Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 422 - Ryan Holiday

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Ryan Holiday is a best-selling author, entrepreneur and creative marketing advisor who works with media companies, authors, and start ups. He is the best-selling author of the books, “The Obstacle Is The Way”, “Ego Is The Enemy”, and “The Daily Stoic”. He runs the YouTube channel, The Daily Stoic, which provides lessons and techniques to practice the philosophy of stoicism in your everyday life. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting our sponsors! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project podcast hosted by Mark Bell, co-hosted by Nseema Iyeng and myself, Andrew Zaragoza. This episode is recorded on August 25th and it is with author and blogger Ryan Holiday. Ryan has written several books, several successful books, most of which cover Stoicism and he runs the Daily Stoic blog and YouTube channel. He has studied Stoicism for over 15 years and creates some of the best videos and articles on Stoicism. His YouTube videos have made a huge impact on the Power Project crew. Even if we're not currently watching one of his videos, one of us is sending each other a video

of his because the way he's able to produce, you know, what he does is he takes some of these old ancient writings and he reinterprets them and he makes them so powerful for everything that we do every single day. So, that's just one of the many reasons why we're so happy to have him on today. Today, we talked about how the Stoicism philosophy can help during this pandemic that's happening right now. We talked about how Marcus Aurelius, during when he was writing his journaling that later turned into the meditations books, he was actually writing those during a pandemic. So a lot of stuff runs parallel to what they were doing back in those days to what we're doing today. Another philosophy that Stoics would practice would be kind of not getting too excited about something and not getting too sad about something.

So we talked whether or not having a positive mindset is actually a good or bad practice. We also asked Ryan what life was like during ancient Roman times. And again, the way he explains it, you just kind of can close your eyes and imagine that that was back then and it could very well be right now. And of course, we got a lot of background on who Ryan Holiday is, how he came to be such a successful writer. So naturally, I'm going to bug him and ask him how to become a better writer. And he gave us some pretty good tips and some

tricks up his sleeve. So it was a lot of fun. I highly recommend you guys get your notebooks out. You're going to want to take a bunch of notes because Ryan Holiday, he's so charismatic. He speaks so well. And you guys will instantly understand why we're such gigantic fans of uh ryan so without further ado ladies and gentlemen please enjoy this episode with the one and only ryan holiday today's episode it's a special episode we got ryan holiday on the show today yes we do you excited i'm very excited yeah super excited are we are we allowed to show our excitement or uh no no emotion we have maybe after we got to act like we've been we got to be philosophical about yes that thing

today's episode is brought to you by piedmontese beef you guys know how much we love that because it's lean it's tender it tastes really good and andrew's going to tell you how you can save some dough for uh yeah to save down for more information on Piedmontese, please head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. But yeah, today's been circled on my calendar for a really long time.

We talked about stoicism yesterday on the podcast, and who's been talking about it more than this guy? I know. He took a deep dive into it. Yeah. And I know that he's friends with Tim Ferriss, and we mentioned Tim Ferriss yesterday, how I think Tim Ferriss is kind of one of the guys

that kind of kicked stoicism back up into the air a lot. And then, you know, someone like Ryan Holiday done an amazing job writing books and making people really aware of it. So it's going to be awesome to get to know him and get to ask him some questions about it. And here we are. Yeah.

Hey, everyone. Hi. How's it going? Great to have you on the show today, Ryan. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me. First thing I want to kind of kick stuff off with here is I think that I think it's amazing how you've been

talking about stoicism and you've been talking about philosophy and how people can incorporate some of this stuff into their lives. And you've been talking about it for a few years and then we end up in this pandemic and we end up in this spot where we really need people like you. We really need to lean on a lot of these thoughts and a lot of these ideas that you've helped, I guess, make popular once again through a lot of your writings and a lot of your books. So we really appreciate that.

But how have you personally utilized stoicism, utilized some of the philosophy that you learned about in the face of this current pandemic and what we're dealing with here in the United States and worldwide? Yeah, well, thank you very much. I mean, it is interesting. I think, one, we think that the sort of the ancient world or the past was just sort of radically different than our today's world. And the exact opposite is true. I mean, so Marcus Aurelius, who I probably write more about than any other historical figure, he wrote his famous book, Meditations, during what we now refer to as the Antonine Plague, a 15-year pandemic that originates in the eastern end of the empire. It's brought home by soldiers. It quickly overwhelms the society, the military,

the healthcare system, and was sort of struggling with so many of the things that we're struggling about now. And so that's actually one of the things the Stoics say is basically, you know, the sort of the truth, the truth of that aphorism that the more things change, the more they stay the same. People have been struggling with economic difficulties, with bad marriages, with, you know, with getting fired from jobs, with going to war, with dealing with the pandemic since, you know, as long as there have been human beings. And so obviously one of the things I try to do is always look towards that very hard-won historical wisdom and try to apply it in my life. And I mean, one of the things that I'm sort of really trying to think about in this pandemic is twofold. One, the Stoics say that sort of what we don't expect is more painful than what we do expect. And so I've sort of always tried to remind myself, hey, things are good right now, but that's no guarantee they're going to be in the future. So, you know, I feel lucky and fortunate in the sense that, you know, there was some fat built into my lifestyle. There was some, you know, I live kind of out in the country. I don't live in some big apartment building surrounded by other people. I sort of already made some decisions that

made dealing with this easier. And then the other thing that the Stokes talk about over and over again is just sort of the importance of, you know, sort of how our actions impact other people. So like when I look at the last five or six months, I'm proud of a lot of things. I'm proud of the work I've been able to accomplish. I'm happy with the time I spent with my family. But what I feel most proud of is like, look, I know I didn't give this thing to anyone else.

You know, I know I kept my family safe. I know, you know what I mean? Like what I'm trying to think about is just like, Hey, have I tried to minimize harm being inflicted on everyone else? And that seems to be something that a lot of people are struggling with, uh, wrapping their heads around. How can we, um, work towards not being walking contradictions? Because I find that, you know, some of the things that we hear in philosophy, especially stoic philosophy, they kind of teach us like calm down, slow down a little bit, pay attention and things of that nature. But at the same time, we're trying to be the fucking best, you know, we're trying to like make the most out of every day. And I heard an interesting

conversation between you and Tim Ferriss and also between you and Tom Bilyeu, where you guys were kind of walking through that. I can see in all three of you how you guys, all three of you guys are really thriving and trying to be the best that you possibly can. At the same time, you're trying to be like relaxed enough so you're not freaking out and having tons of anxiety about it. No, I think first off, let's just admit that it is a tension, right? And in a way, I think Western philosophy, particularly Stoicism, is more well suited to the world that we're in. There is, when you read sort of Buddhism and Zen philosophy, there's this sense of sort of like retreating from the world, living in some beautiful monastery in the hills of Japan or something. in some beautiful monastery in the hills of Japan or something. What I love about Stoicism is, you know, Marcus Aurelius is the ruler of the world as he's writing about these things. You know, Seneca, in addition to being a powerful politician, was one of Rome's sort of most respected and popular

playwrights. So he's a writer at the same time, and which obviously I relate to because that's my profession. So I don't think the Stoics were in any way saying that you can't try to do great things. You can't be a master at whatever your craft or profession is that you shouldn't try to win or you shouldn't try to be world class at anything, whether it's wrestling, which they talked about, weightlifting, which they talk about, or writing, which they obviously talk about as well. But what the Stoic tries to focus on, what I try to focus on and gives me more peace within the ambition and competition that I'm in, is that I try to focus first and foremost on the part of the competition that I control. So when I'm writing a book, I'm not writing a book to sell a lot of copies, although I do hope that it sells a lot of copies. I just know that once it leaves my hands, it's to a certain degree outside of my control. I don't control what a critic at a newspaper writes about it. I don't control where it lands on the New York Times seller list. list. So instead of wasting time, energy, anxiety on those things, I'm going to focus the entirety of my effort on the writing itself, the process itself. So I think one of the ways the Stoics

sort of cuts through this tension is by just truly and deeply throwing themselves into the presentness of the competition, of the fight, of the election they're trying to win. And they're detached a little bit more from the results. You know, I'm curious about this, really, because when we were talking about the parallels between what's going on right now, and obviously the pandemic when Mark Servalius was writing all his meditations. There seems to be kind of a difference, obviously, back then, I don't know, in terms of the way the, I guess, media plays in terms of forming people's opinions. And obviously you are an expert in the dark arts of media manipulation, right? So when, like, for example, when I see my mom, she's watching the news, it stresses her out. And my family, like they're going back and forth. They're stressed about this with COVID.

And it's just really, really, really bad. So how would you like using, I guess, or how do you yourself navigate those waters of hearing things coming right and left about this pandemic, about how horrible it might be, or just all the different things that may happen. How do you navigate that? Or how do you advise people to navigate those? Well, I think we do a bad job as a society making a distinction between being informed and watching the news, right? It's important to understand what's happening and it's important to understand how the world works. I think it's less important to watch two hours of CNN or MSNBC or Fox News every day. So, you know, even 2000 years ago, the Stoics were talking about not being distracted by sort of the latest rumor, not getting involved in gossip, not falling prey

to fear mongering. And they were talking about wisdom instead. And I think wisdom tends to come from books. Wisdom comes from insights and conversations from smart people. Wisdom comes from stepping back and thinking about it. So what I always ask people when I hear that they watch a lot of news or whatever, I always go like, how often do you ever make decisions based on this information? Like, for instance, like the under, although there's been some good news and bad news over the last like seven months with COVID, the underlying facts of the virus have not changed. It's still really bad. It's still going to kill a lot of people. You can still mitigate it by social distancing, wearing a mask, you know, avoiding unnecessary risks, so on and so forth. And that these are sort of our obligations as a society while we work on on better treatments and hopefully a vaccine.

on better treatments and hopefully a vaccine. And, and so I think, you know, you could have gotten that in early March, not tuned into the news or a newspaper or Twitter and, and not missed anything except a lot of things that were designed to either get you prematurely excited or piss you off. And so I think a lot of people tell themselves like, I'm doing my civic duty by like watching the news when really they could go read a book about the Spanish flu, which was, you know, a hundred years ago, written 10 years ago. I really recommend John Berry's book, The Great Influenza. It's an incredible book. It will scare the shit out of you. I don't know. And how important good leadership in a pandemic is.

But the point being, study real information, real history, as opposed to breaking news. And I think you're going to be less anxious and smarter ultimately. news. And I think you're going to be less anxious and smarter ultimately. I think what I've found with stoicism and just in studying some philosophy in general is it oftentimes has left me kind of baffled and almost like ashamed to admit that I thought a different way before I read a certain passage. And it kind of made me feel kind of stupid where I'm like, wow, like, how come I just didn't know that before? But you know, you don't know stuff unless you see it or unless you read it or let's hear somebody else. You know, the information needs to be like transmitted to you or something like that. But do you think that some of these things

are like innately within us to some degree or these things that we have like where do you think this stuff like truly comes from because i know that stoicism is uh you know an ancient philosophy but there was people even before that that felt the same way as the stoic philosophers well i i think you're underselling your intelligence there because you just sort of stumbled upon one of the sort of great paradoxes or questions of philosophy that Plato talks about. He says, if you don't know what you're looking for, how can you know when you found it, right? So how can you know something's true unless you already knew it in some way? So there is this kind of mystical nature of all of it. And in a weird way, I think it's captured in this great

Zen saying, which is, and I'm sure you guys have seen it with the athletes that you've worked with over the years. It goes, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And so I think sometimes you were just not in the right place. You had all the intelligence necessary to grasp the fact, but there was something between you and that fact or that epiphany or that awareness. So I think that is the importance of studying and reading and having conversations is that sometimes you got to approach something three or four times before you can really land on it. I think the other impediment to wisdom, and I'm sure you've seen this even more in the gym, comes from Epictetus.

He says, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And so oftentimes people's ego is what's getting in the way of learning something of like what you talked about, that like a lot of people are not okay with that feeling, like the feeling of being wrong, of, of, of being a little sheepishly embarrassed that you didn't know something. That's the engine by which you get better. You know what I mean? Like if you, if you don't ask, you can't learn. And so, because a lot

of us are afraid to seem dumb or to ask or to be laughed at, we leave, you know, I think real opportunities on the table. A leap that I made in my own life years ago ended up, it ended up allowing me to have more bandwidth to think about what I ultimately ended up thinking about. And I created a product called the slingshot and we're here in Sacramento, California out of this 24,000 square foot building because of this idea, this creation, this invention. Sure. A friend of mine came up to me and he was like, Hey, you know, I have,

I know a friend that's opening up a gym and it would be really cool if you had your gym inside of their gym. And I was like, well, that's dumb. I already have my own gym, but I had a place that I couldn't afford at the time. I had a, it was only 900 square feet. So like it, I couldn't even have the stuff that I wanted to have in there in the first place. And, uh, it was chasing down a dream of, of power lifting and lifting as heavy as I could. And I was going towards some of that.

So all of that felt good. But to your point, I already thought I knew everything. I was like, you know, really, I was comfortable with that. But meanwhile, you know, I couldn't, I wouldn't have, I didn't have any cars that were reliable. They were breaking down all the time, you know? And so one day I just thought to myself, well, how foolish of me, like I, you know, I should go and check out this gym that's in the area. So I did, I checked out the gym. I ended up talking to the owners, had a great conversation. Turns out they didn't have a lot of equipment because they were just opening up. And I was able to move my stuff into their gym and have free rent for a year. During that year

is where I made all my progress. During that year is where I stopped worrying so much about bills. I stopped being so concerned with whether my car was running or not. And I was able to provide a gym that was free for powerlifting that really gave back to the community a lot. And then I thought of this invention, which is the slingshot, which that kind of launched everything. But had I just thought like, oh yeah, I'm good. Like I know everything. But I had just thought like, oh, yeah, I'm good. Like, I know everything. And but I had to kind of look inside and say, hey, dude, like, are you really that pumped about where you're at right now? Like, this ain't a great place to be. You can certainly gain more knowledge. Why don't you listen to that guy? And why don't you go investigate that? So I really like that point hits me really hard. Well, I think I think, too, like when we hear about ego, we go like, well, I'm not an egomaniac. Like, I'm not I think too, like when we hear about ego, we go like, well, I'm not

an egomaniac. Like I'm not as bad as Donald Trump or Kanye West or, you know, whatever we, we, when we, we think ego is like only this, like extremely toxic, like beyond, uh, like living on a separate planet, you know, delusion. And the reality is ego is, is this sort of force that is always there, whatever we're doing. And it's just often an impediment to getting better. I mean, the way I often tell people is like, if you think you're as good as you can be, which is what ego often whispers in our ear, in a sense, you're right. Like you cannot get any better. Right. And so, so the humility to be able to say like, hey, I'm going to partner with someone else or the humility even to say like, I'm going to explore another opportunity and that it's not a threat to my identity to to experiment, to have a conversation, to look at going in a different direction. different direction. It's really, it's not only is it really important, I think we massively underestimate the cost that that attitude, that that lack of humility has for people, because

we don't see all the doors that we've shut. We've shut in our own faces, right? We don't, it's like, let's say you hadn't listened and you just continued doing what you're doing. You would have probably continued to be successful. You might have ended up somewhere relatively similar to where you are now, but you would have had no idea of all the things that you missed out on. And so ego is this really insidious force in that it costs us things, but it so blinds us that we're not even really aware of

what we're missing out on. So, going back real quick to kind of like what Mark said, feeling dumb once you start reading into stoicism, we've been told, a majority of us have been told all our lives like, oh, you got to have a positive mindset, you got to have a positive outlook, no negative thoughts, like hope for the best, think this. But then you start reading into stoicism and it's like, not only should you not expect anything from anyone, but also kind of prepare for actually the worst scenario. So my question to you is like, is there really anything inherently bad about like hoping for a better outcome? Or is that just kind of taking

you two steps back where you really should be, you know, prepping for that possible negative outcome? And then when something good happens, just be like, sick. Like, that was great. Yeah, look, I don't think there's anything wrong with hoping for the best. I think the problem is that hoping for the best is often an excuse for not doing the hard work or having the hard conversation that you should be having. Right. So you're killing us over here. That's a great quote right there. I think I think like to go back to this pandemic, it's not that we should have closed down the world permanently in in fear of there being a pandemic in the future. It's that you would want a pandemic response team and a and a playbook that you would go. You would want a system of tools that would help you predict whether, you know, a pandemic might happen.

What are the warning signs? What are the precautions? So on and so forth. And then what's the emergency team that you call to the scene when it happens to be the case that you are facing an outbreak of a contagious disease? an outbreak of a contagious disease. And look, the reality is we had a lot of this in place, and it was unfortunately dismantled precisely because of some of that optimistic thinking. We go, hey, it's costing me $20,000 a year to have insurance on my building. And that seems silly and will seem silly until the day it burns down. And I'm really going to wish that I was paying those insurance premiums. And so I think more practically, it's not that you don't, you never hope, you never gamble, you never push forward. It's that by knowing that you've covered a lot

of the bases, you can more confidently proceed rather than sort of recklessly proceed. So the Stoics had this exercise of premeditatio malorum, which means a premeditation of evils. And so it's just always thinking about, hey, here are the things that are outside my control that could happen, but here's my likely response to those things if they happen. And by the way, I'm not gonna predicate my happiness or make conditional my happiness

on everything going my way because that's very unlikely to happen. So again, I'd rather be pleasantly surprised that something bad didn't happen than unpleasantly surprised that a bad thing that everyone warned me about and I ignored did happen. Do you think you'd give us some insight into what the ancient Romans, what their lives were like? Because I think that maybe, I know a lot of people listening probably, especially the people that are fans of you understand, but it's my understanding that they like had everything and then some, and they were kind of in a spot that we're in now i guess you'd say like that society that culture had so much that just to get a thrill i mean they would you know watch people fight to the death and

that things things seemed a little a little crazy a little bizarre at the time so maybe you can fill us in on what that looked like well so so I'll read this quick passage from Meditations that might give you a sense of, you know, sort of how similar the Romans' issues were to our own. This is from Book 5 of Meditations. Marcus says, at dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. What do I have to complain of? I was going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do. Then he says, or is this what I was created for, to huddle under the blankets and stay warm? And he says, but it's nicer here. And then he says, so you were born to feel nice instead of doing things and experiencing them?

And so the point is, 2,000 years ago, the most powerful man in the world was having the same trouble getting out of bed that I had this morning when I heard my three-year-old crying that he was awake and wanted to eat. And so the reality is the Stoics were experiencing so much of the same things. I opened, in my book, Stillness is the Key, I opened with this with this scene from seneca and seneca is and you guys would love this do i have a copy uh here give me give me give me one sure sure thing told you that was a good good uh good passage there that's you that's the one that fired me up yesterday not to read too much of my of my own stuff but seneca in uh the year let's pull this up is that an iron maiden shirt of course it is fucking sick bro um uh okay so it was the late first century a.d and lucius seneca rome's uh most influential power broker was struggling to to work. The problem was the

ear-shattering, soul-rattling noise that poured in from the street below. Rome had always been a loud city. Think New York City construction loud. But on the block where Seneca was staying was a deafening cacophony of disturbances. Athletes worked out in the gymnasium underneath his suite of rooms, dropping heavy weights. A masseuse pummeled the backs of old fat men. Swimmers splashed in the water. At the entrance of the building, a pickpocket was being arrested and making a scene. Passing carriages rumbled over the stone streets

while carpenters hammered away in their shops and vendors shouted their wares. Children laughed and played while dogs barked. The point being, that scene he's describing from Rome is identical to Los Angeles or New York City or Rio de Janeiro. People are people, and we struggle with the same things that we've always struggled. And I love that scene because Seneca, his apartment is above a gym, and he's complaining about the noise of the weightlifters dropping their weights

and the fighters fighting in the ring below. Like the same sounds that you guys are hearing in your office right now and you're trying to struggle to do a podcast or maybe you're trying to write an email. Like 2000 years ago, Seneca was bothered by the same things and was trying to sort of concentrate and tune it out.

And so, yeah, look, people are people and the Romans were met very different from us in a lot of ways, but very similar to us in other ways. Yeah, I find that fascinating. When I went to Rome, I saw that they had certain buildings had like heated floors. The Colosseum had a retractable dome. I was like, what in the, how is this possible? This is so long ago. It almost seems like we didn't make any progress when you go back and look at how advanced they were for back then. Well, I mean, the gym experience is a great example. I was in Budapest in October, and people don't realize Budapest was actually a Roman city. And Marcus Aurelius wrote a large chunk of meditations while he was there. And the point being,

I went into this Turkish bath that had been built in the 1600s, but itself was based on the Roman baths that were there 2000 years ago. And a pool of hot water, a steam room, a cold pool, that technology is essentially the same. And even if the way they're heating the water through the pipes is slightly different, the experience of jumping in a hot pool and then a cold pool and then wrapping yourself in a towel, I mean, that is essentially exactly the same as it was 2000 years ago. And so that's just, yeah, as you said, it's humbling and also a little terrifying at the same time that we haven't made that much more progress. You know, I want to know about this because I don't know how long you've been delving into like stoke tests. I know you've been writing

about this since maybe 2013 or 14, right? Like that's, um, I would say, I think I first found Marcus Aurelius in 2005 or six. So go, going on 15 or so years.

Yeah. Okay. 15 or so years. Now I heard you in a, in an interview talk about how, uh, like one of your journaling processes, like recounting your actions you took throughout the day. And I don't know if you said you got that from Marcus or Seneca. I don't remember which. But I'm also curious, like,

what other solid daily practices did you start implementing into your daily routine from what the Stokes have done? And how has that benefited you? Yeah, so a couple. So journaling is a very big one. And meditations, which I was showing you, like, is essentially the diary of Marcus Aurelius. So he's taking time in the morning to just sit down with some paper and just put his thoughts out. And I think that's a really important one. The great way to start the day. It's a great way to center yourself. Like one of my practices, it's not really stoked, but like not only do I journal in the morning, practice is it's not really stoic, but like, not only do I journal in the morning, but my rule is I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake, ideally even longer. Like, so I don't

want to be reactive from the beginning. I want to start my day very intentionally, which I think is a stoic practice. Seneca actually also adds in kind of a review at the end of the day as well, which I think can be really helpful. Seneca talks about walking. I take a walk each day, which I don't consider my exercise. Like I'm walking for the mental benefits, for the sun, for some time being present. So I do a walk each day. One of the other Stoic exercises, I have a little coin here that says memento mori. The Stoics sort of would meditate on their mortality, the idea being that it's really easy to get distracted, to take things for granted, to prioritize the wrong things. If that sort of creeping fantasy of living forever, of being invulnerable to fate or disease creeps in. And so what the Stoics wanted to remind,

wanted us to spend some time thinking about each day is like, hey, today could be your last day on the planet. How, like, you don't know that for sure. So you can't like, you know, go try heroin or something, but it could be your last day on the planet. So as an insurance policy, are you sure that you lived well? And so that, that's another one that I think about. Is your wife into a lot of this stuff or she just like, you know, you bring up a new thing that you found and she's like, Oh my God,

you're bringing this shit up again. To go to your point about how some people are sort of naturally these things and some people aren't, I would say a lot of times, especially, and we've been with each other since almost 15 years ago. So this sort of is a shared journey that we've been on. But I can remember literally dozens of times where I've said like, you know, I was reading this today and I sort of explained it and she's like, you know, I told you that like many times, right? I think one of the reasons that some of us have to read things philosophically, and this is the argument about Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius' stepfather was his kind of hero, his model in life, a guy named

Antoninus Pius. And what biographers have said is sort of Antoninus was naturally all the things that Marcus Aurelius had to work really hard to be. And so I think the reason some of us become authors is because we are obsessed with exploring the idea because it's not naturally sort of intuitively how we think. So, yeah, I definitely have some eye rolling from my wife about a lot of this stuff. Where were you at in your life when you found some of these, some of this information on philosophy? Like, we have a co-worker here, Steven Granzella. He went to school with you. Are some people that went to school with

you or knew you previously or like, holy crap, I can't believe that guy wrote about stoicism. He used to be a maniac. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure that I'm sure they do. So I went to school in Northern California with Steve. And then I went to college in Southern California. I would say the awakening kind of came in between there, like as it is for a lot of people, you know, you leave home and, and you go to college maybe, and you're suddenly exposed to all these different things that you weren't. And that, that was definitely my introduction to, to philosophy and to big ideas. I think the, I think the issue is a lot of people get exposed to these things, but, but as you said, we can close our mind to them or we can go, I don't want to go any further. That's making me uncomfortable. And so I do like to preface the fact that I write about stoicism. That's my sort of job and my

fascination. Obviously, as far as applying these things in my day-to-day life, I'm a human being like everyone else and sort of on a very different, much slower, much less eloquent journey to sort of apply. You know, if we're talking about getting up out of bed in the morning or we're talking about, you know, controlling your temper, these are things that we all struggle with. And I think when you read meditations, the way I read it is, oh, Marcus is writing this down because he had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. No one writes in their diary, I'm so amazing. I got out of bed this morning. Congratulations, right? He's having that, he's recording a dialogue he had with himself and he's not happy with that dialogue in the same way that

maybe you're bumping up against some limitation in your sport and you can feel that voice of resistance inside you. And you have to win the argument with yourself. And so I think that's what, to me, that's what philosophy is about. It's about trying to win that argument over the course of one's life. Do some of your friends and maybe other family members, do they turn to you for advice? Or are they kind of like, shit, I can't ask him anything because he's just going to tell me how it is? Because you have so many different passages and quotes from Stoicism that maybe they just don't even want to hear it because they don't like hearing the truth. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I try to be an approachable, regular person, and I try to keep – as I was saying, my work is sort of the articulation of the ideal, and then I try to be very understanding of real people in the real world. So it's not a, I don't, Seneca talks about this in one of his letters, the point of philosophy saying is to scrub off your own faults, not to go around like indicting other people or lording it over

themselves. So, you know, I obviously, I think we all struggle with, you know, judging other people as it talks about in the Bible. But I think that's an impulse that we want to keep in check, certainly. Pete Cool. And then you just mentioned the Bible. Is there any time where Stoicism and, like, religion run parallel? Or is there too many different, like, you know different intersections here and there? Well, they certainly intersect. I mean, one of the interesting things is Jesus and Seneca are born the same year,

and Seneca's brother, Gio, is in the Bible. He's basically a Roman magistrate, and he oversees a case involving St. Paul, and he lets St. Paul go. There's some other sort of reported instances of persecution of the Christians by the Stoics, and then, you know, a few hundred years later, then it was the Christians who were persecuting the philosophers. So there's sort of a nasty history there as well, but the reality is that the four virtues of Stoicism are courage, moderation, or self-discipline, which obviously you guys talk a lot about, justice, and then finally wisdom. And those are also the four cardinal virtues of Christianity. So I think what you see is,

whether you're talking about Zen Buddhism, or you're talking about Stoicism, or you're talking about Christianity, or you're talking about Hinduism or Islam, is that all the schools are kind of, you know, at the core of it circling around the same essential truths. They might have different explanations, and they might have different names for it, and they might have some very diametrically opposed beliefs. But but at the end of the day, I think truth is truth. And we all sort of get there eventually. You know, I have a lot of people in my life that, like, they asked me about some of the stuff I'm reading in terms of your books or any of this stuff. And some of these individuals are very emotionally driven. And I think one of the things, we talked about it yesterday, when I was initially reading about this stuff a few years ago,

one of the things that I got wrong was I was like, oh, wow, this is going to help me control my emotions and be, you know, like, but in essence, you're not necessarily, I guess, controlling your emotions more so just understanding that they're there and not being controlled by them. Right. So my question to you is a lot of those individuals that talk to me about this view stoicism very negatively because they're like, why do you not want to allow yourself to feel these things? And what's the what's the benefit of that to those types of individuals?

How would you explain the benefit of this being? Because this seems to be to them kind of like when you hear the word stoic, you think of a very straight edged stoic individual, but that's not necessarily what this is, right? Yeah, there's a big distinction between the word stoic and stoicism, right? And that's really hard for people to wrap their heads around. Stoicism, the lowercase word means the absence of emotions in the English language. Uppercase stoicism is the philosophy that we're talking about. And it's really not about having no emotions. I think it's about eliminating destructive emotions like hatred or jealousy or anger and really probably not even eliminating them.

The Stokes would say it's involuntary that you'd have emotional reactions to things, but let's just make sure we're not making decisions based on those emotions. So, I mean, one of the interesting passages that I was just talking to a friend of mine about in meditations, and one of the interesting things is, I think as you read and reread and you go on this journey, as you were saying earlier, you discover things that you've seen a thousand times, but didn't get the first time. Anyways, in this one passage, Marcus Aurelius talks about eliminating or conquering the passions, he says, and replacing them with love. And so love isn't a word that you'd think you'd hear from Marcus Aurelius, but I think that's what he's saying. He's saying like, no, let's replace anger with love. Let's replace lust with love. Let's replace ambition with love. Let's replace impatience with love. And so it's absolutely not about becoming a sociopath or a robot or, you know, a feelingless person. I think it's about getting yourself to a place where you're not jerked around by forces inside of you that you don't understand or control.

I think being an artist and being a creator as you are with being an author, I think can be really difficult. And a lot of people probably desire that lifestyle, but they also don't want to be like the starving artist. So how did you navigate those waters? I know a little bit of your history. You, you worked at American apparel for several years and so forth.

Did you kind of work to make a living as you were working towards, I guess, your quote unquote dream? Yeah, I definitely did. And also wasn't quite sure what the dream was. And so I was just doing things, exploring things, meeting people, learning. And yeah, ideally putting myself in a position where I could take some career risks that, you know, and not and not worry about, you know, living under a bridge somewhere. So I think a lot of people think writing is a profession that you just pick up and do. And really, writing is not the hard part of the job.

The job is having something to say. Do you know what I mean? Like, I was always writing, but I wasn't a writer until my first book came out. And that was, I think I started my first blog in 2005. And my first book came out in the summer of 2012. So it took a long time, but that time was probably the best time that I spend. And I've done almost a book a year since then. So I'm still reaping the benefits of that period. And it even took time for that to grow as well, right? You wrote an article, I think someone was attracted to it, and then they came to you and said, hey, I'd love to do a book with you. And your mentor, your boss told you like, no, dude, you ain't ready for that. And you're like, what? I thought you'd be pumped for me. Well, no. And that's where the ego thing

comes in. Definitely. Just because you get a chance doesn't mean you're ready to take advantage of that chance. And even with my book, The Obstacle is the Way, that book came out in May of 2014, and it hit the bestseller list for the first time in May of 2019. So I think that's the other thing, and I'm sure you guys see this. Everyone is looking for a shortcut. Everyone wants you to guarantee they can get results by this time or that time. And the reality is that book took five years to build its audience organically and naturally. And it wasn't five years of sitting around waiting. It was five years of consecutive, unending work on it. And so, yeah, it took longer than I... certainly if you had told me at, you know, 18 years old that I could be a writer, but, you know, I wasn't going to hit the bestseller list on that book until I was 31 or 32 years old, I would have said, like, fuck that, that's impossible. Like, I can't wait that long, you know?

And so patience is a thing we often have to learn by experience. You know, a lot of our audiences, um, like college students and individuals like at that age, early twenties, et cetera. Right. Um, and I've heard that like, you know, you dropped out after your first year, I believe. Um, and I don't know when you got your apprenticeship with Robert Green, if you had a relationship with him beforehand. But my question to you is, how did you have, first off, the confidence to do that at that time? And then, you know, moving on to everything that you've done since, what does your self-education process kind of

look like? Because a lot of people taking that, I guess, taking that step, they feel that they're lacking something because they didn't go and get their degree in X, Y, or Z. Yeah, I mean, I've always been a big believer in that distinction between school and education. And so I was in school, I was at the end of my second year at UC Riverside. And I had an opportunity through relationships I'd built while I was in school and writing for this college newspaper. I had an opportunity to meet some writers and then work for them. And what I realized is that if what I wanted to do was be a writer, the best way to do that would be to be around writers and to learn directly from actual masters of that craft. That's not to say the professors

at the university didn't have things to teach me, but they just couldn't teach me as directly and from the same position of expertise. So I was very scared by it. It was not an easy decision by any means. I almost backed out of it many times. But you took the gamble. Ultimately, what I realized is that it actually didn't take that much confidence because you could always go back. I think one of the things that scares us about taking these risks and Tim Ferriss, I wish I'd known him when I was that age, but he said something to me recently where he was saying it's much better to think about these things in terms of experiments. So if you're like, I'm dropping out of college, so for the rest of my life, I will not have gone to college and I won't be a college graduate.

That's a really intimidating, scary thing to do. But if you tell yourself I'm taking one year off or one month off from college, you know, that's much more feasible. And so what I basically realized was, oh, I could always go back. So I took this calculated risk. I started to see returns from it pretty quickly and in that sense never looked back. But there is always that kind of, you know, what did I miss out on? What did I not learn? And so I try to obviously, you know, retain a push towards maintaining, like, I'm committed to continuing my education on an ongoing basis, as opposed to what unfortunately, a lot of people do, which is they go like, you know,

I did 12 years of, of, of school, and then I did four years of college, like, I'm done, you know. And so I'm thinking about it more as an ongoing sustainable lifestyle model, as opposed to, you know, this thing you did once and then you're finished. In some of your research, what have you seen in terms of the Stoics talking specifically about like happiness or sadness? Where do you like where what have you seen from them where they think that happiness and sadness mainly comes from? And then maybe even your own personal thoughts on how you view happiness and sadness. Yeah, the Stoics probably don't talk about happiness maybe in the modern sense of that word. word. But I think for them, I was telling you about my book Stillness earlier, that idea of not being jerked around by emotions in either sense, like not fearing what's to come, not worrying about what's happened in the past, not feeling unfulfilled or empty because you haven't

done this or that, not comparing yourself to other people. I think what philosophy is trying to get us towards is a place of kind of equanimity and calmness. I think in the West, we tend to see happiness as like achievement and activity and busyness and exhilaration. In a sense, we're really conflating happiness with accomplishment and pleasure. And so for the Stoics, I think happiness was something quieter and calmer. And that's been one of the weird things about the last four or five months for me, as obviously as devastating as it's been to watch everything that's happened, as I'm sure for you guys, there's been a not insignificant financial hit. But, you know, on the other hand, I'm not sure

I've ever been happier, which feels almost offensive to say, given the suffering and tragedy that's happening. But I've never been happier in that, you know, I've never spent this many days at home. I've never watched this many sunsets from my own back porch. You know, I've never, never spent this much time with my family. I've never been this concentrated on, on like the part of my work I enjoy the most, right? Like the pandemic can take away my ability to travel, but it can't take my ability to sit down and write. In fact, it's almost more conducive to that than than the busier life of all the opportunities that were available to me before. So I think for the Stoics and certainly what I try to think about is my definition of happiness is sort of control over your own life.

think about is my definition of happiness is sort of control over your own life. And the more control I have over my life, the happier I am. And the more I sort of submit myself to outside forces, the less happy I am. So, what did the Stoics celebrate then? Like, is there anything in the writings to where like they had a huge celebration and all that good stuff? Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, look, the Romans obviously celebrated military victories and athletic prowess and and and all sort of, you know, creative expression and all the things that we celebrate as a society today. Did the Stoics think it was a good idea to predicate your happiness on, you know, whether you won this election or that election, whether you were the richest man in Rome or the second richest man in Rome? No, they thought that was sort of a recipe for ruin. I just think, you know, Marcus Aurelius talks about, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, he says ambition is tying yourself to external things. And it says sanity is tying your happiness to your own actions. And so again, if your happiness is, did I write something good today? Then yes, I control whether I have a happy day or not.

Is my happiness, you know, how many books did I sell today? Well, that's dependent on whatever the numbers that Amazon reports are, right? Or, you know, if your happiness is did a famous person retweet you on Twitter, that's not in your control. If your happiness is, you know, did you did you do a, you know, an act of kindness for someone else? Well, that's something that is something you control. So I think what we want to celebrate ultimately is the things that no one can really stop us from doing. You know, looking through stoicism at the depth that you have, when I was in high school, I used to think philosophy was weird. Like, why would I spend time reading about stuff like that? I almost thought it was useless, right?

When I started reading about this, I think four or five years ago, I was like, whoa, this is really, really dope. Like, there's a lot of awesome stuff here. I can apply it directly to my life. It seemed to mesh really, really well. But I was also curious, like, obviously you're, you talk to people and you say, Hey, if you want to learn about this in a, in an easy way to understand, not easy, but in a way you can apply, read my books. If you want to get deeper into it, read the ancient texts, right? Now you yourself having read all of that, I've always wondered, are there things in Stoicism that are absolutely left field that probably you don't want to mess with? Because a lot of other like philosophical ideas or philosophies have things that are just kind of weird.

And have you come across any of that in Stoicism where you're like, maybe this shouldn't be in the book? There's a lot of weird, I mean, there's a whole element of stoicism. Like, there's logic, ethics, and physics. So there's a whole section in stoicism on physics, which I don't under, I don't understand the physics we have now. I certainly don't understand the gibberish, I don't understand the physics we have now. I certainly don't understand the gibberish physics from 2,000 years ago or 2,500 years ago. So, yeah, there's lots of stuff in there that doesn't make any sense anymore. There's lots of stuff in there about predetermination, about, you know, obviously, look, the Stoics lived in both in Greece and in Rome in a society that was not only believed that outside, you know,

countries were filled with barbarians, but they tolerated and accepted a totally brutal form of slavery, you know. So there are all sorts of ideas from the Stoics that don't translate. I think given that these seem to be thoughtful, you know, civically minded people who genuinely seem to be open to changing their mind, I'd like to think that with 2,000 years of better history and thinking, that if you express some of these facts to them today, they would change their mind. would change their mind. We just got to remember, these were people who, who had, you know, no understanding of biology, no understanding of psychology, no understanding of a whole bunch of things that we talk about. It's like, it's hard, it's hard to fall a society, not hard to fall, but the same society that was tolerating slaves also thought you could bleed people to make them healthier, right? So, you know, their compass is

all screwed up as to, you know, how things work. So that's not to make an excuse for some of the objectionable things in this philosophy or in the biographies of some of these figures. But I by no means am a fundamentalist as it comes to the philosophy. I think not only do you take what works and discard the rest, but one of the interesting things, one of my favorite things in Seneca's writings is of all the philosophers that he quotes, he quotes Epicurus the most. And Epicurus was the founder of the rival school of Epicureanism, which is, to a certain extent, the polar opposite of Stoicism. So, you know, the idea, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the Stoics were open-minded and that they wanted to choose. Seneca says, like, I'll quote a bad author if the line is

good. And I think the wisdom of that line is, like, I'll learn from anyone, even if I disagree with them on 99.9% of issues. If they're right about something, they're right. And so I'm not saying you can pick and choose, but you can pick and choose. They say you're not supposed to meet your heroes because of what they're actually like. Yeah. I've been impacted by Marcus Aurelius probably the most. Him and Senecaeneca like incredible. But, um, has there ever been anything written in some of the, like the original meditations

or original, um, you know, just things written on him that didn't quite make the translation over because they were kind of negative. So is there anything like, uh, anything in Marcus Aurelius' closet that he doesn't want to get out? Well, so I was writing about this in the new book, Lives of the Stoics. I conclude with a biography of Marcus Aurelius. What is so incredible about Marcus is here, like, we think that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And here, the most powerful man in the world had like literally worshipped as a god. And they're like the gossip about him is like so minor, like like even if even if meditations had not survived and we only had what other people wrote about him, I still think he'd be a pretty impressive figure. I guess if I was really searching, so obviously there's some sort of accusations about the persecutions of the Christians, although other writers think that

this actually didn't happen. The two big knocks on Marcus Aurelius, if you've seen the movie Gladiator, Joaquin Phoenix does a damn good job sort of capturing the character of Commodus, Marcus Aurelius' son, who was killed by a gladiator. So how do you square being this wise, great philosopher and having a real shitty kid? I think that's hard to do. And then the other argument, and perhaps this is related to the argument about Commodus, but the innuendo at the court of Rome was that Marcus's wife was repeatedly unfaithful to him. So, I don't like the idea of, you know, Marcus the

cuck. But I'd like to think that that's not true. Yeah, it appears like, especially with all of his writings and how much internal dialogue that he had, that maybe he was lonely, you know, and maybe he had to kind of really search a lot within himself to keep himself together, I guess you'd say. I'm curious as to how you handle book sales, your business, and likes on the internet internet comments and and some of these things because i have heard you mention it many times and i do think that you know as as lifters as people that

compete in power lifting you know we might say oh the weight doesn't matter you know make sure you have the right form but the weight is everything the weight is what you get judged upon you you go on a platform and you lift the most amount of weight as possible and yes we can give people a pat on the back and say hey good try and stuff but really we're trying to do the best that we possibly can so how you know do you do you look at a lot of these things do you look at likes and comments and do you really read a lot of the reviews on amazon of your books and stuff and uh i guess maybe stoicism is a lead into dealing with more of that stuff and being able to read that stuff and not have an impact in a negative way. So what is your take on all that?

Yeah. And look, it's like the person who says, well, I don't care about results. Obviously, we respect that attitude more if that person is a winner than if they're a loser, right? Because at least we know then that they're not excusing the losing, right? It's tricky. One of the ways I've come to think about it, because I do think these things matter. You don't get to keep writing books if none of your books sell, right? You don't get invited to the competition if you can't lift the entry level weight or whatever it is. So you got to be kind of in the ballpark, I feel like, and that matters. But I feel like it's like with my first book, I was 10% proud of what I'd done and 90% waiting to see what the external results told me about the project.

And I'd like to think that with Stillness, which is the last book that I put out, project. And I'd like to think that with Stillness, which is the last book that I put out, which paradoxically has done the best, that I flipped it, that I was 90% satisfied going into launch day. And then hearing how the numbers were was 10% of it. I mean, I remember... So the way it works is you put out a book and then all your pre-orders count for your first week sales and then all the way up through the Sunday of that week. And then you find out like the following Wednesday or Thursday how you did. And so I remember I was on book tour and I was staying at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. And obviously I was on West Coast Time, the publishers on East Coast Time. So when I woke up, I went to turn the alarm off on my phone and

I could see a bunch of texts. And I knew like, okay, this is the news. This is whether I got it or not. The numbers have come in. And I remember putting the phone down, getting in the elevator, going down, swimming, doing my journaling, trying to do my writing for the day, and then checking the numbers. And the numbers were great. And I was very happy with them.

But there's no way that eight years previous, when my first book had come out, I could have waited even a half a second to know, you know, how I did because I needed that validation. beating your goals and getting some wins under your belt is it helps you become like, ironically, egotistical people are the most obsessed with external status, right? They need the constant validation. And I think once you know you're good, like once you know when you have what it takes, you're still competitive, you still want to win. But your identity, I think, is less tied up in those things. You know, I haven't read Stillness just yet. I have the book. But I was curious, especially in today's day and age, we talked a little bit in this podcast earlier about the news, media manipulation, et cetera, right? Well, social media is obviously a big part of everyday life,

and I feel like it's affecting younger individuals much more because they're so into that. I would assume that stillness somehow goes into, I don't know if I'm correct, but kind of, I guess, detaching yourself a little bit from that. And I was curious how you would, I guess, talk to individuals who do attach a lot of worth to social media, likes, things that they see, even jealousy when it comes to other things that they see on social media, how to navigate those waters. Because you especially, you have to, you know, everything you do is on the internet.

So what are some, I guess, tactics that you yourself use to not let that affect you as much as it does many people these days? It's really important for people to realize, to understand that the smartest psychologists and engineers and designers and behavioral experts have spent an incredible amount of time, energy, and money on making these platforms perfectly designed to exploit all of your weaknesses as a human being. You know, and understanding that, hey, Facebook and Twitter are not designed to make you happy. You will spend less time on them the happier you are. It's to make you dependent on them, to make you crave the validation. If everyone felt good about themselves and comfortable with their own opinions, would we be broadcasting them to each other and then incessantly refreshing to

see if anyone disagrees or agrees or how many likes? Of course not, right. And so like some some basic tactics I use, like I don't have any social media on my phone. It's all on my wife's phone. So so if I want like I have it, I do use it. It's part of my my profession, essentially. But like as much of as much of it as possible is scheduled. So done in advance as I check to see the results of it as little as possible. And it's not this sort of continual beckoning temptation to use because it's not within arm's reach. And so it's like, if I'm bored, I want to pick up a book, right? Or I want to go for a run. I don't want to spend an hour and a half on Instagram and then wonder where the time went. What's the sleeper book that you have?

What book or what piece of information did you write where you really just felt that you tore it up and you wrote something really excellent, but no one read it or something like that. Do you have a book like that or maybe some articles like that? Yeah, I actually do. I wrote about two and a half years ago, I wrote a book about the billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $20 million and 10 years sort of trying to secretly destroy a gawker, a media outlet that had outed him as gay. And so the book is called Conspiracy. And it's a book about sort of strategy and revenge. And of all my books, it's the least based on philosophy. And instead, it's sort of a narrative driven story. But that kind of goes to the point we're talking about. It's not that nobody read it. It's done well. It's being turned into a movie. But as far as reaching the number of people that my

books normally do, it hasn't. But I'm most proud of it. And so that's where I... It's like, I know that I did what I set out to do, which is ultimately like John Wooden talks about this. He says, you know, success is knowing that you became the best that you were capable of becoming in that moment. And so sometimes that lines up and that means you get the gold medal. And sometimes it means, you know, you did something that wasn't fully understood and maybe it gets validated later or maybe it doesn't.

But you really want to work to a place where you can just be happy with the doing and everything else is extra. And so that book was definitely a lesson in that for me. But at the same time, I also know that it's good because I've heard from other people about it. You've written a bunch of books, and a bunch of those have been extremely successful. How do you become a better writer? Yeah, Tyler Cowen is an economist I really like. And he asks this question, he's like,

if you're a pianist, and you want to get better at it, you practice scales. Like if you're a guitarist, you would practice scales, practice your chords, whatever. And so he's asking like sort of for his question is like, for what you do, whatever it is, how do you get better at that thing? And that's a really tricky question. And I feel a lot of people don't have a good answer. And then they wonder why they don't get better. And just writing books is not a way to get better at writing books because you don't do it that way. You can't just get better playing games in the NFL because you only play 16 games a year. That's not enough. You have to find a practice or a workout that lets you get better. And so for me, it tends to be obviously reading is a way to get better. I do this email every day for Daily Stoic. So every single day since 2016, I've written about a 500 word email that I send out for free every day. And so that adds up to

like three or four additional books. So like in between, like when people, if there's a leap in quality between one book and the next, people might be surprised by that. But really, I also wrote and published a book and a half between those books and that hour, those hours that work contributed to the improvement. So I think obviously writing is part of it. And then just experiences is another big part of it. If you don't have something to say, you know, it doesn't matter how great you are at stringing words together. And for the smaller articles and stuff, what type of feedback do you do seek out to learn whether or not that you're kind of you're hitting a good chord or you're like, oh, shit, that was pretty

whack. So I should go this way instead. Yeah, it's hard, right? It's like the things that tend to do the best are often, as we see on social media, not the best things. You know what I mean? So you have to and you can't always judge your own work. And so I think you have to cultivate, you know, a small group of people whose opinions you respect, sort of an advisory council, if you will. And so I can kind of tell if I really do something good, I'll hear from three or four people sort of informally like,

hey, I really liked that one. Or, you know, I think you, who's your board of advisors? And those are the people whose opinion you want to ask on those things. Who do we also have in more modern times that would be a great philosopher? Who else do you listen to? Are you like, wow, that guy really gets it. I really love that tone. I know that you're close with Tom Bilyeu and Tim Ferriss? Is there a couple other people out there? Yeah, I really like Nassim Taleb. He wrote Anti-Fragile and The Black Swan, which is obviously a very relevant book these days.

I think as far as ultimately, and I talk about this in lives, philosophy is a lot less what you say and more what you do. And so I'm a philosopher who writes things. I would not be an example in my own books. That's why I'm not in my own books. So I think General James Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense, is a great example of someone who's sort of really into these philosophical ideas. I mean, he travels with

a copy of Marcus Aurelius. Then you look at his life, you look at the things that he's done, and you see someone sort of living up to these ideals at the highest level. So I'm always just interested in stories or anecdotes or people who are proving the ideas more than I am, you know, people who are just talking about them eloquently. And I apply that criticism to myself as well. You know, kind of pushing off of what Andrew was asking about in terms of like being a better writer, obviously you're, you're extremely creative. I've heard you talk about how, you know, you, when you're working at American apparel and you're writing at the same time, obviously the writing's the thing that you wanted to do. So you had to leave that sect of

your life. But as far as like the, your creativity, um, is there anything that you do or practice that you've had or that you use every day that help you, um, just come up with more ideas, come up with more different avenues to take in terms of the things that you do? I, I wish I had a good answer to that question. I mean, what, what I try to do is I try to tackle the creative stuff early in the morning before the distractions and interruptions and before the fatigue has set in. usually there, whether it's on a bike ride or run or a swim, that extra ideas sort of get dislodged that I then write down and tackle in the morning. So it's kind of a loop that I'm trying to close each day, if that makes sense. Yeah. So it's like you're trying to hit some base hits early in the morning. And then if you get any extra runners towards the end of the day,

it's just like an extra positive yeah i haven't thought about it that way but that that's yeah exactly it you're like you're you're doing the basic stuff and then and that's what's you know the progress day to day and then you're hoping to get lucky you know the the you know the the the inspiration lightning strike you're hoping you're hoping for but you're not dependent on like when writers talk about waiting to be inspired um that's usually an excuse for not writing has your son uh impacted some of your writing and some of the things that you uh some of the things that you've been thinking about yeah i mean do you guys have kids i have two kids yeah i think think it opens you up. You know what I mean? It opens you up. And so I've definitely felt that from it. So the biggest impact is just, you know, I think it forces you to learn empathy in a different way. It connects you to other people in a better way.

So it, you know, the funny thing, though, I was just talking to my wife about this. My son had a copy of one of my books. He's almost four in his room. And I started reading it to him the other night and he promptly fell asleep. And so we've been using my books as a way to get them to bed as well. So, you know, certainly as happy as I am to get them to bed, it's forcing me to reconsider some artistic choices on the next book as well. I don't like that I can't command even a child's attention. Yeah. My son is due early next year and I've been reading him, you know, a page a day. I just started, so we're still early in the Daily Stoic and it's been... Oh, nice.

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun, man, just because like I get to, you know, read it and then, you know, hopefully it sticks with him early on. But how do you plan on, you know, trying to teach your kids and then how should someone like me go about teaching their kids more about Stoicism? then how should someone like me go about teaching their kids more about stoicism? Well, you might like this. I do an email every day also called Daily Dad, which is like parenting, sort of the wisdom of the Stoics, but also just ancient history and all sorts of other lessons applied to parenting, which is free. You might like that. I mean, I get this question a lot. I don't have a good answer because my kids are so young. I'm not in a position to be explicitly teaching them really anything. So I think, you know, it's like, remember in a Christmas story where the kid

starts cursing and the dad goes, where did you learn these words? And it's like, he learned them from you. You know, the best way I think ultimately to teach stoicism or any moral lesson is by example. So I think you start there. But at the core of it, the stoic teachings are really, really simple. You know, we don't control what happens. We control how we respond. You know, those four virtues we were talking about of courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom. I think you're going to want to keep it really, really simple and then build on it with actual examples from your own behavior. Yeah, I have a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old.

And as they were growing up, it's like it doesn't happen so much anymore but um anytime they would be really rude or say something mean or slam their door type of thing you know i would just go and say um you know just have you ever seen me do that you know that would be a question i would usually wait like i wouldn't go in you know i don't go into the room like right away i'd give them a little bit of time let them uh work out their own thoughts um and hopefully the answer was no but i also wanted to see like if i did do that like are they picking that up for me like am i acting like a maniac and maybe not uh even even recognizing it so things like that have been really helpful and i just have always talked to my children from the time they were really little

um just like they were adults, you know, and I would say, hey, I'd actually usually say, you got my attention. What would you like to talk about? Because, you know, obviously they're crying or making a fuss because ultimately I think they just want to be like recognized. They just want to be heard. And they felt that you didn't hear them or they felt something was unfair. And so they go storming off. hear them or they felt something was unfair. And so they go storming off. No, I absolutely love both of those. And I think one of the things that I've observed about my own parenting that's helped me be better in actual life is like, as you're saying, your kid is throwing a tantrum. They're not throwing a tantrum because they're bad. They're throwing a tantrum because they want something and they don't know how to communicate it or they're feeling this or,

you know, 90% of the time it's because they're tired or hungry, right? And that's usually your fault, right? You forgot to put them down for a nap or you didn't serve dinner or whatever, and that's why they're acting this way. But we're really bad at applying that logic to other people, right? Somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're a horrible person. You know, someone was rude to you. It's because they don't respect you, blah, blah, blah. And if we could step back and try to think about why people are doing what they're doing and try to help explain it away rather than indicting them, I tend to find that that turns down the volume on your emotional response a

good portion of the time. Real quick, just more on the writer's side of things. Do you recommend a certain blogging platform? I know it's kind of like a crazy or just outside the lines question, because I'm sure everything you guys build is all in-house and stuff. But these days, there's tons of different platforms. And you can do one Google search and you'll find nothing but negatives about this one and why you should go with this one. But then you find another one, why that one's not the right one. It's this one. Because I do love to write.

I keep saying that I'm going to start a blog and I just haven't done it yet. But, yeah, I'm just curious what you would recommend for somebody to start with basically zero because I just don't plan on it ever being. I would just start. I would start by starting and you can always fine tune the tools. I mean, I'm sure you guys see this from a weightlifting perspective. What are the best gloves? You know, what kind of bar do you use? Like what time do you wake up in the morning? Or, you know, people ask all these questions. And it's rarely from someone who's doing a good job. It's always from someone who hasn't started yet. And it's like, I could nerd out with you about, you know, I tend to start with Google Docs.

And then I move over to Microsoft Word. And then I move over to PDF or whatever. I move over to Microsoft Word and then I move over to PDF or whatever. And I would say that's responsible for 2% of the advantages, you know, the final product or, you know, that I use this email provider versus that email provider to deliver the Daily Stoic email, you know, is maybe partly responsible for the thing. But the main thing is that I just do it every day. And so I would, if I were you, like, I would just write every day and not publish for a while. I would just focus on the writing, build the muscle, and then select the best of the outcome from there. And then, as we were talking about earlier, just experiment. Try this one, try that one.

I also think if you get the big things right, the little things matter a lot less. So for instance, I think email is a more important platform than social media. But what email provider is a lot less important than that you are building an email list. Yeah. And I'll just, I'll one up you on the nerdiness of it. I actually use a word processor. So I just type on this little like calculator looking screen and then everything just gets saved within it. Like they died around like 2013, I think. So there's no internet on it. There's a thesaurus.

Thank goodness. There is a spell checker, but like I misspelled things so bad that like you can't even figure it out. But what ends up happening is you plug it into your computer and then you see the typings all come out on screen. So it's pretty dope. It's like I said, it's really nerdy, but someone like me, I appreciate it because there's no internet on it and there's zero distractions. Sure, sure.

No, I do a lot of my, like as I'm researching a book, as I'm putting the pieces together, I do a lot of that offline, like on note cards or just pieces of paper. Because I want to just be focused on the thing. I don't want the distraction of all the things that are available on the internet, but I also don't want copying and pasting. And I want it just as no frills as possible. Did you mention that you have another book that you're making called The Life of the Stoics? Yeah, so on September 29th, this will be, I guess, my 10th book.

It's Lives of the Stoics. And it's basically, as we were talking about, what the Stoics said is obviously really important, but I'm just as interested in what they did. Like, how did they live up to the ideas? Who were these people that wrote these things? So it's a set of biographies of the 26 major Stoic figures. So it's a set of biographies of the 26 major Stoic figures. It starts with Zeno, who's the founder of Stoicism, and then it ends with Marcus Aurelius, who's sort of the penultimate example of Stoicism.

And it covers everyone in between. So my point is philosophy is meaningless if it doesn't help you be a better person. And so I wanted to look at the ways that it shaped these people in the real world who had jobs and felt temptations and made mistakes and struggled with pandemics and all the things we've been talking about. What's the meaning of life? I don't know. what's the meaning of life? I don't know, but I do enjoy Victor Frankl, who's obviously one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. He's saying, like, we think we are asking the question when really life is asking us the question.

And meaning is not an abstract thing. Meaning is something we make, and we make it with our actions and our decisions and our relationships. So I tend to think, in one sense, life is meaningless in that who knows where we came from. We all die. Nobody knows what happens after. So the meaning is like right now, what do you do? You make it better for people. You make it better for yourself.

You make a difference, that sort of thing. And what are you trying to do with your writings? I feel like I was given this great gift when I was introduced to Stoicism. And I think a large part of what drives me to do what I do is sort of paying that forward, like communicating these ideas that have been so instrumental in my own life. And then I also think I am trying to figure out what they mean in my own life. So I'm always writing books that I'm never writing the books from a position of having figured it out. And I'm lecturing you about it. a position of having figured it out and I'm lecturing you about it. I am talking to myself first and foremost, and I'm hoping that the ideas are relevant to you as well.

Awesome. Where can people find out more about your books? Yeah. So ryanholiday.net. I'm at Ryan Holiday pretty much everywhere. And then Daily Stoic, if you want that email we were talking about, that's dailystoic.com slash email at dailystoiceverywhere. And if you're a parent, dailydad.com is the same thing. I'm sure I'm speaking for a lot of people

that are watching this right now. I personally really appreciate you. You've made a huge difference. I watch a lot of your content. I don't think I get a chance to see all of it, but I'm damn near close. I try to watch every video I have in my iPhone. I have like 500 videos that are downloaded into my YouTube,

and probably 200 of them probably have come from you. So thank you so much for all your work. It's making a huge difference in a lot of people's lives. So thank you. Thank you so much. No, thank you. And tell uh, tell Granzella, I said, hello. And, uh, next time I run up to Sacramento to go to gym boys, I'll, I'll give you guys an email. Oh yeah. And Tim Ferris had a question for you. He said, uh, what's the name of your farm animals? I think that was the question. You know, he wanted to know what my farm animals are. I have some cows, but I have a miniature highland cow named Bubba.

I have a donkey named Buddy. Then I have a goat named Watermelon and another one named Bucket. Awesome. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. See you guys. Thank you so much. Damn, that was amazing.

Yeah, really, really cool. Yes, it was. I think people will get a lot from that one. I hope they got their notebooks out. Number two pencil. Yeah, I saw you taking a lot of notes with a pencil, by the way. Yeah, I was mixing it up. I was mixing it up.

Why not? I wanted to ask him this because I was curious it up. Why not? You know, I was, I wanted to ask him this cause I was, I was curious about it, but I didn't, I didn't know how weird this question would sound. He's probably someone who has just like a massive, uh, you know,

I guess documentation of the type of people that pay attention to his content. I wonder if like the percentage of men versus women that watch this, uh, I only ask because of the small sample size of women in my life, they tend not to like this that much. Right. So I was just, I was,

I was curious about that, but, um, how, how is it presented to them? Um, I, like whenever I talk about it,

I try to talk about it in the most positive way, but when it does come to the idea of not being uh super responsive to your emotions or reactive to your emotions that's where some people tend to just be like hmm and and you know like like that's why i asked him about you know the misunderstanding of stoicism what it means it's not necessarily a lack of emotion but more so just not reacting to them or understanding them. I think a lot of people maybe just have a misinterpretation of what this is supposed to do in some sense. You are free to kind of react to stuff whatever way that you want.

But if every time someone mentions an idea to you or every time somebody has a, tries to have a hard conversation with you, you start making these cringy faces and start going like it's, it's not attractive, right? Like it's not, it's not welcoming, you know,

and could you sit there and even if someone is, you know, has a crazy idea or they're presenting something to you that maybe you don't really like the tone of it. Could you just wait a little bit and wait until they get the full sentence out? Wait until they get everything out and could you have heard what they said? And then you could still think it's bullshit. That's up to you. You could still think something's bullshit.

I'll give you a quick example. A quick example would be I show you guys a picture of a bacon cheeseburger. And you're like, damn, that looks like some good food, right? I show you an ice cream sundae. Boom, right? I show you some chicken with some rice and some vegetables and stuff like that. And let's say that you don't really like vegetables. Well, now your face may have kind of changed, especially from the ice cream, right? Now let's say I have a picture of just an entire fish that was cooked on the grill with the eyes and everything.

Some people are going to go, oh, like right away. That's a sign that your emotional intelligence is not well kept. It's not worked on enough. And the reason why is because, and again, you can react whatever way you want. But the reason why is because that is food for some people. Like that's what they recognize as food. In other countries, they're like, holy holy shit that's delicious like they love that there grow up with that they could some of the stuff you've mentioned eating

before some of the different me that that's been I don't like goat head or something brains or something right yeah yeah like even even the whole fish head and stuff yeah but yeah I've eaten some some food that some people would think is extremely undesirable. Right. That's just what I grew up with. And it's a reaction that makes sense in some way because it is based off a previous experience. But I think you need to think of the consequences.

That's a really minor consequence. If I said, hey, you want to get this? And I showed you a picture and you were like, oh, that doesn't look like it's food for me like that's not my definition of food that's not a big deal right yeah but what if you did that with everything all the time or what if you just did it very often you were always reactionary to what was presented to you what was what was shown to you second someone shows you something you're you know and it's just um i just don't think it's a great way to grow. Yeah.

How are you ever going to grow? You know, I want to learn about Nigerian food. I think that's cool. Like, I would like to hear, you know, I'd like to try it. You know, I'd like to, and there would probably be some stuff where I'd go, dude, I think that's disgusting. But why not be open to it at first and then, you know, make a determination. Oh, I could see see i could see how you

get used to that that that seems pretty cool you know that kind of thing yeah i get some some eyebrows whenever i tell people how much fat-free cheese i eat yeah especially from in seattle i purposely really tried not to move my eyebrows there so fat-free cheese it's been determined i don't want to know actually food i don't care it's not it's not neither is like i don't know protein shakes i guess but it's still way but like it's created somewhere don't compare don't mess you know my fat-free cheese we're gonna bleep that out every time he says fat-free cheese we're gonna figure it out somebody come in and hit it yo mark okay for someone teaching me how to do that.

Real quick. When, um, Ryan was saying something and you're like, Whoa, that's amazing. I was like, I was listening,

but I was like, shit, what was that thing that he said? Do you, do you have that in your notes? Cause I, I remember that was like a, I don't know if it was off a question that Andrew asked or something that you

asked him. I don't, I don't remember that necessarily. I can look into just a second. But I do know that I wrote this down because Andrew said the word whack. And I just wrote that down. And I was like, I got it. After Ryan jumps off of here, I'm going to fucking applaud Andrew for using the word whack.

Especially with a guest like that. Yeah, in a sentence. And it was super just slipped in there. It was super casual. I didn't even catch it. That means it was really good. You're rewarded 50 bucks. Sick.

Get some more fat-free cheese. I think it was when I asked him about, like, is it a bad idea to hope for the best? Yeah, I think that was that. I have it highlighted. I don't remember exactly what he said at this moment but he did talk about mr granzella he did yeah we we brought you up twice mark did and then he did at the end he said it was like a real angry little guy as he said and i was like we're like what he's not little he also said he was news.

Oh, man. Yeah, that was, that was a lot of fun. That was a good podcast. I like what he said about, uh, informed versus news.

Like, do you really, you know, the news is kind of an unfortunate thing. Cause you want to just put it on just to have some like background stuff sometimes. And, and you're like,

Oh, I'll have some background shit on and you'll just, you know, i can listen to that while i'm doing something else and i can become more informed but you're not really being informed i think sometimes you are but oftentimes it's just like a bunch of bunch of bad crap going on all the time yeah and i guess uh but i guess it could all be the way that you interpret it you could you can decide how good or bad it is for you. But most of the time it's, it appears to have a negative, you know,

to be pretty negative, you know? Yeah. I guess that's where like some of the people you were talking to can like get angry with it a little bit with stoicism. Cause it's like, well, no,

they're talking about all this bad stuff on the news. How am I going to interpret that as being good or bad? Like, you know, it's obviously bad, but like even when, when he was talking about it, like, well, I'm not like I'm not ecstatic that all this is happening. He's like, but all these sunsets that I'm seeing at my house now, all this extra time I have for writing. So it just I guess I can understand where they're coming from.

Yeah. But it's again, that interpretation, I think, is a little bit off. from. But it's again, that interpretation I think is a little bit off. And when I asked him about happiness and sadness, he actually pointed to the word, which I talked about last time we were to the show, which was equanimity, which maybe I'm saying it wrong. He said it slightly different than I said it. But anyway, I thought that was really cool because it was just about trying to have a more even mind, you know, go ahead and be happy and go ahead and be sad if you'd like, but, you know, maybe try not to let those things explode. And also I want to point out that, uh, when we talk about these things, I also, I think it's important to say that everyone's

at a different point in their life. And so I don't know how much of this you could incorporate into your life if you're just not ready for it yet. Or maybe a lot of your needs are not met. You know, if you are currently struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, if you are currently coming off a divorce, if you're just set back, maybe you've always been very broke. Maybe you just haven't had much money. If you're just set back, maybe you've always been very broke. Maybe you just haven't had much money. And so your focus is going to be on these other things, these external things. And I do think that any time that you have an get the opportunity to even know some of this stuff. just kind of, uh, just my own life experience and the people, uh, around me that sometimes, uh, there might be somebody in my, you know, um, there might be somebody that I know or

communicate with and they might think a certain way or do a certain thing. And I'm just like, oh, okay. I can't, I'm not even gonna bother to try to, to try to explain any of this stuff because they're just not, you know, and I could be, I could be wrong, but I could sometimes see it and say, I don't, I don't think they're, I don't think they're in a good enough spot yet to get to even some of this stuff.

Yeah, no, I can understand that. They're just not ready for it. Yeah. But in terms of, I would say like, uh,

the first book, if any, if, if you guys just found out about Ryan from this podcast, check out the obstacles, the way that like out of all his books, I think that would be the one I would have liked to read first. I finished that one.

I haven't finished. I haven't started. So this is the key yet, but the obstacles of the way is really, really good, especially for athletes. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff to take from that book as an athlete to apply directly to what you do. That's pretty damn awesome. So that's the one I would start with. But I, uh, I can't wait to dig into stillness is the key because I think that that book would be one that's very, uh, I mean, that probably deals with a lot of present day first world problems as far as social media and distraction are involved. So I'm super interested in getting that one too.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's interesting. I get these different perspectives. You end up with, you know, the impediment to action advances action,

right? And then you end up with him talking about stillness. So then it kind of leaves you halfway confused. You're like, which one is it, bro? Like, am I supposed to be moving all the time or supposed to chill out?

And I guess the true answer is that we need both. You know, I think you need to purposely, like, you need to purposely just, like, not do a whole lot every once in a while. You know, you need to kind of make some time for that. You need to kind of force yourself to do that. And, like, taking a shower or going on a walk or those things aren't doing nothing. They're not. taking a shower or going on a walk or those things aren't doing nothing.

They're not, it's, um, there's too much other stuff going on for you to really try to really, truly relax and calm down and stuff. So I think I've heard him kind of say it in some other, um, interviews where he talked about how his kid has helped him slow down. And I also have heard people say this before,

where it's important to be a human being and not be human doing all the time like so you need to you need to like be and just being doesn't it doesn't include that you need to do anything else you just need to kind of like sometimes i think it's my best ideas i think have always come from uh being idle you know just slowing down or stopping. That's usually when the best stuff has hit me. In most of the, you know,

creations and ideas that I've had, it's usually come from, yes, it's come from like lifting, right? And then,

but it didn't come like during a lift. You know, it came while I was at home doing nothing, dicking around. Take us on out of here, Andrew.

Absolutely. Thank you everybody for checking out today's podcast. Thank you to Pete Montice for sponsoring this episode. For more information on them, check the YouTube and Facebook descriptions and the podcast show notes. Please make sure you're following the podcast at MarkBowlesPowerProject on Instagram. And don't just follow, like hang out with us, be a part of the community. Tag us on your ig stories if you

guys are listening to this i love seeing you guys when you screenshot that you're listening to it or even like uh some people have like fancy cars and actually take pictures of their dash and it shows like you know listening to mark bell's power project do that i love resharing those that's a lot of fun for us to see that shitty car if it's a shitty car like well i don't want to say like mine but like doesn't have all that fancy stuff just the screenshot does pretty damn good somebody else's photo yeah oh that's even better yeah well all you guys can do is just go to your friend that has a tesla do it in theirs and then put it on yours so not only do you win but you know we win because it's like oh shit our our fans are like ballers this is great uh that uh interact with us on twitter that's at mb power project on twitter

and then uh like i said youtube facebook all over the place uh my instagram is at i am andrew z and sema where you at and sema in yang on instagram youtube and sema yin yang on twitter and by the way there's new smooth panther videos on youtube and there's exclusive ones on markball.com. So check those out. Smooth. Smooth. At Mark Smelly Bell, strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. Catch y'all later.

I'm out of here.