Jocko Podcast - 394: Lessons from the Stoics. Discipline, Leadership, Life. With Ryan Holiday.

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

>Join Jocko UNDERGROUND<Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying; The Obstacle Is the Way; Ego Is the Enemy; Conspiracy and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into over 30 languages and has appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as multiplatinum musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 394 with Carrie Helton and me, Jocker Willink. Good evening, Carrie. Good evening. Self-discipline, the virtue of temperance is the ability to keep your ass in line. The ability to work hard, to say no, to practice good habits and set boundaries, to train and to prepare, to ignore temptations and provocations, to keep your emotions in check, to endure pain. painful difficulties self-discipline is giving you everything you have and knowing what to hold back is there some contradiction in this no only balance some things we resist some things we pursue in all things we proceed with moderation intentionally reasonably without being

consumed or carried away temperance is not deprivation but command of one's physically mentally spiritually demanding the best for oneself and of oneself even when no one is looking even when allowed less it takes courage to live this way not just because it's hard but because it sets you apart discipline then is both predictive and deterministic it makes it more likely you'll be successful and ensures success or failure that whatever happens, you are great. The converse is also true. A lack of discipline puts you in danger. It also colors who and what you are.

There is a little excerpt from a book called Discipline is Destiny. I feel like I have to say it that way. The power of self-control written by a gentleman. by the name of Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is a prolific author, and I don't use that term lightly. He's a podcaster, a blogger, a marketer, a bookstore owner, an entrepreneur, and a modern day follower of stoicism.

And it's a pleasure to have Ryan here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned along the way. Ryan, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been an interesting ride for you. Yeah. as I kind of pulled the thread on your life and what you've done, it's an interesting ride to say the least.

You know, that was actually advice someone gave me. I wanted to be a writer, and they said, okay, writers live interesting lives. The point being, you can go train, you can go to the Iowa's Writers Workshop and get really good at putting the words in the right order, or you can go do stuff and read about stuff and experience stuff, and then, you know, right about that.

And you don't have to be as good. Yeah, no, I would definitely say, I guess I'm a living proof of just go out and do some cool stuff and then write about it. You probably do okay. Yeah. I would definitely recommend that course of action rather than going to a long schooling.

Look, and I went to school. I was an English major. Did I learn stuff? Yes, I absolutely did. But I would much more recommend going out and getting after it, go out and have adventures, get into trouble, cause issues, cause mayhem, let there be mayhem in the world around you, and you'll have some exciting stuff to write about. Yeah, or just, yeah, see people fuck up, fuck up yourself. Just learn something

about the human experience that can then, like, color the work that you're doing. Yeah. Because if you don't, yeah, you have to be way better. It's like with music, like you can be the most technically brilliant person, or you can have some sort of emotional experience that you are communicating. And I think all the best music is that. Yeah, for sure. That's a whole thing for me. You know, I always give the example that you can go to a guitar center anywhere in the country and put up a sign that says, hey, I'm looking for a guitarist that can play all of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Rush, which is the most complex music. There is Rush. And you, and you, you'll get 20 applicants that can legitimately do it. And they all have jobs as, you know,

waiters and construction workers. And then there's one kid that has this streak of chaos in his brain and what he's been through in his life. And he's got some emotional connection with the world or disconnection with the world. And it comes out. And there you go. You're like, oh, Jack White. How you doing? I mean, Invei Malmstein is a brilliant guitar player, but like, I don't know any of his songs. I mean, I've seen him live. It was pretty cool. But again, I don't know any of the songs. And there's a balance, right? There's a spectrum.

And so you can be technically brilliant. You can just have a lot to say. Ideally, you want, you know, temper. The funny thing is temperance, the stoic virtue is also rendered as sort of moderation or balance. You want both. It's right in the middle that you need the combination of the two. I'm going to try not to do this all day. But I also wrote a book called The Dicotomy of Leadership.

And it's all about the balances of everything that you do in life. And if you're, hey, ego is bad. But if you have no ego, then you're just sitting around, you know, watching Netflix and doing nothing. And if you let your ego get out of control, obviously, we know that's a problem too. So, yeah, the idea of balance, 100%. And that does include being a rock and roll guitarist. Although you could take the sex pistols and you could probably say they were as about as raw. I mean, Sid Vicious on bass, he basically learned how to play the bass, you know, three shows before or whatever.

and got up there and just hammered all that thing. So they brought it. Yeah, yeah. And just like there's brilliant technical guitarists too, right? So, but I think the best, it's the, you know the golden mean, Aristotle's golden mean? No. So Aristotle's golden mean is basically this argument, right? He's saying that, okay, he actually says courage.

So the four virtues, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. He's saying that courage actually illustrates the virtue of discipline, because courage is not on one end of the spectrum. Courage is in the middle of the spectrum. There's recklessness and then cowardice on the ends of the spectrum. And the virtue, the thing you want to be is actually in the middle. And pretty much everything in life is like that. It's in the middle because there's always an extreme version that's too much.

Most people don't have the too much problem. They're not too good at their thing. Most people are not good enough at their thing or don't have enough of the thing. but actually you want that middle ground. So even 2,000 years ago, they're like more than 2,000 years ago. They're like, hey, look, it's a balance. It's a balance. Yeah, for sure.

All right, so let's go through how you ended up here today. How did you get here today? Where were you born? Sacramento, California. Sacto. Yes. Sacktown. Yes.

And what did your parents do? My dad was a police detective, and then he worked in the EOD unit, and then my mom was a school principal, or vice principal. So very sort of blue-collar regular people jobs as pretty much everyone in Sacramento is. I think people think California is all this. It's much more Sacramento than the other places. Yeah. Sacramento, or sorry, California is, first of all, it's a bunch of agriculture, massive agriculture.

You drive outside of the big cities and you're just going to run into fields. Yeah. And so, yeah, and it's a huge blue-collar state. and there's just a few cities that are not very blue-collar at all. Yes. I don't know what they are. So you're growing up, was your dad in the police force his whole career? That was his career.

Yeah. And your mom's same thing. She'd teach her whole life and then became a principal at some point. Yeah. And what were they like growing up? They were like regular people, you know, just regular people. Did you relate to your mom or dad from a perspective of like, hey, my dad's a cop. I'm going to be a cop or my mom's a teacher, Vince Principal, I'm going to go in that direction.

No, I would say we were not on the same vibe. Like, I've, and I got the sense that they were like sort of where did this kid come from also? I had the same sense with my parents. Yeah, it might have been the exact opposite. Yeah, like I would have loved an English teacher. You know what I mean? Like, that's who I was. Like, I was into that stuff.

And also, I think, I think, I've said this before, but it was. Hold on. You say you were into, so my mom, we were talking before he hit record that my mom was an English teacher. My dad was a history teacher. So you just, you just said, I, you just said. Yeah. Well, it's weird too because people always like, oh, that's where you, that's where you are the way you are and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I was, my parents were looking at me like, where did this child come from? Yeah. Why is he act like this? Where did, where is this genetic, um, uh, thing fell apart some at some point in our lives. Um, but you, but you. You just said you were into it. So you're talking, you're in high school and you are into literature? Yes, books, ideas. Like, I wanted, I was, like, so excited to go to college because I was like, that's going to be it.

You know, and then you get to college, and it's like, here's a group project. You know, it's not what you think it is. But what kind of music were you into? Heavy metal. So also they weren't like, who is this kid? You know, what's going on? Why has he spent so much time on his computer in his room? Why is he growing his hair?

How did you get into heavy metal? What was your gateway band? So I got into Iron Maiden. I was trying to illegally download a Metallica album, and I downloaded an Iron Maiden album. And I was like, what is this shit? You know, this is like, I love Metallica too, but Iron Maiden is like a different level.

And I think for me, being a history person, you're like, wait, these songs are about things. You know what I mean? Like, and then I would go look up what those things were. So I just fell totally down this rabbit hole of heavy metal. That's right. That's rad. And so you're into heavy metal.

You're reading books. Dude, you're freaking weird at this point. Yes. I'm not like goth or anything, but I was weird. Okay. Yeah. What were your friends? Did you have friends that you were hanging out with?

Yeah. So my parents were like having a dad as a copse. Like you got to play sports. And I remember I went. We moved when I was in high school. And so I started this new high school. And he's like, I want you to play football. And so I you know you go and everyone's in this theater of course all these kids have played football their whole lives

I have not and then the coach just starts like screaming at everyone And I was just like this is not me this is not what I want and so I ran cross country in track before So I was like a running a runner a very skinny runner kid who was always getting into trouble Were you any good? I was pretty good but I was I was afraid of actually trying I realize in retrospect. Like, I was pretty good, and I would do what I could do on my natural talent, but the idea of really trying,

clearly there was some part of me that was reluctant to do that because the same reason why a lot of people don't try is that if you fail, then it's on you. So I just messed around. Like, in retrospect, cross-country was insane. I don't know how it is anymore, but they'd be like, you don't get to cross-country practice, and then they would tell a bunch of 14-year-old boy,

to go on a 50-minute run and come back, you know, and so we would go to my friend's house and play video games or we'd go steal stuff and then throw it off bridges. You know, we would just do whatever we wanted, you know. So I was that kind of kid. Yeah, there's a whole subculture, I guess, of just stealing stuff and throwing it off of bridges for 14-year-old boys. I mean, yeah, of course. That's the best.

It's like, you know, if you throw a computer monitor off a bridge, it implodes, you know, just like you just find stuff out. That's, you know those little scooters, the bird scooters and a bunch? Well, I don't know what it was like. I don't know. You live in Texas, right? Yeah. I don't know.

Do they have them down there? Yes, unfortunately. When they originally brought them here to San Diego, just every time they would put them out, people would just destroy them. They would just throw them off of bridges, throw them off of cliffs, just destroy them. And I remember reading some article about it. And I guess one of the first places they did it was in Holland or something. And I said, man, the Dutch people seem super nice and chill.

And they were like, oh, great, electrical scooters that we can ride around. And Americans are like, cool, shit, we can break. The 14-year-olds in America were like, no, we're not having this. So that's what happened. I definitely get the impulse, too, not just because I like throwing stuff off bridges, but like in Austin, there's this trail around Town Lake, you know, the really cool trail, which is awesome. It's like, it's amazing, one of the best running trails in the country.

And people, they're not allowed on this trail. But not only will people take them on the trail, then they just park them in the middle of the trail. So every time I see them, I want to throw them off something. I've conquered that impulse, but everyone's all see one in the water. And I'll go, I get it. You'll give a nod of approval. Yes, exactly. Good job. To the 14-year-olds out there, we salute you.

Yes, exactly. So are you getting good grades? I was okay. Again, I think when I look at my high school experience, I see it to find by, you know, like 70% of potential. Like when I hear a kid who went to like Harvard or the Naval Academy, I'm always like blown away because like they got serious and good

like way before I was, I cared. Yeah. You know what I mean? Or their parents got serious with them. Sure, sure. With some short term like if you get A's, and then they program them correctly. Or they're just into it, which is also true.

Yes, definitely. But just like to be in any way close to like a high level of performance at 16 is incomprehensible to me. You were not there. No. I was not there. I was, well, first of all, I just knew I was going to the military. So everything else just seemed like a big joke to me because I'm an idiot. Why would I have to do schoolwork?

This doesn't make any sense. I'm going to the military. Yeah. So did you have some kind of a plan, some kind of a vision of what you're going to do? I knew I wanted to, in Sacramento, I don't think I met a single person who did not have a job. And I knew I wanted to be a person that did not have a job. Not that I didn't want to work, but I didn't want to have, I wanted to be a person who did, like, the stuff that they wanted to do. And so I had this vague sense that Southern California was a place where stuff like that happened.

You know what I mean? Like movies or music or writing or whatever. So job to you meant like nine to five job, you're working? for the man. Yes. You have a salary. You are not in control of your life. And you didn't like that idea. I didn't like that idea. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to. And I wasn't even sure, I wasn't until I went to college. I went to Riverside. And like, you meet college professors and they've written books and papers and their works, but you were like, oh, this is like people do, like I remember we had this seminar. Before I started my freshman year, it was like a summer thing.

that I did. And there was this novelist, your name is Susan Strait, who I've gotten to no sense. But she, like, we all had to read this professor's novel that had won, like, some big prize. And it was like, oh, this is just, like, a regular lady that wrote it. And so that was the first thing for me where I met someone who did a thing. And I was like, oh, like people do this, you know, like regular people do stuff like that. You don't have to, this isn't, I don't know, it just made it, it suddenly became much more accessible. I had a similar thing where I was a little kid running around the woods using sticks as machine guns. And then at some point I realized you could actually have that as a job.

And I said to myself, oh, I'm set. You could do this for a living. And then I met a guy who was a Marine Cordial instructor who was like the older brother of a friend of mine. And it was like same thing. Like, oh, okay, cool. This is a real thing. Where do I sign up for this gig? And I can go make this happen.

Well, you know all this, you know what a nepo baby is? No. A nepo baby is like an actor whose kid becomes an actor. They're talking about how many people that are famous you realize actually had like famous or wealthy parents. And so it's kind of been this backlash against nepo babies. But I don't think like Steph Curry is not great because his dad was in the NBA and that gave him an unfair advantage. I think it was partly genetics, partly he had access to the best teachers and teams and whatever. but also he saw his dad go to work at a basketball arena,

and he saw that in an early age. So he had a head start in believing that stuff was possible that's utterly impossible to regular people. Do you know what I mean? You realize, oh, just like I was probably more likely to have been a police officer or score because I saw my parents do it. It's not that they would have opened doors that would have made this thing easier.

It's just like that I would have seen that as the, you know, like the family business. That's what we're doing. Yes. That's sort of like the path that we're following. But the Hollywood thing is different though, right? Because they're getting gigs when their parents are, you know, talking to the director and being like, yo, get my kid in there. I mean, that's got to be happening. I'm sure that's part of it.

But if you can't deliver it, you're not getting more of them, right? I think so. Yeah, that's true. I think, yeah, sure. Tom Hanks' kid is in Band of Brothers, right? Colin Hanks is in Band of Brothers, but he can also fucking act. And so, but I think it's you see someone being in a profession, you see someone being a professional at a thing that as a fan you don't understand

as being a craft. You just, like, when you're watching a movie, you're just seeing the thing. You get lost in the world. You don't see that as, you don't see the process that goes into it. But when you do see the process, I think it's demystified. in a way that gives you an advantage. Yeah. And occasionally you see someone that's not a good actor

and they look bad and you go, that's the only time you realize maybe it's a little harder than it looks because everyone watches an actor. You like, bro, I could go up there and do that. What's up, right? Yeah, sure. Do you not think that?

You watch a movie? Well, maybe you understand the craft a little bit more. I think a lot of people, they just look at that like, oh, I'll go up there and give me the words to say, I'll say them, we'll be good, let's go, give me my money. Or maybe you also see people who are bad who are successful. And you go, I'm better than that person.

I can do that. Yeah. You know, it's like you meet someone who's, that's the other thing. Like, if you're a kid, you never met someone that graduated from Harvard. You think it's like this, it's like Hogwarts or something. Then you meet a dumb person who's graduated from Harvard and you're like, oh, this is, it's only later in life, you go, oh, it's not like unattainable. It could have happened.

Right. These are still regular people. There's a process. You figure it out. So you're in high school. your vision is I'm going to not have a job. I'm going to do something cool or I'm my own boss type thing, but you're not even sure what it is.

Yeah. So then you apply to Riverside, do you see Riverside? Yeah, I wanted to go to Santa Barbara, but then my high school girlfriend went to Riverside, so I made a brilliant choice. I know. I think about it all the time. I met my wife at Riverside, so I don't have no regrets,

but I think, again, you're a high school when you're like, do I want to go to, do I want to live in the Inland Empire? Do I want to live in Isla Vista? Did you visit Santa Barbara? Yeah, several times. God. Because that place is crazy. It's unreal.

It's absolutely insane. It's unreal. The U.S.S. These have all the best land in California. But then you just went to Riverside. You're like, yo. That's terrible. Exactly.

So you show up there. What are you going to study? What are you studying? Political science. Because that was the first on the list. Yeah, I like politics. I like, I think. I think I wanted to be like a political writer or something like that.

But yeah, you don't know. That's what's crazy, too, that you can join the military at 18. You're so fucking dumb. Yeah, your brain, I mean, what? Your brain doesn't develop to your 25. Yeah. So when you're 17 and your sign of the paper, you're just like, yo, let's go. Yeah.

So then what happens? So you only go there for like a year, right? Is that right? I went for two years. Two years. Yeah. And that's when I met. So I became a research assistant for this guy, Robert Green, who's like one of the greatest authors of all time.

And then I got... And how did you hook up with him? I was working for this other author, and he ran Robert's website. And I was just super... Like, this has been blogging. It's just coming out. So what year is this? This is 06, 0506.

Okay. So I was very into this world where suddenly because of the Internet, it wasn't this sort of New Yorkie. keeping media. It was like, if you made cool stuff, people could find it. That was just happening then. I think YouTube sold in 2006 or seven. So this is like when the sort of early internet culture is just happening. And I was looking through your blogs, your first blog is 2007.

Is that right? That's probably right. I think I may have had another one. I had another one that I started right after I graduated high school, which is to 05. So I'd been fucking around. But yeah, something like that. Okay. So you start working for Robert Green.

Yeah. This is while you're still in college. This is while I'm still in college. Where does he live? Does he live in L.A. or something? Yeah, he lives in L.A. He lives in. And you were just doing remote work before remote work was a thing?

I was transcribe. Well, so basically he needed a research assistant. And then I spent that summer, the summer after my sophomore year, I was an assistant at a talent agency. We're into this movie producer. And I was supposed to go back. And he was like, what if you just didn't go back?

And Robert... Wait, this is at the talent agency? Yeah, yeah. He was like, what if you... He was like, I need a new assistant. Would you like to be my assistant? And, like, answer the phone. And the Hollywood system is deranged.

You start by answering people's phones and running their calendar. And that's how you supposedly learn how to be like a producer or a talent manager. But so I was working for this person. And so I was on... He was like, I'll make you into a talent. manager, which seems interesting and cool. And then I was working for Robert, and Robert was just

starting this book, and he needed, like, a research assistant, like, that he would pay. And so, for me, it was like, am I going to go back to school to hopefully graduate? I think I was going to graduate in three years. But I was, I was like, am I going to go spend another year or a year and a half in school to hope, like, I was basically thinking, if I graduated, and these were the two job offers that I had, I would have been, like, college was a huge success. And so for me, It was like, am I going to go back and just read about this stuff happening, or am I going to go do it? And I did it.

So you became a full-time research assistant for Robert Green? And what was he working on, 48 Laws of Power? No, the 40 Laws of Power came out in like 98, I think. So this was, he was doing a book called The 50th Law with 50 Cent. And my first thing was I had to transcribe like 30 hours of interviews between Robert Green and 50 cent, which was a surreal. like super cool experience. It was a super cool experience. Wow, I went way in the other direction. I heard that and I was like, gosh, that's terrible.

And you're like super cool. I was like, this is, well, for me it was like, this is how a book happens. Yeah. This is how you do the thing. This is the craft of it's like I was seeing it start with the raw materials. And then I watched like my favorite author make a book from start to finish. And so that was, I mean, you couldn't, you can't pay for a class like that. Yeah. And it's, I'm sitting here thinking about that, so I've written books too, and the books are in my head. Yeah. You know what I mean? Which is kind of, I guess, different in a way than like a Robert Green book where he's working with 50 cent and doing 30 hours worth of interviews and extracting the information from that.

That's like a different process. It's almost like I'm cooking steak and Robert Green is cooking a seven-course meal and there's a lot more that goes into it. I think so. I mean, your books are you. So it's what do you think? And then his books, and like mine, are research driven. So it's what, you know, what is the scope of history say? It's like I, you go, I'm going to tell a story from my life to illustrate this point. And the word I does not, only in my first book does the word I really ever appear. So like I'm, I'm the, I'm the, I'm painting a picture. And so I have to go find, and this is what I learned from Robert is how you go find it the story. stuff. Yeah, because if someone watched me write a book, they would get nothing out of it. They would sit over my shoulder and watch me type. You know what I mean? Like that wouldn't be, they wouldn't get it.

But the process that you're talking about is actually a process that you could take if you're going to write that type of book. Yeah, like I learned his research system. I learned all. I mean, they would still learn a lot watching you work, just like the discipline of doing it. And then all the editing and all the decisions that you make along the way. I learned a lot there too. but it was really like, first off, it was just, it was like, it was like going to college

because he was like, I had to read all the books that he didn't want to read. Or I'd read, he'd be like, I think there's something in this person's life story. And so I'd have to go read 10 books about Joe Lewis or something like that. And then I'd have to present to him what I thought he needed to know about that person to use for the story that he wanted to tell. Yeah, that's very cool. and he really must have seen something in you because when I read a book,

like for instance, I cover a lot of books on the podcast, I've tried to like see, oh, someone give me an assessment of this book and I can barely get anything out of it. So he must have had a huge amount of trust in you to be giving you that much weight of, hey, look at this and tell me what's cool about it, basically. I think so.

I mean, he's smart about it. So it's like he's doing 95% of it, right? And so I'm pursuing the things that he's pretty sure are going to be a dead end. So it's like if I find something, it's extra. Or if I don't find something, he could at least trust me enough to eliminate something. Hey, there's not a story about Andrew Carnegie that works for this book or whatever. But it started, I mean, it started just transcribing interviews, which was, you know, now you can have. A, I do that for you, but it took a long time.

When you're reading those books for him, are you just going through the highlighter and pulling out a set of notes and giving him the high points and whatever you thought was interesting? Yeah, so like I would read the book, I would fold and mark everything that was interesting, and then I would write up a report about it,

and then I'd give him the book, the copy that I read, and then he would sort of spot check it, and then if something, if he found something interesting, then he would go do more research, So it was more just like a, probably in the way that you would have someone give you an intelligence report. Like here are the things I think you should know.

And then that that's lighting up your sort of intuition for what to write off or look more into or to ask for follow-ups. And so, yeah, but it was really just, it was like an apprenticeship in how to do the thing that I knew that I ultimately wanted to do. So you knew that you wanted to be an author? At some point. At some point in here you figured out I want to be an author. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to write books. I wanted to write books like his books. Got it.

Okay. So how long are you doing this job for? The nice thing about doing it is I could do it on the side, but I mean, probably six, seven years, something like that. Six or seven years? You were doing stuff for Robert Green? I mean, I kept doing it even through, like, my first books coming out. Like, at some point, he, like, he was like, you have to stop. And I was like, but I don't want to. Like, to me, it was like, I remember he. he would go, like Robert would go, like, remember, you need to send me your hours. And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, sure.

He'd be like, no, you need to send me your hours. Like, to me, the idea that I was also getting paid for, it was so, like, beside the point. To me, it was like, I could call Robert and ask him question. I'd be like, Robert, like, how does this happen? Like, who makes this happen? I remember once I was like, how does the index work? Like, what is that? Do you have to do that?

You know, like, I was just so, the whole process is, I mean, even when you sold your first book, it's not like they told you how it works. They were just like, here's some money. Please come back with the thing that you've never done before that almost no one knows how to do. And by the way, you don't get the rest of the money unless we accept it. So it's like when I sat down to write my first book,

I had such a huge advantage. Because I was like, I wasn't like groping around in the dark. I didn't know if I could, if I had an idea or the talent to pull it off. But I knew I could, I knew I could get to the, the end of the process. I didn't know if it would sell,

but I knew I could, I had no doubt in my mind that I could do it because I'd seen it happen. So then as you're doing this, when did you kind of branch off and start sort of the marketing thing? So is that the right, am I making the right statement there?

Because at some point you, you started a marketing company of some kind. So I was working at this talent agency and it was cool. I was working with all these different artists. And then it sort of went sideways there. And, uh, hold on. You can't just like come on the podcast and just say a big chunk.

Your life went sideways and it carry off. It was a surreal experience. So I was, this is a talent agency? This is a talent agency? Went sideways. Yeah. The talent agency was fine. My position there went sideways.

So two, so two things happen. So first off, I drop out of college to work for this guy. Like the thing I'm, the thing with Robert was not like the thing you drop out of college for. It was this, this job. How stoked were your parents that you dropped out of college? Oh, they disowned me. They was terrible. Right. They were like, what are you saying?

Yeah. And even though, like, when I went, the funny thing is I was just actually back there. And I spoke to the 7th Regiment in 29 Palms. So I flew into LX and I drove through and I stopped in Riverside. And I went for a run and I ran by like the building that I dropped out of. And I remember, and I think this is worth pointing out to people who, because before you make a life-changing decision, you think you were literally holding your life in your hands.

And it's never that, right? It's never as scary as you think it's going to be. I remember I walked in, I think it's called Hinder Haker Hall, and I was like, you know, I'm here to drop out of college. Like, I'd already told my parents. They were like, you know, cut me off. I'd already told my girlfriend's parents. Like, it was this terrible thing.

And I was so scared. And I go in and I'm like, I'm here to drop out of college. And they go, what? You know, like, that's not a thing. I was like, what do you mean? They're like, fill out this form. You pay $40. and you just put your academic status on hold.

You take a semester off. And then they were like, if you want to come back at the end of the semester, just fill out this form. And if you don't, it just tolls for 10 years. So, like, I spent all these nights thinking, like, I was, like, literally jumping off of a cliff and, like, it was literally a $40 form

that I could undo at any minute. And so it's so scary, but you don't know until you do it. And by the way, most of life's decisions are like that. Yes. There's very few decisions in life that are actually, even if, you know, a big one is like buying a house, even if you buy a house, even when you, like, worst case scenario, gosh, then you sell the house. Yes. And you look, you lost some money and it's going to take you a little water and recover. You're going to lose all the money.

You're going to lose something. Like, you're like, I'm spending $300,000. This is all the money I have in the world. It doesn't become worthless. It's a mistake. You sell the house for 10% less. You sell it for 10% less. You sell it for 10.

Your agent gets 3%. The other agent gets 3%. You're good to go. You're going to carry on. Yes. There's very few decisions that are permanent. Very few. Yes.

So this is a great example of one. You're like, I'm going to drop out of college. That's cool. Fill out this form because we'll see it in a semester. Because whenever somebody does decide to drop out of college, they're just going, yeah, fill out this form and we'll see you next semester. No big deal. So go to Europe or whatever is you're going to do with your whatever.

Well, and I remember I told the boss that I was dropping out to work for, I was like, you know, I was like, I don't know if I want to bet like my whole life on this. And he goes, he was like, when I was in college, I got mono or some. He was like, I spent a year in the hospital. He's like, do you know how many times this has come up in my life since? He's like, zero times. I spent, it took five years instead of four. He's like, if it doesn't work out, it won't work out.

But so I drive back to Riverside. I do all the stuff. He gives me a week to like, you know, get out of my apartment, pack up, find a new apartment, do all this stuff. And then I show up at the talent agency. And he's not there. And his old assistant is still there. Like the person he was supposed to let go is still there.

She has no idea why I'm there. And none of his partners in the business know why he's there. And they're like, just sit here. And they sort of call me in. And they're like, so Aaron's in rehab. And he checked into rehab and would be unavailable for the next 45 days. and the salary that we negotiated was they were not an agreement. So basically I thought, so I had this relief of like, oh, I'm not blowing up my life.

And then I got there and I was like, I did blow up my life. And this is a terrible mistake. So that was one thing. And then what happened was I was working for Robert. So I always had the 40 laws of power on my desk and I would read it because I was researching fine stuff. And one of the other partners became like convinced that I was like plod. or that I was untrustworthy because I was a protege of Robert Green. And so we butted heads and there ended up being the sort of spectacular blowup

where I was I stormed out slash was asked to leave. And then that was the end of my time. You don't seem like a storm out asked to leave type of person. I don't. This was a weird. This is a weird thing. He comes in. He's sort of like an Ari Gold type, you know, from entourage, like that flashy.

And my boss had asked me to listen in. He was like, listen in to this phone call. And he was like, I want you to message me, like, information that I need to use. So that's what I was doing. But, you know, like, the conference call will say, like, five people listening or whatever. There's supposed to be five people on the call, but they're six because I'm listening. And the boss goes like, who's there? You know, who's there?

I'm like 19. And so I didn't say anything. I was like, I froze. I didn't say anything. So I just pretended that I wasn't in the call. And then he, he, like, finds out that I'm. I'm on the call. And he storms in.

I'm like sitting in like, so he storms in. And he's like, I fucking knew it was you. You know, he's like, you've been fucking, you know, all these suspicions that he had about me. Not like I wanted to be on this dumb call. And he starts slamming the door just like, oh, like he grabs the door and slams it and opens it and slams it. He was just like trying to like physically intimidate like this kid. So anyways, I just got up and left.

And that was it. That was it. That was it for the talent agency. That was the end of my career as a future talent agent. And so now you're just with Robert Green? Well, right around that time, Robert was on the board of directors of American Apparel, which is a fashion company. He was a sort of strategic advisor to the CEO.

And so I met Dove then, and Dove had been asking me to come work for him as like sort of an advisor type person. And so... What was he doing asking a 19-year-old freaking college dropout that just got fired. None of it. None of it made very much sense. What was doing? What what, what, what, what sort of vibe were you given off that you were getting this type of offer? I don't know. I think, I think this is, you know, you know, like any young person, like, all the people think they know how, like, computers work. And so I think he, he thought that I understood something about the internet and online culture and all this stuff that was a big deal, which I did. Yeah,

that makes sense then. And so I, like, I didn't even have, like, a title. or a badge. I was just like, I reported only to this person and that's how I started there. What year was that? 07, 08. Okay.

07, 08. So you had already had like a blog. You had already, and he was able to look at that and say, and this is when blogger. That was a thing. It was like,

you were a blogger. Yes. And that was enough to have him say, all right, you come and work at America. So that was in 2007. Yeah, they'd just gone public. It was like the hottest fashion company in the world. And but it was also a mess because he hired, you know,

random 19-year-olds off the street. Like chaotic places are good if you, they're good, but then they're also, they're only, they're also bad or you wouldn't have an opportunity. They're burning and they're going to burn out. They're going to explode. They're going to explode. They're going to, they're making a lot of heat, but they're going to explode. Yeah.

And so very soon. after, like, you know, he was like, hey, take care of this, like, this project, and then take care of this project and then... Give me an example of, like, what you're taking care of. I think we're spending too much money on online advertising. Tell me if that's true or not, right? Or I want, uh, people to, people don't know about this that we're doing. Find someone online to write about this.

So it would be like these little things. And then I ended up sort of doing kind of an overhaul of its marketing stuff. And then ended up, it was like, so I did what you said. You know, who do you want to run it? And then it was like you. And so I ended up running marketing. I was basically the director of marketing in American apparel by like 21, 22. And what year?

So now it's 2009? Yeah, something like that. Dude. So I missed, so I was in the military, an institutionalized human. That's just been, and very large portions of my life, I've no idea what was happening in the normal world. And I completely missed this whole American apparel thing. Yeah.

And not to mention my fashion, my connection to the fashion. fashion industry, even though I have a clothing company right now, my connection to fashion industry is next to nothing. So I missed this whole American apparel thing. I didn't know anything about it. And I started looking at it. And it's kind of wild. It was wild. I went and looked at all the ads, all these controversial. They're amazing ads. They're amazing ads. And totally controversial, borderline, extremely controversial. So that was you running all that. I mean, Dev, it was a genius. and all of that was him. And he, like, he did everything, right?

So we have this idea that the leader should do everything, and he did do everything. He was a sort of singular genius. Like, he was the fit model. He was the designer. He was the photographer. He was the CEO. He could sew the clothes.

He could do everything. But as the company got bigger and bigger, he lacked the ability to delegate, and your genius can only get you so far. But it was, I mean, it's a totally insane, idea that he, through sheer brilliance, managed to pull off. I mean, at one point, had 250 or 60 stores in 20 countries, revenues of almost a billion dollars, was the largest garment manufacturing the United States when, especially then, the idea that you could still make clothes in the United

States was as close to blasphemy as you could possibly get it. And like, I remember the reason I worked there, I didn't give a shit about fashion. I was like a kid who liked books. He was, he was He was like, come meet me at the factory. And so I go to the factory, and he's like, follow me. I want to show you something. And so I'm following him to the factory on the fourth floor. It was right in Alameda and the 10 there in downtown L.A. in this old, you know, 100 plus year old building.

And so he's walking the floor. And as he's walking the floor, these sewing teams, which were like Korean and Mexican and all, every race you could possibly imagine, but garment workers who are making 15 to 20 bucks an hour, which is insane. Yep, it's great. They are highly skilled,

they're the best in the world at what they do. They're getting up and they're cheering. They're giving him like a standing ovation as he walks the floor of his factory. And it's not like a cult of personality thing. It's a, like, they were working in sweatshops. The alternative was literal sweatshops. And here they have health.

Like, he built all that from the ground up when it was not supposed to be possible. And I'm sure you figured it out with apparel too. Like what he figured out that's so interesting, and I'm fascinated by it still, is like, so Gap makes a T-shirt for 40 cents, and then they sell it for $40 or whatever, right? He was like, where does that money go?

You know what I mean? Like, you could, if you pay the workers, instead of $40 an hour, you're paying them $14 an hour, that's only changing the cost of making the garment by like a dollar or two either way. The problem is that most fashion companies are in a race to the bottom as far as price goes.

But if you make something cool that people want where they're not price conscious, suddenly all the ethical compromises, I remember he said once, he's like, if you're buying a swimsuit for $8, he's like, somebody got fucked. Right? His point was like, who are you exploiting to get this thing

at the price that consumers are willing? So he, you know, an American apparel t-shirt was $22 in 2007. which seemed like a lot of money, but it also allowed the company to do cool shit. And so I was really fascinated by that. The whole story is also kind of a breaking bad arc where this guy who had this moral purpose

and genius ends up imploding. That's what my book on Ego is sort of informed I also watched the rise and the fall of that company. But it was just, I'd never seen anything like it. Yeah, no, it's been awesome. You know, we have probably 450 right now people sewing. And again, I just had a conversation with someone about this the other day. Like the danger of automation, you can't automate sewing.

Like cloth is too particular and too unique. Every little piece of cloth is a little bit different. So a human has to do it. They're not going to have a robot that can sew for a long, long time, even with all the advances that they're making right now. So it's got to be humans. It's got to be people and they got to have skill and they get in there. And they, this is another thing. We've really demonized factory work in America.

And when the reality is when there's people that enjoy working with their hands, they like getting stuff done, they like to see what they've produced at the end of the day, it's very rewarding and it's a good job and it's a career job. So it's been awesome to participate in that and grow those companies and be able to do what you're talking about and pay people what they should be paid. And then on top of all that, the environmental stuff like I see a lot of companies that are out there that

I believe there's a term for it greenwashing have you heard of this term yeah where they say oh well we give this much money to the environment but they still make their clothes in a country which is basically any country but America where we can dump all of the leftover chemicals right into the ocean to go out the smokestack and it just totally destroys the environment so it's it's abusive of the workers it's terrible for the environment And yet we go, we're going to give a little money to the environmental causes. It's organic cotton.

Yeah. And it's total bullshit. So we're fighting against that. And that's why I was really, when I was reading about American Apparel and what it did, it was very interesting for me to read. And certainly for him to be able to pull that off, it's been hard for us to pull it off. And we've done it. You know, we've been able to pull it off. And we're going to continue to keep growing and get bigger and better.

But it's a very fascinating story. and it definitely parallels a lot of what we're doing without the, like, we just have a little bit of a disc, a little bit more of a disconnection from, I would say that like the high fashion type thing, we're more mainstream normal human clothing. But that's a couple things he figured out. I mean, so first off, it was vertically integrated.

So like, he knitted their own, he knitted the fabric, cut it, dyed it. So he did, and then ran his own stores. So he realized that where is the money going? if it's so cheap to make, it's all the middlemen along the way. Cut, cut, cut, cut. Which I thought was really interesting. And then his other thing was, okay, like, do you remember a couple years ago there's a controversy where, like, the CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch, the Abacch, the store is when they would, when stuff wouldn't sell, they would cut it up and throw it in the garbage, the clothes. And they're like, why could you do that? Well, it's because the stuff is

actually worthless, right? If it doesn't sell in the sales cycle, it's worthless. And it actually cost more to ship it back to some warehouse and store it, where, by the way, it becomes less valuable every day because it's not like, unless they hold on it for 30 years, the fashion is never coming back. And you're paying to store it. Yes, exactly. The storage, which might not seem like a big deal, but it's a big deal. Yeah, and especially if you're doing millions of pieces, right? So what Dove figured out was, hey, if you make stuff that doesn't go out of style, you make classics or basics, and you don't venture into shit that is trendy, you bypass all of that. So, you know, if you don't sell this blue t-shirt in March,

you'll sell it in April or May. And so for the first decade of the company, why it was so huge, is that he sold not just the stuff that people always wanted, but stuff that evergreen. Evergreen. And that you would go, oh, I wore out this t-shirt. I'm going to go get another one.

And you knew they had the stuff you wanted. So when you make shit that is perennial, that's timeless, you are not in this cycle of sort of planned obsolescence, which is not only exploitative to the customer, it's also really hard because you have to be so right. Right? Like I'll give you an example for daily stoic,

like I have a calendar vert, like a page a day calendar. And so when I first did it, it was, you know, January 1st, right? And then thinking about something I learned from Dove, I was like, wait, shit, if I just don't put the day on the calendar, If I just make it a January 1st calendar, I don't have to guess how many to make each year. And I can make it better and cheaper and in a less exploitative way because it's perennial. Right.

And so if you think of, if you just take, if you start from not wanting to fuck people over and not seeing yourself as a predictor of the future, you have such a wider target and you can make better decisions. It's like people always are going to want this. They always want T-shirts and socks. and underwear and whatever and then it was even the point like if he made a weird if he made a pink t-shirt people didn't like it because he owned his own dying he could send the t-shirt back and dye it a different color so it was it was a brilliant thing that could be today a hugely valuable company but you know he ended up destroying now what was the destruction how did the destruction take

place there's a huge me-to part of it which is just a collapse of ethics and and discipline you know he would have relationships with employees, even though over and over and over again, he was like, this is not only is it not okay. Like, it exposes the company to all sorts of legal liability and losses and ultimately. But the big thing was, and I see this all the time in life, so American Apparel's is hot, huge company, but Urban Outfitters, Forever 21,

there were these other fast fashion companies that were growing faster, that were getting more media attention, and he started trying to copy them. So, like, American Apparel had 25 stores in New York City because they were basics. H&M has two, and they're big flagship stores. So they're in totally different business models. But what people do is they try to have their model and do what someone else is doing. And so he started trying to compete with people who were running totally different races and abandoned the idea of only selling classic stuff.

So he would try to ride waves of trends. So he would make something, and then it wouldn't sell. And then he started choked slowly on the inventory. But the big mistake was making a T-shirt requires eight sewers, making a button up like this, 40 sowers. And so not only was he switching towards pieces that were less profitable and less perennial, but they would take the teams off the core efficiency. So it's, I mean, it's a really timeless business story. It's like you drift out of your lane and then you crash.

And that's what it was? That's how it went down. That was a huge part of it. And then it was lawsuit after lawsuit, and then the banks wouldn't lend on it. And then just kind of spiraled into, I write about this in one of my books, but he was also like,

no discipline in his personal life. So never slept. He would call me at three in the morning just to talk about stuff. It'd be like three in the morning, his time, like he would just call, he was a workaholic with no boundaries. And I think he kind of worked himself almost into like a psychosis. Like, like just like a Howard Hughes kind of state where you're not on this planet anymore. When you would meet with him, did he listen to other people?

Would he take your ideas? Would he say, oh, yeah, that sounds a good idea. Would someone push back on him? Or was he the type of person? Because I've known people like this that are so convincing and so persuasive that even when they're wrong, they win every argument. It was exactly that. I remember one time he called a bunch of, like, the executives into the office.

And it was like a three-hour meeting, like a three-hour meeting where he talked the whole time. I remember I was leaving one of the creative directors who was brilliant. and she'd been there like from the beginning. What was that? You know, because I'm like 20. I haven't seen it. And she goes, the thing about Dove is that Dove wants to be heard a little bit more than he wants to be successful.

And it was like, oh, he, he, he's a performer. At the end, like he's, at the end of the day, he wants to vent and be listened to and go through the, you know, he, he was like in these sort of manic rants, basically. And you see, like, there's lots of, we just had a president who liked to do that, right? It's like, I'm not here to learn what I need to learn, accomplish what I need to accomplish, delegate what needs to be delegated. It's, I need to air my personal grievances, my theories about the universe. You know what, it's a very, it's both a toxic leadership trait, but it's also an intoxicating leadership trait. And what you, what I saw happen, it only became clear to me in retrospect is like they would, like the investors or Robert, who's on the board, would be like, we're bringing in this new person,

this person's from Apple, this person from this company, and they would make it like three months, you know, and then leave. And then what I realized was happening, again, to me, this is like how business worked. Like I had to unlearn so many habits. It's like, this was normal. It's like if your parents screaming each other all the time,

you're like, isn't this what everyone parents do? But I realized they would show up and go, oh, no way this is gonna succeed. They knew that this was not how it was done. And so they would leave. And so what the interesting thing about egotism or craziness and leaders is not just that they make bad decisions, but they also repel people who make good decisions

because they go, I'm not going to be heard, this is dysfunctional, life's too short, you know, they want no part of it. And so it was this kind of constant shedding of talented operators that he desperately needed around him. And all that was left was like, crazy people. Crazy people or wildly unqualified people,

which I was in retrospect obviously won. So what year does it kind of fall apart? Did they go BK? Like what happened to him in the end? So I wrote my first book in 2012. So like I stayed on and was like an advisor, like a sort of consultant. And so I stayed on until like 2014.

And it was getting crazier and crazier. At one point he sort of locks himself into this facility in La Marada. It was like a distribution facility. Like he moves in there. Like he has a shower installed in the office. And he's like sleeping there on this cot. And he's going. And this is him trying to salvage what's going on and trying to, if I work harder.

It was like, you know, this is why I sleep so important. He makes a bad impulsive decision that reflection and an advisory council would have warned him against. And then instead of backing up and going, shit, I shouldn't have done that. He forces it. And then he's like, well, I'm going to save thing. I'm going to move into the facility. And he brings every, he brought everyone there, even though the factory is downtown. He brings everyone there.

They're all commuting to Lama Ran. And he's like, he just has this basically break with reality. He's losing his mind. The stock price is at like 70 cents. And the banks won't lend because he's been sued over and over again. And the board had given, the board, like a board of directors, people ask like, how did so-and-so get away with it? As long as you're winning, people will let you get away with pretty much everything. And then when it's not all the defer, it's like all the deferred maintenance comes to.

And so the board started to get a sense of what was happening. And then they came to them with an offer. They were like, look, you've run the company into the ground. But you also built this brilliant thing that can't, you know, exist without you. And they were like, here's the deal. You can resign as CEO and stay on as, creative advisor will pay you a million dollars a year and you'll keep all your shares or this is the press release we are putting out right now about you being fired for a cause and he goes let me like

think about it for a minute he walks out comes back and he's like I choose door number three fuck all of you like uh willful wall street just straight up on my living yeah and and he the show goes on he he um he assures this hedge fund that he is of course innocent of every everything he's ever been accused of, that he has been unfairly thrown out. He pledges them as collateral, all of his shares, and says, like, I need to initiate a hostile takeover, drives the company into bankruptcy. I came back after he left to hopefully, like, turn things around at the request of the board, which was a grant, I was supposed to be writing ego as the enemy as this is happening. So it was like the greatest ringside scene you could

have possibly imagined. And, you know, he's basically trying, he's trying to jockey the thing. And it's like, he must have, in retrospect, I think about it so much, it's like, not only did he know where the bodies were buried, people like me also knew where the bodies are buried, because we were there when things happened. Like, the idea that he was going to be vindicated in this process was delusional. And, you know, he ends up driving it into bankruptcy as basically chokes it to death on legal fees, goes into bankruptcy, his shares become worthless. He's not cleared in the investigation by the hedge fund. So they confiscate the shares, the remaining equity, and he ends up owing them $20 million. So he goes, his shares were at one point worth something like $500 or $600 million. And he ends up

negative $20 million. And just recently he was, he is now in business with Kanye, West. He is running Kanye West's fashion company. Like so it's so far he's now in like the only person in the world that will do business with a notorious anti-Semite and Dove is Jewish. So it's it's it's just ego sucks you down like the law of gravity. Okay so trust me I'm lying. Confessions of a media manipulator. Let me take so this is the book that you wrote in 2012. You say this. My full-time job then was Director of Marketing for American Apparelal clothing company known for its provocative imagery and unconventional business practices. And I would go on to found my own marketing company brass check, which would orchestrate stunts and marketing trickery for other high-profile profile clients, from authors who sell millions of books to entrepreneurs worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

I create and shape the news for them. Usually it's a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain. From a tiny blog to a website of a local news network to Reddit, to the Huffington Post, to the major newspaper, to cable news, and back again, until the unreal becomes real. Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I leak a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that.

Really, it can be anything from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However, the place starts the end is the same. The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception and sell product. Now, I was hardly a wide-eyed kid when I entered this world. I grew up online and I knew that in every community there were trolls and tricksters. Like many people, I remained a believer. I thought the web was a meritocracy and that the good stuff generally rose to the top, but spending serious time in the media underworld, watching as the same outlets who fell for easy marketing stunts, seriously report on matters of policy or culture will disabuse you of that naivete. It will turn that hope into cynicism. Though I wish I could pinpoint the moment it fell apart, when I realized that the whole thing was a giant con, I can't. All I know is that eventually I did. It's ultimately what put me on the path to write this book.

So as you're doing all this, so that's like a crazy thing to read. It must be, when you, when I read that right now, are you kind of like, it's, I have a weird relationship with that book for sure. Because you're sort of a grown man now who talks about stoicism and telling the truth. And this thing is like you were a propagandist to make money for savages. Yeah. And to do that, you become a savage. Yeah.

It was weird. It was weird. The whole thing seems like a fever dream. It kind of had that blogger tone, too, a little bit, your writing style on that one. You know, it kind of still feels like that blogger, you know, getting after. Like a little admission of what's going on behind the scenes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would have liked to have read that book, but no one had written it.

And so I was like, you know what? I think I'm, I knew what I wanted to write about, but I also felt like I had this unique perspective on this thing that had happened. And I was like, I'll write about that first. When you look at media, when you look at advertising now, is it all just gross to you? What's funny, like, I remember I was writing that book. So I was writing it in 2011. And I remember telling my publisher, like, this has to come out, like, right now. Like, this is all going to be old news, like, if it's not out soon.

And then basically it was like 10 years early, you know? Like, all the things I'm talking about in that book are really what we see and are complaining about today. Right, like the idea of fake news or misinformation or disinformation, all, like, a big chunk of what I'm talking about is like what foreign actors do now. How they, like they found, for instance, in the 2016 election and with other, like, Russia will create like fake Facebook groups, get people around certain ideas. And then those Facebook groups will get written about it. I was talking about that shit then, which you could do to promote a movie. or a fashion launch. Yeah, like, you think what American Apparel would do,

I'll give you an example, we notice, like, whenever we would do a controversial ad that it would get written about. So we get publicity for the new ad, which is like your dream as a company. So I remember this one guy, he was making fake American Apparel ads. Like he would put them up,

and then people would talk about how American Apparel his new ad campaign, or was it real or not? And I realized, oh, no one's even checking, right? And then it turned out it wasn't even real. Like, he wasn't even making these in real life. He was just photoshopping them onto buildings, and then he would, like, post them.

He would post them on social media, and then websites would write about them. And so I was like, we could do that. I was like, why are we? I was like, if an American Apparel ad is newsworthy, why do we have to pay for it to run somewhere? Why don't we just put it on our website and say, this is our new ad, which we would do.

So we would put ads on the American Apparel website, and it would be like a major news story. And it literally was not more than a PDF. And so that's as a marketing, as a marketer that's like exciting and cool and crazy and interesting and a challenge. And then you go, the reporter who's writing about this ad that does not exist is then the next day writing about a political story or a cultural story or a celebrity gossip or whatever. And you go, they don't have like two sets of standards, right? Like, this is the same person, just relying on the same random tip that came in. And so it was this sort of slow awakening process for me of like, hey, look, I can sleep

in night with what I'm doing because it's relatively harmless, although certainly not so harmless people had tried to hire me many times, but realizing like, oh, this is not good. Like this is not the world that this is if America is a country Where your leaders are publicly elected then basically popular opinion is The ruler of the country that you live in right? Because that's how we find out about people That's how policies get you know thumbs up or thumbs down and so it was realizing that this whole thing was just like That I peaked behind the curtain in a way that was very hard to unseeing And so I tried to write a book that was compelling and interesting, but the sort of the main message was like, this is not how things should be.

This is bad. This is a book really bad. And that's not how the book ultimately was received. Well, how was it received? Well, the initial media tension was like overwhelmingly negative. Like I was the problem. And then what happened is like, oh, like you were a scumbag. Like you're the guy that was doing this and you're a scumbag.

You made all this stuff happen. You tricked us. Like I did this thing for the book where there used to be this service. It was called Help a Reporter Out. And the service was like reporters, like, let's say they're doing a trend piece on MMA. They'd be like, who wants to, like, who's an expert on MMA? And you'd be like me. And so I was like, well, I'll just pretend to be an expert about a bunch of shit that I don't know anything about.

And let's see if they actually check if I'm an expert. Was this an online service? Help a reporter out.com or something like this? Yes, yes. Who isn't, and so a reporter would put on there, hey, I'm doing a story about MMA, any experts out there. Yeah. And Ryan Holiday pops up there. And he'd be like, whoever answers first they would talk to.

And so you know when you read trend pieces and they're like, so-and-so says they love skateboarding or whatever. You think this is like a person they found on the street skateboarding. But as I found out as part of this thing, like they may not even own a skateboard, right? Like they could just say whatever they wanted. So I was quoted in like the New York Times and Good Morning America. I was quoted in every media outlet you can imagine. What, in what, as an expert in what? About anything that they want, no, anything that they wanted in that story.

So if they're like, like I was quoting the New York Times, it's about the resurgence of vinyl records, of which I knew nothing about. And I just gave, I just made up this long answer about vinyl records. And there I am, quoted, the paper of record in the United States. And so this is something I'm doing for the book. Saying like the thing with vinyl records is you get that sound quality that you just don't get on a CD. and also it's something physical that you can hold and there's a whole bunch of nostalgia

that goes along with it. That's why me and my friends are out there buying vinyl once again. You could have been in this story. That's almost exactly what it was. But like I may not have even been a real person. Like this is just an exchange over, you know. And so this is like I'm writing about this going like,

this is not how the sausage should get made. And the media reaction was, look at this guy, he's fucking up how the sauce. is made, not like the process is bad. So that's like reaction number one is that. And then reaction number two is the book starts to become really popular with real bad actors. I was going to say this is like the anarchist cookbook. Yeah.

For for people that are wanting to figure out how to do guerrilla type marketing. Is that a good? Yeah, like all right people and just like just not good dudes. We're like, this is my favorite book, you know? Like, just hear from people you're like, oh, that's not, I don't like that. I don't want that to be true. How long did it take for you to realize, like, did you do a book signing where you were just a bunch of sleaze balls start asking me like, hey, when you do this,

like what's the best way to get people to buy into your scam? Yeah, where it'd be, you know, you just, so here's the weird part. So I wrote the book. And it is true that like people's reputative. We call it now cancel culture. That was not a thing. But people's like reputations will get ruined. from like random rumor or something that's not true

or something that's taken out of context. So I talk about that in the book. And Dove was complicated in that Dove was doing shit that he shouldn't have done. And then some of the stuff wasn't true. And so I talked more about the stuff that wasn't true in the book. So the real thing that slowly affected me on the book

was just like, I've probably heard from every major person who has been Me Tooed since the book came out. And they're all 100% innocent when they call, you know what I mean? Like, and it was this process of, it's probably like what a defense attorney goes through where you start and you're like,

everyone's innocent, they're being railroaded, and then you're just like, they can't all be innocent. And then they're all guilty, you know, and you just start to dislike the clients that you're, you know, hired to protect. And so it was kind of just a process for me of like, that's not how I live my life. And even when I worked in American Apparel,

like I was with my now life the entire time, I wasn't interested in any of the shenan or any of the mischief or any of that shit. And so it was also just a process of like people wanting to use the book because they wanted it to like, they were just convinced that they were like the victims when they were really the victimizers. You know what I mean? So I have a weird relationship with the book.

And that's been a process. Also, yeah, I mean, I wrote it when I was 24. And as you're writing it, though, you kind of think that you're a magician that's like, like going to tell how the magician tricks work. Yes. And so then you get people that are like, yo, why are you telling how our magician trick works? And you also get people going,

oh, I can use these magician tricks to like rip people off. That's basically what you did. Yeah. And you expect, if you say how the tricks work, the trick should stop working. That was my thinking. Like people were like, well, why are you talking about it? Well, I'm like, if I lay it all out,

obviously all these loopholes will get closed, right? Like this won't be possible anymore. It'll be a compelling read, but it's the final chapter in a lot of this stuff. And that's just not the case. Like, there is very little in that book that's aged, some of it's aged badly, but it's all true still. And it's accelerated, right, obviously. Yeah. Because now even less people get their, I mean, social media is the main news source for most people.

So it's not even like when I was talking about how social media would filter into the mainstream media. Now it's. Now it just is. Yeah. And anyone like you talking about how you had to like get it to a blogger. And nowadays you just make up a Twitter account and just fire something off and keep your fingers crossed. I mean, and now you don't even have to do it. It's like now you could write code that does it.

You can have a bot. You know what I mean? Like what percentage of tweets or internet comments or these extreme things that we all get mad? is that person even real? Probably. Probably not. Yeah. Or are they working in some, you know, computer farm in Moscow or something or North Korea, right?

Like foreign actors have realized, hey, like, if we can get our, we can't attack America, but we can pit Americans against each other. And so what is the most extreme shit we can get someone to say from this side? So then people pile on, then people distance. How do we make certain ideas radioactive? How do we pit people against each other? How do we just drive everyone crazy? The more time they're spending on social media's time

they're not spending and doing actual shit that matters. Yeah, I've been talking a lot lately about when I was running the training, the advanced training for seal platoons. You want to put them under pressure situations. You want to see how they're going to perform. But one of the ways you could guarantee that they were just going to fall apart and just do a terrible job was to if there was any kind of like a little, friction or a little fault line inside the platoon. And if that, if they couldn't, if, if, if one of the,

let's say it's the, the platoon chief versus the platoon commander, if the, if one of them couldn't sort of subordinate their ego and be like, okay, fine, we'll just do it your way. If they both just held strong, all of a sudden you'd get this, this little fracture would just turn into a fault line, would just turn into an earthquake and everything would fall apart and they'd just be, hey, they would fight each other and hate each other and it'd be terrible. anytime you can get a team to go against itself, the team is going to lose. And so it's so clear that so much of that is happening in America right now. And we spend so little time going, you know, Ryan's a pretty good guy.

He thinks this, but he seems like a good enough dude. I don't know. We're fine. Instead of going, well, actually, Ryan thinks this. He's an evil person and he doesn't even understand things. And I know everything. and I'm obviously right about everything. So I hate him.

There was a thing that really hit me home after the book came out. I live in this little town called Bastrop, Texas. Do you remember the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory? No. It was one of the first Russian sciops before the election interference and stuff, which is basically through these Facebook groups, they started this rumor that this is like maybe 2015. Remember there was a series of like army exercises.

or military exercises in the southern part of the United States where they were practicing for like a Russian invasion. They were practicing for like an invasion. They're doing this broad sort of war game in the U.S. And they spread this conspiracy theory that the federal government was planning a takeover of the states, which is ironic because that's what the Civil War was about. It's already been settled.

It's like already a settled issue. But they started this conspiracy theory that starts in social media, then these blogs start talking about it, then news outlets are reporting on how people are worried about it, and then like citizens are arming, and then Greg Abbott, the governor, sends the National Guard to observe the exercises, right? So they watched as this fake thing. Now suddenly, literally, the National Guard and the actual army are like potentially in a conflict zone, right? And it's like sort of trademark the kinds of

stuff that I was talking about in the book. I mean, and this is what, I think when people think cyber warfare, they think like hacking. And that can be part of it. Yeah, you fuck up an electrical grid or, you know, the launch of a missile. That's, but a big chunk of it is more like in information cyber attacks where you're spreading out things and getting people riled up about stuff that's not true. Yeah. That's all the stuff that you're talking about in that book is exacerbated now.

Yes. And more true now. Because we're more online now. Yeah. Like there was, I think even when I was writing that book, there was still this distinction between like the internet and real life. And now, I mean, just everyone lives on the internet. Mm-hmm.

Disturbing. Yeah. Your next book that you rolled into was growth hacker marketing, a primer on the future of PR marketing and advertising. So what? same vein, I guess. A little less nefarious. A little less nefarious. You say this, flashback to 1996 before Hotmail had launched as one of the first free web mail services and became an early example of a product going viral. As the journalist Adam Penenberg describes the meeting in his

book Viral Loop, Hotmail's founders, Sabir Batia and Jack Smith sat across the table from Tim Draper, the famous venture capitalist. He told them he thought the product, web-based email was great, but he wondered how they get the word out. Badiah's first instinct was that industrial marketing approach we've been talking about. We'll put it up on a billion billboards.

Or sorry, we'll put it up on billboards. He said, Draper nixed such an expensive approach for what would be a free product. So they kicked around more ideas. Radio ads, same problem. What about sending an email to everyone on the internet? Draper suggested. That was only a slightly newer version

of the old mindset, spam doesn't work. Then Draper happened accidentally on growth hacking. Could you, he asked, put a message at the bottom of everybody's screen? Oh, come on, we don't want to do that. But can you technically do it? Can you put it on one message? And if he sends an email to somebody else, you can put it on that one too, right? Yeah, yeah, they replied.

So put P.S., I love you, get your free email at Hotmail at the bottom. This little feature changed everything. It meant that every email that Hotmail users sent would be an advertisement for the product. And that advertisement was effective, not because it was cute or creative, but because it showcased an amazing product that many people wanted and needed. Each user meant new users. Each email meant more emails and more happy customers. And most crucial, all this could be tracked and tweaked and improved to drive as many users as possible into the service. You say that this was revolutionary and you go on to, uh,

talk about what growth hacking is. A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are emails, data targeting, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like branding and Mindshare, I haven't heard Mindshare in a while, that's an awful one. Growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth. And when they do it right, those users become evangelist for products, bringing more users with them. Growth hackers are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of a self-sustaining growth machine that can take a company not just from zero to one, but from

one to 100 or a hundred million. So what made you decide to write this book? I was interested in this sort of group of all those big companies that are now multi-billion-dollar companies. You know, they basically launched with no marketing whatsoever. And they grew faster than any company has ever grown. And sort of what are the lessons in that? I mean, I think about your brands, right? Like if an established, like, consumer package goods company was going to launch any of the stuff you did, and they were like, well, what's that going to cost?

10 million, right? Like the whole thing would have been at a almost incomprehensible scale and almost certainly would have failed. Like what's their hitting percentage? It's extremely low. And then you look at these people who have built these huge brands off the back of a single Instagram account or a YouTube channel or, you know.

And so I was just really interested in how like the game had sort of fundamentally changed. Like what Don Draper was doing in Mad Men is not how marketing works today. I mean, it's, it works once you, it's still kind of what you do at a, at a very high level, like once you're already huge, but when you're building something from scratch, which is what most of us are doing, right? We're trying to launch a coffee shop or a book or a brand or yoga studio or whatever it is. We're starting from zero. So it's really like, how do you go from zero to those first people? And why don't we learn from like the best people that have ever done? And that idea of

growth, like one of Facebook's early decisions is they didn't have a more. marketing department, they had a growth department. That seems like a kind of a semantic difference, but like a marketing department does marketing and a growth department grows, right? Like just the word there is illustrative. And, you know, marketing is like, we're going to throw a premiere party and we bought everyone T-shirt. You know, it's all this stuff that's cool. We're going to have a booth at the Sundance film festival or whatever, right? It's stuff that's cool for the marketers, but nobody knows if it works. or not. And so it's all about that. That's what it's about. And that book, what's weird about that book is it kind of proved that book started as an article, then it became an e-book, then it was a

paperback, and then it was an extended, I think it's on its like third or fourth edition. So it's kind of a weird, it's also not how books really work. When you wrote, when Trust Me Online came out, what, that come out through a traditional publisher? Yeah, yeah. And you got a book deal? How'd you get that book deal? I got an agent. I knew Tim Ferriss's agent. So we have the same agent, Steve. And I just went and I didn't need the money. So I just wrote, I wrote the book. I was like, this is the book. It's coming out regardless. And then I saw, I showed it to him and asked him if you thought it could sell. And it did. It sold at an auction. It was this big thing. It was funny, actually. Then I, then we put up. What? The publishers had an auction? Yeah. Yeah. It was like a hot book. Okay. Which is pretty cool.

at like 24. But then the funny thing is when I announced it, I just doubled the size of the advance. I just said, you know, I said I got paid like a half a million dollars for it, which I didn't. But nobody checks press releases. And so then the thing got a bunch of press

as this like huge book coming out and sort of prove my point. But, but yeah. So then did you do all your viral marketing for that book? Yeah, yeah. And how did it do? It sold really well. It's old really well.

It got a lot more. attention that it sold copies. It sold really well. And then the growth hierarchy book came out. And then I went to my publisher and I said, actually, I don't remember the exact talent. But at some point I've done these marketing books and I went to my publisher and I was like, for my next book, I'd like to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy.

And they were like, you know, it was like a record scratch thing. And that was the big sort of pivot. It felt like a pivot to them. To me, it was always what I wanted to do. When you are doing this, marketing these two books right here, it seems like you have to be good at marketing these books and do well with them. Otherwise, it's kind of like, you know, why are you teaching us about this stuff? That's what I told him.

I was like, watch me prove it with this book, which I did. And so you pulled it off. Yeah. You pulled it off with both those books? So did growth hacker marketing eventually come out? on a traditional publisher? So yes, yes, it did. I'm actually all my books are with the same publisher,

except for my kids' books, because you gave me some advice on self-publishing. Oh, right on. But, yeah, all of them were traditional publishing. And what about Tim Ferriss's book, The Four Hour Chef? Yeah. What was your involvement with that?

So I met Tim right before I dropped out of college, actually. Dang. at 2007 at South by Southwest. And we kind of became friends. And so I worked on the marketing on all of his books. And I mean, it took that job because I wanted to learn from Tim, which I learned so much from because he's a genius. And I just watched those things become just absolute monsters.

But yeah, we did the marketing for. But that was a weird book, though, because it was the book that came out on Amazon publishing. and he got hated by every other normal publisher and they wouldn't carry in bookstores. It was man. Yeah, basically all the retailers teamed up and said, why would we carry a book

from our biggest existential threat? And so we ended up doing this thing where we gave a huge chunk of it away on BitTorrent, which was like a piracy website. And so like millions of people downloaded in the book sold super well. It was weird. So I met Tim.

And Tim is to blame for like everything that I do right now. So good job, Tim. Appreciate it. But when I met Tim, my first book hadn't come out yet. And the things that he was saying to me, I was, you know, like thinking, okay, yes. Okay. You know, because he'd done really well. And it was so weird that my publisher, I mean, my publisher is now, what has it been, almost eight years later?

They're now more, for lack of a better word, hip to what's going on. Yeah. But at the time, they, what the, how far ahead strategically Tim Ferriss was in 2015 was, was, was crazy. For example, he said, he's like, I'm going to put this podcast. So my book was coming out, Extreme Ownership was coming out October 20th or something like this. And he says, yep, he's like, okay, this is the podcast is because I recorded a podcast, my first ever interview with him.

He's like, I'm going to put the podcast out September or whatever, late September. And I said, he said, that way, we're going to get a bunch of presales on Amazon. He had this whole thing. And so I talked to my publisher, and they said, can you get him to put the podcast out the week of book launch? And I was like, I'll ask him. And so I said, hey, man, they really want you to put this out on the week of the book launch. And he's like, that's because they have no idea what they're talking about. And he was just so right, because I've now done it a bunch of times.

And he was just so right. And he just knew, he had so much strategic insight as to what was happening compared to what the traditional book publishers. And look, there's some great people. I have a team there that has helped me launch a bunch of books. They've done a great job. But he definitely was ahead of the power curve when it came to how to get this shit done right. I think what Tim is, Tim's special skill, Tim's special skill is that he figures out, like, he deconstructs the system before he does anything.

So he figures out, like, what actually moves the needle, what actually works, what the logic of the world that he's operating in. And then he's like, where do I have an advantage? What are people not taking advantage of? You know, and he does all of that. So, like, I'll give me an example. He's also, to blame slash, the beneficiary for me on all. the stuff that I've done. Like my my my my first couple books came out and they did all right. But then I

remember I was we were both at this conference in Amsterdam and I was working on the obstacles way. And I gave him the I was like he's like what are you working on him? I'm like I'm working on this book about Stoic philosophy because he and I both were really into it. And he's like let me read it. And so I gave it to him and he was like let me buy this. I was like what do you mean? It's already sold to a publisher. He's like no let me buy the audiobook rights. This was in 2013 before audio before Audible was huge, and Tim was like, let me buy the audiobook rights. And I think he bought the audiobook rights from my publisher for like $5,000. And my publisher was like, absolutely not.

You know, terrible idea. We want to do it. It's either that or they didn't even care. But I remember being, and I was like, just let Tim do whatever he wants. He knows what he's doing. And obviously my agent sort of brokered it all because he works with both of us. Tim buys the audiobook rights. I think I'm the fourth episode on the podcast.

I think he launched it to promote this audiobook publishing arm that he did. He basically just went and bought the audiobook rights to a bunch of his favorite books, knowing audiobooks were going to be huge. And then more importantly, he also knew that Audible paid like a 50% referral bonus for any new subscriber to Audible. So he knew like not only was he recommending a book that he owned the rights to. But if you joined A Audible for doing it,

he got like a huge cut of your like commission. So he works all this out. And I mean, the audiobook of the obstacles waste sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And he bought the, then I think my next two also. But what Tim realized is he was like basically, I'm blowing people up on my blog. He was like, I'll just take a stake in the things.

And so he just did that. And every, every, time, I remember at South by Southwest, Twitter launched. Like, that was the year that Twitter launched. What year was that? 2007. And I was like, this is the dumbest idea in the world. And Tim invested in it. So Tim, Tim has an eye for whatever. It's going to be huge. And he, he figures out, like, what resources are under exploited or undervalued. And that's, even his investing, like, obviously he's a big investor, but he also realized, like, angel investing is the most efficient way to invest because you don't put in a large amount of money.

And so he was able, and he also understood, I think there's a little bit of status arbitrage there that, like, he was, he's just a genius at figuring out where stuff's going and he gets in very early. And that's why, I mean, that's why it's huge. Yeah. Yeah, he told me to sign up for Twitter. And he said, hey, you really should go on Twitter. It's a great way to get information.

It's a great way to meet people and all this. and get connections with people that you wouldn't otherwise connect with. And I said, well, I don't know how to do it. And he's like, don't want to you. I'll show you. I'll show you. I'll show you.

I'll work you through it. And he, I signed up for it. He never told me a damn thing about it, but I figured that out. I mean, he was early on podcasts. He was early on social. He's been, but he did tell me, he's like, you don't have to be first. You just have to be early.

So he lets people kind of figure it out. He, he, like, there's been very few where Tim has been wrong. Do you know what I mean? Like he doesn't he's not like He's not just like Picking a thousand horses and some of them win He he waits till just it's like just sure enough And then he dives in and jumps in with two feet

And then he fucking crushes it Yeah no he told me to start a podcast too Like as soon he pressed stop on the recorder I remember we were at his house in San Francisco at the time And he pressed stop and he looks at me He said you should start a podcast and I was like Okay yeah you know and then Rogan told me the same thing, but it was, it was Tim just like, press stop, looked at me and said,

you should start a podcast and, you know, like, thank God, he told me that because I listened to him. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty wild. So you're doing, so you had helped with his marketing on all of his books. Yeah. And then you start with the obstacle the way. Now, how long had you been into Stoicism for? I found Stoicism before I dropped out of college. So it was, I, when the obstacles away came out, that would have been in 2014. So, yeah, a while. What was the connection to it? I read Mark Surrealis' Meditations,

which is just, I think, one of the most incredible and unique historical documents to ever exist. Yeah, it's amazing. Right? Like, the most powerful man in the world, maybe the wisest man in the world at that time, is writing private notes to himself

on campaign with the Roman army about what he needs to do to be better as a human being and as a leader and to not be corrupted by the power that he holds. And he never intends it for publication. And somehow, against all odds, like 20 centuries later, we can read it. It's a miracle. I mean, it's just, and there's nothing in every one of my books and your books,

we're writing, there's some performative element for it, right? Like there's something, it's not false, but there is something in it where you're writing for the reader. what's so raw and authentic about meditations is that it's for him yeah it's interesting i've been asked since the first probably five within five podcasts and i'm on 394 right now people are like oh are you going to cover marquisarralia meditations and there's actually a legitimate what i think is a legitimate reason why i haven't done it oh the legitimate reason is if you read public if you read meditations you need no further explanation there's i could read them to you but i have nothing else to say, really, about every one of the statements. And you go, yeah, that stands on

its own. And this stands on its own. And this stands on its own. And that's why I've never taken the time. I suppose I will at some point, just maybe have a conversation around, around it. But it is so self-evident what he is saying in there. Maybe it's because of what you just said. Maybe because it's not perform. If it doesn't take any, it doesn't take any discussion to uncover anything else. It is what it is. Well, that's what's interesting about stoicism is like, stoicism has been this philosophical tradition for 2,300 or so years that some of the wisest, smartest, was powerful people used,

it was wildly popular in the ancient world. Why is it not more popular in academic life, right? And the answer, I think, is that it's hard to specialize in the study of stoicism as a philosopher at Harvard or whatever, because it's all fucking there. Yeah. You know, there's no theories about, what Marcus was thinking or did he mean this?

It's like he said what he means. And it's so boiled down and stripped of artifice or pretension. Like there's no paradoxes or like the only paradox is that sometimes he says this and sometimes he says that. Right? And people go, oh, does he contradicting themselves? And it's like to a practical regular person, you go, sometimes you do this and sometimes you do that.

Right. Like it's just so simple and accessible and real. Like they weren't like, how do we know if we were not? living in a simulation or not? Or like, how do we know if there's such thing as good or evil, right? Like, it's just, it's just practical, real shit about what it is to be a person in a world where the vast majority of what happens is outside your control. Did you, so you read it in high school? I read it my freshman year of college. Did you start to apply them in your own life?

Obviously somewhat hit or miss. I think what struck me at 19 was like the passage about getting out of bed early in the morning. You know, like in the opening of book five in meditations, he's like, at dawn when you awake, and then he interrupts himself.

And he goes, but it's warmer here. And he goes, is this what you were put here on this planet to do to huddle under the covers and stay warm? Like, the most powerful man in the world is having a debate with himself about whether he should get up early or not. And so I think that strikes you if you're a human, right? Like you're like,

that's me, you know, maybe not you. But I've said the same thing. And this is another thing that's been interesting for me. So you and I, once again, we were talking before we hit record. I didn't read. Like when I was growing up, I was a, I was a, I was a knuckle dragger. I was not, you know, my, my, my mom was an English teacher. My dad was a history teacher. My, you know, they were, my mom read all the time. My dad read seven newspapers a day. They were just very into reading. They were teachers, you know, that's what they did. And I was not. I don't know, I can't think of any books that I actually read in high school. And I don't think I actually read any books in high school. I might have read one or two, you know, for some English class or something like this. And I'm,

I apologize to my English teachers that I didn't, didn't do it. But I just wasn't into it. I was going to go in the military I was you know I just it just didn't seem to be something that I needed to get done uh in fact at one point my mom was was I was already in the navy and it was probably like you know a year into maybe two years into the Navy and my mom says like oh have you read any good books lately and I said well no I was I said why would I need to read a book she's well it might be interesting I said if it's interesting they'll make it into a movie and she said well what if they don't make it in a movie. And I said, if they don't make it in a movie, it wasn't that interesting. That's how much of an idiot I was. It wasn't until I went to, it was, so then as I was moving up

through the ranks in the SEAL teams and I eventually realized how important writing was. And so I started focusing on it. And I also started reading military history books like 100% solely nothing else because I could relate to it because I was like, oh, this is about war. This is what my life is supposed to be like. And then when I went to college, I knew that becoming a good writer would really help the guys that worked for me because you've got to write awards for them.

You've got to write evaluations for them. You've got to write concept of operations. Like you write all the time if you're an officer in the military. And so I wanted to get good at it. And that's why I studied English. And then I started to read. And then I started to read all the time. And I remember when I was in college,

you know, one semester I took five English classes because I was an English. major it was horrible but I mean that's you know I'd be reading for eight hours and I also contrary to high school when I was in college and I was in I went to college after I've been in the Navy for a year so I was a grown adult human I would read I read every single assignment that I got 100% like I read every single page of every single assignment that I ever got in college which is I don't think I don't think there's very many people at all that do that and I don't even know if it's that smart but that's what I did so I started reading all the time

then but like when I started the podcast and I started getting interviewed and I'd get people asking me about you know philosophy I remember I was on stage one time and a guy said who is your you know of all of all philosophers who's your favorite philosopher and my answer I said lemmy you know of motorhead because I just didn't I didn't I didn't have it and as people started saying oh Jocko's writing is is you know it's very stoic writing and even what you're just talking about getting out of bed in the morning of sky but I have written about that a ton of times and it's all the same, but I didn't know. And eventually I did a podcast about it because, you know, it's like, oh, you talk about the same

thing that Sun Su and the same thing that Marcus Aurelius and, well, if you put a human into certain environments like war or leadership positions and they look around and they make some mistakes and they learn from it, they make some other mistakes and they learn from it. Eventually, you're going to get to some place that's, it's a normal. place to end up and that's kind of where I ended up and then I looked around and said oh my gosh you know like these guys been talking about this for so long I wish I wish I would be included on that when I was younger but of but that's where you end up you end up saying oh discipline equals freedom I I said discipline

equals freedom for the first time I remember I'd brief it to these junior officers this is like circa 2007 2008 I couldn't have told you one thing about Stoicism and yet I wrote I would tell these guys if you want freedom in your job in your life You need to have discipline you know maybe I got some of it from from black flag Henry Rollins because I grew up you know listening to listening to black flag and hearing Henry Rollins talk about discipline but I realized oh yeah that discipline that he's talking about if you Apply it to your life you'll end up with freedom in your life and discipline equals freedom This is so and I then I realized oh it applies to your team too like if you

you have a disciplined platoon, they're going to be able to operate with much more hands off and they can make things happen quicker. So it was very interesting to me to kind of arrive at a place that is, it's where you're going to end up. It's where you're going to end up if you get put into war, you get put into leadership positions, you make some mistakes, you learn from them, you put, you make some other mistakes, you learn from them, you live a life. It's, it's where you hopefully end up. I think the, This is why Stoicism and Buddhism, for instance, have so many similarities, is that if you boil the human condition, the human experience, if you boil history down enough times, you're not left with that much. You're left with basically this idea that we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens, and that these events are opportunities to, to like be great, to be excellent, right?

And that's like the core of it. And I think that's what struck me reading Marxist for the first time is like, when people hear philosophy, they think impractical, they think theoretical, they think abstract, they think incomprehensible, right? They think like a college professor talking about interesting ideas, but that don't do anything but confuse you. And then you read meditations or you read Seneca or you read Epictetus and they're like, life is fucking hard.

Here's what you can do about it. Like here, like, don't lose your temper, try to be a good person. Epictetus is asked to basically boil all of stoicism down as simply as possible. And he says, I can do it in two words. What's actually three? But he says, I can do it in basically two terms. Persist, resist. Some things you need to keep doing and some things you need to stop doing, right?

Like, that's it. It's not that complicated, right? And this is why the golden rule appears in all the different religious traditions. It's like, there's not that much. stuff. So it really just comes down to like who can say it the most clearly and then who or which tradition does a good job of living up to it. Right? And that's what I think so interesting about Marcus really is, you're the most powerful man in the world, literally worshipped as a God, commands the Roman army, has a limited wealth. And, you know, this is supposed to corrupt,

absolutely. He has the absolute power. Like, it's not that power corrupts. It's that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then you kind of have this exception to the rule. And he writes about it in meditations. He goes, be careful not to become Caesarified and not to be stained purple because the Roman emperor wears a purple cloak. And it's like, oh yeah, maybe it didn't happen for him because he was meditating in his journal about making sure that that didn't happen. Like he was working on it And philosophy was a way to do that. He also writes a meditation. He says, fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you into.

And it's like, oh, yeah, this is like a pep talk from, this is a pep talk he's having with himself about living up to his potential as a virtuous person that he's almost certainly struggling to in the midst of frustrating, annoying, obnoxious life. So 2014, you write. obstacles the way here's a here's a section from that in the year 170 at night in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania Marcus Aurelius the emperor of the Roman empire sat down to right or perhaps it was before dawn at the palace in Rome or he stole a few seconds to himself during the games ignoring the carnage on the floor

of the Coliseum below the exact location is not important what matters is that this man known today as the last of the five good emperors sat down to right not to an audience for publication, but to himself, for himself. And what he wrote is undoubtedly one of history's most effective formulas for overcoming every negative situation we may encounter in life, a formula for thriving, not just in spite of whatever happens, but because of it. At that moment, he wrote only a paragraph, only a little of it was original. Almost every thought could, in some form or another, be found in the writings of his mentors and idols. But in a scant 85 words, Marcus Aurelius so clearly defined and articulated a timeless idea that he eclipses

the great names of those who came before him. It is more than enough for us. Quote, our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. And then he concluded with the powerful words destined for maxim, quote, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. In Marcus's words, in Marcus's words, the secret to an art unknown as turning obstacles upside down to act with a reverse clause. So there's always a way out or another route to get where you need to go.

So that setbacks or problems are always expected and never permanent making certain that what impedes us can empower us And then you go on to say there are a few things to keep in mind when faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle We must try to be objective to control emotions and keep an even keel to choose to see the good in a situation To steady our nerves to ignore what disturbs or limits others to place things in perspective to revert to the to the to the to the to the to the present moment to focus on what can be controlled. This is how you see opportunity within the obstacle. It does not happen on its own. It is a process, one that results from self-discipline and logic. And that logic is available to you. You just need to deploy it. The obstacle is the way.

That was very cool to be honest. This is, you know, one of my, I think it might be the most popular clip I've ever made is this clip from a podcast. good, right? And I'm telling a story about this is something that I was saying, again, before I had any recognition of any of this stuff, I was telling my junior platoon commander, Seth Stone, hey, something's going wrong. Good. Now we have an opportunity to overcome it. And all, there it is, you know, it's like, there it is. There's no wonder people relate to it. It's one of those things that's been boiled down over time and it's just true. When we can imagine that he knew it from experience, you know, it's like, hey, we just found out

this, you know, we just received news. of this setback or this person just defected or, you know, this person just died, right? He's, he's, the emperor would be, nobody brings good news to the emperor, right? It's just going to be bad news after bad news, especially for Marcus's reign. It's, it's kind of tragic. You have this philosopher king. He inherits the throne from a man named Antoninus Pius. There's basically 20 years of peace and prosperity.

And then Marcus's reign, there's a plague, the Antonine plague. There's a series of historic philosophy. Bloods, almost the entire reign of Marcus Rios' time is at war, a series of border skirmishes. And he buries six children. Like it's one thing after another for this guy. And it's not that it's good, right, that he would have chosen it, that he was happy that it happened. But it was an opportunity for him to deploy the ideas in Stoicism. You know what I mean?

Like I think when people hear the obstacle is the way, it's like, oh, this is going to be great for my business. Like, no, your business might just barely survive, right? Or it might go out of business. But it can be good for you as a human being. Like, you can learn something from it. You can grow stronger from it. You can practice forgiveness or acceptance. Like when we say that everything's an opportunity, yeah, a good chunk of the time, the opportunity is like humility or acceptance or learning from your mistakes.

It's not magically a springboard to exactly where you want it to go. Like, sometimes life fucking kicks you in the chest like a thousand times. And when we say the obstacle is the way, it's that it's an opportunity to practice virtue and excellence inside that shittiness. Yeah, I've had to brief quite a few people on that over the years in terms of taking ownership of things. Yeah. And they think, oh, well, you said if I take ownership, you know,

it wouldn't be a problem. Like, no, you did something wrong. You have to take ownership. That doesn't mean the problem went away. You still have to solve the problem or fix the problem or say you're sorry and make amends and do things to win back the trust that you broke. Like, yeah, all that starts with ownership. Ownership doesn't make problems go away.

It just is a place to start. Well, and a lot of times ownership as a leader is owning shit that's not your fault. You didn't screw up. You didn't choose for it to happen in this moment that you just sunk your life savings into something and then a pandemic happens or, you know, there's a strike or something, you know, like, you don't choose any of that, but it's still like, it's your fucking problem. And you have to go, well, how is this problem going to make me better?

Yeah. And we've had a very interesting experience. You know, we'll work with companies. We work with companies, a consultant company called Esselaumfront. We have a bunch of companies that we work with. Most of the time, it's probably gone up. I used to say 80% or 85% of the time. Now it's probably 95% of the time we're working with companies that actually are doing well and they just want to do better and they bring us on to help them with their leadership.

5% of the time we're getting brought in by some external component like let's say the board who says, hey, this company is failing. Can you go help them? Can you get their leadership in order? And the reception that we get in the 95% of companies that are doing well is like, hey, we're so happy you're here. We want to learn from you. And the reason that they're doing well is because they're humble enough to say when the market shifts, they go, oh, we didn't judge that well. Here's an adjustment we can make. Or the competitor did this and they didn't expect it.

So now they got to counter that by doing this move and they admit that they got, you know, the competitor got a one up on them. When the board brings us in because the company's failing, their reaction is like, well, we're only failing because the competitor did this and the market did that and the union said this and our investors did that. It's never their fault. That's why they're failing because they don't change anything because they don't think it's their fault. So when you're in a leadership position, it actually is your fault. It actually is your fault when something goes wrong and you didn't plan for it or you didn't predict it. You didn't have a backup. You didn't have a contingency.

It's your fault. And by the way, that means you have the ability to say, okay, I made a bad call. Here's where I thought was going to happen. This is what actually happened. And here's the adjustments we're going to make. So letting your ego blame other people is a complete disaster. and doesn't work. One of the most beautiful passages in meditations at the beginning, Marcus lists his debts and lessons,

like what do you learn from all the people in his life? And he has this, he becomes emperor in kind of a remarkable process, right? Like his dad is not emperor. He comes from no royal family. It's that Hadrian, there's basically five male emperors in a row that don't have a son, or in some cases any children. And so Hadrian is getting old and he sees something in this boy, Marcus Aurelius, who is sort of unfailingly honest and decent,

and he wants him to become king, but he's way too young and he thinks that's the worst thing you could possibly do to someone. So he adopts this guy, Antoninus, who was like one of the most respected politicians in Rome. And actually what seals it for Hadrian is he watches, Antoninus doesn't think anyone's watching. And he watches Antoninus help his elderly father-in-law up a flight of stairs. And he goes, this guy is it. So he adopts Antoninus, who in turn has to adopt Marcus Aurelius. So he sets in motion this succession plan. And Hadrian probably thinks, you know, Antoninus will live for like five or six years.

And then Marcus will be – well, Antoninus lives for like almost two and a half decades after that. And it's one of the longest running emperors just that alone. So Marcus gets like 20 plus years of apprenticeship under a great man. And it goes both ways. I mean, like, Antoninus could have very quickly killed Marcus Aurelius. That's what you might expect to happen, or Marcus Aurelius could have tried to kill. But instead, they decide, like, no, let's really do this. Like, I want to learn from you.

I want to teach you. And they have this beautiful relationship. And in the beginning of meditations, Marcus lists all the things that he learns from Antoninus. And it's one of the most beautiful encapsulations of what makes a great human being and a great leader. He's like, he teaches me how to, when to listen to experts, when to seed the floor, how to be unostentatious. He even learns, he's like, Antoninus would plan his bathroom breaks so that he could be more efficient at the job. You know, he just lit all this stuff that he just learns from this great man. And you get the sense that Marcus, when he does become power, and suddenly there's no check on him whatsoever.

The main thing is he doesn't want to let this guy down. He doesn't, he wants to follow in the tradition that he was raised in. And it's just this, it's this beautiful, again, totally unique historical situation of which Marcus adds a cherry on top. So Marcus gets a stepbrother as a result of this. And he names his stepbrother co-emperor. The first thing he does with absolute power is it gives half of it away, which again has never happened and will probably never happen again. And it's just, I mean, there's just so much, there's so much you can study from this person. And, yeah, I'm just, I remain endlessly fat. Even all these years later, just every time I think about it, every time I pick it, every time I pick up meditation, I get something else out of it. I'm like, oh, how did, you know, how did you know? Even, even during COVID, like, I didn't really think of meditations as a plague book,

but he wrote it during a 15-year plague that soldiers, brought back from the eastern edges of the empire. So it sounds a little familiar, right? And he goes, there's two types of plagues. There's one that can take your life. And he's like, that's pretty bad. And then he's like, one that can destroy your character. And he's like, that's the worst one. And you just realize like, oh, shit, humans were exactly the same during COVID as they were during the Antonine plague, and always have been, and always will be. And that's what's so cool about philosophy is like the timelessness of it. Or that, yeah, ego is basically the plot of every Greek play and tragedy.

Flash forward to every superhero movie. Like, it's just ego. That's the main thing. What was your, as you're working at American Apparel? How did your Stelic philosophy line up to like this mayhem that's going on there? Well, I think just generally a philosophy of like discipline, ethics and, and, uh, like trying to be a decent person. I think that kept me out of trouble,

so did being effectively married. But I think watching someone who had not absolute power, but just watching the way that wealth and power and busyness and all that, just watching the way that can warp someone's soul, it's pretty timeless and real and also super scary. You know, to watch someone that picked, like, Doves saw me and was like, I see something of myself and you. And then to watch him spin off the planet, that was a real head fuck.

When I introduced the topic of ego and I'm talking to companies and people, I talk about what a threat it is. And then I explain that there's countless examples throughout military history where someone's ego drove them to make decisions. that got thousands, if not tens of thousands of people killed, and in many cases, themselves killed. So they would rather die than admit that they were wrong, rather die than subordinate their ego to someone else, rather die than change their plan because it's the plan they came up with. And I say, listen, if people will die for their ego,

trust me, you can, you can, like, overrule someone because you don't like the way they looked at you, and that's all ego. So that's a scary thing. I mean, MacArthur was this close to World War III, this close. And that's not a new, I mean, he was, he had the same job as so many of the Roman generals who did this exact same thing, right? Like the overreaching is the thing. There's a great epictetus quote.

He says, remember it is impossible to learn that which you think you already know. So on the one hand, there's the ego of the overreach of the like super talented, you could, you could, but we forget all the sort of silent casualties of ego who we never hear of because they never got like they just got fired like on their first day or they never graduated from college like they never made it because like nobody could teach them what they thought they already knew like we think of the egotistical rock star like destroying their career but what about the one that blew up the record deal before it was even signed because they're just a dick um i was once again talking about ego when we would fire a seal leader from a leadership position we would fire a seal leader not

because they didn't know how to read a map not because they didn't know how to shoot their weapon we'd fire them because their ego because they lack humility and when you lack humility you don't listen to anybody else you're just gonna you're just going to implode and it's it's absolutely terrible and I also tell people you look everyone's got some natural amount of leadership capability different levels different skill sets some people are good at simplifying things some people are very articulate, some people have a loud voice and a commanding presence, like, oh, let's get different levels of those. And any of those, you can get better in those categories. You can improve in some way unless you're an egomaniac or you lackymody. And then I really just can't help you. Like,

you're just going to be a terrible person and a terrible leader and you're not ever going to get any better because you don't listen to anybody else. And you think you're perfect. So going back to Epictetus, you can't teach you anything if you already think you know it. You're just screwed. Well, it's like if you think you know everything, you're right. Because you can't learn anything else. And if you think you're perfect, you also can't get any better. It was so weird to deal with guys with big egos. And look, in the SEAL teams, you got a lot of healthy eagles, myself included. Like you're not, you don't sign up and go do the, the quote, hardest training in the world because you don't think you can make it. No, you're like, I'll do this. Let's go.

But then you roll in with some of these guys and you can just see the look on their face. And it doesn't matter. Sometimes they're senior to you. Sometimes they're junior to you. It doesn't matter. You're looking at them and you can see that what you're saying, they do not think they need this information and they know better than you. And so you go, okay, well, maybe it's my ego. And you say, okay, well, explain your perspective and you realize that their perspective is the only thing in the world to them. And they end up getting fired. That's the way it works. It's terrible. I've gotten to work with a lot of sports teams. I know you have to. And they all talk about, like, you're the best in the world until you got here. And so that's, you know, and then can you, do you have, if you have, if you

have confidence, you can become good again. If you have ego, you will get destroyed. Because now all of a sudden you're getting your ass kicked. You don't know what you're doing. It doesn't feel natural. Like, Shock is smart. He's a great basketball coach at Marquette. He was talking about how people go, like, they always quit. The players always quit because it's not fun anymore. And he's like, the game is the exact same amount of fun. You just don't like not being good. Right. Like, you don't like the learning curve. That's what you're objecting to. And the realization that Like, life and progress is this constant process of bumping up into your limitations and the things you don't know. And if you like that, if you get better from that, then you keep growing.

And if you're the person for whom that struggle is immensely painful and uncomfortable and it threatens your identity and self-worth as a human being, you're fucked. You're totally fucked. Ego is the enemy. Let me get a little extra up going from here. In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower returned from his inaugural parade and entered the White House for the first time as president late in the evening. As he walked into the executive mansion, his chief usher handed Eisenhower two letters marked confidential and secret that had been sent to him earlier in the day. Eisenhower's reaction was swift. Never bring me a sealed envelope, he said firmly.

That's what I have staff for. How snobbish, right? Had the office really gone to his head already? at all Eisenhower recognized the seemingly insignificant event for what it was, a symptom of disorganized dysfunctional organization. Not everything needed to run through him. Who was to say that the envelope was even important? Why hadn't anyone screened it?

As president, his first priority in office was organizing an executive branch into a smooth, functioning and order-driven unit just like his military units had been, not because he didn't want to work himself, but because everyone had a job. and he trusted and empowered them to do it. As his chief of staff later put it, the president does the most important things. I do the next most important things. The public image of Eisenhower is of a man playing golf.

In reality, he was not someone who ever slacked off, but the leisure time he did have was available because he ran a tight ship. He knew that urgent and important were not symptoms. His job was to set the priorities to think big picture and then trust the people beneath him to do the jobs they were hired for. Most of us are not the president or even president of a company.

But in moving up the latter in life, the system and work habits that got us where we are, won't necessarily keep us there. When we're aspiring or small time, we can be idiosyncratic, we can compensate for disorganization with hard work and a little luck. That's not going to cut it in the majors. In fact, it'll sink you if you can't grow up and organize. We can contrast Eisenhower's system in the White House with the infamous car company created by John DeLorean.

When he walked away from GM to produce his brand of futuristic cars, a few decades removed from the company's spectacular implosion, we can be forgiven for thinking the man was just ahead of his time. In fact, his rise and fall is as timeless a story as there is. Power-hungry narcissist undermines his own vision and loses millions of dollars of other people's money in the process. DeLorean was convinced that the culture of order and discipline at GM had held brilliant creatives like himself down. When he sat down, when he set out to found his company, he deliberately did everything differently, flouting conventional wisdom and business

practices. The result was not the freewheeling creative sanctuary that Deloria naively envisioned. It was instead an overbearingly political dysfunctional and even corrupt organization that collapsed under its own weight, eventually resorting to criminality and fraud and losses of some 250 million. The DeLorean failed both as a car and as a company because it was mismanaged from top to bottom with an emphasis on the mismanagement at the top by the top. That is, DeLorean himself was the problem. Compared to Eisenhower, he worked constantly with different results, with very different results. As one executive put it, DeLorean had the ability to recognize a good opportunity, but he didn't know how to make it happen.

Another executive described his management style as chasing colored balloons. He was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another. He was a genius. Sadly, that's rarely enough. Though probably not on purpose, DeLorean created a culture in which ego ran free, convinced that continued success was simply his by right. He seemed to bristle at concepts like discipline, organization, or strategic planning. employees were not given enough direction and then at the other times overwhelmed with trivial

instructions. Delorean couldn't delegate except to lackeys who blind whose blind loyalty was prized over competence or skill. On top of all this, he was often late or preoccupied. Executives were allowed to work on extracurricular activities on the company dime, encouraged specifically to chase side projects that benefited their boss at the expense of the company. As CEO, DeLorean often bent the truth to investors, fellow officers, and suppliers, and this habit was contagious throughout the company. Like many people, driven by a demon, DeLorean's decisions were motivated by everything but what should, what would have been efficient, manageable, or responsible. Instead of improving or fixing GM system, it's as if he threw out order altogether. What ensued was chaos in which no one followed the rules.

No one was accountable and very little got done. The only reason it didn't collapse immediately was that DeLorean was a master of public relations, a skill that held the whole story together until the first faulty cars came off the assembly line. Not surprisingly, the cars were terrible. They didn't work. Cost per unit was massively over budget. They hadn't secured enough dealers. They couldn't deliver cars to the ones they had.

The launch was a disaster. Delorean Motor Company never recovered. It turns out that becoming a great leader is difficult. Who knew? Yeah, classic. And it's classic, you know, when I just talked about discipline equals freedom from a just personal perspective, but then also inside of an organization. If you have an undisciplined organization, you end up with this where nothing can happen. Nothing can get done.

No one knows what direction we're going. It's just total chaos. You think it would be fun to get to do whatever you want. And it's the worst thing you could possibly wish on someone. And a good chunk of what I was writing about there was obviously what I just saw at American Apparel. like we have this, again, this idea of the leader doing everything, being everywhere, being always accessible. Like, I remember when I first got there, Doves said something about how, you know, he had an open-door

policy. Any employee could call him at any time and he would answer. And I remember thinking like, that's how it should be done. And then with time, and I saw it firsthand, you go, wait, you've got 250 stores in 20 countries, he's got 12,000 employees. You always have someone awake with a problem in some time zone. And so he'd get woken up from a dead sleep because some store manager in Korea didn't think they were getting enough overtime. And, you know, so he's not able to not only take care of himself as a human being, but he has no ability to see big picture.

He doesn't realize he's making these massive strategic mistakes because what he thinks he's doing, he's giving himself credit for all these tactical corrections he's making, all these problems he's solving. He doesn't realize he's getting further and further off course. And so you end up, I remember Robert Green told me this distinction once between strategic heaven and tactical hell. And egotism is a good way to get stuck or sucked into tactical hell. You think you're busy. And you are the center of everything, but you're not getting anything done. And it's very gratifying as well because you're solving problems and people are praising you,

that you got this done. Oh, you got the new cash register order for that store in South Carolina. Korea, great, you did a great job. They're going to get delivered tomorrow and you're, you're hailed because of it. Meanwhile, you know, three quarters away, you haven't ordered the material that you need to get the job done. I remember I looked out of the window one time at my office. I stared at and he's directing traffic in the parking lot. And again, this seems like this seems like a humble like roll up shirt sleeves, do anything leader. And there is a place. Sometimes for that, especially almost like it's a showmanship, like watch me,

you know, you want the CEO of Uber to sometimes try. drive an Uber and get a sense of what it is. But Dove was doing it because he had passed something on the way in and it bothered him. And instead of having competent staff the way that an officer would that goes, you need to fix this right now. When I come back downstairs, this better have gone away. He's doing it himself. And what he's doing is taking his eye off the ball.

And again, he likes the image and the image is cool. But the reality is if the CEO is not thinking. picture. Someone else can direct traffic, but no one can do what you do. And that requires a certain discipline. It also requires an acceptance of some things not being the way that you want them to be. That's the hard thing. Yeah, there's a certain level. I just was talking this with some clients. There is a level of risk with decentralized command. That the traffic, look, I'm like, hey, Ryan, that traffic down there in the parking lot was terrible. You need to get that squared away. There's a chance that you're going to do something that's not quite what I would have done.

Yeah. And that's fine. Yes. That's fine. I often say that the best operations that we would go on in Iraq, I didn't have to say anything. I don't have to do anything. I'm the overall guy in charge, but I don't have to say anything because everyone knows what they're doing and they just make things happen, which is the way it should be. And I never had to like, if a guy did something wrong, I never had to correct that individual.

The guys on the team would take care of it, which is exactly the way it should be. Isn't it crazy that a guy like Dove can be so talented and a genius to use your words and yet just not see these things which are so obvious right now to just about anybody that watches that arc of destruction? unfold. I mean, yeah, you see this in sports all the time. This is the most talented person in the world, and yet that's not why they're getting cut. That's not why Kyrie Irving is going from team to team to team, right? Like, it's obvious in two seconds what that dude's problem is, but he can't, you know, he can't fix it, or he's not willing to fix it. And so, you know, I think sometimes, like, self-help or personal development stuff gets like a bad rap. But the willingness to work on oneself, to like look at your problems in the mirror to focus on where you're there that's important work

that not enough people do and it's not that egotistical people or people like dove it's not that they don't become successful i'm dove still lives in a very large mansion you know uh lots of successful people were horrible they were shitty leaders um it's it's that it prevents them from doing the things that they could have done and that that's like the shame of it you know what i mean like it Steve Jobs gets fired by Apple. Deservedly so. Like his comeback story is a result of his willingness to do work on himself. But like you don't always get that second chance.

Like you think about, you had great people who pissed off their publisher or their record label or people who couldn't play well with others. And they end up depriving the world and themselves of stuff they could have done. And it's really sad. Like, again, the invisible graveyard of things that could have been accomplished. If people, like Shaq has talked about the number of rings that he and Kobe could have won together, right? Or you look at the Brooklyn Nets.

Like, that was the greatest super team ever assembled. And they managed to be on the court together like 19 times. And again, they're all very rich, all very successful, all clearly performing at an elite level. But there was some ceiling that they bumped into that they could have broken through had they been able to. Listen to the people around them. A huge part of that is having the ability to detach from yourself and take a look at what's happening. So when you say like self-help, what do you say? It's a bad rap or whatever.

But part of what you're going to do in those situations is you're going to take a step back and look at what you're doing. Which if you're in a business and the business isn't going well and what you do to try and fix it is go deeper into it and, close your blinders even more, you don't see the mistakes that you're actually making. I've been saying a lot, the solution to a problem isn't inside the problem. You won't, when you're in the problem, you don't see the solution. You have to get outside that problem. And when you're the problem, you have to get outside of yourself. You have to take a step back and look and say, okay, what am I actually doing right now?

What mistakes am I making? And if your ego is out of control, this will just never happen. It will just never happen. You have to be humble enough to say, hey, there's some things that don't seem to be going very well right now. And I think I'm the person that's in charge. And this probably indicates that I'm making some mistakes. What can I do better right now? It seems like so obvious.

And yet there's countless stories. And this can happen on a large scale, like at American Apparel. Or it can happen in a tiny scale, like when someone's in a relationship with another human being and they don't understand why the other person's frustrated. and it must be that other person without ever looking in the mirror going maybe you act like an asshole sometimes. I just, I saw this interview with Sean Payton. I'm a Saints fan, so I'm sad that he left. But he was asked like, what's he going to do about Russell Wilson who had this terrible season,

huge contract in Denver, terrible season. And he's like, what are you guys going to do? And he's like, well, we're going to break down what happened last season. We're going to see the plays that went well. And then we're going to do more of those plays. and then we're going to look at the plays that didn't go well, we're going to run fewer of those. And you're like, that's so basic,

but that is, first off, that's getting to the outside of a problem, right? Like, instead of just, like, forcing it, like, let's just do what we're doing, but we'll try harder, right? Or we'll hope we'll get luckier, or we'll blame, you know, this or that or the other. It's just like, let's step back and let's break down the film. This is why teams break down film. And that's why in the military you debrief.

You look at what worked and what didn't work. But then also, this is what coach. coaches and consultants and team members and comrades and spouses. This is what they're like, hey, have you noticed this pattern here? Like every time this happens, you do X. Is that? And then how does X go? Not well?

Well then why don't we try this instead, you know? And the ability, it's very hard to see yourself from the outside by definition. And so you have to cultivate a process, whether it's journaling, like that's what Marcus Reelis is doing in meditations or a therapist that you take. talk to or a board of advisors or a, you know, accountability partner or coach or whatever that allows you to go, yeah, I'm getting in my own way here, like a lot. How do I stop doing it? And then, and this is what Dove didn't do, you have to listen to that advice. You actually do that stuff, which nobody wants to do. Yeah, the idea of writing things down, because this is something I

always tell people to do. And it's something that you got told when you were, you know, 16 years old and hey, do you want to go to a summer camp or do you want to stay? And someone goes, right down the list of pros and cons. And what you do is you are detaching from the problem. Even if it's only for 18 inches away, but now you're looking at it on a piece of paper, when you have to write down your thoughts, it makes them more clear. And it makes you see, oh, yeah, looks like I should definitely stay here and get a job because I'm going to need money.

That's going to be a better deal for me. Like making those decisions and detaching from them and writing them down, that's why even writing books for me, as I would write down debrief points for people. I'd write it down and I'd see, oh, yeah, I can see this is a pattern here. I can see how I need to explain this better because they're not getting it. So writing things down is such a powerful tool because it de facto causes you to detach from the problem. Yeah, there's a reason that almost all successful and creative people throughout history have had some kind of journaling practice, right?

Where they talk about how their day went or how they want their day to go or the ideas they're working on or the things are struggling with. Yeah, that 18 inches, that might be, that might as will be 10,000 feet. It gives you so much distance. And it's also so much better to vomit that out on the page rather than on other people. And once you articulate it, once you write it down, I mean, so many times I'm writing my journal, I'm like, what? You know, that is insane. That logic is not true at all. Or also, you've written this up. Like, I'll notice, like, I am writing how tired I am very regularly. Well, that's a solvable problem, right? And you, you, I obviously knew I was tired, but just the act of just seeing your thoughts is, that is the most basic

philosophical practice that there is. And that's what, that's literally what the Stoics were doing. How did ego as an enemy do? Really good, really good. It was funny. It was sort of a nice, so it comes out, it should have debuted at number one on the Wall Street Journalist. And somebody at my publisher made a mistake, like they entered it in the wrong category. Like they put it in philosophy, which there is no list for, instead of business, which we'd ask them for. So what had debuted at number one? And so, you know, I opened the thing, expecting the number one, because my agent told me the sales.

And it's like, it's not only not number one. It's not there. And there's a chapter in the book about this idea that the effort has to be enough. That, like, you control the effort. You don't control external results, which is a very timeless stoic idea. It's also in the bag of, but he did. You had to refer to your own book. I was like, fuck.

You know, fuck. Right. Because, like, I knew I did a good job. I knew I sold the copies, which ultimately is what matters anyway, not this arbitrary list of where you rank against other people. Like, I know what the number is. And also, who the fuck cares about the first week? Like, tell me, is it still, you know, there's a Drake lyric.

Like, tell me who you're checking a decade from now. Like, the book is still selling, right? Like, that's what matters. It doesn't matter what you do in the first week. But it, again, like, what's so cool about stoicism about philosophy is that, it's for those problems. It's where you're like, someone made a mistake. It costs me something.

But did it cost me something? Do I actually care about this thing? What does it actually mean to me? And then how do I process these emotions? Like I think people think stoicism is like having no emotions. No, stoicism is having the framework, the understanding of what really is important, what you really believe.

And it allows you to process those emotions. So instead of sending off the angry email or, you know, like putting my, foot through the wall, I'm like, oh yeah, this is a chance. This is a chance to practice what I was talking about, which I already knew and I already have practiced, but it's more practice. I had my book, Discipline equals Freedom, was coming out in 2017 in October, mid-October of 2017. And so I had gotten the pre-copies, like copies of it at my house, and I had a big box of them. And I had a big box of them and I had the big media tour thing all scheduled and my friend Seth died on September 30th

2017 and so I you know canceled everything but but then like I was distraught because my friend died and I remember I had this book that I had written and I have a section in the book about death and I literally had to walk over to my own book and read that section to remind myself of how you get through this. And again, that's like when we talk about writing stuff down to distance yourself from it, but also like what you're saying, you know, you're pissed that you didn't get on the list the way you should have. And like, of course, you go back and like read this section on that. And it's the same thing. Sometimes you've got to interrupt that emotional cycle that's going on and say,

hey, here's, look at this from a distance, here's what's going on. And that's why having books like these are, it's important to be able to refer back to them. Otherwise, you can get caught in these loops that are not healthy. Yeah, I think, first off, I think writing is like a form of accountability. Publishing is a form of. accountability. You're like, I said this and I sold it to people. So if someone catches me not doing it, that's not a good look. So it forces you, I think. You're like, this is what I think. But then also when you're writing, I mean, it's not, it is you, but it's also you channeling

something bigger and more timeless than you. Like, you didn't invent it. You discovered it and now you're sharing it or you uncovered it or rediscovered it, right? And so like the process of writing it. And I think almost as I've really studied stoism, one of the interesting things, as I've gone back and read more of the obscure Stoics, like there's a metaphor in meditations where Marxist talks about, like, being a wrestler. No, he talks about being a boxer, a pancreationist, like the old form of MMA. And then I realized, oh, no, he's cribbing from an earlier Stoic. Like, he didn't invent this.

This exact paragraph basically appears somewhere else. And he was, oh, he was reminding himself of the act of writing it down, paraphrasing it, putting it in his own language, was a way of kind of putting it in his own muscle memory. And so writing to me is not this generative thing. It's more of this like repetitive meditation. Do you know what I mean? Like writing the Daily Stoic is...

It's reps. Yes. It's reps. It's reps on the squat rack. Yeah. And you're going to get a little bit stronger. And they're going to get a little bit more embedded and ingrained in your head. Yeah.

It doesn't make it easy to apply them, but it makes it easier to remember them. Next up, the Daily Stoic. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. A little section of this. Some of us are stressed, others are overworked. Perhaps you're struggling with new responsibilities of parenthood or the chaos of a new venture. Or are you already successful in grappling with the duties of power or influence, wrestling with addiction, deeply in love, or moving from one flawed relationship to another?

Are you approaching your golden years or enjoying the spoils of youth? Busy and active or bored out of your mind? Whatever it is, whatever you're going through, there is wisdom from the Stoics that can help. In fact, in many cases, they have addressed it explicitly in terms that feel shockingly modern. That's what we're going to focus on in this book. Fast forward a little bit. Organized along the lines of the three disciplines, perception, action, and will, and then further divided into important themes within those disciplines, you'll find that each month will stress a particular trait and each day will offer a new way to,

think or act the areas of great interest to the stoics all make an appearance here virtue morality emotion self-awareness fortitude right action problem solving acceptance mental clarity pragmatism unbiased thought and duty the aim of this hands-on approach to philosophy is to help you live a better life it is our hope that there's not a word in this book that you can't that can't or shouldn't to paraphrase seneca be turned into works So this one, perception, action, and will. Talk me through those things. Yeah, it's also the structure of the obstacles away, which is basically like you control

how you look at a problem, right? What you think and feel about the problem. Then you control the action that you take on the problem, and then you control the sort of willpower, determination, endurance that you bring to bear on the problem. Marcus, I realized in Meditations, he sort of sums them up, he goes, objective judgment now at this very moment. unselfish action now at this very moment. And it says willing acceptance now at this very moment.

That is all that you need. And that is sort of the encapsulation of stoicism, the idea that like, what is it? I'm not going to be rattled by it. I'm not going to exaggerate. I'm going to see it for what it is. I'm going to do what I got to do. And then I'm going to persist through it, right?

I'm going to, like, I'm going to endure it and survive it. That is the sort of, that is how you make the obstacle is the way. That is how you apply stoicism in big situations and small ones. I just did some live events and it's interesting how much of this. One of the things I was talking about is the the amount of control of your choice of how you're going to view things, right? What your perception of these things is going to be when something bad happens,

when something good happens, how are you going to actually perceive it and then what actions you're going to take about it? It's right along the line to this, which is, which is pretty sure. strange. And then this book right here, so as you're writing this, it's kind of everything that we just talked about, right? This is like, oh, every day you're going to remind yourself, you have a journal that goes along with, which I don't have a copy of it, but there's a journal that goes along with where you can say, oh, here's what I did today. You've set it up in a way that it's evergreen. There's no days. So it doesn't have to be Monday, January 1st. It can be Thursday,

January 1st, and you're still good to go. And you can just keep growing through this book forever. That's been the crazy part. I mean, people are eight years into it. And so, I'll sign people's copies and it's like, they'll be like, oh, it's my favorite book. And it's like, I can tell it's not. And then you meet someone and you're like, oh, you put some fucking miles on this thing. And that's like the coolest. That's the coolest part. When they got four different or five different colored highlighters that have been used and different

tags on them, different colored tapes stay hanging out. Because that's what my copy of meditations look like. It looks like, you know, it's all tapes back together. And yeah, almost every page, almost every line is marked because at some point that line spoke to me. Not the first time, not the 30th time, but the 100th time it did, you know? And the Stoics talk about this. They say that we never step in the same river twice.

And what's cool about rereading books is that you're different. It's the same, but you're different. And so that's what it's supposed to be. And then I think the other tricky thing is like when you hear about a tradition or a way of thinking, like where do you start? And I think when they suggested the day of Stoic, which is not, it wasn't like my idea at all. actually my agent who did the translation, Steve is the one that suggested it. It's like, oh, yeah, start with all of them. It's like the greatest hits album.

You know, these are the best ideas from the Stokes. It's like all my favorite quotes, and then I just riff on them. But I found that that can be hard. Like people go Seneca, Marxerilius, Epicetus, which Stoic should I start with? And it's like, I need to know so much more about you before I can, you know, before I can tell you that. And this is like kind of a survey course of the Stoics. And a daily reminder of what you're doing.

And that stepping in the same river? Is it? Because there's a, the continuation of that quote, isn't it like because it's not the same river and it's not the same man? Yeah. Right? That's the continuation of it. It's from Heraclitus, this Greek poet. I've found that, like, I'll talk to a company and I'll talk about, let's say, the four laws of combat leadership.

and two years later I'll go back and talk to the same company and some guy will come up like wow I really like the new like the new spin that you've put on these things and I'm like hey man I've been saying the same thing for the past 15 years sure I won't say that but I'll say hey you're seeing it differently now you remember last time I was here you had a team of four and now you got a team of 42 yeah and you were not publicly traded company and now you're publicly traded so you got it's a totally different you're a different river different man Yeah, there's another line like when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And it's like, it was all in the book, but it just, it wasn't unlocked for you.

You didn't understand all that went into it. And so you, or you understood it on a surface level, and now you understand it to mean something totally different. And that's, that's to me what like great, timeless, amazing work is. There's even movies. You watch movies or you read books and you're like, first time, were the hero. Now they're the villain. Now they're the hero again, you know. The Civil War is like that for me. The more you study the Civil War, you go, you start, everyone has an arc, you know, and that's what moral complexity and reality is all about. Give me an example from the Civil War.

Well, Grant is fascinating because he's flawed, brilliant, flawed, brilliant. Should he have been president? You know, was he a good president, bad president? Is it impossible? to tell because of the lost cause mythology, you know, is Robert E. Lee this sort of tragic figure, or is he a monstrous villain, right? My thing on the Civil War is like, you know, you learn as a kid, you're like, it was all about slavery, right? Then you study the Civil War and you're like, it was way more complicated than just being about slavery. Then you really study the Civil War, and you're like, it was 100% about slavery. Like, and you know what I mean? It becomes, I think when you study things or you study people, it's very simple, and it gets complicated.

and then wisdom is the ability for that complication to then become a kind of simplicity again. You know what I mean? And so, I mean, that's why. Every time I pick up a book about the Civil War, I'm like, I do not need to read another book about the Civil War. I have so many things I don't know about.

I should read about something new. And then I just get something totally new out of it. I'm like, okay, fine. Have you been to battlefields? Dillion of them. Yeah. What's your favorite? Gettysburg.

And I haven't been to a billion of them, but I've been to Gettysburg, I think, seven times now. So we do like a battlefield tour at Gettysburg. And it's just awesome. It's just awesome. See, I'm a Vicksburg guy. Yeah. I think Vicksburg is more important. We've talked about going to Vicksburg as well.

And, yeah, I mean, you could certainly argue that it's more important for sure. I mean, the cell should have surrendered the day after Vicksburg. It was done. Yeah. It's done. Yeah, it's such a crazy war And one of the things that's interesting about it is There's some sort of statistic you can get

But the soldiers were really, really literate And they were really, really good writers. And you read what they're writing about the Civil War And they're like private soldiers on the front line And they're super articulate. It's just awesome to read. And you have all these accounts of all these people that wrote all these letter homes or kept these journals.

And you can get a really close ground truth to what they were thinking or what they were feeling. Oh, it's so fascinating. And then, yeah, you read, like, Grant's memoirs, and you're like, this is like one of the greatest books ever written. And it's just this, like, how do you write this? I like Sherman the best, but.

It's wild to the Gettysburg battlefield that just the whole, when I explained people that I haven't been there before and I was like, hey, here's how they set it up. on the one side of the battlefield, you've got General Lee on a horse standing, looking across the battlefield from where his troops were reigned, and on the other side of the battlefield,

you've got General Mead on a horse, and he's looking from where his troops were reigned. Like, you can't, it's almost too good. It's like the perfect, it's the perfect memorial battlefield that's showing you how this thing went down. Yeah. You want to why I love Vicksburg,

because Vicksburg is the perfect opposite. is the way story. So they sent, Lincoln sends Grant, because Grant's like the only guy in the West with momentum, and they send Grant, but he also sends, was it McLernan? He sends his replacement at the same time, his political replacement, because Grant's going to fail, you'll take over. So Grant goes, Fixburg now is like this nothing city, but it's the only stronghold left on the river. It's the most important city in America because it controls the navigation and the most important river in the country that splits it in half. So it's this citadel on the blus there, recipient. So Grant's like, we'll attack. Doesn't work. He's like, okay, we'll go above it.

Doesn't work. He's like, well, we'll dig a canal. We'll just move the river. Doesn't work. He's trying everything, right? And then he finally has this idea. First of, my other favorite thing is Sherman gets there. Sherman technically outranks Grant. And he just says, no, no, you're in charge. Like, surrenders superiority in this moment. So I'll do whatever you want. And Sherman gets like the worst job. He's like running a faint. He gets like the least sexy job in the whole thing. But anyways, Grant and Porter and Farragut, they run the gunboats and they skip Vicksburg altogether, right? There's a thing that once you do, you cannot undo.

So they run the gunboats, they make it, and they cross like 300 miles south, 100 miles south, something like that, at hard times Louisiana, like the perfectly named city. He crosses and then Grant goes. Now we're talking. He's like boots on the ground on the right side of the enemy, you know? And then so you think, okay, he's obviously, he's crossed the river and now he's going to head up to Vicksburg. Instead, he says, forget about Vicksburg, and he heads to Jackson. And he basically takes Jackson, burns it to the ground,

which is what was supplying the citadel in Vicksburg. And then, you know, months later, now he's in this thing for like a year. Now he heads back towards Vicksburg. And now suddenly all the advantages of being a fortress on a bluff on the Mississippi River are a disadvantage. Now they are trapped in said city, right? And he lays siege, he doesn't give in. You know, it takes like two months.

They finally surrender. They surrender on the 4th of July, thinking that he'll be merciful, which of course he is not. And then Vicksburg does not celebrate the 4th of July until 1945 in protest of this. But basically all the lessons that Grant and Sherman used,

or learn there are how they win the war. Sherman cutting the supply lines, being on the right side of the river, taking the war to the enemy. Sherman's march is learned there at hard times. And for Grant, he was like, I've got more men, I've got more time, I've got more money.

He's like, if I just don't quit, we win. And so when Grant goes east and takes over the Army of the Potomac, it is from Vicksburg. So not only does he take all the advantages of the enemy and flip them on its head, but also in trying all these different things, he accident, because it wasn't easy, because it didn't go his way the first time,

he learns everything that he then uses to win the Civil War, the Battle of the Wilderness, the Siege of Richmond, Petersburg, all that is from Fixburg. Yeah, which, by the way, you can never figure out if you're not humble. Yes. Because you just stick with the same plan. Interestingly, my last deployment to Iraq, we were in the city of Ramadi,

and we were working very closely with the with the army with the 1-1 AD and they had a great colonel who became a general and we were doing a big operation and he so vicksburg was the first joint what we call in the military a joint operation between the army and the navy yeah because the navy's in the rivers people don't see that now yeah so we did this big operation and took down a big chunk of the city and we called he named the operation vicksburg because it was a Army Navy working together, even though there's only 40 seals out there that were working from the Navy side, but we were doing our best to have an impact, and he was appreciative of it, so he named it Vicksburg. I love that, because it is this remarkable story of collaboration and eagolessness in that Porter and Farragut and Grant and Sherman all work together. And my favorite moment, I'm actually just writing about this now as I'm doing this series on the Four Virtues, and friend by Justice, which isn't the legal. justice. It's like how do you comport yourself as a person? Well, when Grant comes up with this

plan to run the gunboats and do all this stuff, Sherman's like, it is a terrible idea. This will not work. Do not do it. And Grant's like, I take this, I hear you, but here's why I think I'm right. And Sherman's like, I think you're wrong. And he goes back and he's like, I think you're so wrong. I'm going to memorialize it in the left. He's like, I have to write. He was so worked up about what a terrible mistake he thinks he's making. He's like, I want to put it in writing. So he puts it in writing and sends it to Grant. Of course, it works out. Sherman, once Sherman's overruled, he plays along, does everything he's supposed to, without a complaint. And then after its success, you know, Grant's like giving Sherman all this credit.

The reporters are there. And Sherman walks up and he's like, it needs to be on the record that I oppose this, right? And he's like, I thought it was a bad idea. All the credit goes to this guy. And then when Grant's writing his memoirs, Sherman goes, sends him another letter. And he says, I am sure you have forgotten about this. and I know that you deleted the, like I know you ripped up the letter.

So I'm enclosing another copy. So the record can, you know, he doesn't even want, in this moment, he doesn't want credit. Undeservedly. And he wants the record to show like, hey, I didn't do it right. And you can see how easily a leader

can only focus on how the results went, that it worked out. And not the fact that they had, like he won, I think he not only wanted it to be honest, but I think he was also going, hey, this was an instance where I got it super wrong. And I want to make sure that that's what stays with me and what other future people learn is that, you know, I didn't get it right. I'm not a genius.

I don't have the minus it. I thought it was wrong. And then I was proven wrong. I just love that story. No, that's a great point. I talk about that with leaders all the time. Anytime I'm wrong, I'm super stoked because it gets to the opportunity to admit to everyone that I'm wrong and be humble and say, look, you're. you had a better idea than me.

Let's use your idea. I love being wrong. It's awesome. I also always say that I rarely have to admit that I'm wrong. And the reason I rarely have to admit that I'm wrong is because I don't run around saying I'm right about something. Yes. I don't sit there and say, well, I think we should use this marketing plan because I think I'm right. No, I say, well, I'm not really sure.

That could work. How about this idea? So if you don't paint yourself into a corner by screaming to everyone that you're right or creating memorandums where you say I want to go on record by saying that this is wrong, which is a weird time to take. I guess back in the day you might have been trying to maybe trying to document that fact just so if it does go wrong, you can say, hey, dude, I pointed it out to. That's a really weird thing at Gettysburg too when you had Longstreet.

And those are documented too where he's saying, listen, I've commanded squads and platoons and companies and battalions and brigades. And in my estimation, no army ever assembled could take this position. And Lee's like, cool, we're doing it anyways. And that's, he probably should have documented that a little bit better than he did. Yeah. No, it's so fascinating. I, we just did this with Daly Stoke recently where like they had, they put this video together.

They had some one work on it. And I was like, it's terrible. It's not going to work. You know, I was like, here's all the reason I don't like it. And they were like, no, trust me on this. And they put it out. You know, did like a million views like the first day. And it's a good reminder too in Hollywood there's this expression.

Nobody knows anything about what's going to work. Yeah. It's all guess. And the second you start to be right a couple times in a row. Watch out. Yeah, that you're fucked, right? Like with Trust Me, I'm lying, the publisher almost canceled the book over the cover. I knew it was the right cover.

I thought it was bad. Is it the current cover right here? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's amazing. But they didn't like it. One thing is interesting my publisher told me, he said, look, you know, what we're talking about, this is when extreme ownership is coming out. We don't know anything about, like, we weren't you going into this.

Laif and I were just knuckleheads that were wrote a book and we're like, well, how do you think it's going to do? And our publisher, Mark was like, listen, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody knows how good a book is going to do. He had some example of some book that Oprah Winfrey was on her show at Oprah Winfrey's peak of her show saying, this is an incredible book by this book and like they sold 3,000 copies and that was that, done.

So only the public knows. Yes. That's why the viral thing, the creating viral thing, which is interesting. because you talk about creating viral things and you're able to pull it off sometimes, but even the great Ryan Holiday, two weeks ago, was saying, hey, this video is stupid, don't put it out, and it's a freaking viral video

with a million viewers. Well, no, and so they didn't like the cover and I stuck to my guns and it worked out. And then on a later book, I was very convinced that the cover should be a certain way and the subtitle should be a certain way. And it didn't work. It didn't like fail, but it just didn't, it didn't work.

And in the paperback, we fixed it all. And so it's like, I could, I guess, go to my grave, convinced I was right and blamed some other factor. But at the end of the day, you've got to go, no, you're not going to be right 100%. Like statistically, you're going to be wrong, like a lot. And so I almost, one of the reasons I look forward to when it's objectively and irrefutable, that I was wrong, I go, okay, this is, this is like eliminating one of, this is, if it was never going this way, then I am clearly in the throes of ego, because it's definitely happening. I'm just not seeing it. So you want to seize on the times where you're like, yeah, I think I'm

I got this wrong. I made the bad call. Clearly it's not true because you don't get that clarity that often. No, no you don't. So then we get into speaking of selling, the perennial seller, the art of making and marketing work that lasts. So this was like a step back. Yeah, a little bit. What brought this about? I just got lots of people would ask me for advice on books because I'd worked on so many. And then the publisher was like, hey, do you want to do this book marketing book? And I was kicking it around and then I was like, I don't actually care about marketing books. I care about making stuff that lasts. Like, it's funny, right? You're measured in the first week of your sales when you put something out. How do you sell? So if you sell like 10,000 copies, let's say you make the bestseller

list. But if you sell a thousand copies a week for a year, you sold a lot more copies, but you will not appear on any bestseller list. And so people always measure themselves on the wrong things, right? and it's funny the publishing industry all of the money and all of the success is on things that are old right what they call perennial titles or the backlists

and yet all the energy and all the focus and all the media coverage is on what's coming out like this Tuesday and so I'm interested in the stuff that lasts and how do you make it how do you market it what do you learn from the stuff that has

and then what so you write this book well, how does it do? Like this is a niche market, right? There's not too many people that are like, yo, I'm writing a book. I want to see how I do this. I mean, it's more about how you make anything that last.

It's like sort of lessons from sort of timeless work. If I was doing it again, I'd probably do it differently. I think I might do it differently at some point. Like the ideas in it are really good. And it sold, I mean, it sold well enough. Any author would be very excited to have that number of sales. Had you made the New York Times bestseller list yet at this point? You know what's funny?

No. No, no. I'd sold well into the millions of copies before I hit the New York Times list for the first time, which was a very surreal, strange experience. The obstacle is the way it came out. It hit the Wall Street Journalists and then has never hit the New York Times list. And I didn't hit the New York Times list for the first time until I debuted at number one with my like ninth book. So these things don't mean anything. But that is what, you know, people care about, you know, how much money companies raised, right? They care about, like, who's selling them? But they don't care. Like, is this still going to be around? Is it profitable? Right. Is it profitable? And is it still going to be around 10 years from now? You know, two years from now, 18 months from now, right? Like, so everyone chases what's popular now, but they don't think about, is this likely to, you know, when I wrote Grethacker Marketing, I knew this is only going to have a short, you know, relatively short life. But I think so many people write things and they think it's going to last. And then it's

just like, what are you talking about? This has never had a shot. You know, this never had a shot. And so I think when you, when you, if you're going to write a book, if you're making a YouTube video that goes up right now, it can be of the moment. But if you're going to take the time to do something like start a company or book or whatever, it's got to, it's got to have the potential to have legs. And writing a book, again, this is something we were talking about before we hit record.

Writing a book is hard to do. Yes. If you're writing it yourself, if you're going to pay someone to write it, cool, whatever. you know, you're weak. But if you're going to actually write the book yourself, it's going to be, it's hard to do. It takes time. It's editing a book is hard to do.

Like the whole thing, it's just hard to do. It takes a whole bunch of time. And what's really crazy is like writing a book, you can write a, you can write a fantastic, incredible book and it'll sell, you know, 1,400 copies and that's that. It's done. And you can write like another book that happens to, to get in some people's heads

and all of a sudden it can sell like crazy. You can write some of your books that have not done very well according to the market out of the gate and yet now they're selling hundreds of thousands of copies over time. So it's a wild thing to get into. It's not a very stable thing to get into.

No. Like if you're out there thinking, well, I'm going to be an author and sell a bunch of books. That's a rough game to get into. Well, one of the funny things is since the books have worked, you know, people go,

Oh, Ryan, Ryan's just writing about stosis to make money. And I was like, I couldn't think of a worse thing to do to make money. Like, first off, because I remember the conversations with my publisher when I was like, I want to write about stosis. And they were like, what's the least amount of money we can offer this person? And it was a not large amount of money. And they told me later that they were just hoping I would like get it out of my system. But then when something works, obviously it seems like,

obviously that was your plan all along. But the reality is books are a terrible way to make money. Yes, they are. Right? And they take an incredible amount of time and energy and they torture you. And so, like, when I talk to people and they go, I think I'm writing, thinking about writing a book, I go, good, don't. Right. Like, if you cannot do it, don't do it, right?

Like, only write a book if you can't not do it. Right. Right. That's good advice. Like, it has to be something that you would be. happy with if it sold seven copies, right? Yeah. Well, I had the same thing happen when extreme ownership came out.

I immediately was going to write a kid's book. And I wish I could have recorded the conversation with my editor. And this guy's a friend of mine. He's a great dude. But, you know, he's like, hey, like he's trying to 15 different ways to talk me out of doing this. You know, it was just like crazy that you're just going to get put in this pigeonhole and then that's that.

and we don't want to hear anything else from you. The other thing that this reminds me of, this is more advice from Tim Ferriss, when you're done writing a book, you're 50% there. Yes. Like when you're done with the labor of writing a book, you now have 50% more to do

that's just as hard as the first 50% that you just did when you thought you were done. I've described to people, it's you finish running a marathon, and then, you know, you come through the gate, and you're like, oh, you barely stand. And you're staggering across the finish line. you had this last burst of adrenaline that got you through it,

I'm done. And they grab you and they pull you through the shoot and you think they're taking you to like the tent where you get to relax, they put that metal blanket on you or whatever, or the metal stand. And they're actually just taking you to the starting line of the second marathon that you have to start right now.

And it's a less fulfilling marathon. It's less in your control. And it's also more embarrassing and awkward at all the things that you didn't want to do to begin with. But if you don't do it, no one else is going to do it for you. And what does it say about like when people are like, oh, I don't do that marketing sales stuff. I'm just like a writer or a creative. I'm an inventor, you know, whatever. I'm a purist. It's like, well, what you're saying is that your shit sucks and that you don't believe in it enough to want to go on podcast and talk

about it or that you don't know it well enough to confidently sell it or market it. And so, yeah, It has to be a huge part of the equation. Otherwise, why did you do it? Like, why did you, I'm not why did you do it? Because, like, getting their thoughts down on paper, there's something valuable in that. But why did you slave over every sentence and the packaging? Like, you did all that because it's four people.

And now, now that the fear of them potentially not liking it and the potential audience being crickets, now you're trying to back out of it going, well, that was never important. to me. I don't care. And so it's this tension of like you have to be pure and do it for only the right reasons. And then once you decide to put it out, you have to become a marketer and a hustler. And you have to work just as creatively and committedly to selling it to people. And it's a long, fucking hard stock. The obstacles away sold millions of copies. But at the first week, it sold 3,100 copies, maybe, you know? And that was, that seemed like a lot. But in retrospect is, you know, not even a fraction of a And so everything that succeeds comes to dwarf what it did at the beginning, hopefully. And that's because you didn't quit on it. And you kept pounding the pavement doing the work.

Yeah. So speaking of why did you do it? Next you roll into a conspiracy. Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue. Yeah. So this is out of left field book. Yeah, wrong subtitle. I forget what the new subtitle is.

Oh, is there a new? No, no, I'm saying like, that was the subtitle. I was like, this is the subtitle. And we fought, I was like, fought so much about it. And then now it's like sex, power, and a billionaire's vendetta to crush a media empire. Something that's like actually sounds compelling to read in retrospect. Like I totally, I totally. And the cover.

That's funny too because I bought into that. Like I was like, dude, this, it's like, you know, pickles. No, like, get a sandwich here. Pickles, barbecue sauce. And, you know, fried. fish and you're like, whoa, what is this? I want to try it. So when I see Peter Thiel, Hulk Cogan, and Gawker, I'm like, whoa, what's going on here? And I kind of vaguely remembered the whole story thing, but... Well, that's what I thought, and you're probably like a nerd

like me, so you're like, intrigue. You know, you think it's going to be a spy, but that's not what the market thought at all. It's my least selling book, but the one I am most proud of because it was the hardest to do. And it was the most outside my comfort zone. But basically, I happened to know Peter Thiel a little bit, and I knew Nick Denton, who was the creator of this company. called Gokker. And these two basically... Wait, you knew them both? Yeah, I met them both before. I knew Nick from my American Apparel Days, and I'd been to a party at Peter's House many years. So I knew them both. And then these two guys get locked in this 10-year campaign to destroy each other.

And somehow, like basically the book starts with, one afternoon I had, like, lunch at one of their houses and like dinner at the... Like, I was in both houses on the same... day. Did they know that? Yeah. And they were like, well, what's it? You know, and so I was like, I got to tell it. Because it's an insane story. There are people who don't know, basically, in 2007, this tech website called Gawker outs Peter Thiel as gay, which he was, but he was private about it. And then he decides to destroy them for this. But what they did wasn't illegal. So he spends 10 years plotting in secret waiting for them to fuck up. up. And then in 2011 or 12, they run a stolen sex tape of Hulk Hogan, having sex with his best

friend's wife. Uh, Bubba the Love Sponge was a Florida DJ. That's the name of the other dude. It's just like weirder and weird. And so they run this stolen sex tape. And Peter Thiel hires a legal team to secretly, Hulk Hogan never knows that Peter is a part of it, to secretly fund a hundred million dollar lawsuit, which they ultimately win. and bankrupt Gocker, and then Peter ends up bidding in the auction, like almost gets the assets of the company in the end of it. So it's this- Wait, he almost gets the assets or he gets him? He destroys the company.

Somebody else ends up buying it. Like the judge wouldn't sell it to him. But it's almost a, do you know a Spolio-Optima? So in Roman combat, the ultimate victory for a general to get, it's only happened like three times, is you defeat the other general on the field of battle hand-to-hand. and then you strip their armor from them. And so he's as close to that as you could possibly get in, like, the business world. And so it's this insane story, which I use as a way of just talking about strategy.

Was your book a post-mortem or were you in it as it was happening? This is all post-mortem, but I had, like, you know, I'd read 20,000 pages of legal documents, and I interviewed all the people, including Holcogne, who showed up wearing a T-shirt, a Holcogan t-shirt. which, you know, makes sense. Yeah. It was an insane story, which I just really wanted to tell. And I think I did it.

I think I did a really good job. I think it's really interesting. I know there's a way I could have done it differently. It would have sold more copies, but that wasn't what the story that I wanted to tell. How could you saw more copies? I could have made Peter Thiel the villain. Oh.

And instead, I saw him as, like, the sort of fascinating anti-hero of the story, if that makes sense. Yeah. Because, like, even if you don't agree with what he did, I was fascinated with how he did it. Kind of cool, right? Yeah, yeah.

I'm like, there's something bad, even if it's bad, it's still badass. And so I wanted to tell that story, which ended up being really, I was fascinated by it. Hulk Hogue, I met him at the UFC one time. He's huge. Yeah. Well, in his... He's a massive dude. His life is very sad.

His life was very sad. In this moment... What's up with him right now? Give us an update. No, no, I don't know what's up with him now. Oh, at the moment. But in the moment that this happens, you know, his life is, I mean, his life has fallen apart. His wife has left him, one of his kids is about to go to jail.

What's his car on the jail for? I killed the guy on a car accident. Just like all the things that fame and success can do to a person. It happens to him. And then this most private moment is leaked on the internet. And then, yeah, he ends up winning five years later wins this insane lawsuit that's been secretly funded. And I'm also just, like, you know, they go, revenge is a dish best serve cold. But nobody can do it.

Nobody can wait, you know? Except for Peter Thiel. Yeah. The patience and the Machiavellianness of it is just, I just nerded that about it. And he knew that you were writing the book and it was coming out? Yeah, he talked to me. So he let me, like he gave me all the, so he even, he hired this kid. And this kid pretended to be, this kid pretended to have a wealthy benefactor who was funding,

lawsuits, but that was his intermediary between Hogan's legal team in Teal. So nobody knew Teal. Teal's involvement was revealed like three weeks after the verdict. So he pulled off complete and total secrecy. That's freaking legit. What did you, what did you uncover in the story that like surprised even you? What was, what was some of the, well, I mean, just, I was the first one break that this dude was there, that there was this character. Intermediary. The interme, the deep throat, if you will, you know, like the guy with the secret identity, that was pretty nuts. There's like this whole FBI sting that happened that was pretty crazy. Here's the funny, so why does this all happen? Why is, so basically Bubba likes to watch his wife get railed by other dudes. That's what he gets

off. So he's secretly filming it, right? He's secretly filming it. He's secretly filming it. films Holkogen having sex with his wife, which is weird onto itself. Yes, we can say that. But the reason it gets out is that a rival DJ in Florida who wants Bubba's spot on the radio breaks into Bubba's office and rummages through his desk and finds the tape, and he's the one that leaks the tape. So this whole thing, this whole clash between these insane personalities happens because one weird Florida DJ wants. to humiliate another Florida DJ

and it's just the weirdest craziest story that I can't make this up you couldn't no you couldn't like it's unreal the Cone brothers couldn't come up with this maybe they could but I don't know yeah I mean it's just like it was the whole thing was you know absurd this the whole thing from start

to vendors it's completely absurd so did you get uh did your publisher buy into this thing a little bit I mean they gave me like much less than I normally would get but I was okay fine go ahead and do it yeah and then it's been in like movie turnaround for like ever since I wrote it but documentary style re-eactment style like a like the director of the hunger games optioned it and then the guy that wrote uh uh the big short

he wrote he wrote a script so it's like it's been you know they've attached like multiple crazy actors to each of the roles and then it never happens what do you think's holding it back i don't know i don't get how i don't get how it works at all it's exhaust i don't know i don't know There's a lot of meetings, a lot of phone calls. It never could. It sounds freaking wild. It was insane. Then you kind of get back to your roots on the next one, right?

Stillness is the key. You've commented on me reading this thing right now, so I'm going to go hot on this one. Sweet. In our own lives, we face a seemingly equal number of problems and are pulled in countless directions by competing priorities and beliefs. In the way of everything, we hope. to accomplish personally and professionally sit obstacles and enemies Martin Luther King Jr observed that there was a violent civil war raging within each and every person between

our good and bad impulses between our ambitions and our principles between what can be and how hard it is to actually get there in those battles in that war stillness is the river and the railroad junction through which so much depends it is the key to thinking clearly to seeing the whole chessboard to making tough decisions to managing our emotions to identifying the right goals to handling high pressure situations to maintaining relationships to building good habits to being productive to physical excellence to feeling fulfilled to capturing moments of laughter and joy. Stillness is the key to just about everything, to being a better parent, a better artist,

a better investor, a better athlete, a better scientist, a better human being to unlocking all that we are capable of in this life. That's about as hard as I can go on that one. No, it's funny, I forgot, but I actually tell the story of Vicksburg in the introduction of that book, Lincoln calls all the generals in. Everyone from the War Department has this big map of the United States. You know, there's a million plans for how to win the Civil War, the Anaconda Plan, we do this, all these different, and he points at Vicksburg and he goes, Vicksburg is the key. He knew like in the earliest days of the Civil War, that was the city that

mattered. And the ability to sort of tune everything out and lock in on what is the strategic objective that matters more than anything else is the main, you know, it's the main thing. Like, how do you quiet the noise, internal, external, avoid the distractions, avoid the short term, avoid the tactical stuff, and go to like the essence of what matters, that's like the rare skill of all. And that's the one that leaders have to have. And, you know, athletes have to have, like the game on the line, you're shooting free throws, everyone's screaming at you.

Can you do what you've done a thousand times? But now it actually counts, not getting your own head about it. You know, that's everything. What other word could you use besides stillness? What I like about stillness is it's one of those words that's like, you can't exactly define it, but you know exactly what it means. And that seems to be shared across all the traditions. Like the Stoics have this word apothea,

the Epicureans have this word Adaraxia. but basically it just means like a freedom from disturbance, right? Like even if you are moving, you are still, right? And in Zen Buddhism they talk about, you know, you have a cup of muddy water. You let it sit still. It becomes clear. So the idea, you know, is there in almost all the spiritual and religious traditions of some idea of peace and tranquility and calmness. And if you can get there, you know, that's where,

that's what unlocks whatever it is that you need to do, whether it's like being present with your kids or it's some high stress, high stakes scenario, or your life is on the line, if you're everywhere, you're nowhere. How do you get in the moment that you're in to do what you need to do? To me, that's what stillness is. What are your protocols for finding that?

I mean, on a day-to-day basis, which is weirdly both the easiest and the hardest way to do it, to me it's all about routine and structure. Like, what do you do? When do you get up? What do you do first? What do you do second? What do you not do? So I'm a big, I'm like a big routine guy. Wake up at the same time. Don't do the phone. Right? My thing is I don't do the phone for the first 30 minutes, one hour I'm awake. I try to take my kids outside. We usually go in a long walk. If I'm by myself, I'll work out by myself. But I do something physical, usually do journaling. I don't do breakfast. And then I take them to school or whatever I have to, like my get everyone. situated for the day thing and then I then I write and then so by like 10 or 11 like everything else for the rest of the day is bonus for me I don't have anything I'm worried about any regrets like if I crush that morning I not only am I going to carry that stillness with me to whatever I have to do for the rest of the day but it's also kind of irrelevant because I already won that's cool um

I got a question. I think I actually have an idea for your next book. Oh, yeah? It's the other path that Ryan Holiday took at American Apparel. Okay. Where like whatever, you know, whatever was going on there, you just got caught up. When you were explaining that morning routine, I'm like, this is amazing that you made it to this situation where you're waking up at the same time. You're journaling.

You're hanging out with your kids. you're working out, you're carrying on with a nice, pleasant life in Texas. I'm like thinking back to when you were 19 years old, you're working at American Apparel, there's mayhem going on there. There's models and just drugs and mayhem and money and power. And you're right at the seat of the emperor and you're there to receive some of that. It's like, this is amazing that you made it to this spot where you didn't get caught up and all that. I write about this a little bit in the

in the afterward of Courage's calling because yeah, in retrospect, it was clearly caught up in something. Colt is too strong of word, but you get in situations that have an energy and a rhythm that you can't get out of. And that's what screws with your moral compass. Like, you can get competing in a game

and you can get so locked into the competition of it or the winning of it that you don't think about whether it's the right game or not. And I think that was a good, chunk of my 20s and that scene for sure. I mean there's moments where I remember I was I remember you know I was asked to do something that I didn't want to do and so I didn't do it I said I wasn't going to do it but I should have spoken up more about it and I was like well why didn't I and I was like well I didn't want to get fired and then it was like well first off I did want to

get fired I wanted to be a writer so I'm like trying to not lose a job that I do want to lose but also like any job that you would get fired for doing what is obviously the right thing is not a job that you should want right and so you know I think it was I looked back at that time and I was one very young to still figuring out who I was but I was also just so overwhelmed and busy that I didn't I couldn't get to the outside of it like we're talking about I couldn't get to the outside of it and go this is insane this is not healthy this is also not what you want to do with your life, you've got to get out. But we always have our, we have our reasons. We have our reasons. And those reasons, what I have found is they don't age well. The reasons, the reason that you

didn't do the brave or the right or the obvious thing, like it doesn't age well. Is it a good assessment to say that you were kind of like the it kid? I was the kid going places. You were 20 years old. Were you getting written about in magazines and stuff like this? Yeah, and I was also just doing stuff that like no one in my family had ever done. I didn't even know you could do. You know, I mean, I was running marketing for a publicly traded company. That's freaking crazy. When I could barely.

This is a job for like a 53 year old seasoned like person that then through the ringer and you're freaking 20 years old. Yeah, it was, it was insane. It was totally insane. Were you making a shit ton of money too? No, not really. That was sort of his thing, as he would give you the keys to the kingdom, but really pay you. I mean, I was definitely getting paid, but I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't making $4,000. Did you buy a house in L.A.? Did you buy a house in L.A.?

No, I bought my first house in Austin after I, after I left and walked away. Did you have a kick-house apartment or whatever? Yeah, it was pretty cool. I mean, it was a good life. It was crazy. And you were married at this time. I was with my, we got married after, but basically, yeah. And, you know, I sort of had this moment. I opened ego as the enemy with it, But basically, like, at one point, my wife is like, fuck this, I'm out. And I realized, like, I don't have you written two books. I was like, I have my dream. Like, all I wanted to do is be a writer.

And I'm destroying myself. I'm compromising myself. I'm compromising my relationship to do what? To go to a staff meeting at a company that the former owner is literally trying to destroy? This is insane. And this is insane. you mentioned moral compass where did you develop that

where did that come from was it from the stoics was it from your mom and dad like something like you put a normal 20 year old freaking kid yeah in this position and they're going off the rails like it there's no turning back like it's going to get crazy and it's going to get real crazy and they're probably not going to come back yeah you could I should have spun off the planet

It was too much temptation, too much access to dysfunctional environment. I don't really know. I mean, I think, yes, I think you credit the Stoics there that it stopped the slide at a certain point. I don't want to make it sound like I was some choir boy or something. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I was due, I mean, I write about shit that I did that I shouldn't have done. But the Stoic virtues are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.

And I think, you know, it's very easy to think of Stoicism as this productivity system. which I and this personal resiliency system, which is what I think I was most excited about, particularly when I was young. It's like, this makes me better. This makes me faster. This makes me stronger. But it's like it's not supposed to make you a better sociopath. You know, like the justice is the most important of the virtues because what is the courage for, right? You know, what are you doing it for? A courage in pursuit of a cause, of the wrong cause is empty and hollow. Now, I forget which one of your books you say this,

but you basically say that there's no eureka moment. Yeah. But was there anything close to your eureka moment where you like, you looked across the room and you saw something and you're just like, what am I doing here? There was some, you know, it's funny. I read this book while I was there,

is this book called The Harder They Fall by this guy named Bud Schulberg, who wrote on the waterfront. and a great screenwriter, interesting guy. And it's about this corrupt boxing promoter who works with the mom. He's like a publicist. And so I'm reading this and, you know, he has this section in there. He's like, I deluded myself.

He says that I could deal in filth and not become the thing I touched. And I was like, fuck, you know, I wrote this down. And I wrote this like a little essay to myself, like, this is you. I wrote this all down in the book. And so I remember that. as like a pivotal moment, you know, where I realized I was heading down the road and then I needed to make changes and whatever. And that's why it's really important when you hear people's stories that you fact check them a little bit, right? Because it's never as clean and immediate

as you want it to be. So I remember that being part of what, you know, leads to my departure. So a couple of years ago, I was thinking about this. I told the story or something and so I'm I'm going to go look when I bought that book because I bought it on Amazon. I pull up when I bought it in 2009. I read it in 2009. I left five years later. I stayed for five more years. So knowing something and then acting on it, right?

Like knowing what you're meant to do and acting on it, you know, it can take you a long time. You can know in your heart what you're supposed to do or not supposed to do. But working up the courage to do it is especially when there's money on the line or status on the line or just inertia and the status quo on the line. So it took me a long time. It took me a long time. You were talking about the game, too, the game that you're playing.

It seems like the marketing game must have been fun too in a fun kind of way, like an immediate gratification kind of way and like, hey, we pulled this off kind of way and look, look what we did. It seems like that would be a fun kind of thing to do as well. Yeah, to pull up a newspaper online and see people talking about something

that you willed into reality that like the sort of puppet masterness of it, it's very exciting. It's very exciting. And then just anything that you're good at is exciting. You just have to go, just because you're good at it doesn't mean it's a good thing to spend your life on. In fact, it might not be the thing this rent your life on. Yeah, you can get wrapped up in that short-term gratification, I'm sure. That's got to be, that's got to feel good.

Yeah. And then it's scary to walk away and do other stuff. But because I dropped out of college to go like, hey, I am going to walk away from this. I was ready to quit. Like I was like, hey, I quit basically. And they were like, let's keep you on. But I was ready to quit to go write that first book. And so that seemed equally crazy to people at that time.

At 24, I could have left and gotten a job at any other. I probably could have gone, got a job at a startup that then would have been worth billions of dollars, right? So my options would have been worth. Like, I had a lot of options. Like, I had a lot of options. Yeah. I mean, actually I remember Tim was like, hey, he needs you to talk to my friend Travis. He's starting this startup and he needs some markets.

And it's like, so I had all those sort of opportunities, but I knew that wasn't really what I wanted to do. I'm glad you did get involved in that because it sounds like it. It didn't work out. Yeah. Next up was Lives of the Stoics, the Art of Living from Zeno to Zeno to Zeno? Zeno to Marks-Raelius. This is going to history mode. Yeah.

And so you're, again, writing these books for you, for me, writing books is just what's in my head. It comes out. Yeah. It seems so much easier. I'm sorry that you have to write these kind of books, bro. No, it's what I love. But it's what you did. It's like, well, who were they?

So the idea for the book is not what did they say, but who were they? And where do they live up to the ideas and where did they fall short of the ideas? Seneca being the most interesting. Why we see the most interesting. Seneca writes the most interesting. beautifully. He was so famous as a playwright in Roman times. There's a line from one of his plays as graffiti in Pompeii. So he's like the most famous writer in Rome. And he ends up getting exiled under these false charges. He spends it in Corsica, where Napoleon is from, which he

portrays as this like, speaking of Stoke, you know, Seneca writes of Corsica as being this barren horrible rock in the middle of the ocean. Napoleon, born there, writes about it as this, his place of his childhood, which he always wants to get back to. But anyway, Seneca, he's exiled, is this horrible thing, and he's called back. And it's called back by the mother of the future emperor. This is Nero's mom. She says, you can come back, but you have to be the tutor and advisor to my son. which he does is an ordinary like teenage boy, but it becomes clear with time that Nero, not all is well with Nero,

and Nero becomes emperor, and Seneca now is the right-hand man to the most powerful person on earth. And he has this moral quandary of, which I thought a lot of people can relate to, myself included, which is, yes, this person is awful and evil, but I am preventing them from being as awful and evil as they could be, right?

Where it is, are you the adult in the room or are you complicit? And so he becomes enormously wealthy in working for Niro. He becomes the second richest man in Rome. You just became complicit home as far as I'm concerned. Exactly, exactly. You know, that's how they get you, right? The gifts that you can't give back. And he gets wrapped up in it.

And, you know, he writes, Nero tries to murder his own mom, like, several times. and Seneca is, I think, complicit in one of the worst reigns. So how do you have this incredibly wise, decent man, a component of this horrendous regime? I mean, I think he would justify it in all the same ways that people have ever justified working for people like that. You know, look at what they would have done to me.

Look at what they would have done to my family. Or you don't want to think about what it would be like if I wasn't there. And so he's this immensely commonplace. complicated, complex figure that is both the philosopher but also has these ambitions, this desire that puts him in conflict with his own ideas and ideals. And then he does break with Nero, and he's ultimately implicated in a conspiracy against Nero, and Nero sends his goons to demand Seneca's suicide. And Seneca has this sort of Socrates' Christ-like moment. You know,

He does it, but then he ever, there's also, there's something that is inherently performative about it that hasn't rung right to everyone since. That he was, he was, he was both, it was both brilliant and brave and then also some part of it about his showmanship or whatever. Exactly. Exactly. So he's just, you know, just endlessly fascinating. Yeah. This book right here called About Face, Colonel David Hackworth, the, he's a, one of the up rising stars in the army and he just can't take it anymore and he feels like he's complicit in this war that is being fought in the wrong way and we're not going to win it if we keep fighting it this way and he ends up speaking out in the press and they were drummed him out of the army but this is something that I talk about a lot and it's that exact same thing like

you're here are you the person like if he would have stayed in he would have been the person that have said, hey, we need to change the way we're fighting this. Now I'm in charge of a brigade. Now I'm in charge of a division. And now I can help 10,000 soldiers do a better job and stay safer. But he just, you know, nope, I'm getting out. I'm going to tell everyone what's going on. And that's a tough decision to make because the moment that you leave, all your power is gone.

Is there a chance that there's this huge backlash and people get on board? Who was it? It was the Marine that was. was with Johnson and McNamara. He writes about the same thing. Yeah, he was like the same way of like, like if everyone says I should have done more, but if I would have resigned my position,

I would have been in the news for 24 hours and then that would be that. Yeah, it's immensely complicated. It's so easy to judge on the outside, but you don't know. But I imagine like General Mattis, who's a hero of mine who carries Mark Serrealis with him everywhere he goes, I imagine he was wrestling with the exact same things that Seneca was wrestling with. Put politics aside.

Like personality was, he must have been, he is as different from the administration he served as you could imagine. And he has to ask in a sort of who and what to my, do my duties lie? What are my obligations, right? And then who comes after me? So these are incredibly morally complex questions. Yeah. And yeah, who comes after me?

and once I'm gone, I'm gone. And even like General Mattis as immensely popular as he is. I mean, just as a popular human figure, General Mattis is one of the most famous kind of modern military humans. And when he left the administration, like there was a little bit of a buzz, but I mean, it didn't have the big impact, that big of an impact. And yet the complexity of, well, I'm going to hold my fire

until it makes a difference, that's how, that's how they make you complicit, right? Like, every one of Hitler, it's always problematic when you compare Hitler, but like everyone knew Hitler was a problem. All of his generals thought he was deranged, and they all hoped someone else would do something about it, right? And so nobody did, right? It's this sort of, I call it the tragedy of the commons or a collective, no, call it a collective action problem. Everyone needs to come together and do it. And the sacrifices only matter if enough people do it. But where does that leave you as the individual?

Yeah, and where does it start? Yes. If there's an, you know, the active shooter. If we all mob the active shooter, we'll get him. Yeah. But he's going to get three of us. And so who's going to be the first three that's rolling in? And look at American Apparel.

I mean, like I stuck around for much longer than I should have. And there were moments that should have been red line moments. But if I would have left, I wouldn't have also been able to, after they fired him, to make a lot of changes to, you know, I wouldn't have been able to. But is that something I tell myself to let myself off the hook? You know, am I not on the hook because I was 23 and I shouldn't have been in the position to begin with? You know, it's complicated.

But I think you have to be asking yourselves these questions. And like, I think it was Admiral Rickover, he's quoting Confucius, but he says, like, the obligation of every individual is to act like the fate of the world rests on your shoulders, which is like you have to act as if your decision does matter. Like you have to act on principle. You can't, if everyone is a pragmatist, then if everyone is only going, well, I'm only going to do this if it's a, I know it's 100% going to be effective, if I know it will make a difference. I mean, if everyone operated that way, no change would ever actually happen. You need, progress depends on the irrational man, they say, right?

Like the person who says, I'm going to do it. I don't care about the results. It's the right thing to do. I'm going to say it. I'm going to blow the whistle. We cannot function without those individuals. A compare and contrast example I bring up with this is, have you seen the movie Band of Brothers? Yeah.

The series Band of Brothers. Of course, most people have seen it because it's fantastic. But Dick Winners, they're at the end of the war. the war's going to end and they they he gets ordered by the colonel take a recon element across the river and so he goes well why are you going to do that he says because i said so whatever so takes a recon element across the river one guy gets killed a couple guys get wounded they come back uh next night colonel says take another recon element across the river and he's like sir i don't think it's a good idea there's not the war's going to end blah blah blah nope take a recon it along across the river

roger that sir and they go into the basement of a building and they drink wine and they don't go across the river again. And that's an example of where, like, he could have stood up for himself and he would have gotten fired and they would have put somebody else. They would have taken him across the river and put the guys at risk again. That's just a good counter example to the fact that when you draw a line in the sand and you say, nope, I refuse to do this. You're then, you don't have any control anymore and you just got to be willing to accept that a yes man is going to be put in that position immediately and there'll be no shelter and no buffer for the troops. Yeah, but there is a certain ego and savior complex in the, like, I'm the one fishing the papers off the desk. I'm the one

countermanding the bad orders. You know, all would be lost without me. That's what bad leaders exploit, that sense of, that's what they need. That's what sustains bad regimes and bad leadership, right? So it's a tension. Oh, so you're saying Dick Winters is like, perpetuating this bad leader being in position because he doesn't stand up and say, you know what, I refuse to do this. Yeah, or just the people that go, hey, I'm preventing them from crashing the car constantly. Well, the car keeps going. And eventually it does crash because you're not actually the savior.

And you can't actually, like inevitably, invariably, they're going to find the thing that sinks them. Right. And are you just letting it go on the, I don't know the answer. but well yeah i don't i don't think it's one of those situations where you can say here's the right answer um because you know you'd have to be able to run both those courses in out infinitely to find out where it actually leads and even when people when people talk about telling the truth right this is a discussion i have in people say for example oh your wife doesn't cook you know my My wife cooks dry chicken, right?

This is the big joke. And, well, why don't you tell her? Why don't you tell the truth? Wouldn't it be better just to tell her the truth? And so I can tell you that that's not a great option, right? If you tell your wife, she spends all day making you chicken and going to the store and buying everything and squaring it away and cooking in, she overcooks a little bit, so it's a little bit dry.

And I can tell you that the right answer is not, it's not going to make things better when you tell her the truth. So what am I saying the line? And what I've come to discover is that actually, no, you should tell the truth. And you should tell the truth to yourself. And the truth that you should tell of yourself is that you are very lucky to have this woman that has made you this meal. And you are being a complaining, whining loser for not just being thankful that you have chicken. I'll be it a little bit dry to eat for dinner.

Say thank you because that's what the truth is. You should be thankful. Yeah. Aim the weapon of truth at yourself. Sure. Same thing with radical candor, right? Radical candor like, oh, you know, Ryan, you didn't get this project done on time. Hey, I don't accept that you are failing with your timelines.

What I should do is aim that radical candor at myself, which is, hey, have I given Ryan the support that he needs? Have I said to explain to him why this timeline is important? Is he the right person for the job? Did I place him in the job just because I didn't take the effort? So if you aim the truth at yourself, it's going to be a much, it's going to be a much, more powerful tool and it actually will be the best course of action. Yeah and so so much I think radical candor and honesty or whatever this is really just an excuse for being a dick. Yes. That doesn't really help anyone or anything. No. No. That's why if you aim it at yourself,

it doesn't, you won't be a dick. You'll be actually, it'll come across the way it should, which is the truth. The truth about the situation is you're the problem. Well, whether it's true or not is a separate question from whether this is important or not, whether it's worth talking about or not, is this the hill you want to die on or not, you know? And that discretion is super important. Oh, yeah. I got a section in leadership strategy and tactics called Don't Care.

Yeah. And it's like, well, Ryan wants to do it this way, but I think we should do this way. And I actually don't care how we're doing it. Yeah. Well, you said this and I, no, that's fine. I don't care. Well, like, believe me, I care,

but I don't care about these little things that don't matter. Well, it doesn't. My wife said this to me, too. It's like, what matters? being right or the relationship? Or is this more important than the relationship? And so often it's very easy to want to be right or to want to voice your opinion or whatever.

And you don't realize that these are Pyrrhic victories. Yeah. And the truth is, the truth is, the relationship is more important. Yeah. So why are you talking about something that doesn't? Because the real truth is the relationship is more important. Yeah. Then who took out the garbage, right? So get on with it.

Um, next one we're jumping into. I wrote too many books. You wrote a lot of books. I had to make a conscious decision like, okay, what do we doing? Are we going to do 14 different podcasts? Because I don't know how many books you got, but you're giving me a run for the money. Actually, no, I think you got me beat. I don't know.

What's your number? How many books have you written? I think it's 12 or 13. Yeah, I think you got me. There you go. Good job. Speaking of General Mattis, this is from the book, Courage is calling. This is what?

2020. Courage is calling. What keeps you up at night, General James Mattis was once out. by a television reporter before the question was quite finished you he was already answering I keep people awake at night It was an answer that capture the philosophy by which this warrior and every warrior before and since lives their life the philosophy of offense of initiative of intimidating the enemy rather than being intimidated of Striking fear striking period rather than being struck by it

This is why his troops were commanded to set up and sleep in a V-shaped camp at night a V pointed in the direction of the enemy. It's why he famously cashiered an otherwise excellent officer in the Gulf War for going too slow. To borrow a phrase from the British General Sir Douglas Haig, loser in my opinion, at Mattis's Corps is the trait that all great soldiers must have a sincere desire to engage the enemy. expects nothing less from his troops what are you going to wait for your opponent to

prepare are you going to give them an advantage no way in a civilian world we call this initiative in sports we call it the will to win and borrowing from the brutal world of war we get this expression killer instinct it is impossible to have a killer instinct without courage one presupposes the other and nobody achieves great things in war business sports life without either of them the Spartans never asked how many of the enemy there were only where because they were going to attack anyways, they were in it to win.

Yeah, in my note on General Hague. I actually hate, I loathe all the World War I generals. They're horrible. Even the American ones? Yeah. Some of the Americans were okay. I mean,

the Marine Corps went in there and actually were like, hey, hold on a second. This is freaking stupid. But Hague, butcher, they called him, just terrible.

Just carnage and, futility and you know it's so disgusting to me that he's like you're quoting here from him as like a sincere desire to engage the enemy and all he did was like send two million British to their death it's just awful no never never said hey maybe this thing that we're doing maybe the way we're doing it's not working well um well there yes having an offensive mindset and then running into a brick wall different things. But I think that's what makes Grant great, right? That's what defines and tips the balance in the Civil War

as Grant realizes, oh, yeah, if we're in the defensive, we're going to lose. But we have more men, more manpower, more money, the greatest industrial might in the world. We have to take the war to the enemy. We have to win. And he didn't, you know, all my favorite Grant stories are about that. There's that.

I did a six-part series on the Civil War. war it's called the civil war excursion we owe six more it's my friend jd and i he's a he's a freaking civil war maniac uh just the civil war in general it's it's just an incredible thing to contemplate going back to the book here you say it's been long held that there are two kinds of courage physical and moral physical courage is a knight riding into battle it's a fire fighter rushing into a burning building it's an explorer setting out for the Arctic defying the elements moral courage is a whistleblower taking on powerful interests it's the truth teller who says what no one else will say it's the

entrepreneur going into business for themselves against all odds the martial courage of the soldier and the mental courage of the scientists but it doesn't take a philosopher to see that these are actually the same thing there aren't two kinds of courage there's only one the kind where you put your ass on the line in some cases literally perhaps fatally in other cases figuratively or financially courage is risk it's sacrifice commitment perseverance truth determination when you do the thing others cannot or will not do when you do the thing that people think you shouldn't or can't do otherwise it's not courage you have to be

braving something or someone courage is calling what made this the next of the virtues that you wanted to hit on. So I'm doing this series. This is a Stoke Virtue series. It's courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And I felt like courage is the most accessible and the most exciting and the most inspiring. So I started there.

I know you can't start with justice. I knew discipline was the one I was most excited. The discipline was the one that I felt like I have the clearest hook on. I got a lot of texts when people were, I guess, it must have been when it actually came out Discipline is destiny. I got all kinds of texts like,

yo, what's up with this? Some of them were like, oh, this is cool. Some of them were like, yo, he's stealing your stuff. I got a few of those, which I thought was kind of funny. Well, you picked a perfect title. Although I advise,

why did you call it discipline equals freedom and not discipline is freedom? That's what I originally said. You know, that's what I originally said. That's what I originally said. And I think it's because I don't think they're the same thing. I think that one gives you the other. So this one will give you this.

Not it is it, but it'll equal that. So I guess that's why. You know, we did the same thing in extreme ownership. So the four laws of combat leadership are cover and move, simple, prioritize, and execute and decentralized command. And they're not in the same tense. They don't quite fit together grammatically. And I think our publisher was like, you should change simple to, you know, simplify.

And because then it's an action that you take. Covering move is an action that you take. Prioritize and execute as an action that you take and I think they actually had something for Decentralized command as well that would make it a not a thing but an action and Leif and I talked about it we kind of came to the fact that like dude this is what I wrote like this is the stuff that I was saying So let's just stay with what we wrote and you just kind of have to deal with it So the same thing with discipline equals freedom that's what I originally said when I was trying to explain to these young seal officers like this is what you need to do if you have discipline it's going to equal freedom for you. And your physical life, your, your, your, your, your,

platoons, like the more discipline you have, it's going to equal more freedom. That's what I originally said. I really struggled with the title of that book because it's often rendered by the ancient says temperance. Like that's with the name and the virtue, but it's like, I'm obviously not calling it that. Nobody knows what that means. Or if they do know what it means, they think of the temperance movement, which would, which is what banned alcohol in America. So it's like already super unpopular. So it's like, I wasn't going to call it. temperance. And then one of the working titles was only the disciplined are free. And then it became, and then I really didn't want to use discipline because I didn't want it to be anywhere near

what you did because you so perfectly title. So it was going to be called self-discipline is salvation. And then I found salvation kind of has this religious connotation, but also it wasn't, it, salvation wasn't the right word. I don't know. I just didn't like it. But it went as far as like, I saw covers with that title. Like that's how far we went down the thing. Self-discipline is salvation. Yeah, that's what, because, and it is important. Like, you're talking about discipline, because discipline, you mean self-discipline, but you also mean discipline.

Like in the military, there is discipline, and you enforce it on other people. Well, if you do that, you're not a good leader. But there is discipline. It is a thing, right? Like, there is discipline in the ranks. And there. Imposed discipline. This is how I eventually had to break this out to explain to people.

Because, you know, you do your best you can with your title and you stick with Jocko sticks with discipline equals freedom. And so you get some leader out there that goes, cool. I want freedom in my organization. I'm going to impose discipline on everybody. And then you have to go back and say, well, we're not talking about imposed discipline because if you're imposing discipline on people, they're going to reject it. There's all these problems that you're going to have.

And it won't work out well. But I did, so I was like, it's got to be self-discipline. People need to understand. So that's where I was going. And then it just wasn't working. And then so there's a Greek expression, character is fate, right? Which means like your character determines what you're going to. accomplish who you're going to be, that your character, it's deterministic in the sense.

Like if you have bad character, you will eventually do bad things. Gosh, that's so important to remember. And so. And it's so unfortunate. Sometimes that takes like three decades. I know. And the problem is when people hear fate, they don't, fate doesn't mean what it means to people now.

So sometimes that quote is rendered as character as destiny. Like character determines who you're going to be, what you're going to do. So it's like, that's what discipline is, right? Discipline, it's both, it determines whether you will be successful or not, but it's also there's something inherently great about discipline. So if you go down fighting, you might lose, but if you were discipline, there is a form of greatness even in the loss, right? And so I ended up, I was like, you know what, fuck it.

Discipline is the right title. I have to stick with it. And yeah, it was, that was the hardest of them to title. Yeah. Well, here's a little chunk of that. Show me a man who isn't a slave. Seneca demanded pointing out that even a slave even slave owners were chained to the responsibility of the institution of slavery One is a slave to sex another to money another to ambition all are slaves to hope or fear

The first step he said was to pull yourself out of the ignorance of your dependency whatever that happens to be Then you need to get clean get clean from your mistress from your addiction to work from your lust for power whatever in the modern modern era, we might be hooked on cigarettes or soda, likes on social media, or watching cable news. It doesn't matter whether it's socially acceptable or not. What matters is whether it's good for you. Eisenhower's habit was killing him as so many of ours were too, because you're, earlier in the book, you talk about Eisenhower quitting smoking, super disciplined dude his whole life and yet he gave himself an order, he said. He's like, I gave myself an order. slowly,

imperceptibly. But even if they weren't, even if they were harmless, why should we take orders from our belly or our crotches or the device that seems almost physically connected to us at this point?

The body can't be in charge, neither can inhabit. We must be the boss. He gave himself an order to quit smoking. I love it so much. Forty years, like two packs a day. I had a guy

came up to me. So I had a guy write in on one of my early podcasts was like he was a nail bit his nails. Bleeding like in meetings just like couldn't stop. And he asked me like what he should do or whatever. And I was like stop biting him. And then, you know, wrote back like I stopped biting him. Like I'm good. I'm normal.

And then I had a guy came up to me at the first muster. This was really cool. A guy came up to me and he, you know, we're hanging out. And we're walking to dinner, actually. He's come up to talk to me. And he says, like, I'm going to tell you something right now that I'm like, embarrassed to tell you and you're going to think it's super lame, but I just want to tell you anyway so you know what's going on.

I was addicted to video games, as weird as that might sound. I would play 12, 14, 18 hours of video games a day. That was my entire life. And it was absolutely horrible. And I heard you tell this guy just to stop biting his nails and he stopped. Yeah. And I just stopped playing video games after how, over many years and I sold all my video game cartridges or whatever and I sold my console

and I used that money to come here and come to this event with you and I just want to tell you thanks. Wow. Just freaking give yourself an order, man. Sure. Yeah. Seneca's other line, he says, no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves. And so this idea, I think that's what Eisenhower, what's so powerful about Eisenhower is that

he was literally the most powerful man. I mean, just imagine to be the American president at the beginning of the Cold War. After you won World War II. You. Like you. Not America, you. There will never be a singularly as powerful person again, probably. Isn't it weird that Churchill wasn't?

Right, because Churchill gets knocked out of office. Yeah, I know. That's crazy. And also Eisenhower had nuclear weapons. I don't know if Britain had them yet. Right. So you're just, and there's a brief moment where the United States is the only country in the world with nuclear weapons. So singularly, one individual effectively had the power to destroy the earth. And Eisenhower's mother had given him that Bible verse. Like he that taketh the city is not as great as he that conquers his anger, right? And the idea that if you're master of yourself, that's a stoic idea, that's the, that's the greatest empire, the Stokes would say. The greatest empire is self-control, self-command.

And you realize there's way more people who have been in charge of large armies or large empires or large companies or large fortunes or followings. There are more of those people than people who are truly self-contained in self. You know what I mean? The discipline of the monk may be stronger than the discipline of, you know, the great, conqueror world leader. And you need that. Who? The Stoics said that, you know, I think every philosopher, every king should be a philosopher, but he says at the outset, every philosopher must be a kingly person. And this idea that like you need your leaders and you need your thinkers to be

in command of themselves. Because if they're not, what qualifications do they have to tell other people what to do or how to do it. So bizarre that people get into these positions when they don't have control over themselves. It's just so freaking crazy. When you go character as fate, how'd you think it was going to go? Yeah.

You know, of course it was going to end that way. Yeah. I've, one of the guys that I work with now, I was in the military with, JP to Nell, and he had like when I met him for the first time he had like a broken hand right clearly because he cracked somebody and I just you know I said hey man like losing your temper is a weakness and what

was cool is the reason I remember this because he told me you know he's like you said that to me and I was like oh damn because you know he's growing up he sees his dad his dad loses his temper this looks like a superpower oh when you lose your temper everyone listens to you everyone just does what you said and they get in line and that's the way that seems like a good superpower that I kind of want to so boom lose your temper it's a superpower and that's JP and you know he's now like 22 years old or something and he's working with me for the first time I'm like losing your temper is a weakness never yeah never had that idea never never had that idea and he's like oh and he said it just like oh you know

again did that change him overnight no did he get in trouble some more yes do we have to keep him in check a few times absolutely but it was like that beginning of he was young I was like probably 12 something years older than him but that idea that discipline emotional discipline physical discipline like that is what allows you to be good at making decisions good at leadership good at moving through life like it just all boils down to discipline. It's a weird paradox of masculinity that like crying or you know being scared any one of these emotions is weakness but then getting so angry that you punch a wall or you break something that's like strength but they're this fundamentally the same thing. It's a baby. Yeah right

I can't handle what I'm feeling right now and in fact there's probably actually something at least the sort of you know crying has some kind of emotional vulnerability to it. Like it's almost, I can actually buy that there's something good in that. You stuff the sadness down. It comes out, you know. And so this idea that it's about suppression is not the way to think about it either. That's missing what Stoicism is. It's like, I'm feeling something. Is this a good feeling to act on or not? You know, why am I feeling this? How can I process this feeling? Like, that's what we're doing, right? It's having the emotional awareness to go, this is triggering for me.

I don't like this. But it's not appropriate for me to do X, Y, or Z. That's what Stoicism is. Like, it's the maturity and the self-discipline and the self-awareness to not be the victim of those emotions. Like, I think there's a huge difference between being angry and then doing something out of anger. Just as like being sad, it's totally fine.

Or being grief-strict. and it's totally fine. Five years later, you still can't get out of bed, like you need to get some help, you know, like that. If you're so depressed, you don't want to be alive. You've got to be, you got to go, you've got to talk to someone about that. Yeah.

I went through a whole string on one podcast a long time ago that may have caused a little bit of backlash, but basically we were talking about, I was talking about emotions, and what is a baby? A baby can't control their emotions. They get mad, they get sad. Like, that's what happens. And so as you get older,

you control your emotions more. Now, there are going to be times where you can't control your emotions, for instance, someone that you care about dies, and now you're getting hit with these waves of emotions, and that's what makes it so scary to grown people, because for the past 32 years, they've been able to control their emotions, and all of a sudden their dad dies, and they can't control their emotions, and it's hitting them at these weird times, and so they feel like they can't get themselves together. They feel like there's something wrong with them. And what I am happy to be able to tell them is that over time, you will regain control those and that will start to dissipate and those waves of emotion will become weaker over time,

and that's not a bad thing. It's actually a good thing. And you're processing it. Never caught any crap about that. But on some other podcast, I was like, oh, you've got to stifle those emotions. And there's like a whole category of emotions that you should freaking stifle. You know, when you get pissed off at your wife because she did take out the garbage or whatever the thing is and you should stifle those emotions.

That's what you need to do. And boy, did I get a bunch of people saying, if you stifle all your emotions, you're going to like, no, there's a category of emotions that you should stifle, and there's other emotions that are going to come out, and that's perfectly fine. And in fact, it's healthy. Yeah, of course.

And yeah, if you're stuffing them down, you're pretending they don't exist. It's just like putting them on a credit card. They're going to pop out at a different time. But if you act on every urge and impulse, if you share every thought that you have or you can't, you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by every temptation or opportunity you have, you're going to blow up your life and you're going to hurt other people, you know?

So the ability to go, I am feeling this, that's a dumb feeling or an inappropriate feeling, or the Stoaks say, you know, you've got to think about how you're going to feel the morning after, right? Like drinking is fine on the way down. The problem is the hangover. And you have to, as you're contemplating an emotion or a thought or an action, you have to go, how's this going to age? You know, how's this going to age?

And the ability to go, oh, yeah, like, here's what I feel. I'm right to feel this way. But if I type this all out in an email and I hit send, it's going to be fucking awkward three days from now when I have to see that person where they're going to hold this against me forever, right? Or if I quit in a flurry, where does that leave me? And so the ability to, yeah, be in command of, not even. in command of your emotions, but command of your actions instead of your emotions being in command of your actions. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, and there's another piece that comes into

play when we're talking about truth earlier and like telling the truth. Another thing that you've got to look at is where does the truth end up from a strategic level or a tactical level? So I can tell you the truth in this email that I'm about to send you because you went behind my back on and did something and I can send you, it's the truth right now. And it's going to make me feel good tactically at this moment to tell you this. But now we don't have a relationship anymore. Now I can't count on you. And I said the truth is, in a long-term view, this doesn't matter. That's the truth. The truth is I'm being petty about something. That's what the truth is. The truth when I aim it at you is probably not going to work out well for me. And think of the truth

over a strategic timeline instead of a tactical timeline. People make all kinds of emotional decisions on the tactical timeline, and they're not going to work out well in a strategic, in a strategic outlook. Lincoln would write these letters that are called his hot letters. And he'd be like, this is everything that's wrong with you, McClellan, you know, and then it would sit in the desk and he would not mail it, right? And that's really, that's the emotional self-control that we're talking about. He's right to feel everything, and it's good that he felt everything,

and it's good that he didn't pretend that he didn't feel it, because it would have vomited it all over the next time he saw him. but then he goes, is this what I want to send to my, you know, to my general right now? And where is it going to leave us? And do I have a replacement yet? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the ability to just not take the action on the emotion, no one's asking you to be a saint. Just don't do that stuff.

You know what I mean? Feel it all. Just don't try not to act on it. Good, good lessons. And speaking of good lessons, eventually, what is this? It's 2022, you roll into some kids' books. I did, yeah. I think this is the first book you sent me.

Is it? It's not the copy. I couldn't find the actual copy that you sent me. But, yeah, you sent me this book, The Boy Who Would Be King. And then you wrote another one called The Girl Who Would Be Free. So the Boy Who Would Be King is about Marcus Aurelius. Yes. And it's cool.

It's really cool the way that you wrote it. It's basically a lot of stoicism in these little events. You know, lessons being taught to him along the way. Great, simple read for kids to learn lessons. Was this because you had kids? I did, yes. I wrote it in March of 2020 during the pandemic where I was like, I'm stuck here. How can I teach my kids about Stoicism knowing that they have zero interest in philosophy whatsoever?

And so Mark has released his story. It's so incredible. Like, you have a boy selected to be the emperor of Rome. and somehow it doesn't end in tragedy and disaster. I just wanted to tell. I wanted to tell that in sort of an all-age's way. And because, I mean, it's really, Marcus's life is a parable of leadership. Like, what does it mean to be selected for greatness

and to prove yourself worthy of it? That's what Marcus' story is. And then what about the girl who would be free? Now, is this, what's this story based on it? I know in the book, she's a slave. Yes. and becomes free. Yeah.

Is this an Epictetus? It's Epictetus. So I wanted to tell Epictetus's story, but I also, I really dislike the idea that Stoicism is just for dudes. So I wanted to tell a female version of the story, and I'm like, Epictetus is dead. And Epictetus isn't a boy's name. Epicetus just means acquired one. So I was like, you know what, I'll just tell, I'll just render Epictetus as a girl,

which is interesting because Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus. Epictus' teacher writes this essay, you know, right around the turn of the millennium, about how philosophy should be taught for boys and girls. He says, virtue doesn't have a gender. He's like, you don't care what sex your horses or your hunting dog. You just care if they can do the job, right? And he says, that's what virtue is. It's like the job of a human being.

So I just decided to tell Epictetus as a girl, so people who wanted to teach Stoicism to their girl. Like, seeing yourself in stuff is really important. And so I just didn't want to do another male version. And then some people were really upset about it. It was controversial as if it was this sort of gender ideology thing. When really it's just saying, like, it doesn't matter if you're a boy or girl. This is what it means to be a good person, to be in command of oneself, which Epictetus's story is so perfect with. Like, Marcus has been learning out about Marcus. He's powerful and rich and has all this access. But Epictetus is following the same philosophy and has nothing. You know, as shitty of a life as you can imagine for a person, that's what Epictetus is born into. A slave in

the Roman Empire. He's owned by someone in Nero's court. And he basically looks around one day and goes, I'm freer than all of these people because he's in command of himself and they're not. He watches he watches a man suck up to Nero's cobbler, like to get access. And he goes, my life is way better than that guy's life. And I think this is what ultimately resonates with Stockdale. And Stockdale is introduced to Epictetus in college. He's walking the halls of Stanford. The Navy sends him to Stanford.

And this fighter pilot who's a professor there goes, have you ever read Epictetus? And he's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And it changes his life. I have a good Epictetus story. You want this one? Yeah, absolutely. Have you interviewed Dave Carey?

No. He was like 80 now. He was one of the POWs with Stockdale. Flew off the Oriscani, shot down a couple months after, and he told me he's sitting in his cell. And you know they would tap messages to each other. And the message is like Stockdale says, remember Epictetus's teachings. And he just goes, what are you talking about? Like the idea that this like 20-year-old fighter pilot would be familiar with, like Stockdale had so steeped himself in the stillics that...

That's like if I was in the prison with him. They'd been like, Jocko, remember Epictetus? Who the hell are you talking about? Exactly, exactly. And then he comes to understanding means Epictetus says, in every situation, we have some freedom of choice, some things that are up to us and some things that are not up to us. And he was saying, focus on what part of this is up to you, right? which is the essence of, I think, what Stoke philosophy is and what made Stockdale so great.

That's what the Stockdale paradox is. Yeah. But I just love the idea he'd so nerded out about it that he just assumed everyone was familiar with an obscure philosopher's slave from 2000 years ago. Yeah, that's one of the probably best lessons that I've reinforced on myself with this podcast was, you know, Captain Charlie Plum, Another guy that was in he was in the Hano Hilton and that one of the rules that he told me about

Was if you were in your with your cellmates and your cellmate because they would they would usually have a cellmate for like three months maybe six months maybe a year and then they'd get someone new or they'd get rotated out and Every time a new cellmate would come in it was like the newest Issue of a movie a new book and like they just got to learn everything about this person what their favorite food rules how they grew up they they would know everything about each other's lives but also you're living in a cell with some other human being and they had a rule and the rule was if your cellmate does something that annoys you it's your fault and to me that is the ultimate like ownership you and it's the it's stoicism very clearly oh you know Ryan is my cellmate he's he's He's above me in the bunk and he's picking his toenails as I'm trying to go to sleep.

And it's annoying me. That's my fault. And I need to readjust my thought pattern and be okay and not allow his actions to annoy me. That's on me. I wonder if that came through Stockdale via Epictetus. Because one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus, he says, remember when you take offense that you are complicit in being offended. There you go. Because they just said it.

you chose to see it as mean or directed at you or hurtful. Like at the essence of stoicism is the idea that like things are objective, right? Epitius says it's just our opinions about them that are not. And so like them picking their toes, it's not annoying. My wife has said this to me. She goes, I can't frustrate you. And that was very frustrating to hear. But it's true, right?

Like they're doing the thing. And then I am saying it is frustrating, right? It is like the frustration is in me. Their thing is that because it's not frustrating to me when I pick my nails, right? Like when I do it, it's not annoying. Because the event is the event. And we say, I don't like that. It's gross.

What we make up hurtful, politically incorrect, whatever. This is all on us. Yeah, yeah. It is what it is. It is all on us in the end. We should take ownership of it, one might say. It sounds like a brilliant. Thank you, man.

Does this get us up to present time? I think so. This is where we're at? I'm finishing justice now. I was just working on it this morning when I'm... When's it coming out? 24. Fall of 24.

How many hours a day do you write? Like this morning? 30 minutes. My thing is like I make a positive contribution every day. I do a thousand words a day and it takes an hour. Okay. And that's not every day, but that's when I'm working a book. because that's what I'm doing.

And I think I could go down to a half an hour a day. I've never thought of just positive contribution. That's a low bar. I like it, though. That low bar can really make it easy to, you know, belly up to the computer. Well, Tim Ferriss told me once he said, just a couple crappy pages a day. Yeah.

And so if you make it, because like right now, I'm actually not writing. I'm more editing and finalizing. I'm definitely, I started a new chapter that wasn't there before. But I think word count can be hard because right now, actually, it's more important than I'm eliminating words. than writing words. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's just like, did it get better today? The thing that I found that really locks me into this mode is that if you, if you write a thousand, if I write a thousand words today, tomorrow, I can immediately, I can start writing immediately. I don't have to review anything. I know exactly where I left off. If I wait literally one extra day, I have to go back and read, maybe, you know, the last thousand words I wrote, maybe the last 500, but I think, you know, I think, you know, the last 500, but I think, you know, I think, definitely am going to have to reinvest and reengage my brain and redeploy into this mode,

whereas if it's from my mind yesterday, and I do the thing that Hemingway did, which was like, Stop in the middle of a sentence. Yeah, stop in the middle of the sense. I won't quite do that. I'll finish the sentence, but then I'll write like where I'm going in a phrase or three or four words, you know, move towards the building, take it down, and whatever, whatever thing I'm going to write next, I'll kind of just know where I'm going, so that way it can get back into it really easily. but yeah if you take more than a day for me I'm just I have to go back and re-engage the whole freaking thing

what I like to do is so I write in the morning get it done and then you know I'm working out later or I'm hanging out going for walk or swimming or whatever ideas pop into my head and I write those down and I don't go back and work on them like I wait until the next like so you want to be excited about what you have to do for the next like you want a to do list for tomorrow not not, well, what do I do today? You know what I mean? So I'm saving it. Nice.

So you're always like ready to go. Getting fired up for it. Exactly. Exactly. So that gets us up to speed though. That's where we're waiting on that one. In the meantime, you've got Ryanholiday.net. It's where people can find you.

Also, daily stoic.com. Both those things have Facebook, Twitter, and the gram. Instagram at Ryan Holiday and Daily Stoic at Daily Stoic. You also have a YouTube channel that's at Daily Stoic as well. So every day I do like, so the Daily Stoic, the book is one page a day, but then I just do a free email version every day I have for eight years. And then there's a podcast version of it. So I just, it's just kept going.

So I do the writing practice every day I have the email. So that's totally free. Do you make a new YouTube every day? A couple of a week, but I don't do like a video version. of the email. Oh, okay. Okay. But you can listen to the email or read the email for free.

It's one dose of stoicism every day. Oh, you can listen to the email? On the podcast. That's what the podcast is. Yeah. Check. But you do longer podcasts. I do interviews too.

Because you've interviewed me before. I know. You came on right in the middle of COVID. Oh, yeah. That's right. We were getting after it. Yeah. So that's where people can find you.

You got freaking 84 books that they can read. You got books for kids, books for adults, calendar books, journal books. You've got some freaking books, which is outstanding. And I think that gets us up to speed, does it? We good? Yeah, man, thanks. This is crazy.

Carrie, sir. You got any questions? I do have one question. So we talk a lot about open-mindedness versus closed-mindedness, and I was just trying to figure out, I'm a fan of Stoic philosophy, and I've followed your stuff for a long time, Ryan. So I'm just curious, is there kind of a direct,

corollary to that open mind versus closed mind where open minded you're practicing humility you're being open to others ideas close minded you're kind of using judgment and shutting down as opposed to hearing somebody else help you might like this marcus in meditations he writes remember things are not asking to be judged by you and he says you always have the power of having no opinion and i think about that a lot i think politically culturally, with my kids. Like, so much of the conflict I had with my parents growing up was them having opinions about shit that just didn't matter.

And those conflicts pulled us apart, right? Because they didn't like my hair or my music or whatever. It's like, you don't need to have an opinion about it. It doesn't matter. And you don't need to have an opinion about 99.9% of the things that are happening in the world, particularly other people's private choices in their private life. And I just see people, they just make themselves so miserable, but it's, It's worse than that because they make other people miserable too.

Do you know what I mean? By having strong opinions about who they should marry or how they should live or how they should raise their own kids. It's like people are not asking you for advice on how to live their life. And it's called self-discipline for a reason to go back to where we're starting. Like you, people did not ask for your standards. You can't hold them accountable for not living up to them. you know, like I heard someone say, don't yuck someone else's yum,

and I think about that a lot. That's a pretty good one. You know, people go, that band sucks, okay? You know, like, why, why does it bother me that they like that? But that's hard. It's hard.

I'm trying to get, as in, you become a writer because you like having opinions about shit. And I'm trying to have less opinions about shit. Yeah, that open-minded thing, I mean, for me, there's a constant battle of your mind trying to close because it's safer, it's easier. I don't have to listen to you.

My ego wants to be closed. My ego doesn't want to hear your opinion. My ego thinks my opinion is better than yours. So we're constantly closing our mind. And the goal is to constantly pry that thing open, be open to other people's ideas, be open to other people's perspectives. And it's going to make you a much more, it's going to make you, it's just going to give you a better understanding of what's going on in the world.

And a lot of that is driven through. humility, obviously. But keep that mind open. Ryan, any closing thoughts? No, man, I think I said everything. I don't know if I've ever talked this much in my life except for doing an audio book. Right on. Well, that's what we're doing. I guess we're set in records. Thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for getting down here. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned, of course. And thanks for capturing these lessons for people and getting them out there in a way that they're digestible and accessible to people that need them. It will help them stay on the path of discipline.

Well, it's a total honor for me. I've loved yourself for a long time since I heard about it from Tim, so this is really cool for me. Right all, man. Appreciate it. And with that, Ryan Holiday has left the building. Carrie, you went a little fanboy at the end there. After we, you know, after we hit stopping the mics,

you want the picture. Of course, man. I'm a Ryan Holiday fan. Yeah, yeah. And just Stoic philosophy in general. But Ryan's, he's been pushing this stuff for a long time. And definitely popularized for sure this in the modern day. Yeah.

Yeah. I picked up Life of the Stoics when it first came out in 22, I think. And I've had Marcus Aurelius meditations for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, when we were talking, I guess we can cover it. I guess we can cover meditations, but it's like I might as well just do an audio book and just read them because they're that self-evident. For sure. I mean, they're awesome.

So, yeah, we'll think, we'll think about that. But the ancient lessons still being applicable 100% today. And it was cool to, you were saying you hadn't really heard much many people talk with Ryan about. like the whole marketing American apparel like that's a crazy story his story is is awesome in that first book he wrote trust me I'm lying I've never even heard of that book yeah so I'm it's still now it is definitely an interesting book and it's like he said you can you can read it and be like whoa I can't believe people would do this or you could be like whoa I'm gonna do this you know if you're a nefarious way of doing it so definitely some stuff to

or just be aware of what's actually happening out there oh for sure like oh there This is a manufactured story that was then leaked to get more press on and then push it, you know, particular. Yeah, so let me give you an example of some of the stuff in that book. They got a book coming out. They want to make it, they want press for the book. So they put up billboards and vandalize the billboards themselves. So it gets reported that the billboards were vandalized. Right.

You know what I'm saying? Like, that's a good move. That's some chestnut checkers marketing right there. That's some chestnut checkers marketing. So those are the kind of things that are in that book. It was very, very interesting. So pretty cool to talk to him and hear about all the stuff he's been going on. And just like I said, it's pretty impressive that he went through that time period

of being the kind of it kid and money and all the other stuff that was thrown into his face. And he was able to steer clear of that sort of demonic downfall. spiral that people can get onto, which a lot of people get, you go to Hollywood. Like, they're in LA with money and action and go look at those advertisements. You can pull them up. They have whole websites that are dedicated to the advertisements for American apparel. You can see it's a very and like I said, I didn't know about it at the time because I was just so detached from like fashion. But when you look at it, you can see why it went Richter and why it was doing so well because it's cool looking stuff, you know, cool looking advertisements.

But very cool conversation. Glad to have them on here. So thanks once again to Ryan for coming out. What do we got going on? We got Chocco Live, by the way. Look, we sold out in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We just got done with that. In Shytown, we were sold out there.

What was your, you were there, both shows. What was your assessment? Powerful. I'll say that. Yeah. They were, it was awesome. is awesome to be out there. We are going to be,

we got two more shows. We got one in Boston. The Boston, when I looked at the chart, there might be like, I don't know, there's not many seats left in Boston, if any.

Honestly, I think Boston sold out. And Philly, Philly's, so Boston, July 21st, Philly's July 22nd. There's still some seats left in Philly.

It's a bigger venue. But there's like a handful of seats in Philly. So if you want to come, and listen, it's, I'm going to meet you. Like if you want to come and say hi, I will stay there until we shake hands. So bring your books. Bring your books.

Damn it. I shouldn't have said that. I signed a shit ton of books. I'll sign your books. Just because, look, I, I'm a normal person, you know? I'm not in the green room. I'm not hiding. I've got freaking nine security guards standing in front of me to get me, whisk me out of there when it's over.

No, I'm like, you. You're my friend and you want to come hang out. Come and get it. I'll be there. We'll hang out. And I'll definitely meet you. Shake hands. You want me to sign your book.

Yep. Bring it. Let's do it. So once again, next up is Boston, July 21st, Philly, July 22nd. Come and get it, man. Look forward to seeing you there. And I will be hyped up on a little something called Jock Fuel. when I'm there. It's weird because I love, I love go my own energy drink, right? I love it. I love

the taste of it. I love the way that makes me feel. But I, you know, I have to put a governor on myself, right? I can't drink nine of those things in a day. I would, but you can't, right? But at that, I'll drink like, in the matter of two hours, I'll put down three because I've just cleared hot, you know? And it's just awesome. So, jaco fuel. This, this, The Jocko Lives are fueled by Jocko Fuel 100%. So come and get some of that. You can get it at joccofuel.com. You can get the protein powder.

This is another thing. A protein powder, you know, you're traveling. Throw some of that protein powder in your bag. You're good to go. You don't have to eat that crap in the airport. You got the mulk with you. Get some of that. The ready to drink stuff is going Richter.

I don't know if I haven't told you that, but like the ready to drink stuff, it's just going with the protein, Mulk protein shakes are going Richter or wherever they are. People are consuming them at an incredible rate. 30 grams of protein, just freaking tasty as can be. So check that out. We got this stuff available at the vitamin shop.

It's at Wawa. Look, you can get the drinks at Wawa. You got to look at the bottom right corner because they're trying to, you know, the big companies are trying to do their thing to us. They're trying to push us out. They see a threat. They know what's up. But we're there.

Wawa, Shop, GnC, the military commissaries, A-Fees, we're in A-Fee's now, Hanifers Dash stores, Wake Fern, Shop-Right, H-E-B, everyone in Texas, thank you. Meyer, I was just up in Meyer country in Michigan. Everyone that's up there, thank you, because you all are getting in there

in clearing shelves in Texas and at Meyer at H-E-B and Meyer. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, we're in there, we're at Shields. And by the way, we're in little gyms and little places. Also, we just went heavy. into Tennessee. We're in all kinds of stores in Tennessee. If you're in Tennessee, go into like your local convenience store and see what's up. If you want to sell in your CrossFit gym, if you want to sell in your JJITU studio, email J.F Sales at joccofuel.com. Get it in there. Take care of your people.

Take care of your clients. Get them in better shape. That's what we're doing. That's joccofuel.com. We got it going on. Also, we got origin USA. You heard us talking about, you heard us talking about the apparel thing you're just talking about other companies making a t-shirt for 40 cents and who is getting exploited in order to do that someone is getting exploited when that happens when you can buy something when you can buy a t-shirt for seven dollars someone's getting exploited and it's and it's and it's national security is being exploited as well and the environment is being exploited it's just destructive so don't don't buy to go to origin usa.com and get yourself something that's made in america that's what we're doing

t-shirts boots jeans geese for that shu jitsu boha rash guards we got the whole rtX line which is roll train execute that's what it is you can do whatever you got to do and we also have hunt gear so look we got it going on and we're making it all in america we are taking care of our workers We are taking care of national security. We're taking care of a supply chain. We're taking care of the farmers that grow this stuff. And we're taking care of you because we're making you the best possible product. OriginUSA.com.

Go get it. That's what I'm saying. We also got jocco store.com. Check. Where you can get your podcast, discipline equals freedom gear. You can get your stay on the path gear. Yeah. T-shirts, trucker hats, beanie, hoodies.

The way Echo Charles says this is you can represent while you're on the path. 100%. And this is what was cool. At the live, people were representing on the path. It was freaking legit. So that was awesome to see everyone was showing up representing. Representing that shirt locker. Yeah, that shirt locker.

It's just awesome. So thanks for the shirt locker is a subscription T-shirt, make new T-shirts all the time, like new designs. Some are a little edgy, a little bit risky. A little bit layers. There's layers on all of them for sure. One of the questions at the Jocko Live was about a shirtlock. Which one? Everybody must get stoned.

Yep. Yep. They asked about the T-shirt. So there's layers there. Layers. Layers are always worthwhile. Jocco store.com. Also subscribe to this podcast.

Also subscribe to Jock Wonderground. Also subscribe to the YouTube channel for Jocko Podcast and Origin USA and Jocco Fuel. We got YouTube channels for all those. Check those out. Subscribe to them. click subscribe. Smash the subscribe. Smash the like and subscribe button.

Flipside canvas, Dakota Myers making awesome stuff to hang on your wall. Books. We got a ton of books. Freaking Ryan. Ryan Holiday writing books like a boss, dude, just turning them out. So check out all his books. He's got, I think he said 13 of them. Pretty ridiculous.

But they're all freaking good to go. So check those out. And then, of course, I've written a bunch of books as well. I guess I need to get busy if I want to go and freaking trump old Ryan Holiday because I don't like getting beat because my ego's in the way. But a bunch of books, man, reading as we were talking about, readings how you learn. You can learn from other people's experiences. You can refresh your memory. You can be detached.

You can do assessments. Like all these things are through reading. So get yourself some books. We also have Eschlam Front. It's our leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Ashlandfront.com for details. We have August 8 through the 10th.

I think we got a couple spots open for the Little Big Horn Battlefield review. Come and check that out. We got it. We got an FTX, like back to back. FTX has taken place in Texas. When's that? September, I think. We got in October, then is the next muster October 18th through the 20th.

Listen, we sell out of everything. So if you want to come, please just go register. We also have the Women's Assembly. That's September 14th through 16th, Jamie Cochran, the C-O at Eshlam Front. And an incredible leader in her own right, she is running that event for women. So you can check that as well. We also have the Extreme Ownership Academy where all these little lessons that give you the skills to make better decisions, to maneuver properly, to build good relationships, all these things that make up life itself.

Relationships, decision making. These are things that make up life itself. And if you're good at them, if you're good at decision making, if you're good at building relationships, if you're good at discipline, if you're good at these things, you will be good at life. So check out Extreme Ownership Academy. It's at Extreme Ownership.com.

We got free courses on there that you can take. Listen, go take some of those free courses. if nothing else. Look, if you're broke right now and you can't afford to pay for some of the courses, that's fine. Go and take the free courses. The value in the free courses, you will benefit from immensely. You'll benefit with your family. You'll benefit with your business. You'll benefit in life. So get in there. It's free. Get in there. Get in there. It's gold. We're giving away gold. If I could have had these lessons when I was 23 years old or 20, 27 years old or 32 years old my whole life would be better

I had to learn them the hard way now I want you to have them the easy way go to Extreme Ownership.com and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their families gold star families check out Mark Lee's mom Mama Lee she's got a charity organization She helps so many veterans Get into a better place in life through the therapies that she offers and pays for so go to america's mighty warriors.org if you want to help out mark lee's mom mama lee just an amazing woman and also don't forget about micah think latest report is that he just fought off uh two grizzly bears with a pocket knife and a twig and he came out on top that's

Micah Fink. He's got folks up in the field right now. He is taking veterans into the field where they can get lost and then get found. Incredible program that he's running, Heroes and Horses.org. And if you want to connect with us on the interwebs, ryanholiday.com. Also, Facebook, Twitter, and the gram at Ryan Holiday. Dailystoic.com, Facebook, Twitter, the gram, and the YouTube channel at Daily Stoic. And, of course, Of course Kerry is at Carrie Helton. Kerry underscore Helton. Guess what?

He missed the boat. He missed the boat. He had to throw that underscoring there. Too slow. Too slow. Too slow. Underscore. Have you tried to get that?

You tried to get that Carrie Helton? Yes, sir. No nothing? Nothing. Just didn't response? Nothing. No response. Zero movement.

Is Kerry Helton active? No. So it's just somebody's just sitting on it. Somebody parked it. I got some connections. Let's see what's up. Let's go. Let's go.

And I am at Jocko Willink. Of course. Of course. Please, please, please. Just watch your back because the algorithm sneak up on you. Put you in a chokehold. You'll wake up and you wasted 48 minutes of time. So just be careful.

That's the algorithm. And of course, thanks to all our military folks on watch around the globe right now, protecting us and our way of life. Thank you for what you do every single day. And of course, the same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all you first responders, you sacrifice to keep us safe here at home. And we thank you for that. And everyone else out there from Marcus Aurelius, warrior, emperor, stoic, we should discipline ourselves in small,

things and from these progress to things of greater value. As we say on the podcast here, unmitigated daily discipline in all things. Also from Marcus Aurelius, stop allowing your mind to be a slave to be jerked about by selfish impulses. What does that mean? Do what you're supposed to do. And finally, from Epictetus. Freedom.

isn't secured by filling up on your heart's desire, but by removing your heart's desire. Or, as we like to say, discipline equals freedom. And that's what we've got. Until next time, this is Kerry and Jocko. Out.