Modern Wisdom - #1001 - Ryan Holiday - Stoicism’s Lessons on Becoming Wise

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Ryan Holiday is a podcaster, marketer and an author. If intelligence were enough, the smartest among us would also be the wisest. Yet time and again, they stumble over life’s simplest lessons. Wisdom isn’t about knowing more; it’s about seeing deeper. So how do we shed the illusion of being ‘smart,’ and actually grow into wisdom? Expect to learn what Ryan learned from his near-death experience, what most people get wrong about wisdom, how daily habits compound into wisdom across a lifetime, what Ryan learned from studying the Wright Brothers, why in a culture of shortcuts and “life hacks,” how Ryan convinces people that wisdom is worth the long, uncomfortable path, what a Stoic would say about when you’ve lost yourself in life, why humility is such a crucial ingredient for wisdom, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Why We Need to Push Outside Our Comfort Zone (5:13) Banning Books Isn't Ethical (16:41) Does Learning Keeps Us Humble? (27:48) Why We Learn Lessons from Old Tales (33:41) Literally True, Figuratively False (50:33) Do the Work Now to Build Your Wisdom (57:55) Stoic Advice for When You’re Lost in Life (01:03:45) How Stockdale Remained Unbroken Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did the live shows go? The last time we were talking, we were discussing upcoming live shows. Yeah, I think I was doing two in Australia, and you gave me this advice. You were like, well, you told me that you'd done it with no notes. And usually, like, when you do talks at events, like they don't want you to just go up and give a speech.

They want, like, a presentation. But these were, this was different. So, yeah, I had to figure out how to do it with no notes, which was, it was interesting. Like, it's good to pick arbitrary challenges. and take something that you're good at that you've done a lot of times and just figure out a way to do it the hard way.

Yeah, what's new? Yeah. And so I had to sort of reinvent it from scratch. It was challenging but good. It's actually funny. In Mark's Realist's Meditations, he talks about practicing, holding the reins with your non-dominate hand.

And so just like, what's the way that you're comfortable doing it? What's the way you normally do it? And then how do you force yourself to do it, not the way that you like to do it? and to force yourself to do it in front of the way they're not comfortable doing it in front of 2,000 people. Huge fucking audience. It's a, you know, it's a whole thing. Difficulty plus, yeah.

Yeah, I've always thought about doing a podcast episode with a guest that somebody had organized for me. Yes. And sat down opposite me, and I didn't know who it was. Yes. And I had to try and do an episode without breaking the fourth wall that I didn't know who they were and see if I could excavate what the fuck is going on here, who is this. psychologist athlete coach trainer like you what the fuck are you and uh and do it without like destroying the episode i always thought that would be like a fun challenge well and and the reason you challenge yourself

artificially is that life doesn't really care about your plans doesn't play by your rules so i i had a talk i was supposed to do in kentucky like a couple weeks ago and so i was supposed to fly in uh i had all day and then i would do the talk at night and then you know i get to the airport at nine and it's like 30 minutes to late, 30 minutes to late, 30 minutes. It's starting to get crazy. And some incredibly complicated, very expensive travel adjustments later, I land, and I'm in the car. Like, I'm already late. So they've pushed it.

They've been stalling. Everyone's there. And I'm the last speaker. And I'm, you know, I'm texting them. And I go, okay, like, I just landed. I'm 12 minutes away. I will be there. I will run up and go on.

And they go, okay, that's. awesome, we're waiting for you, where are your slides? And I go, what do you mean? Like, I know for a fact they came in yesterday. Um, so you should definitely have them, but I'm like, here they are again. I'm like texting. Here's the link to the, there's the dropout links to the slides again. And they're like, okay, awesome. And then, uh, so, you know, they get there. Seven minutes ago. Yeah, seven. They, I opened the door, uh, the car and I'm, you know, running upstairs. I'm carrying my suitcase up, up to the thing. I'm getting there. And, and then as they're micing me up, they go, and you don't have slides, right?

It's like, is no one talking to each other? But like, now I know for a fact that you've had the slides for at least seven minutes, you know. So, so, and there's like a band on stage performing, uh, that's stalling because it's like a old. Old up. Yeah, yeah. And the guy goes, okay. So, um, uh, the band's going to play the first 20 seconds of two minutes to midnight by Iron

Maiden, and then you're up. And I go, okay, so we got that. Like, we had a live band performing, like, a song that I like, but no slides. And then the guy's like, I'll try to figure out the slides. And I go, in the next 20 seconds, what are you talking about? I was like, this is, you know, this is done, man. I was like, I'll just, you know, but I walk. And so I start to talk. And I'm, you know, now I've got, you know, 45 minutes of time to fill with no slides. And you can't just do. the talk you were going to give without slides because you can't be like normally there'd be a slide every other minute yeah exactly and so I'm like what am I going to talk about for 45 minutes I'm starting and then the guy's like trying to talk to me via the screen you know he's like slides he's like slides incoming should be about 10 minutes you know and it's like this is too late man but but you know I was able to just give some version of the talk that I've now given several But new, and maybe some new shit came out. Yeah, of course.

But the interesting thing is, like, you think, to me, the lesson in these things is always like, you think you need it to go a certain way, you think you want it to go a certain way. And then when you were forced to do it the way that you didn't want to do it, not only do you find something out about yourself, but you actually find that the thing you were preparing for it not to happen actually isn't that bad. And it might be better in some ways. So, you know, but, like, you, technical difficulties are a part of any industry in life.

And so if you, if you, if you, if you need it to go a certain way, you're very vulnerable. If you're good with it going effectively anyway, then you'll be all right. Yeah. What happened with that Naval Academy speech? Sure is it. That was slightly different technical difficulties. So, you know, normally you send your, like, so for the last four years, I've been speaking every year to the incoming class of the Naval Academy. It's called Plebe Summer.

So these are, like, the brightest kids in the country, future naval officers, so they're going to run submarines and fly F-16s and command aircraft carriers. I mean, future presidents, future admirals, future heads of the CIA. Real little top gun shit. These are the best, you know, most promising people in the world. actually, because the Naval Academy sometimes has, like, students from other countries on these sort of guest programs. So every season, every year for the last four years, I've been doing this series of lectures on the cardinal virtues. Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. So I've done courage, done discipline, I've done justice, and then I'm supposed to do wisdom this year.

And so you send your slides in before, not for approval, but for technical reasons. Like, you don't, you don't show up with your computer because, you know, they don't have the plug or what? you send them in advance. So I sent them in, you know, the night before, as I had for every subsequent talk and had previously received zero notes because that's not what we were doing. And then I get a call, you know, I get up, I go for run, walking through the talk, and I get a call from someone at the academy, and they go, hey, so there's this thing in the talk that we would like you not to talk about. And of course, I knew exactly what they were referring to because I had spent a lot of time

thinking about what I was going to talk about and one of the things I felt sort of duty-bound to address was they had just removed several hundred titles from the Naval Academy Library as part of this order from the president that was supposedly

about addressing you know, DEI and wokeness or whatever. They had removed books that talked about those themes from the library. Okay. So you could say you have a problem with the policies, right? And the president is allowed to decide, you know, how the academy is going to be run. But you can't remove books from an elite university because you don't like

what's in the books. That's a very different thing. Well, it's an interesting point there. Was it Megan Phelps Roper that did The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling? So this was the inverse of that situation that was one book, one series of books, Harry Potter, originally in the 90s and 2000s by right-wing fundamentalist Christians. They campaigned to have them banned from schools because they were worried that it was witchcraft. And then two decades later, the left-wing progressive people are trying to get it banned because they think that J.K. Rowling is a transphobe. And what you're talking about here is this is the other way around. This is right-wing in the modern world trying to get rid of books

that they don't like. Well, and this is why we don't ban books because it's stupid and it's incredibly inconsistent, right? Like, the Bible is a very banned book. So they're removing it because

these books have these objectionable themes, but of course, MindConf is still in the Academy Library. And, you know, so here you are removing a book that's talking about, like, minorities that died in Holocaust or minorities had served in the troops. Like when you when you have chat GPT pull up a list of books that it thinks might be objectionable and then you just rip them out of a library. You're in very dangerous territory. And so I was going to speak about this in, because it pertains

to something I've been writing and talking about there, which is that Admiral James Stockdale is one of the most famous graduates of the academy, one of the most famous modern practitioners of Stoic philosophy. After he graduates from the academy, the Navy sends him to Stanford, where he gets a post-grad degree, and he studies quite a bit of philosophy there. And his favorite course while he's at Stanford, this is in 62 or 63, is he takes a course on Marxist thought, and they only read the primary Marxist texts. So not like commentary on Marx, not neo-Marxism, but like Marx himself and Lenin. And they read, and they spend an entire semester talking about what the Marxist's Marxists thought. And you might go, well, what does a Navy fighter pilot need to learn about

Marx? Well, when he ends up in a Marxist prison camp in North Vietnam is subjected to years of brainwashing and torture and propaganda, it actually comes in extremely handy. And he would talk about how he was able to go back and forth with his captors. And then in many cases, he knew Marxism better than they did. And that this was a defense mechanism, right? And it's actually funny is the Stoics talk about this too, which, of course, I was going to talk about the talk about in the talk. The Stoics, Seneca talks about reading like a spy in the enemy's camp. The idea is you... I want to stop. No. No, no, I've heard the sound. Good. Good. So the idea is that you want

to know what your opponents think. And in this case, we're not even talking about opponents because we're talking about, you know, the memoirs of Maya Angelou that are getting removed from the library of a, again, a university on par with Harvard or Yale or West Point. So I was going to talk about why this is why we can't be afraid of ideas. And in fact, we have to engage with ideas that we disagree with and dislike. Well, you can imagine the people that are removing. Once the leadership of the academy had put themselves in the position of not challenging the order and, you know, sort of removing the books without protest, they're now in a tricky situation of like, can we allow criticism of this decision, right?

This is what happens when you, and of course Stockdale talks about this too. He talks about when you start to make compromises with extortionists. You have to make more and more compromises. And then pretty soon you're not just removing one or two books because it's controversial, but then you're revoking invitations to speak from people who are criticizing that idea. And it escalates. So they asked me to remove it. And it's like I can't, I felt, and I don't know if I could have made this decision early on in my life,

But I'd talk to these kids who are going to, again, in the future, be entrusted with nuclear weapons and immensely powerful bits of machinery and budgets of the billions and billions of dollars that I can't give them a lecture about courage. I can't give them a lecture about discipline. I can't give them a lecture about ethics and doing the right thing. And then when someone says, hey, if you want to keep talking here, we'd like you not to speak about the things that we're trying to sweep under the room. rug. And so I said, you know, I can't do that. And so, of course, the invitation was revoked. And then so was the subsequent invitation. The interesting thing about, to me, was I said, you know, I think you think this will avoid controversy. But it's only going to do the opposite. Not only is it going to do the opposite because, like, this is a public event, like, not this is a publicized event that is now ended, you know,

10 minutes before it's supposed to go on. But, you know, part of the, like I was speaking at the, I was brought there by this center on campus called the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. So the irony of like, let's remove books that we find to be objectionable and then let's not talk about it. And then let's pressure a person from the center of ethical leadership. You know, the ironies are stacking up here. But, like, there is this presumption that people in the military are just, like, big, tough, strong, you know, robots that you send in to do. But that's what gets countries and the world into trouble. Like, the crown jewel of the American military and the Western militaries for centuries has been the ability of their leaders to think to, to. challenge orders and to question, right? This isn't to say that it's anarchy, but like, you need independent thinkers or everyone's thinking the same thing and thus not thinking at all. And so, like, you are going to want these young men and women at some point when they're entrusted with leadership and power to make difficult unpopular decisions that are, you know, maybe not always in the interests of their careers

and what this leadership is showing them in this moment is we might say that but we don't mean it, right? Like imagine you become a multi-star admiral of the Naval Academy, one of the, you know, crown, and then you're not just a party to removing books from the library, but then you are like, I guess this is a theme that I've been writing about for these last couple years is like what is the point of power, influence, success, a platform if you don't use it? And so it was a strange surreal experience that's only sort of gotten worse like

the West Point just revoked an invitation and an award they were going to give to Tom, to Tom Hanks this week because of his political views. So we are in the full sway of, like, the pendulum of cancel culture, snowflakeism has gone from, like, this way to this way. And it's the same thing that's happening just in the opposite direction. Yeah, and it's equally stupid in both directions. And it doesn't help anyone. And then, you know, it was funny because people kept going, like, well, what about this book? And what about this book?

You know, this is a bet. And I go, I don't know the names of basically any of the books. Like, I don't give a shit what the name. names of the books are. I'm actually sure most of the books are bad. Like the library has hundreds of thousands of titles. It would make sense that in fact a large percentage of them are I would agree that most books that are published are bad and stupid and wrong. Like that's that's how it works. But but a free society, you know, requires the free transmission and publication of ideas, right? And so it's a weird, it's a weird moment in time to be sure. You've been in the

wall zone, it seems. Well, no. As I did, it may be, maybe an intellectual war zone. I think what's ironic about it is these are people who are going to, at someday, be sent into a real war zone and we're nervous that they're going to read Maya Angelou or even the most, like, offensive, stupid, wrong, you know, ass backwards book and just be like immediate. That's my worldview now. Yeah, their mind melts.

Like, actually, this is when we would want to find that out, you know? Ah, okay. So read these stupid books, see if your mind is changed. And if so, out you go. Yes, exactly. A quick aside, you are probably not eating in a fruit and vegetables and you know it. And this is going to help.

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And if you sign up right now, you can get a year's free supply, vitamin D3K2, 5-free AGB.G, travel packs and the 90-day money back guarantee plus international shipping by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink asy1.com slash modern wisdom that's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom you say wisdom is the most elusive of the virtues it's the hardest to define I think courage is something we know it when we see it you know discipline pretty straightforward word. I think the thing about wisdom is that it's not just elusive in terms of its ineffability, like it's hard to define. You know, it's experience, its knowledge, it's intelligence, it's creativity, its insight, its perspective, it's all these things, right? But the interesting

thing about wisdom is that it's one of those ones that if you think you have it, you almost certainly don't. And the second you think you have it, you find that there is more left for you to learn. So there's something elusive about it in the sense that the horizon is elusive, right? Like you approach it and you feel like you're not making progress. You look behind you and you clearly have made a lot of progress. Look at all the things that you've read. Look at all the things that you've learned. Look at how much smarter you are than you were before.

And look how far away the people who were standing with you when you began are. But there remains an infinite amount still to know. And so there is something inherently humbling about it. The physicist John Wheeler said, you know, as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance. I think that's, that is the paradox of wisdom, that the, the more you learn, not just are you humbled in that most, you know, really smart people are actually quite humble. But, but the more you learn, the more you learn about all the things that you still want to learn about. What do most people get wrong when they think about wisdom? it comes from well you know like there's some you know um is it is it is it like book smarts or street

smarts like is it school or is it life as if it's this binary thing and of course it's a combination of all of the above it's like you want a base of knowledge ideally uh you want to learn from all of the experiences all the the the great ideas that's humanity has come up with over thousands of years. And then you have to go out and experience things. And then what that does is it informs what you've learned. And then the things that you continue to learn, inform the experiences you're having. So the subtitle of the book is like, learn, apply, repeat. And that's the idea is that is that it's this loop of always be learning, always be exposing yourself to things. And then always be going out and applying and trying the idea.

So, you know, if you're just sort of reading up in your tower, so to speak, you might be getting smarter, but I wouldn't say you're getting wiser. And then there is something fundamentally stupid, though, about trying to learn all these lessons yourself, right? Like, you go, I think it was Otto von Bismarck. You know, he said, any fool can learn by experience. I prefer to learn from the experiences of others. So why would you want to figure something? something out when someone has been in your exact position before and not just learned from it, but like written about it. And then other people have written about them. And so you think about,

like, this position you're trying, this thing you're going for, this thing you're attempting, like some of the smartest people have ever lived have spent years of their life thinking about just that thing. And then there is the, you know, ego in us that goes like, well, I'll wing it, you know, or I know better. And so the reason that humility is this key to wisdom is not just like you can't learn that which you think you already know, but it keeps you hungry to learn more and more. I have this idea about unteachable lessons. Yeah. And it's a unique category where no matter how many songs and movies and stories from your grandparents and warnings, you cannot expedite the

process of understanding this thing through somebody else's story tale. You can only learn these things. Money won't make you happy. Fame won't fill yourself worth. That girl's not lovable. She's just hot and difficult to get. You should see your parents more. You should work less hot. You know, these things that are cliche, and the reason that they're cliche is that they seem to be so reliably groundbreaking to everybody when they arrive there. So it almost becomes its own, it's like a self-defeating prophecy that everybody says it, which means everybody thinks that they know it, which means everybody discounts it as like, oh, that's just like a wives tale. That's not like you shouldn't put your hand on a hot stove. That's, these people, they've just

accepted it as part of the source code of reality. But I watch me dance through this. minefield and I'll do pirouettes and I'll spin around. The rules won't apply to me. But the funny thing about that is I think one of the reasons those lessons are so cliche and then why you talk about them so much is partly because, okay, so you take something like money won't make you happy or fame is empty or, you know, you're not going to fill that hole in your soul by achieving and doing. That's, you know, a theme in literature and art. and, of course, social psychology also. And there's probably some evolutionary reasons

why that's a hard lesson to learn, right? This is what propels humanity forward. But some of us learn that lesson sooner than others, right? Some people have to go as far as Alexander, like literally to the end of the world to learn it, and then other people experience it during their college graduation. What was Alexander's realization around that point? Well, I'm just saying Alexander gets all the way to the end of the world, and his men are like, how much longer are we going to do this?

And he says, you know, let it be said that you turned around here and, you know, didn't conquer the rest of the world with Alexander. And then he subsequently dies. And he dies this brutal, painful death where some of the theories are like he was like sort of in this, like, conscious coma where he's like frozen. But like, it was a, let's say it was an end where he might have had a few moments to contemplate. whether it had all been worth it, right? And so my point is you can learn it at the very far end of the extremes or you can hear it at the first inkling of it. Like I've said before, like I feel like life is always trying to tell us something.

And eventually it will tell us in a way that we can hear it. And so... The whispers just get louder. Yeah, do you want to hear it when life is whispering this to you? or do you want life to have to pin you down and scream it in your face, you know? Like in sobriety circles, they talk about, like, you know, hitting rock bottom where you still have two cars in the garage. Like, do you have to hit rock bottom when you've blown up your entire life and lost everything

and everyone? Or can you take this DUI as a sign, right? That's a really great point that, yes, these lessons are unteachable, but some people need to be taught more times than others. Yes. And that was, you know, the Romans talked. about, you know, the fool is not someone who stubs their toe on a rock. It's the person who stubs their toe on the same rock more than once. And so it's how quick can you learn the lesson?

And so part of why you take in, especially early on, why these classic myths and ideas and the Western canon is so important is that they contain from the Bible to the Odyssey, you know, to Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle and all the great stories. stories is they contain kind of the sum total of human wisdom, right? And some of them, though, you don't learn, you hear, but you don't understand until you have the experience that matches that lesson. Oh, that's that thing. Yes. And so you need to, you need to, you need to have the ideas to match with the experiences. Neither is, is, is sufficient on its own. I love that, that blending of the two, especially because if you don't have a good enough framework,

sort of a robust scaffolding to hold your life's experiences on, yeah, maybe you will take the right lesson, but maybe you'll take the wrong one. Maybe you get gold medalist syndrome. You think, ah, two. Yes. Two. That's the issue. The issue is I need to prove that I wasn't lucky that I was good. Yes. I don't just sell the one company for $100 million. I've got to run it back again in a different industry and then the thing as opposed to no this is habituation you have learned this before it's the exact same gremlin just coming at you from a slightly more conniving angle yes and it's to be able to recognize oh this is what so-and-so was doing here this is so-and-so at this you know critical juncture point like and and there was a time when we had enough shared story that

first up there were just fewer stories so everyone could kind of recognize all Oh, this is like Odysseus at the Sirens or this is Hamlet or this is, this is, you know, George Washington at this moment. You know, you have these stories that are designed to teach these moral lessons. Like the greatest biographer of all time is Plutarch. And Plutarch says, you know, there's a difference between biography and lives. And he says, I write lives. And lives are illustrated by a certain anecdote, a little story, an utterance of a few words that help you unlock the last. lesson or the fatal flaw or the brilliant genius of this person. And so when you read about

these historical figures who are often flawed and tragic figures, the idea is you take back from them little lessons that then, yeah, when you're winning a gold medal or you just sold a company or, you know, you're about to gamble it all on this thing that you believe is, you know, the key to unlocking your happiness or your legacy or whatever, you go, oh, maybe I should ask myself, am I about to do what they did? And how did it go for them? And so it's having this broad array of case studies and stories that were, you know, not always the most historically accurate, but they were illustrating something about the human experience that we need to remember. Mm-hmm. I was spending time with an impressionist a couple of weeks ago.

Like a comedian? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or do you mean a painter? No, sorry, yeah. He does impressions, whatever that person's called. They both called the same thing. I think so. Someone should change it. Yeah. Anyway, and I was explaining, I've got Matthew McConaughey coming back on the show. Wouldn't that be exciting? And it's like, what was it like to sit down with him the first time? And I said, all of the thing, he's very charismatic and all the rest of it. And he does a great McConaughey. And I said, he does this thing. you didn't do when you did it and he doesn't ever have it seems to me like he doesn't have stuff in his mouth but he goes like he's sort of like as if there's a little bit of straw or something that he needs and he does this with his hand and the dude was like that's the unlock and he explained to me that in the art of doing impressions of people uh there is a uh an unlock and

the unlock is this one thing the way that you speak the pronunciation of the s the moving of the fingers, the hands, the face, whatever. And he says, that's the thing that people hook onto in the same way as what you're talking about here is that there are these portable stories, as Clay Habit calls them, these individual, maybe even a tiny little afferate, three-word aphorism, whatever. And you go, that's the thing. And both me and you quote other people a good bit because original thinking is pretty tough and also people way smarter than me and you have already figured stuff out.

And it's kind of our job to essentialize that and make it accessible. If I could say it better, I would. Yeah, true. And I've tried. And I think that, you know, in many ways, for me, the reason that I love it is that using small quotes, aphorisms, mantras, stuff like that is kind of like a Winsip file that condenses down this big thing. My memory is not that good. But it's not bad if I just have to remember this small sequence. And I go, oh, yeah.

the universe has changed and life is but what we deem it oh well there's like this big thing that that means that I kind of remember a bit yes but I can recall this I can remember the chorus and from that I kind of the rest of the album comes along with it too yeah and and I think too many people have confused you know history and trivia exactly what year this happened exactly how the name is pronounced you know exactly you know uh where the troops were aligned in this battle or that battle, you know, is much less important as to the why or the characters or the kind of the fundamental moral lessons that that thing has the opportunity to teach us. And that's what the classics and the sort of ancient stories have always been. Like Cincinnati, do you know the story of Cincinnati? So Cincinnati is this Roman general who's living in retirement. This story will sound familiar to you in a second. He's this famous Roman general living in retirement. And the Roman army is in battle in some distant land and basically the whole of the Roman army is trapped. And so Rome is basically undefended.

And so the Roman elders go to Cincinnati, who is plowing on his farm in retirement and say, we need you to save Rome and we will make you dictator. And so he's made dictator. He leads a small, you know, troop of Roman auxiliaries and, you know, frees the Roman army, saves Rome, and is now dictator. And he, after 17 days, resigns the dictatorship and returns to his farm, right? This is the plot of Gladiator, of course. And it's also the model for George Washington resigning his commission after the revolution. war, you know, when King George hears that Washington is going to return to his farm, he goes, if he does that, it'll be the greatest man in the world. Both of them understand

that this is an allusion to the example of Cincinnatus when Washington resigns the presidency after two terms. It's against Cincinnati that he's. So this is a famous story, but Cincinnati almost certainly did not exist. Like, that is a story that goes back so far in Roman history that there is almost no factual basis for it that anyone can clearly point to one way or another. But the story has existed for so long that the Romans certainly thought it was true and Washington thought it was true and King George thought it was true. And, you know, when I tell it to my seven-year-old, it may as well be true. And I think some people have taken the role of the historian to prove that it didn't happen. To be like, here, George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree

or, you know, Cincinnati didn't really exist or this didn't happen or it was more complicated than that. And look, if you're a grad student specializing in that thing, perhaps that is important. But for most people, most of the time, the significance of that is the lesson of sort of restraint and selflessness that actually power can be laid down and that, you know, the truly great and powerful people not only do do that, but that's the gift they are giving the future generations, this continuing this tradition and the peaceful transfer of power. And so the history is supposed to be the sort of sacred, hard-earned knowledge that we pass on from person to person. And so a lot of

this famous stories, you know, maybe they're true, maybe they're not. If you're being literal about them, missing the point. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from

an annual physical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function, it is only $500. And right now, the first thousand people can get an additional $100 off, meaning it's only $400 to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom Did you read Derek Sibber's book Useful Not True? No. Okay, so I had this idea for

I swear to God I came up with it independently which was figuratively true literally false. Yes. Literally true, figuratively false. Yes. And Derek came up with something that was not too dissimilar, which is usually a good idea. It's like, hey, two people pointed at the same thing from different angles, like there might be something here.

Sure. Literally true, figuratively false. you determinism might be a way to look at this that perhaps there is no free will and the entire way that we move through the world is predetermined by the Big Bang and the Dominoes just falling, falling, falling, however, functionally What would you do with that?

It's fucking useless. It makes me nihilistic. It makes me feel like I don't have any control of my future. Something which is literally false but functionally true in the Middle East in sort of medieval times pigs are morally dirty creatures. They're no more or less moral than another creature, but in a hot climate,

their flesh contains more pathogens on average. So not eating them, probably a pretty good idea. Porcupines can throw their quills. No, they can't. They can't fucking throw their quills. But if you treat it like it can, you stick just a little bit further clear and you're less likely to get stung.

So this idea that holding modern stories to the standards of objective rationality, where does it appear on the spreadsheet, please show me how this comes into land. I think for a lot, it was a good solvent that was supposed to kind of wash away a lot of bullshit that existed because there was stuff that was literally false, functionally false, and that actually needed to fuck off. There's an expression that traditions are often solutions to problems that we've forgotten about. And this idea,

There's kind of been this fetishization these days of, like, thinking from first principles, right? And this is important. You'll arrive at it myself. Yeah, I think for myself. I'm a first principal's thinker. Not one of the sheep, I'm autonomous. Yeah, I don't care about your precedent. And, you know, a lot of precedent is hard one, right? And maybe even why it was hard one or how it was hard one, you are blowing past and you are ignoring

why it was set up this way in the first place. And so not only is it exhausting and unsustainable to truly think from first principles and everything. But yes, sometimes things are incidentally solving one problem and also solving another problem where things are variables are hopelessly tied up with each other. So you go, hey, we don't need this. This is stupid.

And you don't understand because you don't have 20 years or 50 years or a thousand years of experience in this thing, that actually this is a subpar solution or an inelegant solution to a very complicated or multifaceted thing. And so the arrogance, I think that again, what wisdom is, is this humility of having done hard things before and solved hard problems before. And you go, oh, okay, it's probably not going to be solved like this. And this thing that popped into my head that should magically resolve all of this, you know, is, is naive. Like, do you know the story of the Gordian knot?

No. So there's this knot that's tied that is impossible to untie, and person after person goes to untie it. And if you untie it, you know, you become the king of this land. And I think it's Alexander comes and, you know, he solves the Gordian knot by chopping it in half with this sword. And yes, that's technically a solution, but it's also not a solution. You haven't actually untied the knot. And so there's this, again, this sort of fetishizing of like these complete solutions to things that, hey, the people before were not idiots. And in fact, they had a little more humility than you did and understood that there probably was not a solution

that pleased everyone or checked every box. And so that's why this is where it is and why, by the way, things have remained relatively stable for a long time. I think we're seeing this now in politics but also life where, okay, if you're a Silicon Valley investor and you invest $50,000 in a company,

okay, the downside of you being wrong is that you lose $50,000. But the upside is you might make $5 billion. So that's great in this very specific domain that you are in, where you get access to lots of early stage companies. You have a large, broad base of capital, and you can throw, you can be wrong a lot to be right one time. Well, most of life is not like that, right? And politics and life, geopolitics are not like that. You don't get to be wrong that much before there's a catastrophic outcome.

Yes, yes. And so a lot of the systems that we have set up and a lot of the systems that we have set up and a lot of the procedures we have. This is not just in America, but all over the world. Talking about the UN or the EU or all these different institutions, they are there not to create the easiest, most well-functioning, efficient machine in the world. They're there to make sure World War III doesn't happen. They're there to make sure that a nuclear weapon doesn't explode. You know, they're there to prevent an economic meltdown, right? They're protecting against downside, which, unlike, say, investing, is not you lose the capital that you put in. The downside

is you lose everything for everyone forever. And so understanding what environment you're in and the stakes, this is also, I think, something that some really smart people don't have. And in fact, they've learned a lot of bad habits from being the master of one domain. Like some domain expertise is transferable and a lot of it is not. And the wisdom is knowing what domain expertise is transferable and what isn't. You write fantastic songs. Wonderful lyricist, graded melodies. Yeah. Don't care what you think about climate change. Don't care what you think about the Ukraine. Don't care. Like that is not an area that your expertise can go to. Now you can outsource that to other people or you can become an expert in your own right. Yeah. But just because you're great at this one thing,

So I agree, but as with most things, the devil is in the details here. So for instance, there are people from outside of an industry that get a new perspective because of the fact that they're alien to this thing, because they see something with a fresh set of eyes that nobody else would. And the Wright brothers kind of strike me as a pretty canonical example of someone like this. Sure. So I think balancing this Chesterton's fence-pilled, like, hey, let's be careful with what we get rid of, which is a much more sort of conservative,

less innovative, less move, fast break things position with, well, you know, sometimes we need like a great man or great woman to come and kind of do a thing. Yeah. And balancing those two, the innovation desire with the iteration desire. But what you find in the best of those people, the Wright brothers being a classic example of this, is there wasn't this sense that everyone else trying to tackle the flight problem.

And it was a problem other people, people have been interested in it for thousands of years. But, you know, like all the armies of the world were also rushing to try to figure this out at the same time. You know, there wasn't this sense that everyone else is a moron and were geniuses. What the Wright brothers had was this curiosity, this sort of openness to, how am I working? They spend hours and hours just studying how birds, you know, fly. They had a scrappiness to them. They were outsiders. They were independent. But, you know, the first thing the Wright brothers do is write to the Smithsonian for like every book ever published on flight. It wasn't like burn it all down. Everyone's a moron. And in fact, they would have loved to collaborate

with the powers that be and would have loved to be brought in as part of it. So there's this tendency to celebrate the sort of brash, you know, domineering outsider who comes in and tears everything apart. But I think you tend to find that the most effective reformers have a profound understanding of why things are the way that they are. So that's actually, you know, the negative capability to go like, here's what I know and here's what I think is true. And here's what I understand as an outsider. And then here I've done a profound deep dive as to why it is this way. Like one of the most profound, I'll give you two sort of related reformers. You have Abraham Lincoln and then you have Thomas Clarkson, the two basically forerunners of the abolitionist

movement. Thomas Clarkson in the UK leads to the eradication of the slave trade and then slavery in England and then Abraham Lincoln ends it in the United States. Both of them start their campaigns against slavery. They had this as outsiders or as just human beings, this immediate impulse that slavery is wrong, that it doesn't matter that we've been doing it for thousands of years. It doesn't matter that, you know, billions of dollars are riding on it. It doesn't matter that all the religious teachers say it's okay.

None of that matters. They understood it was wrong. That's your classic sort of outsider. view seeing the world from a new perspective. But then what they both do is they go, I got to figure this out. Like Abraham Lincoln goes to the State House Library in Illinois and then the Library of Congress when he's a congressman. And he goes and he actually reads like what the founders said about slavery. And he realizes that the sort of dominant view at this time that the founders were out to preserve and protect slavery actually wasn't true. Thomas Clarkson, his genius is he

realizes that slavery is actually just like bad as a business. Like he studies the insurance claims that slave traders are making on the human cargo that they are transporting. He's looking at the fact that like 20% of the sailors are dying on each voyage. He's actually going and looking at what a slave ship looks like and then he draws this famous diagram that like illustrates the vividness of what was an abstract problem before. So the point is, it's not that you have to absorb the dominant view or the status quo, but you have to understand the logic of why it is that way. This is where justice and wisdom are interrelated virtues.

Like, it's not just, oh, I have this opinion. I'm morally correct. So therefore, the world should agree. You have to have this curiosity to go, well, these people probably aren't wrong on purpose. So why do they think this? what are the underlying conditions or incentives that are making them things like. You know, Lincoln, a lot of people have tried to go, well, you know, Lincoln is equivocating on slavery because, you know, he was so understanding of the South. But, no, that's what empathy is.

He says, you know, like, we are just what they would be. We are just, they are just what we would be in their, in, if we were in their condition. Meaning he's like, if you were raised in the South and this is what you were taught from day one, you would think about it this way. And so what you have to have the negative capability to understand, and for people that don't know, that's a thing that Keats talked about, the ability to have mutually exclusive ideas in your head at the same time or contradictory ideas. You have to be able to go, here's what they think, and here's why they think it. That's not going to change what I know to be true, or that's not going to change the fact that that's still fundamentally incorrect. But I have the ability to understand why. it is that way. And that is usually a prerequisite to doing anything about it or doing anything

about it effectively. Like Elon Musk is right. The federal government is very inefficient. And he has a lot of domain expertise in his specific areas. But most people predicted Doge would fail because it would run up into these sort of longstanding obstacles and difficulties that I think he thought he could overwhelm with sheer force. Do you know Sam Corkos from Levels? No. You know, Levels? It's like a glucose monitor thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know Levels. So he was the founder of Levels. He is now the CIO of the Treasury Department.

Yeah. I'm interviewing him on Thursday. We go an episode with him on Thursday. It's the first long-form conversation anybody from Doge has been permitted to have and it's been like, it's okay to happen. And this is one of the kind of the fundamental questions, which is how tied up in bureaucratic red tape fuckery is the inside of the government when it comes to trying to make things more efficient and how much can you take the Silicon Valley mindset of notion templates and slack

and if this, then that Zapier fucking integrations. How much can you Zapier integrate your way? Like vibe code, how much can you vibe code the government into efficiency? Yeah. And how much of it is this ossified, walnut shelved mahogany

leather fucking Chesterfield sofa bullshit that's getting in the way and I think that's going to be And then

how much of it is there because that is the best solution to an imperfect situation and do you have

the humility and the openness and the empathy to understand that that's why it is that way?

Does that suggest that along with wisdom comes a humble comportment sort of gets brought in for the ride as well that an amount of humility grows with the more that you are wise I think so I think so you know

Epictetus said one of the signs that you're making progress in the path to wisdom is that you get in fewer arguments and I don't think that means that you, you know, just roll over all the time, uh, or that you, you know, you have no core values. It's just you understand, well, this is why they think what they think. You know, as I get older, I have, I, I, I certainly do have fewer opinions about shit that I don't think actually matters, right? I have, I have fewer opinions as I get older about other people's opinions, right? Because, uh, they're right. They like that, you know,

And I'm spending a lot of my energy trying to explain why they shouldn't like that, as if it changes or means anything. And so, uh, part that Stoicism was this idea of getting to a smooth flow of life, right? Now, you can get to a smooth flow of life by, uh, removing yourself from most of the contentious and complicated parts of life, right? Uh, you can have a smooth flow of life if you live on an island in the middle of the Pacific and you don't work, right? Like, you never have to worry about money. trying to do anything and trying to accomplish anything you don't care about anything it's pretty easy to live on vibes can you get to a smooth flow of life in the arena right as you're trying to accomplish and do and contribute that's the same as you can do your live talk with a fully

scripted out comfort monitor in front of you and slides behind you can you do it when there's no presentation and you've just got off a plane 12 minutes ago well you can have it if it always goes that way, you'll be fine. But it's not always going to go that way. It's a kind of fragility. Yes. Yes. And so resilience, adaptability, you know, being able to function and contribute and perform is the ability to work in less than ideal environments with less than ideal people. And that's, I think, a skill you cultivate and develop over time. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting their Euro road trip

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flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom that's drinklmnt dot com slash modern wisdom given that we've got modern culture of shortcuts life hacks how do you convince people that uh wisdom is worth a long uncomfortable path the thing is at some point in your life you're going to need it right you're going to come to some vexing decision, some challenging moment, you're going to go through something, you're going to be in the middle of something. And in that moment, you're going to want to have wisdom to draw on, right? Wisdom that needed to be accumulated a long time ago. It will be too late in that moment for you to do the crash course to figure out all the things that you need

to do, to develop the meta skills you need to solve this problem in front of you. And so are you doing the work now? To me, that's the question. I think one of the things we can all agree about wisdom is that it's not something you're born with. There's certainly people who are wiser than others, but I don't think any of them came out of the womb that way. Which is what distinguishes it from something like raw intelligence. Yes. Compute power.

Yeah. Wisdom is something you accumulate over time. And so if you're going to want to draw on it in the future, what are the deposits you're making now? So that's the investment that you make in wisdom. There's a story Seneca tells us. And I think it goes to this very idea of hacks and shortcuts and the fetishizing of like gurus and teachers who can just tell you everything you need to know. Watch this video and, you know, I'll tell you everything you need to know or, you know,

come to this seminar. He talks about this Roman who wanted to be seen as smart. And so, you know, the Roman could have gone to classes. The Roman could have read hundreds of books. The Roman could have experienced things. And instead, this guy acquires a number of wealthy slaves. Or, sorry, this wealthy Roman acquires a number of very literate slaves, each one like an expert on a different topic. And at dinner parties, they would, you know, whisper in his ear, the things that he needs to know.

And so everyone kind of thinks he's very smart. And the guy thinks he's getting away with it. He thinks he's figured out this shortcut. until one of the men comes up to him and says, you know, hey, this is a great party. You're very, you know, love this repartee. He says, have you ever thought of taking up wrestling, competing in a wrestling competition?

He goes, wrestling. I'm like an old man. Why would I do that? And he says, but look at how young your slaves are. The point is, like, they can't do that for you also. And I think we are under the impression, for instance, that, like, artificial intelligence is this magical transformative thing because it contains all this knowledge.

But you still have to know what questions to ask it. You still have to be able to separate the good answers from the hallucinated nonsensical answers, right? It can tell you, you know, oh, yeah, that quote you're talking about, it's in this book. But you have to know what that quote is, right? You have to know some vaguely know what it is. And you can really only do that from the work.

It can help you solve. some problems, but if you can't recognize a good solution from a bad solution or bullshit from from a real insight, it's not going to do much for you. And I think people think that people are always looking for some magical thing that will exempt them from having to do this really hard thing. And it almost never works. Do you know that story about chauffeur knowledge? Is this Richard Feynman maybe or somebody else's famous physicist in the 1900s? and he was going around giving the same lecture and over and over again and his chauffeur was there at every single lecture that he gave.

And after a while, the chauffeur basically knew the lecture off by heart and he said, hey, wouldn't it be funny if one day we swapped? And you went up and I'll dress as the chauffeur and you'll come in and this guy goes up and he gives the lecture and it's perfect, the exact same way that the guy that was supposed to do it. And somebody at the end asks a question and says, excuse me, I just need to ask you whether he says, that is a question that's far too difficult for me.

you're going to have to ask my chauffeur and turns to the chauffeur that's the real guy. Yeah, to know by heart is not to know. Well, Naval came on the show at the start of the year and just this lovely idea, which is there is a big difference between appearing wise and being wise and the temptation to wrote, memorize things that give the allure, the illusion of wisdom. Like, this looks like being wise because it is an insight that someone far smarter than me came up with. Sure. The difference between being able to put that out, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's like, okay, I understand and have retained the concept. That's a very good first start,

because without understanding it and retaining it right down, right down, right down, right down, you don't know it at all. So great first step. But what does it mean to be able to explain it three different ways? What does it mean to be able to apply it in your life? What does it mean to see that insight when you're gripped by a motion. Yes. Yeah. To even recognize that there was a kernel of insight or truth in the idea is no, is not nothing. But then, yeah, to really know it is the next thing. And this is where the interplay between reading and study and exposing yourself to ideas and then having experiences is so important. And it's also why it's a loop because there are some things, you know, maybe narrative nonfiction or whatever, um, travel books.

or something. You read it once and you're like, I get, I get the argument. I get what I'm supposed to take from this. And then many of the great texts, literature, philosophy, plays, stories, poems, etc. You have to read, have experiences, read again, have experiences because every vantage point that you look at it from, particularly with the passage of time, allows you to unlock something new in it. McConaughey says when he's reading a script, that he reads it when he's tired, when he's happy, when he's hung over. And each time that he reads it, because you don't have the luxury of taking five or 25 years to go back to fucking crime and punishment or whatever, short period, okay, so how can I change my state so that that different perspective that I'm

coming in from, that different vantage point, I get access to. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. there are books that you there are books you know people go oh I read that and there are books that are designed for you to be reading it's not a thing you have done it is a thing you are doing

and this was easier to do in the ancient world because there were just fewer texts you know there was fewer you know you might read the Odyssey 500 times in the course of your life or here exposed because there's not any other

you know major works to John, we have this, you know, we have all of human history. We have thousands of years of extra history and knowledge and art and stories that some of the ancients didn't have. That's our blessing and our curse. Well, I think that's a really interesting challenge that we're facing. A lot of the time people may have thought they knew who they were and in the modern world have sort of lost themselves. I had geographically triangulated who I am and why I'm here at this point. And then they go through a period of protracted challenge. They lose a thing, a person, a belief in themselves. And now this sort of paradox of choice, lots of options open

in front of me, plus this unmooring from who they thought they were before, uh, arrives them at a port that they have no idea where the ship's sail to. So what do you think a wise Stoic would say about somebody who's lost themselves in life? Yeah, it's when you, when you lose everything, there's something very freeing about that when all your assumptions have been challenged or turned over, and there's something profoundly destabilizing about it because you don't, you don't have anything. So I think you go... maybe one of the things you do is you go back to those things that were formative to you at one point. And I've been thinking a lot now about what I'm rereading, what I'm re-watching, what I'm re-examining,

because now that I am different, now that I am in different places, what I, what strikes me about them is so different. But there is something nostalgic and beautiful about going back to something where you're like, I knew who I was when I read at Great Gatsby for the first time because I was 17 and I know exactly what class I was in and what I thought was important. And I can look here and see what I marked. Like Joan Didion has this famous essay about journaling. And she says, you know, why did I record a thought that I had at a train station in Pennsylvania? Why did I write down this thing that I overheard someone say in a restaurant? Why did I write down this or that? Why did I tell this story? And she'd been journaling since she was five years old. Her mother gave her, she told her, she told her mother she was bored one day. And Joan Didion's mother said, well, here's a notebook. Why don't you write a story? And then you can have something to read. And so she'd been taking notes for her whole life. And in this famous essay on notebook, she says, well, why did I, why do I do this? Is it a professional like Rolodex? Is this like, someday I'll find a story to put this quote in? And then she said,

no, that's, it's got to be more than that. She says, the purpose of journaling is to keep on nodding terms with who I used to be. Just like, that's what it is. It's to remember to who, it's to remember who I used to be. And there's something very powerful about journaling. Like, I have this journal that I do every day where it has five lines on it. And, you know, so every five years I do a new one. But you write, like, where you were on that day, what you're doing, what you were thinking about five years ago.

Or that day. And then you do it the next year and the next year. and the next year and the next year. And the first year it's kind of cool and the second year it's kind of cool. But by three, four, and five, it's very powerful because you're like, oh, you know, in September of 2022,

this is what I was thinking about. And that feels very urgent and important or that feels like silly and weird. And so her point was that what journaling allows us to do is not just write down and record something, but it's almost like it's like taking a picture on your phone and both cameras are working. Like, it's taking the picture of what you're looking at,

and it's taking the picture of you as you're looking at it. And it depends on which of those is actually the more important image to capture, right? And I think journaling as a practice is very helpful to prevent some of those dark nights of the soul. I don't know who I am. I don't know what any of this means. I don't know what happened.

Because you do know what happened. You've been monitoring it and tracking it. tracking it incrementally as you go. I wonder whether the meta lesson as well is nothing as is as important as you think it is, apart from when you're thinking about it. Like that moment when you are caught up in the rumination cycle, the worry, the despair, the depression, the anxiety, the concern. And although people unfortunately don't tend to journal when this is happening,

the elation, the bravado, the overconfidence. Yeah, the ephemorality of all of it. Like, this is from Buddha, but the story is, you know, the wisest philosopher in the world was asked to find a phrase that's true in any and every situation and always has been and always will be true. And what the answer that comes back is, and this two shall pass. And, you know, that can be true of grief. That can be true of, you know, an incredible triumph. It can be true of despair. It can be true of happiness, torture.

All of it lasts less long than you think it does. And eventually it all does end. Like it ends one way or another, the Stoics say. Like the Stoics say like when you're feeling like profound pain or like sickness or whatever, you can say confidently to yourself, this is going to end. Either because it's going to kill you or it's going to go away, right? And sometimes it's only zooming out and getting a little perspective on your own life

that you realize this is true and then zooming out and looking at things historically that you realize, oh, this has always been true for every person who has ever lived. I was reading Unbroken about Zamperini. And I'd never read that. So my favorite stories are kind of solo

or group people against the odds. Endurance by Alfred Lansing. forgotten Highlander by Alastair O'Con that I got you on to and Unbroken Laura Hillabrand about Louis Zamperini

and I said this to you last time no one's done a good Stockdale book yet have they I'm in the works no way let's fucking go dude I'm maybe three chapters in

I've been That's gonna be the next one That's the wisdom is this And then that's the next one I'm so perfect His story is fucking incredible, like so much better than you would think it is. Like, I think people think, can we know about Stockdale? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So for people who don't know, Stockdale shot down over North Vietnam. He spends basically seven years in what's called the Hanoi Hilton, where he's tortured, spends the vast majority of that time in solitary confinement, horrendously tortured. Okay, so the key to understand, like, it's not, it's actually a much, more powerful story than even unbroken because Zamperini, I think I'm saying that right, is your ordinary prisoner of war, right? He is an enemy combatant held against his will, right? So Stockdale is in effectively a re-education prison, right? Like the job is to take these people to break them and to turn them into propaganda assets. Okay, but the thing

you need to know about Stockdale is Stockdale is in the air the night of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. So Stockdale is there at the beginning of the Vietnam War, which is begun under effectively false pretenses. So when he has shot down several months later, and he's parachuting into this camp and he says to himself, you know, I'm entering the world of Epictetus, he's not just going to be held captive and not seen his family for, you know, however... long he possesses the most terrible secret that you could possibly possess other than perhaps knowing the nuclear codes or the you know like there isn't a secret that his captors would have been more motivated to know than to know that he was in the air and watched them effectively he

as we were shooting at ghosts, that there was nothing there, that, because the North Vietnamese know that they cannot win militarily. They have to win in the court of global public opinion. So imagine they were to come in possession of a pilot who was there, who saw his country do something wrong, and imagine they could flip this person. So breaking isn't like, oh, hey, let me tell you like how a U.S. aircraft carrier works, or let me tell you, like, this. secret vulnerable spots on the F-16. He possesses the most significant secret of, and, and, you know, piece of information. So, like, he has a very special sort of artillery shell hidden inside of his brain. Yeah. And that can be deployed by people who would really like

that specific weapon. Or just imagine the moral weight of what he is dealing with. So he's not, it's not like he's, you know, flying over Nazi Germany and it gets shot down. And he gets shot down. and he's being held by the worst people of all time. He's the bad guys. He is not fighting. It's a morally complicated war. He doesn't have pure virtue to stand on top of. Yes.

And so he has to bear the weight of this. It's a flimsy position. Yes. And so what is he holding on too? He's holding on to this idea that he is his brother's keeper. And that if he betrays his country, who he's really betraying is the other 200 or so prisoners and then all the other draftees and officers.

He's betraying, he's not worried about protecting Lyndon Johnson, right? He's worried about the person in the cell next to him. And so the mental gymnastics and the moral injury and weight that this guy has is unfathomable. If you think about what he's dealing with. When you look at Alistair Urquhart from the Forgotten Highlander, dysentery for four years straight, forced march, bridge over the river Kwai, et cetera, et cetera, locked in a tin box, knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki. Hardcore shit.

That's like the equivalent of this climbing Mount Everest, which is just you versus the elements, you versus the situation. Battle of attrition that's on this sort of one plane of existence. Yes. What you're saying that Stockdale had was this like astral, Charmic challenge that he's also fighting with. Yeah, and so far I've been fascinated by his childhood. And then when he's at the Naval Academy,

and this is what I've been learning out about, so when he's at the Naval Academy, when he's a senior, the first, the man his name is West Brown, who would go on to be the first black graduate of the Naval Academy is also there. So he's the Jackie Robinson, effectively, of the Navy. And so as Stockdale is this young,

student who's just trying to get ahead. He's watching this other guy go through this, you know, horrendous ordeal. Like, he had to have, like, basically guards on him because they were worried other midshipmen might kill him. And there was a sustained campaign to give this guy, West Brown, demerit, so he'd get kicked out of the academy. So they wouldn't have to graduate him. And then he wouldn't become a naval officer. There only been, like, 10 naval officers in history, black officers in history before this happened. So he's watching. another person go through effectively what he has to go through 20 years later, a sustained campaign to break you as a person and crush your soul, right? That's what the the captors in the

prison are not just trying to go, hey, if we don't give them food and water, you know, will they turn on their country? They're trying to break them as human beings. You know, they're torturing them. They're playing mind games. And his famous thing, Stockdale, is tortured for days on end. And then they basically, in a moment, they switch. And they go, okay, it's too much. We push you too far. We're sorry. Why don't you go to the bathroom, clean yourself up. You can go back to yourself. And he realizes that they would never give them anything for free. They would never be nice to him for any reason. So he realized, oh, there must be a reason they want to clean me up. And he realizes they're about to parade him in front of the cameras.

They want him to give a videotaped statement. Maybe he's even sensing in this moment that they know what he knows. And so at this moment, he walks into the bathroom. He says he knew he had about a minute in there. And he begins to beat his face to a bloody pulp with the stool. And then he cuts, he shatters the mirror

and he basically scalps himself. Like he cuts, he gives himself what he calls a reverse mohawk. He just takes this jagged and he cuts it off the back of his head. He basically makes himself unspeakable. Yeah, he's bleeding everywhere. And it's like they come in. They think he's trying to kill himself. He hasn't.

He's just maimed himself so he is unfilmable. Not pressworthy. Yeah. And they go, you know, what are we supposed to do? We were supposed to take you downtown. And he goes, you tell the major that the commander won't be going downtown. And so he has this, you know, sort of this, like, this determination and this grid and this intensity that takes on a whole different color when you realize what he's holding and what he's been through. And that he realizes that, yeah, it's about his connection to these other people, which I think is interesting.

What I'm, you find these threads, you go, oh, this is something that you believe at 38, however, he's in. his late 30s when he's in this camp, now he's a commander, that he fundamentally didn't believe when he was 20 at the Naval Academy. He doesn't participate in the hazing of this guy, West Brown, but like famously Jimmy Carter, who's like from the deep south, is in their class, and Jimmy Carter runs cross-country with him. And Jimmy Carter is famously like this supporter, a guy who grows up in like the segregated South is there helping and encouraging this guy in Stockdale's are too busy doing his own thing. And so I'm fascinated.

How does this person go from, like, selfish in the way that when we're young, we're all, I'm into me and my thing and what I'm trying to do. I love me. Who do you love? I don't have time for this other stuff, you know, like that if not, if I am not for me, who is? And then he becomes, by the end, if I am only for me, who am I? And that's the arc of Stockton.

I cannot wait for you to do that. I love it. That's it. That's sick. I guess conspiracy tracking a story, but it's over like a tighter timeline, right? But a lot of investigation, what's going on? But this is like archive shit. Well, yeah, to go to what we started with, like, the reason I'm doing the book is because I've never done a book like this.

And I want to, I love those kind of books. And so, like, the book could come out and sell zero copies. The book could come out and everyone could say that I suck and I failed at it. But I have learned a lot. Like, I have gotten better at what I actually do in struggling to do this thing, which is not what I normally do. Actually, I want to bring up a video of yours that I remember seeing. I want to say, did you video yourself getting the call from your publisher about the New York Times list of the last book or the one before?

I think I've done it a couple times. I do know when the call's coming in. Okay. So I work on the camera. Yeah, there's this video. maybe your kids in the room or maybe not anyway and you're there and you're talking to them and they say Ryan just congratulations bestseller later you came in at number whatever the fuck and uh you say thank you very much that's good and then basically but now I must get

back to writing the next book yes and I remember I remember watching that and you know we've met this is episode like seven first time we come on the show was like fucking six seven years ago yeah yeah forever ago like when I was still oh this is sick I thought you're saying I was on sick Got it. I got a good understanding of sort of, I think, where you're at. I want you to ask you about that because that, at least from the outside, looks a little bit like somebody who is struggling to take a moment to celebrate their accomplishments because not, and I wouldn't say that it's as philosophically shallow as, as I'm just moving on to the next thing.

Yeah, I don't think it's that. But I do wonder whether there is a Puritan work ethic driving you to the point where this thing that happened that's great that by all accounts, I probably should put the fucking buck down, get some cake, and allow my, like put a couple of banners up. I know their shit, like light some candles and have a little thing, have a little celebration. Is that?

Because I'm very interested, one of the things. the criticisms typically of stoicism is sort of a lack of celebration of the good, this sort of indifference to emotion that is good in times of strife, but kind of like having sex with a condom on in times of, you know, times of good. It's like a prophylactic against everything, fortunately including the celebrations. Did you consider taking the condom off at some point? There's a couple things there. I think talking about wisdom, one of the things you'll sometimes you can hear from older people. Take the fucking compliment.

You know, like some, you're being like, oh, no, no, it was nothing or I don't care. And they're like, no, no, I appreciated it. You should take the compliment. And I think that's something that everyone should work on. If someone's saying they like something, if someone's saying good job, be gracious with it because you think you're being self-effacing,

but actually you're rejecting. It's a middle finger to them. Yes, exactly. And I think that's something I've tried to work on. Some people see that. They go, okay, like, so you hit number one, which I've been lucky enough to do a couple times, and then you're just work right back to work. Where's the joy? Where's the fun? And my answer is that the joy and the

fun is not in throwing a party for hitting number one. I like doing it. Like I like, I like writing books. Like where I am right now in the book that I am writing is my absolute favorite place to be. Like I, I'm not in the early phases of like, what is this? Is this anything? I'm in the thick of like every day there's like a challenging uh invigorating problem to solve and then i'm making progress on it and it's coming together and i'm learning and i'm growing and i'm i'm doing what i like meant to do so um one of the hardest parts of the schedule that i am on is that usually my my last project is coming out when i'm in the my favorite part of the next one right now which is why you're so fired up about stockdale and we should be

talking about fucking wisdom. Yeah, like, I didn't really do, I, I maybe got like 45 minutes of writing done today because I had a doctor's appointment and then I'm here and then I can pick up my so, like, I'm actually not doing the thing that I like to do. Not that I don't like this, that this is amazing, but like I like doing the thing. That's, and, and I, I think early in my career, like all people, I, I was somewhat extrinsically motivated. Like, I wanted to the best sell list. I wanted you to say it was amazing. I wanted recognition. I wanted all that. And I still do like those things. And I'm not shrugging them off as nothing. It's just, I just feel like the reward for succeeding should not be taking away from it. Like, I'll tell you, like, my first, the first time I hit the New York Times bestsellist, stillness is the key debut at number one in 2019. And I remember I woke up, I was, I was in L.A. on book tour, and I could, I, you know, my alarm goes off my phone. And one of my rules I don't check my phone, the first thing that I do when I wake up, because I try to.

But that's difficult on the road, right? Because yeah, exactly. You're using your phone as the alum. And so, so it's like, you know, you pick up your phone and you're like, some stuff has happened, you know, like, I can tell some stuff has happened. And, and I remember going, yeah, because I was staying at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which is one of my favorite places to swim. And I go, okay, like, this is either good news. or it's bad news about the book. Because it's coming from New York, right? So I'm on the West Coast.

Your three hours behind. Yeah. So I woke up and I was like, I'm going to go for a swim. I'm going to swim my exercise. I'm going to do the thing I love to do here. And the news is the news. It's like, you know, the cat in the box, right?

It's like I'm either a bestseller or I'm not. I should get to enjoy the swim either way. And so I went, I had this great swim. And then I checked in and I, you know, was a call from my agent. in my publisher and my wife the news

great but like even if it Why the fuck have you been? I was swimming front stroke in a way

the good news is just as much a catastrophe as the bad news right? Like the good news if I get the good news and then I go swimming

I'm just thinking about that the whole time like presence is the gift just being in the moment enjoying the thing is what you like. I am going to interject that I am.

abhor open loops. Okay. Fucking, I am allergic. You couldn't leave that on a lot? I am allergic. I'm working on it. And I know, I know that it's a, I know that it's a,

a challenge of mine that not knowing what's going on with this thing, to me is the sort of shit that keeps me awake, the sort of shit that wakes me up at 4 in the morning. It's a sort of thing that causes me to be thinking about that when I should be thinking about whatever else. I would,

struggle with that. And yet, I would say as well, I've seen other videos, like random shit that just pops up from you, there was this video where you're complaining about trash. So many of loads of trash, like, near the driveway to your ranch or something. There was another one about fence posts that might have even been like five years ago. I do remember seeing some of these different way markers. And it's not a representative. It's what you've recorded and chosen to put online that the algorithm's chosen to give to me that I can remember. There's a lot of philip in here but i do get a sense of of like regulation yeah from from seeing from seeing your stuff and there is something uh sort of wonderful in the purity in the almost

complementarily the boneheadedness the stubbornness some might say right the the the the yeah single-mindedness of some of these approaches that sure some days i'm gonna get 45 minutes in But for the most part, like, this is, I am a writer. I am a thinker. I am a musician. And this is the main thing. And the main thing is for me to keep that the main thing. And I do find that, you know, as a support it from the sidelines of that stuff,

it is good to see somebody who I think, at least from the outside, appears to be trying to find that balance between, I want to enjoy my life. I want to care for my family. I don't want to sacrifice everything in pursuit of the goal. But given that I don't want to sacrifice everything and I want to make a dent in the world, I have to constrain the aperture of shit that I do down to a really, really, really small number of things. That's interesting. Yeah, there's a lot there. I would say regulation is the key to life, right? Getting emotionally regulated. That's what Stoicism is. People think Stoicism is the eradication of emotions. It is the regulation of emotions. It's not.

having none, it's I'm feeling anger, I'm feeling frustration, I'm feeling envy, I am feeling worry, I'm feeling anxiety, and I don't have to impulsively act on that information, right? And so how do you find, how do you build the practice of like, this is what I'm feeling, but this is what I'm going to do, right? Um, exercise, a physical practice is a great metaphor, training ground for this because you're able to go like, I am feeling tired, I am feeling not into it. I am feeling cold. I I'm feeling whatever, and you're saying to yourself, but that doesn't fucking matter. Here's what you're going to do, right?

And so how do you practice deciding who's in charge? That's, I think, really important. And it's something I think I've gotten better at over time, and you work on throughout your life. I think I know that what I control is, and what I enjoy is the doing of the thing. and I try to think less about the things that are not related to the doing of the thing. And so writing is what I like, it's what I enjoy, it's what I'm best at, that's what I want to be doing,

and then publishing is the stuff that comes out the other side. It's the byproduct of the discipline and whatever. And so that's kind of how I think about it. Your point about these open loops, I think that's a capacity you, like, again, just it's, it's a capacity you develop and increase. Like, hey, I'm deciding I'm not going to think about this until tomorrow. Or I am going to be here for this

school performance. I'm going to sit here for this, you know, however long this plane is delayed. I'm going to, they told me I'm not going to get an answer back on this medical test for two weeks. I'm not going to waste two weeks

feeling shitty. And so how do you go? I decide when I'm going to think And to me, that's a very stoic practice. Like, and I think you, you do it in the, in, you, you develop it intentionally over often insignificant things so that in the significant things, you can do it. That's a good point. I mean, the ability to learn how to get out of quicksand is probably something that both of us could work out in an afternoon.

Yeah. And we could practice it. If you're trying to learn that while you're in quicksand, that's going to be significantly more difficult. Also, Quicksand doesn't exist. But is it not? It's basically a trope from Westerns in the 50s. I've been sciopped by fucking American TV.

Well, I mean, it's one of those things you're like, I've got to be aware of Quicksand. It's like, have you ever experienced, you've been all over the world. Have you ever seen Quicksand? I haven't seen Quicksand, but I, you know, I wasn't in America in the 50s. So maybe that's a. But yes, exactly. Do you think intelligence then is overrated when compared with equanimity? Well, I think intelligence poised.

with equanimity is a very powerful thing. And there's a lot of intelligent people who don't have it. And it prevents them from being as smart as they can be. You know, Marcus Aurelius is a stepfather, the emperor before him Antoninus. His last, his final dying word is equanimitas or equanimity. That's what he's trying to pass to his, to his son. It's like the most powerful thing that a leader, a parent, a human being can have, right, is the ability. to sort of be even to be regulated. Again, this is easy to do when the world is simple and things are calm and nice,

but that's not how it is, right? So it's like, like when you have children, especially, like they can't be regulated if you're not. You see this if you have a dog, right? You're like, the dog is crazy because you're crazy. The dog is responding to your energy. And what is, it can sometimes be helpful to have something as unbiased as...

That's why people love equine therapy, right? Because you have this creature which is really fucking sensitive. It gets a little woo. There's some stuff that I went to equine therapy. I've done it. The lady that was there that was really lovely

was telling me about how the horse heart has a magnetosphere and it's able... And I'm like, we're getting into some astral realm shit here. But I do not deny prey animal, twitchy as fuck. If you have bad energy, it'll hurt you. So you go, oh, okay. And then you, yeah, some of these things can seem very woo-woo. And then you go, hey, but I came into this this way.

And now it's acting this way. There's clearly been some kind of- Literally false, functionally true. Yes, yes. Or maybe fucking literally true, functionally true. I don't know. Yes. Yes.

It exists. It obviously isn't real, but it's obviously real. Something's happening. You know what's another good example of that is like a hot streak? Like statistically, obviously it makes no sense, but there is something about being in the zone, right? But yeah, you go, oh, okay, it's about how well can you, how good are you at going from dysregulated to regulated? That's what stoicism is. I think a wonderful game for couples to play is something like when we get out of connection, the game is how quickly can we get back into it.

And what a wonderful goal for you both, because it's the dopamine, it's this sort of cohesive, we're working together thing. it's a challenge it's not you against each other it's you against the problem yeah the third thing that is your relationship yes yes yes yes how quickly can we both get back into that well I'm going to do the thing that I know brings you back in and you're going to do the thing and I that's something it feels like

some shit that Matthew Hersey's probably said he probably has it something have Dr. Becky on Dr. Becky Dr. Becky Kennedy no she's I know you don't have kids but it's the she's like the parenting guru of our time one of the fucking greatest cool she's like don't try to be a

perfect parent, try to get better at repair. Because you're going to screw up, you're going to get disregulated. It's about how quickly you can come back and fix it and address it. Fucking Dr. Becky, stole my idea. So it's about that. Talking about the intelligence equanimity thing, and I think a lot of very intelligent people struggle to be equanimous. And I don't know whether a lot of equanimous people struggle to be intelligent,

but I think that one of the things that people who have got sort of deep in a piece at least in my experience sometimes struggle with is that sort of outward drive to make a dent in the world and that's fine because you are your own unit and who the fuck is anyone

to say you're peaceful and largely content but have you not considered making yourself feel unworthy so that you can go and write bestselling books? Anyway, I guess another like an interesting question with regards to the wisdom thing is

what are the mistakes that otherwise smart people make most often that stops them from becoming wise basically what is the disadvantage that a person who is very clever has of achieving wisdom are there certain hurdles that they need to overcome well i think we could say that there's a number of things that really smart people do that make them stupid right uh ego is obviously one of the the things that makes us very dumb right because it filters everything through the lens of what we want to be true or how we see ourselves, what our identity is and not how things actually are. So ego obviously makes us

pretty stupid. Obviously, bad information makes smart people stupid. And of course, ego contributes to this. If you crafted information diet that's about confirming what you already think or what you want to be true because you're so fragile and it's challenges your ego, you're obviously going to get very stupid um i think we could say that um you know again they seem to all center around ego but you know stop becoming complacent ceasing to learn if you're a know at all right you've learned everything that it's possible for you to know right um that line that you've got about you can't learn something you think you already know yes that's that's epicetus uh but i think another way we get very stupid is uh you see people acting stupidly um

out of a lack of empathy. Like Elon said, you know, empathy is going to be the death of Western civilization. Empathy is like the key to the greatest achievements of Western civilization and humanity, the ability to strategically understand what is going on over there. What do they think? Going back to Socrates, Socrates says, you know, no one is wrong on purpose, right? Going, oh, they've thought themselves into this position. They don't think they're being stupid.

They think they're being right. You know, Temple Grandin famously watches this video. She gets called in by these cattle ranchers who are trying to vaccinate their cows against these different illnesses. And they put them through this shoot. And the cows are freaking out. They didn't want to go on the shoot. They weren't even being, like, killed or hurt. They just didn't want to go on the shoot.

And they're, you know, forcing them and forcing them and forcing them. And she, with a black and white camera gets in and takes pictures. And the black and white camera approximates how the cow is seeing the world. She realizes that a lot of these things seem scary to a cow. Like a hose on the ground looks like a snake in black and white. Or she goes, when you get down in the cattle shoot, this chain that's rattling against the gate sounds incredibly loud. And then it makes one cow scared, which makes another cat. And then that energy is trying.

So the ability to get down and think about why someone else is thinking about. There's this German word, umvelt, which means like the worldview of someone. someone else. What is it like to be a bat? What's it like, you know, what's it like to be my eight-year-old? Because it's not the same as how I can. So I'm going like, do this, you have to do this. But that's from my view of 30, you know, more decades on this planet than him. And it's to go, yeah, what is it actually, how are you thinking about this? What do you not understand? What have you not had time to experience? So empathy to me is, is the key, not just to like being a good person. It's key to the virtue of justice. But like, when you look at most of the enormous blunders of history, you know, Iraq, Vietnam, fundamentally, it's this sense of like, well, here's what we think should happen. Here's how we think it's going to go. And then this inability to conceive of the other people in the equation as being rational or reasonable or even significant actors, right, engraved on the, Temple of Apollo or the Oracle of Delphi sat, it said, you know, one of the epigrams famously,

we know, one of the famous ones is know thyself, but the other one is offer a guarantee and disaster threatens, right? So you think you know how it's going to be. You think you know how it should be. This is often exactly what proceeds, like the biggest blunders of history, the lack of empathy to go, what do they think? What do they want? What are they going to do if we do this, right? And so I think there's a number of kind of blind spots or, um, uh, impediments to our intelligence or wisdom. And, and so really, um, being wise is the removal of some of those things. Like Socrates, you know, someone is sent to that same Oracle to ask why Socrates is so wise, because he doesn't think that he's wise. And it comes back, you know, he's, you know, he's,

He's the wisest man in Athens and his Sarktis thinks about it. He realizes it's because he doesn't think that he's the wisest person that he is, in fact, wisdom. So it's like, what are the, if we go, hey, I want to be wiser, I want to be smarter, it's stepping back and going, well, where am I being stupid? Like, what are the things that are making me stupid, that are impeding my judgment, impeding my ability to discern to see what's really here, and how do I strip those away? That's how we get wiser. Do you know the idea from mathematics of never multiply by zero?

No. Okay, so take as big of a number as you want, 2,343,000, times it by 5, times by 52, times by 17 million times by zero. You get zero, right? So you never multiply by zero, and it's basically an argument that you can continue playing the game as long as you're not kicked out. It's the reason that using too much leverage when you're trading is a bad idea, but going bankrupt is a bad idea. You can spend all of the time that you want looking after your health, you eat a grass-fed diet, you avoid seed oils and red 40, but one day you decide to not wear your seatbelt in the car. Yes, sure.

Zero. Yes. You spend your teenagers working very hard at your education. You make it to university. You're just about to start on this brand new adventure. And you have unprotected sex and get somebody pregnant. Not quite zero, but fucking big, big change. Avoid the major stupid things.

Correct. Avoid the major stupid things. And that idea of, okay, in the world of business, and in the world of sort of objective outward metrics of success, I probably should double down on my strengths because my highest point of contribution is where all the gains accrue to the very, very top, right, power laws. So move yourself up, oh, you're 99.5, get to 99.6.

That's really great. It's a huge big change. However, when it comes to life, like the shortcomings are what's going to kill you. There's a great idea from Visikan Verasamy, and he says, he calls it the divorce paradox, which is, why do people who are, seemingly the best friends in public so reliably end up breaking their marriage apart.

And it's because we don't realize that the bad times and the way you deal with bad times are a much better predictor of long-term marriage success than how much you enjoy the good ones. Nobody, I would estimate most marriages don't end because of too few peak experiences. Sure. We're not having enough time. Yeah. From too many will and too much rupture without repair. effectively. That is what pulls you down into negative equity within a relationship. And you can

reinvest that back in. But really, it's like calories, right? Why is it that you control your diet more than you control your expenditure when it comes to exercise? Because it's way easier to eat 400 calories than it is to expend them. And I think marriage, as the non-married guy in the room, is similar to that. The amount of work you need to do in terms of good things to offset that fucking shit argument you just had last night is an awful lot. So, hey, control your calories. Like, make sure you get good at repair after rupture in the same way as ensure that you don't multiply by zero in your personal life.

I was just thinking of a couple more things that smart people do that make them stupid. One is, like, you don't deal with your childhood issues, right? So you are very smart. You are very successful. You are very powerful. But there is a part of you that's an 11-year-old. There's a part of you that's an angry teenager. and that person is

is not who you trust with these high-stakes Have you done a much sort of emotional work? What's that looked like? Yeah, the inner child work, I think, is really key. When you find that kind of

very young, very impulsive, very impetuous, very sensitive part of yourself, that's usually something that you haven't dealt with. That's kind of a state of arrested development inside you. Like, you know,

there's the, they say there's the adapted child, right? The child that has to, the decisions, the assumptions you make about the world because your environment was not perfect growing up, right? Those are coping mechanisms that made sense when you were 13 and your parents were splitting apart or, you know, you were an unattractive nerd who was bullied or, you know, you lost a bunch of people that you make these, you were abused, you went through these

things. So you made certain assumptions or adaptations to survive that. And maybe that's not good now that you're the leader of a company of a thousand people or that you're you know making films in hollywood you you can't afford to be that 13 year old right so i i think you sometimes you see people you know like this is the classic midlife crisis like you're blowing up your life because there's some part of you that's like trying to get back to some earlier part of you right and so i think you can see people who have sort of very smart very rational in most aspects of their life, but they're making sort of very impetuous, irresponsible decisions, because they've left something unaddressed. The other thing I think we see people do that makes them stupid is

like, and this goes to the idea of information diets. But I think as I've gotten older, I've just seen more and more smart people that I know just kind of lose it. Like go crazy. Right. Like your inputs are very important. And also taking care of this vessel is a important. And so, you know, I think sleep deprivation is cumulative. The drugs you take are cumulative. The stress you put on yourself is cumulative. The lonely nights is cumulative, right? The hours that you work is cumulative. And, you know, you get to a place where something snaps, right? John Stuart Mill is one of the smartest people who ever lived. He has this crazy education

and he snaps at like 20 years old. You know, you can only wind the rubber band so tight. And I think you see that so people make really bad decisions. And it's like this trauma that they're not addressing and then it's

producing new trauma in the present moment. There's something that sort of fall is, especially in someone who's really, really smart. It feels extra catastrophic, pitiful, there's this sense of, oh, wow, it happened to them. Therefore, how am I a mere mortal protected from this thing?

Well, they're actually more vulnerable to it than you are because imagine you've gotten really used to trust in your instincts. You've gotten really used to being right. You've gotten really use to making contrarian bets. Like a friend of mine said, you know, having a, making a contrarian bet that you turn out to be like massively right about can be a brain destroying experience oh that's so great because you've just learned that everyone else is an idiot and you're really smart and that that even though everyone is pointing out this problem and that

problem what about this and what about this you are you you are learning the wrong lesson from that which is like not like oh this is the one in a thousand times you're like no no this is every time. And so often that's why people who build like transformative companies or artists who had its reputation for being transgressive, and they get themselves into trouble later because they drink their own Kool-Aid. They're just playing that same thing again and it's different circumstances. I think we all have this sense that our view of the world is the right one, right? We're all biased toward that. And if there is a time where your view of the world, seems to be contrary to most of all other people, and you get to stand atop this big pedestal

and say, fuck you all, I was right. Yes. The allure to think, run it back. Like, we're doing it again. Yes. It's so strong. And this goes to what we're talking about, though, is like, okay, so that's a historical fact, right?

Like there are so many great historical examples of that same thing happening. So you want to learn, you want to see that. can recognize the pattern in your own life, which is almost certainly not going to be as catastrophic or as significant, right? So when I went to my publisher in 2011 or 2012 and I was like, hey, I'd like to write a, you know, about Stoic philosophy, they were like, what? You know, and that was not a thing they were excited about. Now, I ended up being obviously very right about that, but I try to actively think about why they thought it was a bad idea. And in what ways they were right. And in what ways I was correct, but only accidentally so. You know what I mean?

I wasn't this far-seeing genius who predicted all of this was going to happen. I had an idea for one thing that I wanted to do. So a question on that, how, and I put myself in the camp of someone who doesn't have the courage of his convictions as much as I think I should. I think not fantastic at listening to my instinct, not fantastic at listening to my gut, very sort of top down, not bottom up, very sort of existing above the neck. For me, I get the sense that it would probably be a good thing for me to maybe go, I think I'm right on this. And I'm going to commit to that. What is your, give me the contrarian perspective on this. What you want to do is go, okay, I'm having this feel like, I'm doing this and I'm getting this pushback, or people are

questioning it for this reason, or it seems, you know, like a impossible task for this reason. And then is the part of me that's resisting that ego? Or is it like, no, I have secret knowledge here? Is it that I've really done the work? I've really thought about this. And I have an answer for that, right? I think about this when I get edits back on my book. I don't like getting edits, right? Is my objection to the idea of, am I feeling this as the 15-year-old who doesn't like to be told what to do? Or, and some of those notes that is what's happening and I need to put I need to talk to that kid and go this person is trying to help you you should listen to them and then there's the part of me that that knows what I'm trying to do and knows what I'm trying to say and has really thought about this and I have an answer to

why that's not a correct bit of feedback and distinguishing between the impulsive emotional resistance and the sort of rational courage of your convictions is a different is these are very different things. And I think that's really important. And so it's probably better that you're not, you know, blowing shit up on a whim. This sort of missionary, you know, prophet thing. That's what's good. That might serve you well until eventually it blows you up. It's a higher likelihood of multiplying by zero. Yeah. By doing that. And so, so I go, I try to think about, okay, I wanted to write these books about stoicism, this book about stoicism, and it turned out I was right. What are the good lessons to learn from that? And what are the good lessons to learn from that? And

And what are the lessons, the lies that I want to make sure I'm not taking from that? And then, you know, like this bookstore that I opened, you know, like it was a stupid idea. It was crazy. It shouldn't have worked. It did work. Now, why did it work? It was because I thought about why it would work and I minimized the downside and I turned it into a fucking office, wrote off this thing instead, did the blah, blah, blah.

Not the lesson, the lesson is not, when I feel like doing something, I should just do it. and people, you know, are always trying to hold me back. And so those are just like a couple minor examples in my life that I was able to learn and recognize in the moment because I watched, you know, because I've read about, you know, this Nobel Prize winner who thinks they found a magical cure for this. I mean, like Newton got into, like, alchemy. You watch how smart people learn the wrong lesson from their success. And then you want to make sure that when you experience success or you have these analogous moments in your life, you're like, okay, this is my opportunity in a low stakes, low key way to learn the same lesson as opposed to needing to escalate, escalate, escalate to eventually learn it catastrophically. I love that idea of sort of a dose response or this particular waterline that you need to get past in order to have this unteachable lesson. Well, some people are more and less teachable than others.

Yes. So I guess we mentioned that what are some of the impediments of intelligence to wisdom? Another interesting question would be something like, what are the prices that a wise person pays that an unwise person doesn't? What are the costs of being wise? Yeah. I mean, self-consciousness can be tricky. Like there is a, you've never done it before, you know? You don't know how hard it's going to be.

You don't know what to be wary of. You don't know what to be intimidated by. You can just plow ahead, right? And I do think in art, creativity, business, self-consciousness is sometimes an impediment. It's an, it, you're overthinking, right? And so wisdom, if wisdom paralyzes you, if wisdom makes you think about everything from every angle and thus deprives you of the energy or the enthusiasm to do the thing that can be a real. problem. I think the other side effect of wisdom, although it's not really wisdom, but they can be associated with each other, is like a certain cynicism, right? Like, Feynman talked about how, like,

you shouldn't lose the wonder. Like, you know, he says, you look in through a microscope, he says, you know, does it make your heart flutter? It should still make your heart flutter. And there is something where the, the byproduct of the learning and the understanding and the experience and the experience, and the years of it can make you kind of jaded and cynical. And that's sad and tragic. And I think you have to, it shouldn't deprive you of hope. It shouldn't deprive you of purpose. It shouldn't deprive you of these really wonderful things. It just means you have to work for them in a new way. Ryan Holiday, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're great. I appreciate you. I can't wait for the Stockdale book.

Where should people go? Keep up to date with the million things. Daily Stoic, Daily Stoic on YouTube. I think my name on YouTube, I don't know, just Google around. I'll figure it out. Fuck yeah. Ryan, I appreciate you. Thanks, man.