 Speaker_00
The show delves deeply into the nuances and complexities of Israeli history and how it relates to the present, examining tough questions like, is Zionism a colonialist project? Is Israel an apartheid state? And are the settlements an obstacle to peace?

00:03:25 Speaker_00
You won't want to miss it. Learn the history behind the headlines and find Unpacking Israeli History wherever you get your podcasts.

00:03:35 Speaker_03
Ryan Holiday, welcome to Honestly.

00:03:37 Speaker_02
Yeah, thanks for having me. Where are you from? I'm from California like everyone in Texas now.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
So why did you move to Texas?

00:03:43 Speaker_02
Well, I've lived all over. I've lived in New York. I've lived in LA. I lived in New Orleans when I was writing my first book because it was a media book and I was like, I want to be as far from media as possible so I can actually think about this.

00:03:55 Speaker_02
What I love about Austin is it's like the good parts of the South without most of the bad parts of the South.

00:03:59 Speaker_03
What are the good parts of the South?

00:04:01 Speaker_02
You know, sort of do what you want. It's free. It's big. People are welcome. You get the hospitality. It's just a nice vibe. It's also right in the middle of the country, which I love about it.

00:04:10 Speaker_03
So part of that is Republican, Ryan. Where's Democrat, Ryan, in this?

00:04:13 Speaker_02
It's the purple dot in the red ocean. So I like that. It's funny.

00:04:18 Speaker_02
So I talk about ancient philosophy in my work, and then every once in a while, I'll touch on things that are happening in the world, because the idea that philosophy is disengagement, I think, is missing the point.

00:04:26 Speaker_02
But people think I'm super, super liberal or woke or something. And it's like, look, I live in Texas. I live on a ranch. I own guns. I don't like paying lots of taxes. middle of the road as I think you could possibly get.

00:04:39 Speaker_03
People think you're liberal, right?

00:04:41 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:04:42 Speaker_03
And I pick up this book, Right Thing Right Now, and the subtitle of this book sounds like Bill Bennett in the 1990s. Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds, the book by Ryan Holly. It sounds pretty conservative in a way, doesn't it?

00:04:56 Speaker_02
It's sad that, I guess, virtue sounds conservative. It is funny because I'm now five years into this series I'm doing on the cardinal virtues. And I think even when people hear cardinal virtues, they think religion because they think cardinal.

00:05:11 Speaker_02
It comes from the Latin cardos, which just means hinge. And so there is something about our conception of virtue that is just permanently associated with religion, even though it predates Christianity by hundreds and hundreds of years. So it's weird.

00:05:29 Speaker_02
I'm talking about virtue ethics, and in this case, I'm talking about the interrelation of the different virtues. Some people think it's very conservative. Some people think it's very liberal. I don't think that much about that.

00:05:41 Speaker_03
I mean, you can have answers to these issues from the left, from the right, from sort of atheism, agnosticism to religion. But do you agree in the general idea that we are living through a crisis of ethics and virtue in this country?

00:05:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, for sure. And it's hard to point to a time in history when which our ethics and our morals were not in some sort of crisis, even in the golden age of antiquity. This is what people are upset about, worried about.

00:06:11 Speaker_02
They always feel like the kids these days or whatever, especially when you live in a time where religion is itself polarizing or large portions of people turn away from the church. So then, what do you live by? What is your code?

00:06:26 Speaker_02
What is guiding your sense of right and wrong? There has to be something.

00:06:31 Speaker_03
I mean, you're providing that guidance, clearly, for a lot of people. You sell millions of copies of books, right?

00:06:37 Speaker_02
It's surreal. It's surreal, right?

00:06:39 Speaker_03
And people are coming to you in the same way, very, very different in all the specifics of it, as people discover someone like Jordan Peterson. And they say, oh, wow, this is, I need these strictures in life. I need to know how to live.

00:06:54 Speaker_03
Do you think that's because religion has receded into the background that people find things in either politics or, you know, maybe it's something like Stoicism, which is a philosophy that you live by?

00:07:04 Speaker_02
I was 19, I was in college in Southern California, and somebody pointed me towards the meditations of Marcus Rilis. I don't know if you know who Dr. Drew is. I do indeed, yeah.

00:07:14 Speaker_02
I was writing for my college newspaper, and I go to this conference in Los Angeles, and he's there, and he was sort of a Jordan Peterson-esque figure at that time. Yeah, correct. And I was like, hey, I'm 19, like, what book should I read?

00:07:25 Speaker_02
And he was like, hey, I'm reading the Stoics right now, maybe you would like it. So I pick up Marcus Rilis' meditations, and I remember I was sitting at my little table in my college apartment, kind of like this,

00:07:34 Speaker_02
And I'm just like, holy shit, what is this and where did this come from? Because I grew up, as I said, in sort of a conservative place, a religious place, but not super seriously so. And then I was, I think, a lot of young college men.

00:07:48 Speaker_02
the sort of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris of the world, so they're like, okay, all this is maybe not what you think it was, sort of posing some really provocative and interesting questions. They tore some stuff down, but what replaces that?

00:08:01 Speaker_02
And I think what struck me as I was reading meditations is Oh, here is an ethical framework for living. Here is an explanation of the universe, purpose, meaning, all these things.

00:08:13 Speaker_02
But from a relatively secular point of view, and from a relatively logical point of view, I think that was very, very powerful. And I think the fundamental questions we have about who we are, why we're here, What does a good person do?

00:08:28 Speaker_02
What does a good person not do? These are the questions that philosophy and religion have always tried to answer. But for most of Western civilization, religion has been the primary, if not the only, answer to that question.

00:08:39 Speaker_02
So generations of people have grown up without these philosophical ideas being taught to them.

00:08:44 Speaker_03
What's interesting to me is you come across this at 19. And I don't know how old you are now, but we won't ask. But you're older than 19. Yes. You stuck with it.

00:08:55 Speaker_03
I mean, the books that I read at 19 were kind of signposts on the way to my kind of ideological, philosophical development. I hope it's been development rather than devolution. But, you know, they're gone, right?

00:09:07 Speaker_03
They're important at that time and place, but this stuck with you. What is it about stoicism that you said, okay, this, you know, hit me at 19 and it remains a pillar.

00:09:18 Speaker_03
I have kids now, I have a house, I have a different world, but it still remains that pillar of my life.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think what I love about Stoicism, instead of being this sort of systemic or systematic philosophy that's like, this is what we believe, this is what we don't believe, what it really survives to us as is sort of just a series of snapshots, little fragments of surviving things.

00:09:40 Speaker_02
We have Marx's Meditations, some letters from Seneca, we have a couple essays, we have a couple fragments from the other founding Stoics. But other than that, we just kind of have

00:09:51 Speaker_02
the writings and then the lives itself stretches over five or so centuries. So the idea even that Stoicism was ancient philosophy to the lower Stoics, the later Stoics is interesting to me.

00:10:03 Speaker_02
But I think what you find in Stoicism, maybe similar to what you find in Zen philosophy is this sort of all these different personalities who are trying to apply it in real life, as opposed to try to explain it in real life.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
And so I think when you go out and do stuff in the world, what you come back to in the Stoics is the sense that, oh, they were also trying to do this.

00:10:24 Speaker_02
Seneca's a power broker in Nero's administration, Mark's realist to the emperor of Rome, Epictetus is a slave. So it's this wide spectrum of experiences that I think allows you to grow and evolve with it. And what you take out of it changes.

00:10:38 Speaker_02
Like, I think what I took out of Stoicism early was similar to what a lot of young men take out of Jordan Peterson early, that make your bed, toughen up, whatever.

00:10:48 Speaker_02
But then the other aspects of it, the sort of ethical component, I think that was a slower build for me. I mean, I spent my 20s working at American Apparel and for a bunch of different marketing clients. My application of stoicism has grown over time.

00:11:04 Speaker_03
You wrote about this. I mean, you were basically a very skilled liar.

00:11:07 Speaker_02
I mean, in the sense that all publicists are effectively that, but yeah, I mean... I don't mean that that's genetically encoded in you, but that was your job, was to kind of be slay-deceptive in a way, right?

00:11:15 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, look, media is not this friendly, fun thing. It's a battle for the supremacy of different narratives or points of view. It's this battle for attention and, you know, I... was in that, you know?

00:11:28 Speaker_02
And I think there was a part of me, because of what I'd been exposed to in socialism, that was like, this is not what I want to be doing. This is not the world that I want to live in. And I really didn't like the people in it, most of all.

00:11:41 Speaker_02
And so I kind of always felt it was building towards writing something about it that I knew that as I was writing it was burning a lot of bridges slash the boats behind me. And then this is what I wanted to write about.

00:11:58 Speaker_02
I wanted to be a writer and this is what I wanted to write about. That was very clear to me almost from the day I first read Meditation.

00:12:04 Speaker_03
When you look at the media landscape now, I mean, something that you're involved in, you wrote a book about Gawker and the downfall of Gawker. I mean, that's a very, 2000s media story, isn't it? What do you see when you see the media landscape now?

00:12:22 Speaker_03
It's changed so dramatically. You have things like Substack, you have Twitter that is very different than the Twitter it was 10 years ago, owned by Elon Musk. Podcasts weren't really a thing. Podcasts weren't really a thing.

00:12:31 Speaker_03
I mean, you know, what do you see when you look at that landscape?

00:12:34 Speaker_02
I mean, the big thing I take from it is that people just consume way too much of it. Too much of it. Too much media and too much real-time media. And we're not zooming out enough and we're not getting enough context.

00:12:54 Speaker_02
Like, I'm not saying podcasts are not an important part of being an informed person, and that smart people don't listen to them, but when I hear from someone, they're like, all I do is listen to podcasts, I go like, that's not how you become an informed person.

00:13:06 Speaker_02
Do you know what I mean?

00:13:07 Speaker_02
Like, I think people are, they're way too on social media, they listen to too many podcasts, and then they're just reading too much developing news as it's happening, and they lack the sort of greater historical perspective or the context

00:13:20 Speaker_02
One of the things that Stokes talked about a lot is how history is just kind of the same fucking thing happening over and over and over again. And so people get... really worked up about specific things happening in the news.

00:13:31 Speaker_02
And I don't think they're fully aware of just how unremarkable a lot of the things are or the tropes that they themselves are participating in, if that makes sense.

00:13:42 Speaker_03
It does. I mean, particularly when it comes to history and how unremarkable things are.

00:13:46 Speaker_03
I mean, regardless of where you find yourself on the current war in Gaza, the uniqueness of it is not unique to anyone who's been looking at the history of conflicts in the world.

00:13:58 Speaker_03
not particularly gruesome when it comes to, you know, 600,000 people dying in Syria. But the focus on this in the media is specifically this conflict, so it does look very different in scope to a lot of people.

00:14:11 Speaker_03
And again, that's not a value judgment of who's right, who's wrong in a conflict. But no, I think that is probably right. I mean, how does one—I mean, this book is anchored in history. There's an anecdote from history on almost every page.

00:14:24 Speaker_03
You start with Harry Truman. Yeah. And a pretty laudatory— I think he was a great president, yeah. Why did you pick somebody like that?

00:14:33 Speaker_02
You know, it's funny. Truman's line was, the only thing new in the world is the history you do not yet know.

00:14:39 Speaker_02
Which I think is very true, and I find oftentimes I go back and I'm reading about historical figures, and they help me unlock and understand what's happening now.

00:14:47 Speaker_02
What's so great about the Stoics is that they just said what they mean, and so they don't need to be explained the way that Heidegger or Kierkegaard did.

00:14:55 Speaker_03
So why don't we explain that, because I mean, you've done this a million times, but what is the 30-second, 60-second definition of Stoicism?

00:15:00 Speaker_02
I say it's a philosophy built around the idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, and that we can always respond with those four virtues of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.

00:15:09 Speaker_02
That's my sort of working definition. What I tried to do in the book, and this is more an ancient genre as well, is instead of explaining the ideas, I wanted to illustrate the ideas, largely through stories, fables, historical anecdotes.

00:15:22 Speaker_02
And so I have a theme or an idea or sometimes just like a vibe that I wanna communicate. And then I go, okay, who's the vehicle through which I can tell that story?

00:15:32 Speaker_02
And so I wanted to start though, not with like social justice, with legal justice, but like a more personal form of justice. Like what is the character or the- Where you say justice is a verb.

00:15:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, justice as a set of standards for individual behavior that is self-imposed.

00:15:50 Speaker_02
And I think what's so interesting about Harry Truman is here you have someone sort of very much embodies a sort of classic Midwestern, little Southern values of honesty, decency, loyalty, integrity.

00:16:05 Speaker_02
And so I wanted to illustrate that in an example of someone I love, especially too, when people aren't super well predisposed to that person.

00:16:14 Speaker_02
So, you know, he doesn't seem like a towering figure, because in relation to an Eisenhower or an FDR, he just seemed not that exciting.

00:16:23 Speaker_02
But when you really dig into the life of Harry Truman, you go, whether I agree with all the decisions he made or not, this was an incredible human being. And there's this tension.

00:16:32 Speaker_02
I think one of his secretaries of state said, you know, everyone keeps telling me what an ordinary person Harry Truman was. But he says, in that, he was one of the most extraordinary people that I've ever met.

00:16:42 Speaker_02
The presidency should make you a worse person, and in his case, it seemed to have unlocked in him these sort of humble, ordinary virtues that were always there.

00:16:51 Speaker_03
What do you say should make you a worse person rather than it usually does?

00:16:54 Speaker_02
Well, let's just say yes. Yeah, it usually does. Historically does. Marcus Aurelius is another great example of this, like you give someone— absolute power that even an American president couldn't conceive of. It does not go well.

00:17:06 Speaker_02
And when we say it shouldn't go well, we mean if you just let a person do whatever they want, you worship them as a god. That's inherently corrosive and destructive.

00:17:14 Speaker_03
You know, in the absolute power cliche, is it that people in positions like that and the uniqueness of somebody like Harry Truman is it tends to attract people that want to be president. And I don't want those people to be president.

00:17:29 Speaker_02
Of course. I mean, in both Marks Relis' case, in Truman's case, and then looking at some of the great presidents, what they do tend to have in common is a sort of accidental path to power. So Marks Relis,

00:17:43 Speaker_02
is the emperor that we just assume, oh, it's because his father was emperor.

00:17:47 Speaker_02
In fact, the emperor Hadrian sees something in this kid, and he sets in motion this remarkable succession plan where he adopts this guy named Antoninus, who in turn adopts Marcus Reus. So we have two really good Roman emperors in a row,

00:17:59 Speaker_02
neither of whom had any preconceived notions or any expectation that they would be emperor and no bloodline entitlement to it. Truman, he was, I think, more ambitious than people thought.

00:18:14 Speaker_02
Clearly, somebody thought he would be a good president because they forced FDR to get rid of Wallace and replace him with Truman. Thank God.

00:18:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, Wallace would have been a bad person for him to die in office.

00:18:24 Speaker_02
So there's something about the not having campaigned for it, not having wanted it your whole life, that a friend of mine has this joke, it's like, if they tell you there's a most powerful person in the world and you go, that should be me, there's probably something wrong with you.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
So this is about justice and it's interesting you say in so many ways that people think of going to court. Or they think of social justice, which people have very polarized opinions on these days.

00:18:52 Speaker_03
If I were to be rough on you on this, I would say these chapter titles seem pretty self-evident, right? So you have things like keep your word, tell the truth, take responsibility. good, not great, be an open book, be decent.

00:19:09 Speaker_03
Why do we need to tell people to be decent? Are we in a place where people just naturally aren't being decent without being told to be?

00:19:18 Speaker_02
I mean, do you look around and go, everyone's real decent.

00:19:22 Speaker_03
No, no, in New York City, this is a very different place. I'm usually like, please put your pants on in the subway. That's a different thing. But when you're in your town in Texas, is the default not to be decent?

00:19:33 Speaker_02
I mean, first off, I think none of us live where we live because we also live in the online world. We get to see the full mass of humanity behaving as they probably thought they could get away with.

00:19:43 Speaker_02
Are there fundamentally decent parts about small town America? Sure. But there's also a reason why most people flee small town America is that there are fundamentally indecent parts of that, intolerance, judgment.

00:19:56 Speaker_02
I always say with stoicism, like, a lot of the things are simple, but that doesn't mean they're easy. And the fact that we all know them doesn't mean that we put them in the right place in terms of prioritization in our life.

00:20:10 Speaker_02
I hope it doesn't come off as I'm lecturing about them, because I'm mostly, when I'm writing these books, I'm primarily talking to myself. Like, these are things I want reminders of that I want to be better at in my own life.

00:20:20 Speaker_03
There's an interesting chapter here towards the end of the book, which is sort of challenging in a way, which is loyalty.

00:20:27 Speaker_03
And the example you use is Alger Hiss, which I thought was a really interesting one to take because you talk about Dean Acheson, you know, official in the Truman administration.

00:20:38 Speaker_03
and Truman himself, being loyal to somebody like Alger Hiss, who was obviously a Soviet agent, a spy for the Soviet Union, a spy for Joseph Stalin. Is it a virtue to be loyal to somebody who is themselves a disloyal person?

00:20:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's what's so fascinating. I think about this in the world of cancel culture that we live in.

00:21:03 Speaker_02
Like, I know a lot of people, especially because of my media work over the years, I would get sought out by people who were in the middle of some controversy or scandal.

00:21:13 Speaker_02
And the tension of like, okay, this person is probably wrong, or this person definitely screwed up,

00:21:21 Speaker_02
And also either the injustice of what's happening or the inhumanity of what's happening to them is profound enough that one has an obligation on a human level to step in or step forward or step in front of.

00:21:38 Speaker_02
And so I was fascinated by that specific story because Yeah, Hiss is probably guilty. How aware was Acheson of this at the time is obviously, we have more confirmation now than he would have at the moment.

00:21:53 Speaker_02
And I also, I'd assume they would have been like very close friends. He was like colleagues with his brother.

00:21:58 Speaker_03
Yeah. What I think he was- Donald Hiss, who was also a Soviet agent, by the way.

00:22:01 Speaker_02
But it's not like they grew up together. But I think he was saying, hey, look, I'm not going to pile on this person and I'm not going to forsake them. And he felt like it was his Christian duty not to do so.

00:22:12 Speaker_02
And yet he also understands that by this act of loyalty, he's endangering the Truman administration. So the first thing he does is he goes to Truman and he says, would you like my resignation?

00:22:22 Speaker_02
And he goes, look, the press ate me alive when I went to Pendergast's funeral, Truman having being this virtuous guy gets his start in the Kansas City political machine.

00:22:34 Speaker_02
And the first thing he does after assuming the presidency is he goes to visit the widow of and attend the funeral of the corrupt crime boss who allowed him to enter politics.

00:22:44 Speaker_02
And he said, always get shot in the front, never behind, which I thought was interesting. The tension of these loyalties, Truman's loyalty, he was a very loyal person.

00:22:55 Speaker_02
Like Grant, sometimes loyal, Ulysses S. Grant, sometimes loyal to people who were not good. But I think that's one of the virtues of loyalty is that it doesn't discriminate.

00:23:04 Speaker_02
Like loyalty is a thing that you give to someone because you know them, you love them, you care about them, you came up together.

00:23:14 Speaker_02
And I think about that like I've had some friends that have gone in very strange directions or done and I I go back and forth between finding what they do and say and even are now abhorrent and then my affection or affinity for

00:23:32 Speaker_02
Do you know what I mean? And that tension of loyalty is tough. Can you remain friends with them? In some cases, yes. And in other cases, it's too painful.

00:23:39 Speaker_03
What is too far? Is there an example? You don't have to name names or anything, but there's somebody who you've been loyal to, who for only, they didn't do anything wrong.

00:23:50 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:23:50 Speaker_03
But she's had an opinion that you thought that maybe this trespasses the boundaries of good taste or something that I find acceptable.

00:23:57 Speaker_02
When we're talking about taste, when we're talking about career choices, to me that all seems not like a big deal.

00:24:03 Speaker_02
I guess where sometimes when that, those, I think where I've struggled more recently is when I find that the views they're expressing are sort of outwardly or actively dangerous. Do you know what I mean?

00:24:17 Speaker_03
So like- You had friends like that.

00:24:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, like what about when there's like legitimate harm being caught? And I don't mean that in the sort of snowflakey sense, but like there's real harm to the thing that you are saying, that starts to be troublesome for me.

00:24:30 Speaker_03
But in the snowflakey sense, and in the culture that we, that's kind of developed to say in the past 10 years or something, if this book and this, I mean, you have a series, the Stoic Virtue series, if these books sold 15 copies and not millions of copies,

00:24:42 Speaker_03
You're in a position now where millions of copies allows you to be a little more honest about what you think about certain things. But if you're selling 15 copies and there's a friend who's kind of on the borderline, loyalty becomes hard, right?

00:24:56 Speaker_03
Because it might affect your career. Do you blame people who say, I don't really want to touch that radioactive person because not good for me, but they probably deserve my support?

00:25:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's like it's not a principle unless it costs you money. Correct.

00:25:11 Speaker_02
And so, yeah, when someone is twisting in the wind and there's sort of, you know, we're in one of those places where we as a mob slash society cannot judge or think about it honestly. Do you sacrifice yourself for some moment?

00:25:27 Speaker_03
Have you ever gone out and gone to bat for somebody who deserved it but would hurt your career, maybe?

00:25:33 Speaker_02
I think I have. I'm trying to think of what a specific... I think about it also, though, one of the stories I close the book with is this moment in Oscar Wilde's life after he has been convicted.

00:25:43 Speaker_02
of sodomy, and he's been bankrupted, everything's been taken from him, and there's this moment where they're transferring him between prisons, it's going from bankruptcy court to where he's going to serve his sentence, and he's walking down this hallway and the entirety of the British press is there, and the haters are there just to

00:26:02 Speaker_02
catch a glimpse of this person at his lowest and worst moment, and he sees there in the hallway his friend Robbie Robertson, the writer, who just sort of nods and smiles to him. And he writes, this nod was to him the greatest

00:26:17 Speaker_02
and most gracious thing he had ever experienced in his life. Here you have this person at their lowest ebb, no one has shown up for them and you're just sort of there smiling. I don't necessarily know how public these things always have to be.

00:26:30 Speaker_02
I was talking to someone who had been through this like many years ago and he was sort of showing me, and this was as big of a scandal as you could possibly get. I don't know who Price is. Lance Armstrong lives in Austin.

00:26:43 Speaker_02
And we were talking about something and he goes on Oprah. He thinks it's gonna redeem him or explain where he was coming from. And just everyone in the world is like, hates it and hates him.

00:26:56 Speaker_02
And he was showing me some of the texts that people had sent him, and this was at this point like 10 years after it all happened. And I could see what that had meant to him in that moment.

00:27:08 Speaker_02
So whether these people had gotten headlines for defending him wasn't what stood out to him years later, but it was the message of like, I'm not forsaking you as a person, that was privately expressed. So I think about it more that way.

00:27:21 Speaker_03
But when people say this, I got so many private messages, none of these assholes would come out and say it publicly.

00:27:27 Speaker_02
What do you make of that?

00:27:28 Speaker_03
I mean, it's in the sense of like, you know, cancel culture, whatever you want to call it. I think that's a kind of flabby term and, you know, people don't really know how to define it.

00:27:37 Speaker_03
But if we kind of know generally what we're talking about here, would that exist?

00:27:41 Speaker_03
if people, I mean, I think we're on the other side of this in some ways, because people are saying, well, you know, Kevin Spacey was vindicated by five court trials, whatever it might be, four, and people are having him on and he's allowed to explain himself.

00:27:54 Speaker_03
There was a point at which to even have a conversation with somebody like that was, you know, tying a rock to your leg and jumping in the water.

00:28:02 Speaker_02
But here's what I don't get about, I don't know that much about that one specifically, but I have been thinking about this in relation to the ideas in the Justice Book.

00:28:10 Speaker_02
Which is that, okay, just because someone has been found not guilty of something, or just because it's more complicated, I experienced this at American Apparel. A lot of the media coverage of what Dove had done or who he was or the specific cases

00:28:28 Speaker_02
was wrong or flimsy or exaggerated. In one case, the lawyer who filed like the majority of the cases against him ultimately ended up as his lawyer when he was fired by the company. And he said, you fired this man without cause.

00:28:44 Speaker_02
So there is something unfortunately- Might say something about lawyers too. Yeah, but also just about how the legal system can be weaponized or used against someone. And then the other hand, that didn't,

00:28:56 Speaker_02
actually justify or make right the private behavior that was happening, right? And so there's this weird thing where we've been going like, oh, this person's vindicated. And it's like, no, this person's just not going to jail.

00:29:10 Speaker_02
They're still a piece of shit. They're not legally a predator, but they're not a person you would want your children around.

00:29:17 Speaker_02
And so I think what's been interesting to me, I find fascinating where my sort of stoic work and my media work intersects, is this because of how tribalized things are, someone will get accused of something and then people will defend them or it'll turn out that that was exaggerated or whatever, and then the other side will embrace that person as if

00:29:38 Speaker_02
that's a good person. And it's like, no, no, no, that person's just not literally a criminal.

00:29:42 Speaker_02
Like I was thinking about this with the Trump case, whether or not a former president of the United States should be criminally prosecuted for paperwork crimes, it doesn't mean that a dude who cheats on his wife with a porn star and then covers it up, that's morally abhorrent behavior that gets like very quickly lost in our sort of

00:30:02 Speaker_02
our discussions about these things, it's strange. No, I mean, I've said the same thing. It's so strange.

00:30:08 Speaker_03
Is it a justified prosecution by Alvin Bragg? And at the end of the day, it's like, well, we still have to elect him president. Yeah.

00:30:15 Speaker_03
Whether or not this was done in a way that I think is acceptable does not mean that I'm not going to judge his behavior, whether it's a paperwork violation or cheating on his wife with a porn star.

00:30:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, and even putting aside voting, you could still go like, that's a shitty thing to do. Who the fuck does that, right? And like, so there's this weird thing where we're almost embracing like abhorrent behavior or people because the other side

00:30:42 Speaker_02
is overreaching in their attacks on those people.

00:30:45 Speaker_03
Is it always the case, though, that you can normalize any behavior provided it lines up with your politics?

00:30:50 Speaker_03
I mean, I always used to make the joke that if you want to commit some sort of terrorist act or kill somebody, make sure you say before that you were going to give free breakfast to the local poor people.

00:31:01 Speaker_03
Because, you know, that's what happened with people like the Black Panthers or something. They could do all these horrible things. It's like, well, you know, the free breakfast program is fantastic.

00:31:06 Speaker_03
We do tend to dismiss these things provided it lines up with our own priors.

00:31:11 Speaker_02
But I would say even in like the free speech debate, like I feel like, of course, I largely agree people should just be able to say what they want and this is what the First Amendment is about. And of course, we're talking here at the Free Press.

00:31:22 Speaker_02
But like, I feel like we sometimes lost in our discussions about it, the preface of, okay, this thing is really stupid and wrong and a shitty thing to say. Yeah. but you should be allowed to say it, right?

00:31:34 Speaker_02
Instead, we're like, it's their right to say it. But it's, I think where virtue comes in is- But you should get angry at the people who are squelching speech then.

00:31:44 Speaker_03
We're changing the conversation away from the stupidity of the argument to, can one even have the argument?

00:31:49 Speaker_02
Certainly, but I think the preface is also important that like, hey, by the way, this is wildly incorrect, or this is downright evil to say or think. Is it allowed? That's different. Do you know what I mean?

00:32:04 Speaker_03
What is allowed? What do you think should be allowed? And I know it's a huge question, but when it comes to some of these debates about speech, people with noxious ideas, should they be on Twitter? Should they be speaking on college campuses?

00:32:17 Speaker_03
I mean, what are the guardrails here? And I do think that this kind of fits in with your books in a lot of ways in exposing some of these people, engaging in conversation with them,

00:32:30 Speaker_02
Well, it's funny, right, because one of the things I tried not to do in the book itself, I love these conversations, but I do, it's interesting, you kind of, we tend to gravitate towards these really complex edge cases.

00:32:41 Speaker_02
We get lost in these debates instead of, you know, spending more of our time on going like, well, what am I doing? Should I be doing this? So that just, I just think it's worth being said.

00:32:53 Speaker_02
I did, I tried not to write a book that was like, how do I, how do I nail down the correct answer to the trolley problem? Oh, for sure. That's absolutely not what the book is about, to be clear. What's the point of this? Like we,

00:33:03 Speaker_02
philosophers bend themselves into knots debating these questions of justice kind of in the abstract or in the extreme. And then they're not thinking about like how they just treat the person who's serving them at breakfast, right?

00:33:15 Speaker_02
So I think that all being said, one of the cases I was really fascinated with that I wrote about a couple of years ago, my favorite novel is this book, Ask the Dust by John Fante.

00:33:27 Speaker_02
The backstory on Ask the Dust is that it's a beautiful novel about Los Angeles that is, forgotten because that same year his publisher, Stackpole & Sons, publishes a pirated edition of Mein Kampf, which Hitler is rising to power in Germany.

00:33:45 Speaker_02
He's actually published in the U.S. by HMH, Heltmann, Mifflin, Harcourt, which is still a publisher to this day, and they held the rights to this book until the 70s.

00:33:53 Speaker_02
And so Hitler's agents through HMH sue Stackpole and Sons, and Hitler wins a copyright case in federal court in the US in like 1934.

00:34:03 Speaker_02
And the fighting of this case famously more or less bankrupts the publishers and his promising novel is lost until Bukowski rediscovers it in the Los Angeles Public Library like 60 years later.

00:34:14 Speaker_02
Even then, there were these arguments about whether Mein Kampf should be published. HMH brings their addition to the White House, their editor sends it to FDR. And he, who had read it in German, goes, what the fuck is this?

00:34:29 Speaker_02
He's like, you've cut out all the horrible parts of it. You are publishing a more palatable version of Hitler instead of Hitler in the raw.

00:34:37 Speaker_02
And then other people are arguing that publishing Hitler at all is funding Hitler's, like people don't, how does Hitler have the money to run for office and fund the movement early on? It's royalties from his book.

00:34:49 Speaker_02
So anyways, I was fascinated by this because it brings up a lot of questions. And again, we're talking about, we go back, look at things historically as opposed to the moment we're in right now.

00:34:59 Speaker_02
So on the one hand, you should go like, hey, more people should have read Mein Kampf. They would have known exactly what Hitler was up to. On the other hand, Hitler was able to be Hitler because of the royalties of the sales of his noxious ideas.

00:35:14 Speaker_02
And so you can't just look at these ideas as, hey, should it be allowed to exist or not? Because there's also the financial component of it, which is how is one profiting from what they're doing? Like, do you know what I'm saying?

00:35:30 Speaker_02
It's not simply an abstract debate of should it be allowed or not? Because in the world we live in, it being allowed or how it's allowed often creates real world consequences that we kind of forget as if it's purely this First Amendment discussion.

00:35:51 Speaker_03
We'll be right back.

00:36:03 Speaker_00
Hey, Honestly listeners, I have something exciting to tell you about. It's a brand new limited podcast series called Stars of David with Elon Gold, and it's exactly what I think a lot of people need right now.

00:36:15 Speaker_00
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00:37:30 Speaker_05
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00:38:31 Speaker_03
We seem to be living through a political moment of extremism, in a way. And I don't mean this in any political direction. I just mean in general. The rhetoric seems extreme.

00:38:42 Speaker_03
It seems that when you don't, people talk about, we can't agree on a basic set of facts. I don't think we can agree on a basic moral framework for American history.

00:38:50 Speaker_03
Do we tear down, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, as we did in front of the Museum of Natural History? Do the same thing with Jefferson, Washington, et cetera? It seems to be that everything is so fraught with politics these days.

00:39:02 Speaker_03
Am I imagining this, or have we always been like this? Is there a moment that we're living in that, because of media, because the way we consume information, is especially fraught?

00:39:14 Speaker_02
Well, I think the Confederate statue one's a good example of how we do kind of obscure. It's like, oh, everyone agreed we should put up the Confederate statues, and now you're saying you're pulling that.

00:39:23 Speaker_02
Well, actually, like in most cases, these were like majority black counties. So, clearly, they didn't agree. It's that some people were kept by the point of a gun and law from voicing their opinion.

00:39:35 Speaker_02
So, this was an extreme minority viewpoint at the time that gets – that seems with the passage of history to have been more tranquil and consensus than it by definition was.

00:39:49 Speaker_02
But I would say that I think we live, what's that expression about how it's like we live in a vetoocracy? Like no one has enough political will to like put things forward, but we can kill things.

00:40:00 Speaker_02
And I think some of our cultural discussions are similar.

00:40:03 Speaker_02
They could tell you who sucks and they can tell you why they sucked and they can tell you all the bad things we did, but we don't have enough people arguing in good faith enough to be able to put forth like, What are the good things?

00:40:14 Speaker_02
What are the values we share? What are we celebrating? What is good? And so we just have this sort of process of canceling, which in some cases needs to happen regardless.

00:40:24 Speaker_02
But cancellation without replacement strikes me as creating a moral vacuum that ironically lends to more shitty stuff. Like we talk about like Trump and we go, oh, he's like breaking norms.

00:40:37 Speaker_02
Well, the reason people don't care about that is that they don't know what the norms are. Like, we don't talk about the norms until they get broken.

00:40:46 Speaker_02
We don't have a civic culture and understanding of, like, sort of what virtues we expect or celebrate or demand of public figures.

00:40:56 Speaker_03
What do you glean about American Americans. When you go out on the road promoting these books, I mean, you work for American Apparel. You've had a very, very good life. I'm sure you have a very happy life now. You've made lots of money.

00:41:11 Speaker_03
We talk about the virtues and the kind of moral centering of certain Americans, and they don't really care about Donald Trump. And a lot of the things, what he's done, it doesn't really interest them.

00:41:21 Speaker_03
It strikes me that it's mostly people in New York and L.A. saying, why do these people not agree with me?

00:41:28 Speaker_03
When you go out and talk to people writing these books, when you've written these books and you're doing these tours, and you're talking about virtue and things like this, what are you gathering from people in like, say, very red places that maybe don't reflect the exact values you hold?

00:41:43 Speaker_02
One of the things you find that's always very encouraging is like, people are genuine and earnest about wanting to develop and grow as human beings. And then they're very concerned about raising good kids.

00:41:55 Speaker_02
Like that's something where everyone's thinking about how do I pass these ideas onto my kids? How do I teach them these? And I think we're all sort of right, left, red, blue in agreement that like, they're not getting it anywhere else, right?

00:42:07 Speaker_02
There's not some, they come of age and that's where they, there's not like this sort of cultural or structural way in which people are inculcated with the values that we sense are important.

00:42:21 Speaker_02
I would also say when you are angry, or when you hate someone, or when you resent a group, it becomes very easy to support or, I think, not care about the means or methodologies of someone. Do you know what I mean?

00:42:39 Speaker_02
So like, I think that's a big part of it also. So if you're angry, if you're suspicious, if you have some grievance, I think,

00:42:47 Speaker_02
And I've seen this, you know, on the individual level, like ultimately with some of the people we're talking about earlier with like, when you get canceled, I've noticed that what tends to, what a lot of these sort of figures who have moved to the right have in common is some shared cultural grievance.

00:43:06 Speaker_02
Like something happened to them that they thought was unfair or mean, usually by one specific group. It's often the media or whatever.

00:43:17 Speaker_02
And they become radicalized by their hatred of those people and what they did and how they operate or the hypocrisy of them. And that, I just, that's a very destructive force.

00:43:31 Speaker_02
And so part of the reason I felt like I wanted to- Does it ever consume you? Part of the reason I wanted to move out of media and I wanted to move away and I wanted to sort of live a very different kind of- I'm very leery of that force and world.

00:43:45 Speaker_02
It's just not- I don't think it's good for you.

00:43:48 Speaker_03
But you had to fight it at one point.

00:43:51 Speaker_02
Yeah. I mean, I, there's, we talked about, is there this part of you, that part of you? I mean, like I was in that world. I was successful in that world. I knew the players in that world and on a lot of different levels.

00:44:03 Speaker_02
And, and I, could I, could I have made a great living as a media edge Lord? Probably, you know, I just, I just saw there's this James Baldwin line. He said like, um,

00:44:16 Speaker_02
uh, hatred has never failed to destroy the person who who hates and that's an immutable law something like that. I just when people are motivated by like grievance or sort of gamesmanship that this sort of

00:44:30 Speaker_02
video gamification that we were talking about earlier of like culture. I just, I haven't seen anyone that's in it. Even if I agree with them on some things where I'm like, it seems like they're having a great time and a great life.

00:44:44 Speaker_02
Like that's, I wrote this Gawker book. What's interesting, if you wanna talk about justice, like there's not many people that came out of that world that I, look at and go, they're really having an awesome time.

00:44:59 Speaker_03
Most of them have disappeared.

00:45:01 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:45:02 Speaker_03
It's actually true. I mean, it's the, you know, typical trajectory of somebody at a big successful media organization is that maybe that blows up, but they end up being big and successful somewhere else. Yes. But that was a tonal thing.

00:45:15 Speaker_03
That was like an established tone. Yes. Not, I mean, everyone was putting their writing into this tone machine. Yes. And when they came out, you may, okay, I'm going to be a labor reporter now and write about things like that. And it's just like,

00:45:26 Speaker_03
People don't notice. I would say that's really interesting, too, is when people have catastrophic individual events that actually cure them. George Wallace is a good example.

00:45:36 Speaker_03
A insane racist that made an insanely, scarily successful run in 1968, didn't win, but got a surprising number of votes, and then was shot and paralyzed and was cured. of his racism from that.

00:45:50 Speaker_03
In the last election he ran, I think he, for the governor of Alabama, I think he got 85% of the black vote. And he had really turned himself around from this. I mean, so it can be poisonous, and mostly is poisonous.

00:46:03 Speaker_03
But you have these moments where this catastrophic effect will actually cure you of some of the bad things that infect you.

00:46:08 Speaker_02
And what is the, where do the bad things that infect a person, where does that come from?

00:46:14 Speaker_03
Wallace's case, I mean, you can say it's in your mother's milk when you're that young. I mean, I can never hate anyone for their personal politics. But if they have bad views, I just always presume that it's come from their parents.

00:46:27 Speaker_03
It's come from some, as you say, like, you know, you want to inculcate these views. And that's usually where a lot of this stuff comes from, and people come from different backgrounds, and I can't get mad at them for that.

00:46:37 Speaker_03
The one thing I'm interested in, though, is that the people that They lie their entire life. Let's take Alger Hiss again, and let's take Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong goes to Oprah and says, I'm unburdening myself. Maybe people will love me for this.

00:46:51 Speaker_03
Alger Hiss had a very big following to the day he took his last breath. lying for his entire life, telling people he didn't do what he did to everybody. I mean, he became a hero. People would, you know, they endowed a chair named after him at NYU.

00:47:06 Speaker_03
And he knew he was lying every moment of the day. I mean, what is that like to live a life in which everything you say in your career is predicated on an enormous lie and a lie about your own disloyalty?

00:47:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I think the Stoke argument would be like, there is not a greater hell than that. Forget karma, forget an afterlife. So he is being punished. Yeah, who you are is the punishment. What must that actually be like?

00:47:34 Speaker_02
And if it was so wonderful, I guess more people would do it, right? Clearly there's something about it that holds us back. I mean, they're the exceptions rather than the rule.

00:47:44 Speaker_02
One of the ancient Soaks is there when Marius dies, the sort of towering Roman statesman who was this great military figure, I think he's consul eight times, and he sort of

00:47:56 Speaker_02
delusional at the end and and he's just he's realizing that like oh that's that was the punishment that it was horrible to be this person and Seneca writing of this scene says Marius commanded armies but ambition uh commanded Marius that he was a slave and so

00:48:12 Speaker_02
The Stoics were really interested in this idea of slavery, that it wasn't just these lowly people that were working in the fields or in the palaces, but that there were these very powerful people who were slaves to these forces inside themselves, and freedom was really command of oneself, whether you're incredibly powerful or incredibly powerless.

00:48:30 Speaker_02
How much command do you have of yourself, your opinions, your urges, your thoughts, that that was really it. So I think sometimes you Lying is obviously an extreme example, but you see some of these figures and you think they're getting away with it.

00:48:44 Speaker_02
But I don't really feel like they are getting away with it. And I have been fortunate and unfortunate enough to see some of these people up close and you go, oh, it's horrible.

00:48:52 Speaker_03
Ego is the enemy. Yeah. An important concept to you, they wrote a book about it with that name.

00:48:57 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:48:58 Speaker_03
And then tattooed it on yourself. Why is ego the enemy?

00:49:02 Speaker_02
What's funny, I was gonna write a book about humility, because I think it's an interesting concept and there hadn't been a good book about it. And I was actually still at American Apparel while I was writing. I sold it while I was there.

00:49:13 Speaker_02
And I was writing it as I'd been, I'd sort of come back after they'd fired Dove, the founder, and then he was in the process of trying to initiate a hostile takeover, bring it back, and he ends up destroying the company in the process.

00:49:26 Speaker_02
And he'd run it more or less into the ground in the preceding months and years anyway.

00:49:31 Speaker_03
I worked at Vice, I know this story very well.

00:49:33 Speaker_02
And so it was fascinating to me to watch one of these things that I think you would ordinarily only read about, like watch it happen. And I just remember thinking about how timeless some of the decisions and the way he was acting was.

00:49:45 Speaker_02
But I think of ego being one end of the spectrum. worthlessness and despair or abject humiliation to be the other. So the middle, the middle, the actual virtue there would be confidence, which I would just make a distinction of.

00:50:01 Speaker_02
Ego to me is something false. Ego to me is something very dangerous. It's something that affects and infects one's sense of reality. And confidence to me is something very real. So like, I think of someone

00:50:13 Speaker_02
Like Truman, what's remarkable about Truman is that he was awed and there is this moment that he wavers when he first finds he's going to be president. He's like, I feel like the whole world fell on me. But he also had this sense that he could do it.

00:50:28 Speaker_02
And where did that sense come from? I don't think it was delusion. You know, it's not a, this is going to be easy. He had a sort of a humility about it. I think he thought that he would figure it out. And to me, that's what confidence is.

00:50:42 Speaker_02
So excessive ego can destroy you. Yes.

00:50:45 Speaker_03
Dov Charney is a great example of this. Yes. Is ego necessary for success?

00:50:50 Speaker_02
Well, it's certainly often correlated with success. It certainly is.

00:50:55 Speaker_03
I mean, I don't know many nice people that run big companies. They have these reputations for being monstrous in a way.

00:51:01 Speaker_03
And I'm not saying that they're deserved always, but I mean, you tend to think like a healthy ego is what makes you a lot of money and gets you to the top.

00:51:08 Speaker_02
You think about how that ego gets you somewhere. It's not that egotistical people are never successful. Of course they are. It's just egotistical people, for the same reasons that created the success, often destroy that very success.

00:51:20 Speaker_02
And so when you meet those people, what's always interesting to me is the stuff that doesn't get said about them or that the people close to them know, is they see where that person is their own worst enemy.

00:51:30 Speaker_02
You know, like people sort of celebrate the myth of Steve Jobs. It's like Steve Jobs should have been fired from Apple the first time. He was awful. He was lucky that he got this second chance, right?

00:51:41 Speaker_02
And I think he learned some lessons from that second chance. But to me, what we're trying to do is push away ego, replace it with confidence. If you don't think you can do something, you're probably not gonna be able to do it.

00:51:53 Speaker_02
But just the sense that you can do something, that you should do something, that it's gonna be wonderful if you do something.

00:51:58 Speaker_03
But it's a chemical compound, that it's a couple of strands difference, right?

00:52:02 Speaker_02
And if you do it one way, it might blow up. And if not, it's confidence, right? Right. What was to me so fascinating about Dove is like, and this is a very common thing, every step of the way, the idea was insane. What he was trying to do was insane.

00:52:15 Speaker_02
And then he did it. And so how is he going to listen to those people tell him, You're going to lose everything if you keep doing this.

00:52:23 Speaker_02
Elon Musk has talked about this, where when he set out to start SpaceX, people had an Alcoholics Anonymous style intervention. You cannot do this. This is a terrible idea. So then when he says he's going to buy Twitter, how could he listen?

00:52:38 Speaker_02
That success is also the seeds of our destruction. Is that ego or confidence or a combination?

00:52:43 Speaker_02
if what you took from that is, okay, here's why they were wrong about SpaceX specifically, you know, like if you can take from that a set of criteria that allows you to be objective about future decisions, then we're talking about confidence.

00:52:57 Speaker_02
If you have taken from this that you have the Midas touch and that everyone who disagrees with you is a hater or an idiot, which is what often happens.

00:53:05 Speaker_03
It's kind of hard for that not to happen. If I was walking down the street in Manhattan on a very crowded day, and a thousand people walked by me, and I went down to the subway. I wouldn't go to the subway if I was Elon Musk. But I'm going down.

00:53:17 Speaker_03
Every single person who walks by me, I'm richer than them. I just know that. I get on the plane. Every person. I land in Paris. Every person, I'm richer than them. That has to create some sort of hubris in you, like, how can this not be true?

00:53:30 Speaker_02
I'm the richest person on the planet. And it's going both directions.

00:53:32 Speaker_02
Not only are you looking at them and going, I'm better than them, they are looking at you and saying, you are better than me, and I want something from you, so I probably am only going to tell you what you want to hear.

00:53:43 Speaker_02
And so this, I mean, this is the most timeless thing that has happened. We asked earlier, like, why does the being president make you worse? I mean, it's just very hard to stay sane and decent and connected to reality when you live in that era.

00:53:58 Speaker_03
I said this before we started. It never surprises me that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of friends. Yeah. He had islands and plains and he was insanely wealthy. That tends to attract people and people tend to forgive

00:54:10 Speaker_03
your shortcomings and presume that you're better than them.

00:54:13 Speaker_02
But wouldn't you also add on top of that, he also seems to be an astute flatterer. You know what I mean?

00:54:19 Speaker_02
Like, I think, sure, hey, I'll take, insert obscure academic on my private plane to a private island, but it's also, I'm interested in your work, which is so incredibly seductive and corrupting.

00:54:31 Speaker_03
I think one of the most interesting pairings in it is a very challenging thing for a lot of people, myself included,

00:54:37 Speaker_03
is to discover that Jeffrey Epstein was friendly with Noam Chomsky, a radical anti-capitalist who was flattered by the guy who had lots of money and was willing to listen to his ideas and pay him, too, for those ideas, which I think is an astonishing thing.

00:54:54 Speaker_02
Yeah, we all have those sort of human weaknesses. And, yeah, it's a story as old as time.

00:55:00 Speaker_03
I want to do one final thing, quick thing. Okay. Which is a huge question, but you can give me a quick answer because you're very good at this. Just this virtue, all these words that we're throwing around.

00:55:13 Speaker_03
What does America need more than anything right now?

00:55:16 Speaker_03
If you were to kind of take all of the books that you've written about concepts, what would be just sort of the one that you could pick if you could assign it and you'd think would have a curative effect?

00:55:26 Speaker_02
If we could pair some more courage with more justice, I think we'd be in a great spot. The amount of people that I've talked to, like in Washington specifically, They fucking hate it.

00:55:36 Speaker_02
They hate the job, but they won't take even the slightest step that would imperil that job. Do you know what I mean? Or that, I'm sure you've heard this, what people will say in private about different politicians. But Donald Trump in particular, yeah.

00:55:50 Speaker_02
Yeah, and then what they'll say in public or what they'll vote is very strange. So these weren't jobs you were supposed to have for really long periods of time. You had to be willing to risk it occasionally.

00:56:00 Speaker_02
I remember I was sitting in the Senate dining room, I was talking to someone, I was asking him like, why doesn't someone do something about this? And they were just talking about the next thing.

00:56:10 Speaker_02
And it's like, you're one of a hundred most powerful people in the world. There's not that many people above you.

00:56:17 Speaker_02
And so there is this sense like there's some adult whose job it is to step in when things get really, really bad and be the responsible, virtuous, selfless one. And I don't think there is.

00:56:31 Speaker_02
The idea is that every person is supposed to act in their own sphere as if they're responsible and that their decisions matter.

00:56:41 Speaker_03
Your next book is going to be about term limits, isn't it? You're going to have that tattooed on your arm.

00:56:45 Speaker_02
Next one is wisdom. Oh, is it? Yeah.

00:56:47 Speaker_03
Courage, justice, temperance, wisdom. Ryan Holiday, right thing right now, good values, good character, good deeds. Thanks for joining us on Honestly.

00:56:57 Speaker_02
Thank you for having me.

00:57:03 Speaker_03
Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation, please share this episode with your friends and family, and use it to have a conversation of your own.

00:57:09 Speaker_03
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