SOLVED with Mark Manson - The Stoic Secrets to a Good Life (ft. Ryan Holiday)

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

There’s an ancient philosophy that could actually help you give fewer f*cks, and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of it. Stoicism has been helping people manage their stress and anxiety for thousands of years and today, it’s more relevant than ever. @ryanholiday is the New York Times Bestselling author of multiple books on Stoicism. He believes that Stoicism is the framework that can help you be a normal person in an increasingly crazy world. Today’s episode dives into the life-altering benefits of following a philosophy that encourages you to focus on what you can control, and fuck the rest. Get 10% off BetterHelp by signing up via my link: ⁠https://www.betterhelp.com/markmanson⁠ And get your nutritional goodness with AG1 using my link: ⁠https://drinkag1.com/idgaf⁠ And of course, check out The Tim Ferris Show here, available on all podcasting platforms: ⁠https://tim.blog/podcast/⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose. That is purpose.com. Why is it that a 2,000-year-old philosophy suddenly becomes massively popular, selling tens of millions of books and garnering millions of adherents around the world in the age of social media? Why, when made more aware of the problems of the world, do people seem to be more apathetic than ever? And what keeps the world's most prominent Stoic up at night? These are just a few of the questions that we're going to be touching upon in today's episode with my good old friend, Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is a 10-time best-selling author, marketing genius, and founder of the Daily Stoic brand.

He has single-handedly brought a school of ancient Greek philosophy to millions of new people around the world. He's been so successful at marketing the philosophy that his name has become almost synonymous with it. It's interesting because my books have often been compared to Stoicism, and people, and people often mistakenly assume that my background is Stoic Philosophy, and I'm pretty sure that's Ryan's fault. So, thank you, Ryan. This episode was fun for two different reasons. One is that I visited Ryan down in Texas,

and we shot this in his beautiful studio. We actually recorded two podcasts. I was on his show, The Daily Stoic Podcasts, and the morning, and then we recorded this episode in the afternoon. By the way, that episode I did with Ryan is also out today on his podcast feed if you want to go check it out. The other reason it was fun is because, I've known Ryan for about 10 years, and he and I have an easy rapport with each other.

In fact, I think he gets more personal here in this episode than I've ever heard him get in public elsewhere, as we talk about his family, his regrets, his anxiety, and how he continues to wrestle with the question of how to spend his time well. But before we begin, I'd like to ask that you take a second and follow and review the show. It helps us out immensely when reaching out to new guests and putting together new episodes for you. All right, that's it. On with it.

Here is Ryan Holiday. 20 million books sold. Zero Fox Given. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. What do you give too many fucks about? Ooh, I was going to ask you that question, and I didn't, but that is a good question. Like most things, I think that that's why you wrote such a huge book about it, but we all care about way too many things that we care about. When you have kids, one of the things that you care about a lot is like that's that you know you shouldn't care about is like how you come off.

Right. Like in public with your, like every parent you get on a plane with your kids and you're just like, God, I hope they don't like cry this whole flyer. Like there's this thing of like you don't want to be seen as a bad parent. Yeah. But then you're inherently at the mercy of this like unpredictable autonomous person, right? And then you add on top of that, which is a new thing for me, which is like, I used to. be all to just go through the world as me, just like as a random person. And like, fame is the wrong word. But let's say I'm no longer anonymous. And so the being able to be in public with my family

for all that the unpredictability that that entails. And then the sense that I'm being watched, I just shouldn't care at all, right? But, and I'm never glad afterwards. Like, I'm so glad I corrected that behavior over and over again because like it really matters how much noise you were making, you know, as we walk down the hallway in this building. I find myself like in that trap that all parents do of like not wanting to be seen as a bad parent and then the sense that I'm being watched as a parent all the time. And it's compounded by the fact that I live in a small town and the people know. Everybody knows everybody. So I just I just have I'm struggling lately with just this sense that I'm having to perform all the time.

And I wish I was just more comfortable, like, this is who I am. I don't care what you think of me. I think I also give a fuck too much about things that are outside my control. That's like the main one. Just like needing things to be a certain way on a certain time. Like, you know what I mean? Are you like a little bit of like control freak type stuff? Control freak is a strong term.

Well, you know, what I would say is that it all depends on what that's stemming from. I think I would define myself as a naturally anxious person. person and ritual, routine, structure, control are all ways of trying to treat or mitigate that anxiety. Gotcha. And so, like, I see it more like that. Do you think that's why Stoicism appealed to you so much? Of course.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because anxiety doesn't serve you well. It tortures you. It doesn't do anything. And the idea that there's a very ancient philosophy that has something to say about dealing with that. That's other than like, take this pill or, you know, do this therapy. I like that.

I think there's an interesting intersection of stoicism in kind of the present cultural moment with the technology. You've said many times that when you started writing obstacles the way, you accepted very early on, you know, this is an obscure form of ancient philosophy. I don't expect this to sell a ton of books. I don't expect it to become a thing. Yet it did. Yeah. And it is a huge thing. And there are millions of people who resonate with. and now might even consider themselves Stoics. Why do you think that is? What is it about this moment?

Obviously, Stoicism has been around and it's been popular and intellectual circles. Yeah. For centuries. But what is it about today that the masses are resonating with it? Well, it is funny, right? Because in retrospect, it seems like obviously it would be popular, like, because it is popular, right? And so sometimes people criticize me or, you know, he popularizes this thing or, you know, he popularizes this thing, or, you know, he popularizes this thing, or, you know, it's a popularize this thing, or, you know, it's he cashed in on this thing.

As like, I remember, so I wrote Trust Man Lying, which had gotten a very big advance for being a 25-year-old who'd never written any books. And then when I had the idea for The Obstacles Away, my publisher offered me $75,000. Yeah. Which is not nothing. That's like, obviously that's a lot of money, but you have to go. That's several years work. Yeah. For people not familiar with the publishing world, that's not that much.

Yeah. It's the kind of advance they give you because it's easier than saying no. Like they didn't want to, they didn't want to lose me as an author. So that was the least amount of money they could give me without hurting my feelings or driving me to someone else. And my editor told me this later. She was like, we hoped you would do this book. It would not work. And then you would go back to doing marketing books because they're a business imprint.

Yeah. So like not only do I remember that, but that's how I went into putting it out. And I think it sold like three or four thousand copies its first week. You know, like not nothing. Again, if you're comparing this to a self-published author or some, you know, like, starving artists who put out their first novel, this is all great. But like it was not what it is now. It is not even a blip on the radar today.

Yeah. I mean, there are days when it sells that many copies, you know? Yeah. Many days. So I went into it thinking like if I could like, I knew, for instance, like Machiavelli and Sun Su had been made popular for business audiences in the 80s and 90s. And like, I'd fall in love with Stoicism and I thought, well, maybe there's a market for this ancient philosophy in this bit.

That was like the most I was hoping for. Interesting. And so the freedom of low expectations is a really important thing. That's why I try not to have goals. If you have goals that are outside your control, like you need to sell this or your company needs to make, you're just like, it's just an arbitrary target. it and you're better off just like seeing where it goes. And the funny thing is, if I'd had any kind of goal remotely close to what it ultimately done, it would have been because I was

a delusional entitled asshole. Do you know what I mean? Like if I could have said, hey, I'm doing this book about an obscure school of venture philosophy and I'm hoping it'll sell millions of copies and set in motion like a series of books. Yeah. Like you would have been like this person's insane. You're out of your mind. Yeah. So that was the freedom of low expectations is a big part of it. But I think the reason it resonated is the reason that Stoicism has always resonated. And it's not fair to say it's an obscure school of ancient philosophy, really, because all schools of philosophy are obscure, right? But for thousands of years, like, real people doing real shit have said, like, you know, if you ever read Marxist or Epoetist, these have been like the kind of underground, like, it's like when

people say that like heavy battle is like underground. But it's also enormous at the same time. Yeah. Stoicism is like your favorite. intellectuals, favorite intellectuals. Yes. And also the people who, the favorite of the people who are not intellectuals. Like it's the favorite of just, they've only read one philosophy book in their life. This is one of those people. Like, and so I think what Stoicism speaks to and has always spoken to is this idea that like,

we don't control the world around us, but we know we have some control over ourselves. And no one really tells us like what we should or shouldn't. be like this question of like well what's a good framework or operating system for like being a person in this crazy fucked up world that to me is what stoicism is and it's kind of been refined over thousands of years like you know here's a way of thinking about it do that you know it's just it's that that's really cool has your relationship with stoicism changed since becoming so successful with it yeah i mean look stoicism as a philosophy for dealing with adversity or you know, like ordinary life is great. And on the one end of that, the spectrum of stoics,

you have like Epictetus, if Zeno, who found Stoicism after the shipwreck where he loses everything. You have Cleanthes, who was like basically a manual labor who worked in the gardens of these rich people in Athens. So like it's always been on that end of the spectrum. There's been a ton that stoicism can tell you, like what to do when a tyrant throws you into exile, right? Yeah. But on the other end of the spectrum, stoicism is also really, been popular with extremely successful people. Not that Stoicism helps you be extremely successful, but like Marcus Rilus is relying on the same philosophy as Epictetus, but their lives are as different as they could be, but there's a horseshoe element to it of like the emperor is not

as free as you would think. And the emperor is stressed beyond you can possibly imagine and tempted in all these ways. So I think like Stoicism as as the books have worked and I've done other stuff and stoicism as a philosophy for dealing with that, for dealing with ego, for dealing with, you know, ambition, for dealing with temptation, for dealing with self-mastery. Like, in a way, it's almost more interesting and more helpful, I think. Yeah, because it's when you're at the top of the totem pole, there are no guardrails. Yeah. So in many ways, it's harder to say no to things than it is to get out of adversity.

It's easy to say no to things you're not being offered. Exactly. That's a good way of putting it. It's easier to not do things that you're not in a position to do. Right. So you can imagine Mark Cyrillius like unlimited power. So when he says, you know, he talks this. There's beautiful passage in meditation as he's talking about. He says, take care not to be Caesarified, not to be stained purple.

Yeah. Like the only check on Mark Cyrillius, because the Senate at this time in Rome is a ceremonial body almost entirely. Like the only check is Mark Sererilis. Like he's the check on himself. You can say the philosophy is the check on him. It's the final check and balance. And so, yeah, I think I've relied on it more than I did early because, I don't know, early. Like, my life was pretty good, you know.

Not to say I didn't experience adversity or difficulty, but it's just like it's a different set of obstacles when you achieve the things that you want to achieve. What do you give too few fucks about? Ooh, what do I not care enough about? I feel like this is a question to ask your wife. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I think you, if you're like a creative, introverted person, you can kind of live in your own world, you know? And one of my favorite novelist, Walker Percy, if you're ever in like the movie go or anything, he talks about this problem of reentry for creatives.

Like you go out into this world, then you have to reenter the regular world. And it's exacerbated by the fact that a lot of the advice, you know, for successful people is like outsource everything. It's almost like you design your life to be this like pampered baby that only does things you want to do. And there's value in that. Like, you know, you don't need to be like changing your own oil if you can pay somebody to do it. But at the same time, like, this says something about me. But it's taken work for me to be like, I'm only the main character in my own life. But if you are in relationships, how I've had to consciously give a fuck about just first off,

how my mood, my decisions, whatever, have consequences for other people. And then also just although the temptation is there, not designing your life where everything revolves around you and you only do the things you want to do. Would you say part of that is being present? Definitely being present, especially when you're working on a book because you're always working on a book. Like, there's some part of your brain that's working on it all the time. And how do you, like, actually be where you are? You get really good at just following your mind wherever it's taking you. But that's not fair to a three-year-old or to your spouse or it's not fair to the, just

random person in front of you that you're talking to. So I think that, but also just going like, you took like a year off. I, the justice book that I did was finished in January of 23. It was supposed to out in the fall of 23, but I pushed it until June of this year. And I just decided to just, like, just be kind of home and around more. Like, I really sort of consciously just decided to, like, just do more shit around my house. Like, I'm going to do most of the drop-offs and pickups. The, just the division of labor in a house. Yeah. When, you know, you can, you can set it up in your favor when you're the primary breadwinner. Yeah. When you have this thing that's, It's hard for, that no one else can do.

You know what I mean? So just the decision to do that, like, I decide to give a fuck about things that I got really used to never thinking about because they took away from my main thing, which was writing. So the decision to be like, I want to be really good at what I do, but I also want to be more of a functioning person in the world. Yeah. Having worked really hard at like almost, well, the word for it in really, they call it weaponized

incompetence. Like a lot of dudes do that especially. Yeah. Just naturally. But it wasn't so much that. It's just like if you're a genius theoretical physicist. Yeah. You just in the way if you're a all-star point guard, they're just like, Ryan shouldn't

be booking his own travel. Like Ryan, you know, like we, how do we make things as easy as possible for this star, you know? And so you just get used to not caring about things that are not. that. And I don't know, I just decided to care more about that stuff. It's interesting. Every time I come and visit you out here, it's incredibly impressive. Like you, you have constructed a life between the bookstore, the studio, the farm, everything out here. Like, it is so optimized around what you're optimizing for in your business and in your life. And from the outside, it's incredibly

impressive. But a lot of people, I don't know if people know, but, you know, a lot of us authors know each other. You know, you, me, James, Tim Urban. Like, we're all, we all known each other for many, many years. And it's funny because the conversation about you when you're not around is like, dude, does that guy do anything other than write books? Like, does he sleep? Does he take a Saturday off? Does he ever go to a movie? You know, it's like your level of productivity and optimization is maybe the highest of anybody I know personally. And that is a quasi-complement. But I guess what I'm getting at is that it sounds like some of this is the fallout of that. It's definitely the fallout of that. And the pandemic was very helpful because it just blew up

everyone's life. Right. And so it allowed me to reset in some ways. And I'm probably, if my wife was listening, she would maybe take some umbrage with the idea that some of these were like decisions that I made, as opposed to, say, ultimatums and come to Jesus' conversations, or just finally getting things that have been, someone has been attempting to communicate for a very long time. Right. Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Tauce. Capable and confident, the Volkswagen Touse is fit for everyday life, nimble in traffic,

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For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon, and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. At the same time, I've always, like,

my wife and I've been together since we were 20, and I've never worked 20-hour days. I've never pulled all night. Like, I've always been, I think, more rooted and a homebody than maybe people think that I was. Yeah. But, like, I work bankers' hour. and that's like generous.

Do you know what I mean? Like I got here today at nine and I'm going to pick my son up at 3.30. Yeah. You know, and that's like a normal day for me. So I do feel like I'm much more disciplined and have better boundaries than like a lot of, first off, than most creatives,

then I think people assume that I do because of the output. And to me, that's because I think a lot of people are bullshit. And they're, They're an incredibly inefficient. Yes, you are incredibly efficient. It's funny because we did your podcast and we had lunch and you were like, when do you want to do yours? And I was like 15 minutes. And you just disappeared.

And I think, and this is not a knock on you. Like this is, I've known you a long time. I'm like, oh, yeah, it's right. But like probably every other person I know would probably still hang out at the table and just shoot the shit for 15 minutes. Yeah. And I was trying to be. I thought you would want some space. I definitely did, but I also was like, yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I'm not, I'm not knocking you. I mean, but it's funny because it's, you know, if we were meeting for the first time, I'd be, I might be like, what the fuck, you know, but it's, I've known you forever. I'm like, yeah, it's Ryan being right. So I could see when it comes to being present. Yes. Being both physically and mentally present with a family. So how is that worked out? The improvements or the, sorry, the changes I'm talking.

talking about? Yes. I feel weird talking about the horrors that was the pandemic of having emerged from it much better because like it just, I mean, first off, I didn't travel. Like, we drove some places and we out a little camper show. So we, like, I wasn't like stuck in my house. Sure. But like I didn't spend the night apart from my family for 500 days. Wow. Which is like the most I've never like not gotten an airplane, probably in including my own upbringing. Do you know what I mean? And so it was like, it was just a total reset in a lot of ways that was amazing. And it took out a bunch of stuff that, I don't know, I just like don't really do shit anymore. Like I don't like, Austin Cleon, actually when I first moved here, he told me he was

like, work family scene pick two. Yeah. And I think about that all the time. And so I basically don't do the scene thing at all. Yeah. Which has meant I pass on like a lot of stuff that's cool. Like, you know, I've been offered like Super Bowl tickets multiple times from teams in the Super Bowl and I've said no. Like I wouldn't be cool to do that or it's like we're all going hell of skiing. Do you want to come or like you know just like I turn down like cool stuff because I understand it's coming at the cost of the two more important things for me. Is that hard? I would say it's hard in some ways and it's easier and it's easy because I think I'm naturally pretty introverted and I also like my life. Yeah. It's hard in the sense that

there's a, I know my life has been changed by random things that I said yes to, right? And then it's, but it's easier when you start to make a habit of it. Yeah. Like, I imagine for you when you took a year off, when you decided to take a year off and then you started saying no to things, it becomes the default. And then when it's the default, it's great. Yes. The problem is the default for most of us, most of the time is yes. Yeah. But I would say like it, I think two things. I talk about this afterward of the justice book a little bit. Like the hardest part was not the changes. The hardest part was you make the changes and then you can't make the changes and not have to face the implications of how self-absorbed or selfish or unbalanced it was previously.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And this is the other thing. Like this generation of people spends like more time with their kids than the last generation. in the last generation, last year. So that's all great. But one way, another way to think about it instead of like, how shitty were men back then is like what were men missing out on back then.

Right. So that's another bit of cognitive dissonance that can be painful when you go, oh, I didn't do these things because I thought it would affect me professionally or whatever. Yeah. And then you change and it doesn't affect you professionally. And you go, so what was I doing it for? Yeah. You know what I mean?

It's like, you would think it'd be like, hey, I'm suddenly going to be home more and I'm going to do more stuff and I'm going to take on these things. You know, like, nobody throws you a parade. They're like, where the fuck have you been? Yeah. And also like, like, I get this like when I get home, like if I try, like I go to do a talk and then I come home. Sometimes my wife goes like, you understand like nobody hit pause here. Yeah.

And then you have to reenter into this thing. Yeah. Right. And so real like the implication being like the idea that you can just come and go as you please. you can only maintain that if you decide you're the center of the universe, but you're not. I can relate to that. You know, my reset showed me a lot of the same things of how when the default becomes no, there are all these opportunities that when you took them, you thought they were so valuable

and oh, my God, this is a once-on-a-lifetime thing. And then when you start passing them up, you realize like, oh, it's nothing. It like doesn't mean anything. I think the one I still struggle with is this, you have this insecurity, with this sort of like scarcity mindset, mixed with this idea that the musical chairs are going to stop at some point, which they are.

Yes. But every time you turn down an offer to do something, part of what's preventing you from turning it down is the belief that it's the last time you're going to be offered that thing. Yeah. That you're not going to be sitting back at the end of the year and go,

this year was way busier than last year. I did more than last year. I still struggle with that a lot. So it's so hard for me to say no, that part of why I live here and have set up my life and I have a reputation is so I just get asked less. Yeah. What I don't know about can't give me FOMO. You mentioned in passing kind of a sense of lament or struggling with feelings of guilt or regret. Would you describe that as a regret? Yeah. I mean, it's a regret. There's guilt. There's a sense that I don't know how I would think about it.

actually. Yeah, I think I think all those things. It's just, it's my favorite thing and how often I prioritize things that were not even close to my favorite thing to do that. Do you know what I mean? And when the stuff went away, I didn't miss it. Yeah. But I would miss this. Right. But then why do you choose that thing over the other thing? I think it's interesting to me because, and this is a drum I bang on quite a bit, which is that self-improvement is often accompanied with a lot of negative feelings. Guilt, regret, shame. And it comes in different forms. Like sometimes you have to, like, grieve an old identity.

Yeah. And in this case, you know, you almost have to grieve a life you could have had or time you could have had but didn't. Yeah, Epictetus is the philosophy classroom is like a hospital because you weren't well when you entered. Like you're saying you're sick. You came to it because something wasn't working. You weren't who you wanted to be. You weren't what you were capable of being. When you do this work on yourself, you find like assumptions or decisions you are making or patterns that you're in.

And most people come face and faces that and then decide to double down or deny it or blame other people. And then there's the other path where you have to wrestle with it and deal with it. And like you can't do anything but make amends for it. You can't do anything but try to be different in the future or just grieve what it could have been. Right. That wasn't. Again, I don't feel like I wasn't terrible at it, you know, but.

It's not like you were deadbeat dad. No, no. Yeah, I'm not like coming belatedly, but it's just more like even though I was doing, it's like, I was doing the large building blocks were there. You know, I was never like, oh, I was gone for a month to do this thing or whatever. But it just was just like not fully understanding. how much of the load of what you do is born by other people. And the decision to be like,

I'm going to try to deal as much as I can with my own. All you can really do in this life is carry your own fucking weight. And the decision to see where you are, haven't been carrying your own weight and carry that weight is like the starting point. And then hopefully you can also help other people with theirs. But that's kind of how I've been thinking about it. What do you think most people give too many fucks about? Oh.

Yeah, I mean, I think most people care too much about the things that other people told them they should care about. This is Renee Gerard, right? That we don't know what we want, so we want what other people want. And they don't really stop and go, here's what makes me happy. Here's what lights me up. And because they haven't done that work, they're just like, well, what seems to light other people up? What are the things that are important? You just end up trying to win these races where, first off, maybe the outcome isn't really up to you.

And then the outcome is like not great. You know, like how many people become lawyers because they don't know what they want to do with their life? Even though, like, the data is very clear on how unhappy lawyers are. Yeah. Right. And so I think that's a big one. It's like people just, they don't really know what to care about or not care about. And so they kind of just default to like whatever they fell into or what.

whatever seems a lot of people care about. And the real problem with that is that by definition, that's the most competitive stuff. So when you're kind of doing your own thing and you set your life up in the unique way that is only possible for you, chances are you're not fighting for, you know, like if you live in New York City

because that's where you heard people like you were supposed to go, I don't think it's surprised to go, like it's more expensive to live there because a lot of people want to live there. Yeah. But if actually you're uniquely, suited to live in Gary, Indiana, you're going to find out it's very easy to live in Gary

Indiana. I mean, you're paying for it in another way. But the point is, you don't understand you're paying a premium and, say, rent or taxes for a thing that you're not getting. Now, if New York is the only place in the world for someone like you or San Francisco is the only place in the person or Paris or whatever, then by all means gladly pay those what it costs to do that thing. But are you sure that's the thing for you? I love this topic because it's part of it, I think is just necessarily human. Like if you look at young people, like the way you learn anything is you mimic and adopt the scripts and narratives and skills and behaviors that other people exhibit and try to mimic them yourself, adopt them for yourself. The next step after you've done all

that, you know, that that is in a sense what education is. It's just taking all of civilization's knowledge and forcing young people to mimic it until they understand it or can behave in the appropriate ways. I think what probably most people never get to the point of doing is just realizing that those are simply scripts and narratives that were handed down through the generations and that you don't necessarily have to follow it and that you probably should question each of those things. And it's fine if you question it and decide to come back to it. It's like mom and dad raised you in a certain religion or culture. You deviate, you question it, you experiment outside of it. You decide, No, I like mom and dad's way and you come back to it.

But I think that experimentation outside of whatever your default script is is so important from just like a self-esteem perspective. Because when you do come back to it, at least now you know, I tried the other thing. Wasn't for me. Mom and dad had it right all along. And then you can live in that with confidence. You don't have to like put blinders on. You've got to learn the rules before you break them.

But my sister-in-law said something to me once. she was talking about how she had always been, like, scared to drive at night. Like, she didn't like driving at night. Yeah. And then she was saying that she realized that actually her mom was scared to drive at night. Like, this was just a thing that she just heard. Mom was scared to drive at night. Mom talked a lot about it's dangerous to drive at night.

Always made dad drive at night. Whatever, right? So it just became this, like, inherited assumption, this part of her worldview. But, like, had never actually challenged. it or said, like, is this true for me? Now, it could be, ultimately, that it is true for her, but in that moment it wasn't. And she was just realizing that it was like an inherited, unquestioned assumption. And we all do this, right, because stuff happens to us in our childhood, as I understand that you have these things that happen to your childhood or you're neglected,

you have some problem in your childhood, and you come up with some childish way of addressing that feeling or distress or pain. They call this the adapted child, right? And then you become an adult and you have to ask yourself like, am I being the adults or am I being the adapted child, right? And I think a lot of people give a lot of bucks or care a lot about things that are about coping with assumptions or environments that they're no longer in or that they're on paths that were set up for them by their parents or their culture or even just like the era they grew up in. Right. And they haven't stopped at this really essential question, which is, is this still true and is it true to me personally? And so those are really powerful questions and you can

free yourself of a lot of baggage. And it doesn't have to be judgmental, right? It could just be like this was true at the time. This is what I thought or what I needed when I was 15. It's what I needed when I was 25. It's what I needed when I was 35. But like that's not me anymore. And so I don't have to care about that stuff. You know, my marriage, especially marrying somebody from a completely different culture. There's so many times throughout my marriage where we'll get into an argument about something. And ultimately, the root of the issue, after like going around in circles for 30 minutes, the root of the issue is simply, we have different definitions of the same word. Like her idea of clean is different than my idea of clean or her idea of saving money is different than my idea of

saving money. And until we actually like get to the point where we can look at our definitions and ask ourselves like, well, is that a good definition? Is my? Is my. definition good? Okay, yeah, no, my definition actually probably doesn't make sense. Or let's find a compromise definition. I feel like so much of a relationship conflict and actually probably the healing part of relationships as well is renegotiating the meaning of a lot of those narratives and stuff. Was it my opinion that was driving it? Or was it, hey, I want to do this way or I think it should be this way or it should be this many times or whatever. Was that actually based on like my needs and desires or my sense of what my needs and desires would be or how I

would feel if someone else knew about it. Right. So it comes back to this Gerardian thing of like, is this what you're after or is it what you feel like you should be after or how you saw it in your household? And the ability to sit down and go like, well, what do I really believe what's actually important to me? What are my needs? How do I want things to go? Are we actually totally in agreement here? Yeah. And there's just some like external noise that's adding pressure on this situation. And then you can kind of reset. Do you know the Kurt Vonnegut thing where he says all fights in marriages can be boiled down to this one idea, which is that you are saying to that other person, you're not enough people. And I think that's totally true. He was commenting primarily on

the sort of the idea of the nuclear family that, you know, people used to live in these extended networks and the spouse wasn't asked to do so much. And I think you could say, yeah, so you're not enough people. And then also, like, a lot of them are rooted in, a lot of the arguments and spouses are rooted in assumptions that neither of you actually believe, but I've just gotten used to insisting on or thinking is what you want. There's an inertia that happens with with values and beliefs. And the nuclear family thing. is interesting. I had David Brooks on the podcast, and he talked about that. Yeah, it was an amazing conversation. He talked about how the idea of two parents and X number of kids is like a really

recent idea. And that both of them would be employed full time? That's a super, that's like a two-generation idea. And he pointed out that like it might be unreasonable to expect all of your needs and wants to be fulfilled or all of the duties and expectations to be fulfilled by. like a singular person. Yeah. Whereas in the past, there was probably like siblings, in-laws, aunts, uncles, you know, either in the house or in the neighborhood who could, like, take off some of that load.

Yeah. And we're asking both parents to do way more than they've ever done before. Right. In the sense that, like, families used to be, like, pretty okay with, like, a couple of the kids dying. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, we need to go back to that. No, I'm just, like, it would be like, pretty okay.

You know, like, you just, when you read history and you read about, like, the incredible amount of preventable deaths. Yes. I mean, I'm saying it's way better that we, but it is, like, a lot. Do you know what I mean? Like, I was just reading some book. I forgot what it was. And it was like, the mom had to go do something.

So she just, like, left her kids that are my age, just, like, in the cabin by themselves for, like, two weeks. You know what I mean? You would never, you would get arrested and spend, like, years in jail if you did that now. Oh, I've seen multiple news stories of parents. getting arrested that I was like my parents did that you know yeah of course like leaving a kid at home overnight you know yeah and I'm playing out playing outside until like 9 p.m like yeah and I'm not saying that that's like the way it should be I'm

just saying like we're now expecting people to do more it is less and I think it's an unreasonable expectations okay I think it's we may be over corrected it's something else here now something new from exclusively on Paramount Plus it's the series Stephen King calls scary as hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch.

Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Last question. Oh, okay. What do most people give too few fucks about? Well, I just as I'm thinking about this with the book I'm doing now, I think most of us give too few fucks about basically anyone but ourselves. So we care way too much about what other people think and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then we are very indifferent to the vast amounts of preventable suffering that are happening in the world. So Peter Singer, the ethicist, the ethical philosopher's, like, premise is like, okay, if you were, like walking to work and you saw a child drowning in a puddle in front of you, you would obviously not allow that. You would not jump over them because you didn't want to get your clothes dirty. But like some version of that is happening all over the world constantly, right? And a lot of it is like quite affordable

to make a substantial indent in doing this. We're talking about like malaria nets or whatever. So I feel like we just don't care a lot about what's happening to other people. The pandemic was obviously a huge example of this where like for a kind of, couple weeks, we were kind of all on the same page. And then, although we were arguing about this or that, fundamentally, one segment of society was arguing with another segment of society as to why

they should give a shit about how their actions affect other people. That's obviously horrendous. You know, you think about something like the opioid crisis, which is this devastating, slow-moving, like human catastrophe. It's not like it's this totally unprecedented thing. Almost exactly as the opioid crisis was beginning, the crack epidemic was ending. And America specifically decided to see the crack epidemic as like a moral failing of a certain group of people

or segment of society or as primarily an inner city problem. Right. Right. Had we decided instead to go like, this is a public health crisis. And if one community is threatened, potentially all other communities are threatened and decided to figure out as a society what you do about addiction, instead of just criminalizing drug use and locking people up, or ignoring that it's happening altogether, you know, maybe we would have been in a better position to do something when a much

more potent drug epidemic happens that affects like everyone. Do you know what I mean? Totally. And so I think you shouldn't care what other people think. You shouldn't care about things that are outside your control. At the same time, cultivating a sense about the validity and dignity and sacredness of life itself. You know, I think Albert Schweitzer had this expression. I think he would say it in French, but it was like a reverence for life. Like just caring about life is probably what we don't give a shit enough about.

There's a lot to dig into there. I want to go back to this Peter Singer thing. Yeah. So on your podcast a couple hours ago, we were discussing moral philosophy and how it's one thing to toil theoretically with moral questions and another one entirely to think about implementation. And I think about the singer thing. And I'm like, okay, yes, from a moral point of view, a kid drowning 10 feet in front of me. Yeah. and a kid starving the death in Africa or wherever. Morally, those two things are equivalent.

And yes, in a perfect system and in a perfect world, if I can just pay $10 and save that kid in Africa's life, I should do that. I think what gets lost in that, and I don't have a high conviction. Like, my beliefs on this are not high conviction. So there are coordination problems. There are executive and administrative problems.

How does that $10 get there? Yeah. Who is spending it? where are they sourcing it? How does that sourcing affect other parts of the economy in that area? Of that $10, how much is actually making it to the kid and how much is going to like, you know, some NGO in Switzerland or something? Again, it's that in theory, I agree wholeheartedly.

I think we had a whole conversation earlier about how the trickiness of moral problems is almost always in the implementation. And I would argue that with things like the pandemic, the opioid crisis, and maybe even the crack epidemic, obviously there are some horrible people who just don't give a shit and they're very cynical and callous about it. But maybe I'm naively optimistic. But I feel like the opioid crisis, I think there's probably almost universal agreement that it's a horrible, tragic thing. Yet seemingly nothing is really being done about it. And when I look at why, I think it's in those questions of administrative systems, you know, how are things executed? What are the implementations of it? There's like, there's probably a network of

systems that are so interlaced and tied up in each other that to get anything to move or change is like, Oh, I totally agree. And look, there's so many problems with the effective altruism, not just philosophically, but practically as we, we have seen. I do think it's illustrated. that like effective altruism is like a recent invention. Like we've been obviously generous for thousands of years, but no one was ever like, how do we actually get good at this? You know what I mean?

So I'm just saying, they're obviously like psychopaths and sociopaths who don't care about other people. And then there's people who think that just caring about other people is enough. Yeah. And so on both ends of the spectrum, I don't know if I would totally agree that most people care. I would argue there is this impulse in every human being

to look at a problem that is, happening in the world. And the mind is very good at looking at that thing and trying to figure out a way that you can say to yourself, this is either not a problem or it's not my problem. And that's sort of what I'm talking about. The idea that because someone's different than you, they live differently than you, they have different beliefs than you, when we make decisions or we put in policies, they affect people. Like, now someone can't get IVF. Now someone can't worship the faith that they want to worship. Or like, so again, it's a cross. the political spectrum, but thinking about how the decisions you make, or the views you have,

land on other people, presumably people you will never meet and know nothing about. That, to me, is something we could use more of a... We could care less about a whole bunch of things that don't really matter. And that's a thing that really does matter. So Derek Thompson published a piece just, I think, a few days ago, about a new study, actually done by... It's really interesting. A Danish political scientist did a study on American voters.

which I love. It was really interesting what he did. So he intentionally put out fake conspiracy theories about both Republicans and Democrats on social media and then he tracked

who shared what, who liked what, who did whatever. The expectation, obviously, was that Republicans were going to like and share conspiracy theories about Democrats

and Democrats were going to like and share conspiracy theories about Republicans was not what happened at all. What he found was that there were a minority of Democrats and a minority of

Republicans who shared everything. Yeah. So it's basically like 90% of people just don't give a shit about conspiracy theories and see them for what they are. And then there's 10% of people regardless of party who share all of them. So the Democrats shared conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton just as much as they shared conspiracy theories about Donald Trump. And he actually went and interviewed these people.

And his conclusion was that there is a small subset of people in the United States who seem to just have this need for. chaos. Some people just want to watch the world burn. That's exactly what it is. That they have given up hope on the system entirely, that they have no illusions that it's ever going to do anything for them, either party, no matter what. And they just want to sow chaos, which, yeah, that scares the shit out of me. Yeah. Because I don't know how you retrieve those people. No, I don't know if you can't. The ease with which people can be infected by those people, or those people can care so much that other people who are busy and generally do care go like it's not worth it.

Right. Do you know what I mean? Like it's just this is a morass of this is an unending unwinnable battle. Yeah. I'm just going to focus on other shit. And when you don't really understand sort of like how civil rights movement happened, you forget. Like, the reconstruction ends because the South realized that although the North could beat the South in a civil war, it could not perpetually occupy the South and it wasn't prepared to win a battle for the hearts and minds over this issue, which the issue was not whether we could own people or not. Ultimately, it was whether the country was really predicated on the idea that all men were created equal.

and the South just realized if we lynch enough people, if we sow enough chaos, if we cause enough trouble, eventually the North's will will collapse and at some point they'll need something from us and we'll be able to negotiate a compromise where we get to not reinstate slavery but protect enough of the status quo that we can live with it. So then when you watch these videos like during the civil rights movement of like the fire hoses and the beatings and the, you go, what did they think, how did they think this was going to go? Like what they knew was, hey, if we're awful enough and we're, we make it hard enough to enact these federal laws at the state and local level. Democrats won't be in office forever. You know what I mean? Or like one of us

will win the presidency or just people get tired and move on to the other. They just knew that eventually they would give up, right? And so I think the problem is, like, the crazy, awful chaos agents, cynics, whatever, they have, it's like an asymmetry where they know that if they just make it hard enough, painful enough, you know, exhausting enough, you'll just go back to your own life, right? And so it's not just that you have to care. You have to like really care. Like to wrap your head around the sustained interest and commitment it took to abolish the slave trade to the women's rights movement took like 70 years. Like Seneca Falls to the passage of women's suffrage is like 70 years, something like that. Right.

And like it took forever. And every fucking state and every fucking city was this massive battle over. an issue that's obviously morally, you know, clear, right? In retrospect. But like, it wasn't like some people really cared and some people didn't care. But like if you want to make any kind of moral difference in the world, you have to care like to an incredible degree. So this is also why you have to pick which fucks you care about. Like, you know, do you care about like pronouns or do you care about like, you know, legal protections and you know what? So you have to pick your battles, but I don't know. That's, that's, I don't mean to sound like I'm on some high horse, but it's just

what I'm thinking about a lot and realizing like what alarms me about the world that I'm bringing my kids into, but also what I see is just like, it's not apathy, but it's, it's almost like an energizing of awfulness. I don't know. I probably took this way far. Ryan Holiday, everybody. And his high horse. You can read about this in my worst selling book. What is the Justice book called? Right Thing Right Now.

Okay. And then the subtitle, which I've gone back and forth, you tell me if you hate it because it's the Inc Sun-Tride, but it's right thing right now, good values, good character, good deeds. It's not bad. You want, ideally you want something better than not bad, but I'll be. It's not terrible. I don't hate it.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to be, you know, whistling it to myself when I drive back, but, you know, it will suffice. How is that for a pro? I'm actually going to put that on my cover. Yeah, Ryan Holliday's new book, It Will Suffice. Not terrible. Yeah, not terrible. I've read worse. As far as the title goes, I thought it was okay. No, I like it. It's catchy.

It's got little Van Halen thing going. Oh, yeah. Right now. You should get Sammy Hagar to come on your book tour with you. You know, David Lee Roth is mentioned as an offhand comment in the book, and so is David Brooks. So I have a chapter on the second mountain, the climbing on the second mountain. And, you know, he just decided on a lark to become paramedic in New York City. Yeah, I remember that.

And I just think, that's great. That's what people. More people should do that. You should take your success. And I taught English for two years or whatever. Lou Gehrig, after people know, like, Lou Gehrig, his baseball career, cut short, he spends, like, the last three years of his life, he's the head of the New York City Parole Board. Oh, wow.

Like, he could have made a fortune or done nothing, like, you know, putting his name on a nightclub or something. Instead, he, that's fascinating. He just approves and denies, like, rehabilitates criminals, basically. Wow. I wonder why you chose that. Liguardia offers him a job and he wants to be of use and I think he probably probably exactly what David Brooks is talking about in the second mountain. Totally. Which is like he's like I swung a bat and hit a ball my whole life. I want to do something that's meaningful. Yeah and also I'm going to die.

Yeah. Totally. And so what how am I paying back? Yeah. What I think of it. Cool. Thanks man. Yeah man. This was fun.