The Bossticks - Ryan Holiday - How To Say No, Do Hard Things, & Create Space For Yourself

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

#711: Today we're sitting down for the fourth time with Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. He has authored books like The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key. He joins us for a conversation surrounding success, creating boundaries, and how to differentiate between ego and confidence. We also discuss how to audit your life and learn to say no, how to simplify your productivity, and know when it's time to take a pause. To connect with Ryan Holiday click HERE To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To Watch the Show click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential Head to the HIM & HER Show ShopMy page HERE to find all of Michael and Lauryn's favorite products mentioned on their latest episodes. This episode is brought to you by AG1 If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Go to drinkAG1.com/SKINNY to get a free 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase.   This episode is brought to you by Dreamland Baby Use code SKINNY at checkout for 20% off sitewide & free shipping at dreamlandbabyco.com This episode is brought to you by Squarespace From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Go to squarespace.com/skinny for a free trial & use code SKINNY for 10% off your first purchase of a website domain.   This episode is brought to you by Betterhelp BetterHelp is online therapy that offers video, phone, and even live chat-only therapy sessions. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. It's much more affordable than in-person therapy & you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/skinny. This episode is brought to you by Jaspr Visit jaspr.co and use code SKINNY for 10% off your first purchase. This episode is brought to you by Primally Pure If you're tired of discomfort during your menstrual cycle, try the Cycle Soothing Spray from Primally Pure at primallypure.com/SKINNY and use code SKINNY for 15% off your order. Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a dear media production. All right. So yes, the ice roller. Everyone needs one. It's the best. It's superior. But we just launched Mint Roller. Okay.

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it so it protects it and keeps the cold in. Definitely check out the mint roller. I have a code for you. Go to shop skinny confidential.com and use code mint. You get 15% off the mint roller. That's shop skinny confidential code mint and the codes live until the end of June. Enjoy. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you alone for the Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her. My goal is to write one book.

I just thought, if I could write a book, that would be the dream. What happens is, then you're like, and then I want to sell it to a major publisher for more than somebody else. And then I wanted to sell a certain number of copies. And so you're adding, you're moving, you're moving what you defined as success. And so that's why it's never enough because you're not able to go, I did it. my, I did my thing. You should get to a place where you're still trying to get better and do more. You're just, your sense of value as a human being is not rising and falling on whether you're reaching the goal that you deliberately move right outside your grass. Good day or good night,

everybody. Welcome back to the him and her show. Today we are sitting down for the fourth time with one of our good friends, one of our longest returning guest, Ryan Holiday. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Ryan. He has graced us with his presence on this show for years now. We have become friends. And Lauren and I for years have been admirers of his work. For those of you who do not know who Ryan Holiday is, Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. He has authored books like The Obstacle is the Way. Ego is the enemy, the daily stoic, and stillness is the key. He joins us for a conversation surrounding succeeding, creating boundaries, and how to differ in between ego and confidence. We also discuss how to audit your life and say no,

how to simplify your productivity and know when it's time to take a pause. We also discuss his new book called Right Thing Right Now, which is all about good values, good character, and good deeds. Lauren and I love talking to Ryan every time we do, and like I said, this is the fourth time we've sat down with him on this show, we get something, we learn something, and we just have a great time. He's easy to talk to and he always brings value to the audience in our opinion. So with that, our friend Ryan Holiday, welcome back to the skinny confidential, him and her show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. I want to talk to you about how you think about time.

Okay. Because anytime you post anything about time management and time and having blocks on your calendar, I'm inspired and I think the audience would gain a lot of value. There's this part in your career where you have to say yes to everything. That's how you like get something from nothing, right? You just like jump on every opportunity. And then there's a point in your career where it switches. and it can come really fast where you have to develop essentially the opposite skill set,

which you go from the yes person. I'll do any amount of work, go anywhere at any time to the person who said, so you say yes, and then you have to become a no person. And that was a learning curve for me and it's tough. I have all these like reminders in my office about saying no. Like I have a picture that literally is just the word no between two pictures of my, kids. This sports psychologist named Jonathan Fader gave it to me, works with all these NFL teams. It's a picture of Dr. Oliver Sacks, this famous writer, and he had a picture of, he just had

a no sign in his office. So I think I put it there between my kids because when I'm saying yes to stuff, I'm saying no to them. And conversely, when I'm saying no, I'm saying yes to them or to me, right? And so I had that reminder. And then I bought this other one recently that's like a memorandum from the Truman administration right after he became president. I actually have a couple. But it's this memorandum from right after he became president. And he's being asked to go to all these places and do all these things.

And his secretary says something like, should we ask that the president be excused because of too many inquiries? And he gets a hold of it. And he underlines it. And he goes like, the proper response is underlined. And I just love this idea like the most powerful person in the world. all this like having to remind like his staff like you got to protect me from this stuff. And like I think that's that's sort of what you have to develop is like you can say yes to

one of the weird features of success at something. Usually you become successful because you're very good at a specific thing. Right. And that's the thing that you wanted to do, that you risked a lot to be able to do, that you fall in love with. And then you get all these things that are not that thing. And that's the fundamental tension. You know, how the reward for making it as a writer, which I've been lucky enough to do, would be strange that the reward for that is that I don't have time to do that thing anymore. But that could very easily be my life. So I, I've tried to become very protective of like the couple hours in the morning first thing where I get to do what I wanted to do my whole life.

You're right. Right. Yeah. So is there any other things that you do specifically that you can tangibly give us? Like I know you take walks in the morning with your kids. Like, can you give us little peaks at your day where you have that space and how you create it? Yeah, I have a couple of real. I mean, you get up early.

If you get up late, you're already behind the eight ball. One of the benefits of being not in California is you're not behind, no matter what time you wake up. That's one of the best things that's happened since we moved here. Yeah. So I think the mornings are really important. Mornings are sacred. And then my rule is like you don't touch the phone first thing. That's poison.

You know, like you should not have fucked up your day before your feet touch the ground for the first time. And look, stoicism is all about like focusing on what's in your control, right? And you don't control the shittiness of the world. You don't control the fires that happen at work. You don't control what your family does. You don't control all the things that can come at you, but you do control how early in the morning you peak at them.

This is going to be different for everyone, obviously. But at what moment in your career did you realize, okay, it's got the yeses have to slow down and the noes have to start? And it doesn't have to be a specific, but like, was there something that happened? Was there? Well, I think with the phone thing specifically, it was like, it was just like, why am I in a shitty mood? And it's like, I'm in a shitty mood because I got this dumb email from someone. about something I already talked to them about like 10 times that they didn't need to bother me with in the first place that I chose to look at before I'd said hello to my wife, before I'd

played with my kids, before I'd worked out, before I'd gotten any writing. Like, I was losing before I started, you know? And I'm a big believer in like energy and being in the right head space. And I was just finding like that I was like deliberately, I was leaving that. I was leaving that up to random luck. Like some mornings, everything was fine, but a lot of mornings it wasn't. But I think generally like realizing that, okay, so you, you fight really hard to get into something, right?

Entrepreneurship or podcasts or the movie industry or writing or baseball, you fight to do your thing, right? And you make it. And then you quickly realize, like, it's going to require just as much, if not, more work to stay here because you realize how many other people are trying to get in, right, and how replaceable you are. And so if you think the reward or the luxury of your success is you can just chill, you're sorely mistaken. And hopefully you've also added things to your life like relationships and children and hobbies and other things. So if you want to be able

to stay good at your thing, which you should also hopefully love, you bet. better get really ruthless, really fast about stuff that doesn't matter to you. And so I think there's a Mitch Headberg joke that I always loved where he was talking about how the second you make it as a comedian, they try to make you an actor. And he's like, that's like going to a chef and saying like, but can you farm? It's like just totally different thing. And that's like the reality of life. And oftentimes the things that are kind of tangentially related to what you do are more lucrative.

So I, it's not like I say no to literally every opportunity. I just, I just had to be really disciplined about what I said yes to and didn't say yes to because I wanted to maintain my level of performance at the thing that I love and, you know, think is important. No, it's a timely conversation. It's a timely. I had a literal panic attack. This is the perfect person to have on the podcast last night because I, I do look through

the same lens of is this worth being away from my children. I've learned a lot of that through your content. Oh, thanks. Not trying to be creepy, but you are in the shower with me. Whoa. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you listen to the Daily Stoke in the shower, right? I do. I listen to the daily Stoic because it times my three minute cold shower. Like it's, the little clips are perfect for my three minute shower. So when I'm thinking about writing a longer one, I'm deliberately torturing you. Yeah, well, no, I'll bring you along to other areas, but the shower is where your voice is most. That's so funny. Like, I'm around your voice in the show. The audiobook or the podcast. The podcast. But I've listened to your audiobook. But the podcast right now, I'm just having

moments with you guys should all do it. Three minutes in the shower. No excuses. So I was having a panic attack last night because I feel like I am saying, I feel like I'm overcommitting. Yeah. And then I'm disappointing people who I'm close with and care about. Yeah. And that's where it's, I think, no offense to you guys. It's a little, it's a little bit hard. for a woman. Yeah, I would agree with that. It's a little bit harder. It's almost like he gives off a vibe like no. My vibe is more like, disappointment at the start. Yeah, my voice is like, no, but. You know what I find with my wife? So I have my bookstore about 30 minutes from here. And so people come in all the time, they'll see my wife. She's like hanging out or work and, and they'll go, where are your kids?

No one has ever asked me that once in my life. And it's such a weird double. So like, as a man, you get like, if you're like, sorry, I can't. I got to pick my kid up. from school, people are like, can I throw you a parade right now? And then, and then, you know, women is just sort of assumed. So there is that weird double standard. And I think, like, there is the assumption that, like, if you're a man, though, that, like, you will go to the dinner meeting or that, like, like, I just get invited, I get invited to do lots of cool stuff. and people are always like surprised that

that I say no because like that's what someone in my position should want like they haven't read your books but don't you think that they need to listen to your podcast so don't you think though at least for all of us here just in this room I may have at a time said yes or no to some of those cooler

things but with kids now I'm brutal with it because you can't you just you can't like you can't It's just, like, I look at it. It's like, okay, there's what I have to do for my profession, and then there's what I have to do as a husband and as a father. And like, the rest of the stuff is, it falls outside of that. And if it's convenient and I'm really excited, maybe, but if it's even just the slightest bit inconvenient, it's a no.

Do you guys know Austin Cleon? I know the name. He wrote, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work. He's awesome. He lives here. He's the first, like, person that I met when I moved here. And when I was thinking about moving to Austin, he was like, I'll take you out.

And we drove around. We showed me a bunch of stuff. he had kids. Our first books came out at roughly the same time, and he had kids. And he was like, what you have to understand is one of the best pieces of advice I ever got. He said, he's like, work, family, scene, pick two. The scene being like parties, events, the perks of whatever your success is. It's like work, family scene pick two.

It's totally been true in my opinion. Like, you can do good work and enjoy the perks of the stuff, but your family's going to suffer. you can do good work and be a dedicated family person. And then people are going to be like, but I never see you. And like, I would much rather have random people who I don't really like that much be like, Ryan never goes out than my kids say, where's dad, you know? So I try to measure the things that I, and you had to know what's important to you and how your family life works, but I try to measure the stuff that I say yes or no to in bedtimes.

So like how many bedtimes am I going to miss? Oh, that's a good one. So, you know, like I'm doing something next week and I can like leave after they go to bed and I'll be home in time to pick them up from school. So like, yeah, I'm gone, but it's not that different than me leaving for the office early one morning and then being home for dinner. So like that is an easier yes than this thing where because of where it is. Like I just got to, I got asked to do this talk in Mayorka, which I've never been.

It seems awesome and it was paying a ton of money. but I would be gone for four nights to do one hour of work. Meanwhile, I've been offered similar amounts to do something 40 minutes from my house. So, like, I try to think about, you know, like, how much am I going to miss? That makes total sense. You're walking me off the ledge of my panic attack. It's hard, though, when you disappoint friends and extended family members, and you're trying to sort of do it all.

Balance is fake, in my opinion, especially if you're, running a business and an entrepreneur. It's just like you really have to prioritize. My argument to her, though, was I'd rather give them the disappointment up front by saying no and say, okay, that's the no as opposed to committing and half doing what I say. And then like giving a real big disappointment that they either feel secondary or I can't finish the task or I can't see something through. The Supreme Court Justice Sondreda O'Connor, one of her clerks said what I always, she was the first female Supreme Court Justice said, she said what I always admired about Justice O'Connor was that she never said sorry before she said no. She just said no. And like I think,

I think that's especially true for women, the sort of like people pleasing side of things or where maybe men or maybe a little bit more used to just being selfish. But like I try to be upfront and clear about it. At the same time, one of the things I'm struggling with I'm trying to get better at is like the deferring of the no. So I don't want to do it. I'm not interested. but it seems far away, so I leave it dangling, and then it just sort of lingers, and then maybe there's a, like, a hard and fast to know is probably the best way to do it, and the things that I really hate are where I should have said no early, but like three months seemed like a long time from now. And so I said yes, or I tentatively said yes. And then as it gets closer to,

it's really clear that it's something I shouldn't do. And now I have to be the asshole who cancels or I have to be the person who is there that doesn't want to be there. And that's not good for for anyone. So like those kind of like I saw a shirt once that said like don't say maybe when you want to say no. You know? And like those get me in trouble when I like I should have just said like, I'm sorry. This is this is not a fit for me or I can't say yes, stuff like this.

I should have just said no. And then now I'm in this awkward position where like either I'm being the bad guy or I'm having to like ask like an agent or publicist or something to be like, can you get me out of this? I think there's this girl tinks. She's on TikTok. She's like very famous on TikTok and Instagram. And she said if it's not a yes right this second in this moment right now. Yeah.

Don't do it. So the hard thing like there's that expression like it's hell yes or hell no or fuck yes or fuck no. the problem with that, I think that works for like little things, but then I think about like the most life-changing decisions that I've made or like the biggest risk I took. I was like 51-49, you know. So there's also this tension of like I think about how did I meet some of the people that changed my life. How did I find clients or kind like I think about also though the role of serendipity and how things that I thought would be a complete waste of time. change the trajectory of my life. So it's like, I think you want to get to a place where you say no to the stuff that's obviously a hard and fast no. And then you have room to like, oh, maybe I'll swing by. You know, like little things because you also never know. You can't be a, you can't be a hermit at

the same time. Robert says all the time like don't make yourself a fortress. I'm like, oh, I like my sanctuary. I'm not. I do want to say though, just so that it's clear for people that are maybe earlier on the path that in the beginning, I think many of us, we were saying yes to a lot of things before. I mean, even like thinking back to when we interviewed, you get on a plane, carry all the stuff. That's what he said. You say yes to everything. And we did that a lot. And then you just reach a point where it doesn't work anymore. Yeah. Brian, I would still travel for you. But you're in rare air. There's a lot of people like, no, you're going to have to come here. I'd like to know all your little disciplines, meaning like daily disciplines, monthly disciplines, yearly disciplines.

you have so, you're one of the most disciplined people that I look to on the internet. How do you think about that and what are some little things that you do that help hold you accountable? I think people think that I have all these like complicated systems, you know, like, oh, I do these quarterly board meetings or I do this time blocking thing or whatever. I am much more a believer in just like steady day to day, like show up, do a pretty good job. Like in writing, there's this rule like just. a couple crappy pages a day. Yeah. And for me, like, the reason I've written a lot of books is that I

show up a lot of days and write and publish work comes out of the other side of that. And so it's like, I think I look at people's stuff and I go like, that seems like a, like just managing that or tracking that seems. It seems so incomprehensible to me that I'm, sometimes I just don't believe it. Like I don't think that they're doing it because my, my system. is much more informal. Like, I take my kids to school every day. I pick them up most days. I leave the office. I'm usually picking them up and then I'm not at the office after that. So I'm working like pretty regular hours. But like to me, I'm front loading. Like one of my hard and fast rules is like I do the hard thing first, which is writing. So I go and I write.

What time? It depends, like school, not school, but like, let's say I'm writing by, if I'm not writing my 915, I'm like, you know, like I'm starting to feel the out of the rhythm, you know? So every day? Pretty much every day. The weekends, maybe not, but pretty much every day. And then I finish a thing and I start the next one. I'm always like in the NFL, they go, like, if you don't get out of shape, you don't have to get back into shape.

You know, like I think also what happens is people do. things in this sprint, you know, whether it's like, I'm going to, I'm going to train for this marathon and then they're like, never again. And then like eight months later, they're like, I should start training again, you know? I'm just always, I just try to stay in the same level, the same shape, and the same routine. And stuff comes out of the other side. Like, when they say trust the process, that's what I try to live by. Have you always been like that since you were a little boy? I don't think so. Your parents won't tell you that. They, they won't say you like did things and concentrated.

It's hard to know because afterwards, I think we kind of retcon these like sense of who someone was. But like I don't remember being that way. I don't remember wanting to be a writer. And I don't remember. I don't remember there being much in the way of expectations. Like like in the like I thought I thought I was average. Certainly I feel like I was treated like I was just some average person, which to me,

that's the funny thing is though like showing up and being pretty good a lot is. better than average. Like, the reason we have the story of the tortoise and the hair is because it's like a timeless distinction between types of people and approaches. And, like, that's kind of how I do it. I think all-nighters are bullshit. I think, like, you know, when people are brach, like, I just, I think there's a lot of sort of the glamour of, like, the grind.

And I just, I don't, I don't see it. Like, I don't see it working for me. and then I'm not, I think, I remember I was supposed to do this book with these rappers this one time and they were like, yeah, like, meet us in the studio like midnight, like 1 a.m. And I was like, oh, this is like the grind,

you know, they're all saying about it. And then I realized like they'd woken up at like, they'd woken up like three hours earlier. You know, like it was just, they weren't like working until 2 a.m. And it was like also highly, highly inefficient. The whole thing was like so weird. You know, it's funny like,

even sitting in the seats that we sit in now, we were doing this a long time and people will come and say, like, hey, I want to do something similar to this. And what I just point out to people is like, it's just been eight years of just consistently every, even we just went to LA and recorded like, oh, are you taking a break?

I'm like, no, like, we'll be back. It's just the thing. And what I see people struggling, I'm like, well, you're not going to cram this thing into a short window of time and they compete with the people that are doing it, you know, at a high level. by just like kind of doing this at a sprint and then leaving it and then coming.

If you're either going to do something, it's just like you said, you have to just commit to the thing and it's boring, consistent, steady over long periods of time. There's a Zen story about this student who wants to learn Zen and he goes to this master and he says,

you know, how long will it take me? And he says, 10 years. And he goes, well, what if I work like twice as hard? And he go, you know, and I put in twice as many hours. And he says, okay, 20 years. And then he goes,

No, no, no, I'm going to work like extra, extra, extra hard. Okay, 30 years. Like, he's just, he just, the faster you try to do it, not only are you probably going to do it worse, but you're missing the whole point. The point is slow, steady, but compounding returns. The obstacle's way came out in 2014. I think that's like right around the time we met.

And it hit the best seller list like in 2019. You know, it took a long time. it sells more most years than previous years, you know. It's this thing. And like I, when I think of my, but when I think of my journey as a writer, obviously I note that, like how long a book took. But I also think, like, who was I then and who am I as a writer now? I think that gain is more considerable.

Like, I think I'm getting better at it because I've steadily, consistently shown up and done the thing. It's like, it's just all about the amount of reps that you get. And if you think you can compress the reps into a shorter amount of time, you're just getting shittier reps and you're not getting better. Speaking of that book, The Obstacle is the Way. This is a perfect example. That was a moment of my career before I read that book that I was trying to compress everything and do everything fast.

And I crashed and burned almost to the floor. And pulling myself up out of that tailspin, I found your book, which is how. And that was a very helpful book to me to be like, oh, the opposite. That's like kind of how I found you. It's funny hearing you say this now all these years later because that was me trying to do everything as fast as possible as a young guy and then doing it in a sloppy way and almost getting in trouble doing it that way because it wasn't sustainable. And then I read that book and was like, okay, this is the way out of it. It's funny. That book came out in 2014, but in 2008 or 2009, I'm forgetting when exactly a publisher, I'd written an article about stoicism and a publisher asked.

me if I wanted to turn it into a book. So I'd probably wanted to be a writer. I'd probably been working at writing there for three or four years, maybe four, maybe four or five. But that was it. Like I was like, this is my shot. This is the thing that I've wanted. This is my, yeah, this is my shot. And I went to Robert Green, who I was then a research assistant for and doing a bunch of other stuff. And I said, you know, this, what do you think? Like I, I was like, this is what they're offering. And I thought he would be like, well, you should ask for this or you should. I thought he'd give me like, contract negotiation advice. And he was like, you should turn it down. I was like, what? This is it, man. Like, you don't get shots like this. In retrospect, it was actually a terrible deal. But he was

like, no, he's like, you'll be better in a couple years. The book will be better. You'll be a better writer. You'll know more. You'll have understood more. The stoicism will be, the world will be more, you know, inclined to hear what you have to say. You should do it. And so it, that was what I mean, he said it all very nicely, but he was also saying a not nice thing. He was saying, like, you don't have what it takes. And he was totally right. But that was one of the hardest things that I've had to do. I mean, it's a very good champagne problem. But like, if I had come out with that book in 2010, I don't think we'd be sitting here. Maybe somebody else would have written a better book or maybe I would have written such a shitty book. Like it would have killed the whole thing. I don't

know. But it was you want to think you're ready. And sometimes you are, but a lot of times you're not. And sometimes discipline is like not doing the thing as opposed to doing the thing. For new listeners that are feeling overwhelmed about all of the different products and supplements and things that Lauren and I talk about on this show, I want to talk to you about AG1. I have said for years, actually eight years now, maybe a little longer, that if I only had money to spend on one supplement, one product to touch all of my foundational health needs, my gut health, my energy, get my greens in. It would be AG1. And that is because AG1 is a foundational nutrition supplement that delivers daily nutrients and gut health support is backed by multiple research studies. You can

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But I have the hack, okay? This is a hack that I think every mother should know about. I do three things. I have my air purifier on in my baby's room. The room is completely black, so there's no light, not even like the diaper pale light. I don't have any light. And then my third thing that I do is I use a gently weighted sleep sack. The one that I have used with Towns is Dreamland Baby. It's amazing. It's really cute. It's gently weighted. And what it does is it just tells their nervous system to relax. It gives a little bit of weight on the baby. I've been using this. I want to say since he was like maybe five months old. He associates it with sleep. So when I pull it out, he knows it's time to go to bed, which I think is really relaxing and calming for the baby. And he also sleeps don't mean to brag from 7.30 to 7.30. And I really think this is attributed to his fresh air in his room. I think it's attributed to his gently weighted sleep sack. If your baby is waking up every couple of hours, definitely check out these sleep sacks. I got his in like a natural color.

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And that's squarespace.com slash skinny. How do you look at social media with all these people going viral quick? Like what do you think the long-term effects of that are? Well, I think it's really tough to be blessed by the algorithm and to get the thing that in previous environments or markets you would have had to slowly acquire over years and years because you can learn the, you can learn, instead of going to go. going, hey, I'm lucky. You go, hey, I'm good. And maybe you are, but you're probably not. You can learn the wrong lesson from your success. Even with the obstacles away, and I'm speaking

here from experience, like when the obstacles away came out, it came out, it did okay. I don't think it didn't hit any bestseller list, but it didn't, wasn't a failure. It was sort of slowly chugging away. Probably did what the publisher hoped it would do. And then maybe six or seven months in, I suggested we'd like discount the ebook. I'd seen these like sort of email newsletters that just specialized in discounted ebooks. They were like, okay, let's give it a try. And it did really well. Like it sold the sales spike that that week that we did it.

And then for whatever reason, Amazon just kept it discounted. And they, like, I think it was either a glitch or like some person was putting their thumb on the scale for me. But the result was that it stayed discounted for like 10 or 11. months. And they kept paying the royalty, too. So no one at the publisher was like, fix this. So it was basically like a loss leader for Amazon for 11 months. So I can, I remember looking at the sales and they were like, you know, this, this part's me. And then there's this part that's not me. And I remember sort of very clearly saying to myself, you have to filter all of these numbers out when you do your second book. Like you earned like

the first sales and then a chunk of these ones. but then the other one was this other thing. And don't adjust your baseline to be like, this is who I am, this is what I deserve. It's funny because I was writing a book about ego, so I think it was fitting, but like I was trying to say, like I got a really lucky bounce.

And now it's my job to take advantage of that bounce, but it's also my responsibility not to update my identity to reflect what the bounce could say, right? And so I was trying to be, I was trying not to let it make me complacent or entitled and to just do the work. And I think what can happen is, you know, you guys have put stuff up that you thought was amazing and it did nothing. And then you've done stuff that you just threw up and it crushed. You have to have this sort of confidence versus ego to to know which of those, which of that feedback to take. And when you get these spikes or when someone endorses it, you get this rush or stuff, you have to go like, this isn't me.

This isn't a reflection of the work. This is just a nice thing to have, which I'm going to enjoy. But I'm not going to let it change like my ethic or my understanding of myself or any of that because that is that is like death. You have to stay driven by getting better at the thing, which is almost never going to be reflected in the audience numbers. we talk about this all the time i i in a way sometimes feel i don't say sorry but i feel empathy sometimes for younger creators or you know any creative people that that are that have the benefit of an algorithm kicking in and shooting them to the moon when they first start because that is like they think that that's the baseline and we've been doing this for so long i mean even swimming in

in these waters with us for a long time and i think about what that looks like over the next five 10 years for that person and when that algorithm stops pushing and if they if they start to believe their own hype and you see a lot of people kind of get washed out because they can't handle the down swing right yes yeah they look if you identify with it on the way up especially if you get like a lucky bounce or just some the first thing you do just crushes if you identify with that you're also going to identify when it does zero or you get criticized or or or the trends change or whatever. You have to, you want to cultivate this kind of like even kill this sense of yourself that's based on ultimately what's in your control. You want to root,

when I'm patting myself on the back, I want it to be for things that were up to me versus things that were not up to me. And the algorithm, look, you could put out a book one week and there wasn't any competition, and you could put it the same book out the next week, and that could be the difference between number one and number 10 that has no bearing on whether the book was good or not. And so if you now are like, I am a number one New York Times bestseller,

you are letting a random set of circumstances that you had nothing to do with a decision that you made months and months previous change your understanding of yourself. And so conversely, when you get skunked or you get unfairly attacked or you're ahead of your time or whatever, you're going to do the same thing. And there's this great writer named John Kennedy Tool,

who wrote maybe one of the funniest books of all time. It's called a Confederacy of Dunces. It's about this hot dog seller in New Orleans. It shouldn't work. And it didn't work. He writes his manuscript and it's not just like rejected by everyone. His agent, I believe, fires him. So he's devastated by this rejection.

they told him this thing you did, it's not good, and he committed suicide. He put a garden hose through the tailpipe of his car and, like, the side of the road in Biloxi, Mississippi, and he died. His mother finds the manuscript, like months or years after his death. She takes it to this university professor in New Orleans who goes, this is a work of genius. He gets it published. It wins the Pulitzer Prize. The book does not change in any, the book is the same book. And so if you're going to, and look, it's a good. It's. It's a tragic story. He's a victim in this. But at the same time, if you let the crowd say you're worthy of living or not living, you better hope you get a lot of lucky bounces because

you've now taken, you've now handed over your happiness or, you know, your life to this fickle thing. This is one of the themes in Marxian realizes meditations. He goes like, he's like, people who long for posthumous fame forget that the people in the future will be just as stupid been annoying as the people now. Like the audience has been wrong about so many great works of art, so many great ideas. Just think of like the horrible things that society's been okay with. Like not even artistically just like injustices, right? So the idea that like these people get to tell you whether you're good or not, that's death. Yeah, no, it's funny. I did an interview yesterday with a publication. It's not so I won't say who, but they were like, do you feel any level of

responsibility to behave in a certain way or, you know, basically like cultivate your content in a way that keeps, you know, that keeps everybody happy and do you feel responsible? I said, I feel absolutely no responsibility whatsoever. It's not that I want to do harm. I want to do good, but I feel no responsibility in the sense that like I cannot at any time make everybody happy and please everybody. I can only do what I think is good the way that I believe it to be good. And if somebody doesn't like I can't, I can't worry all the time about how I'm going to be received at any given moment by everyone. And it's not that I, meaning, yes, I want to do good. Yes, I want to put good, helpful content, all the stuff that we want to do. But at the same time, I don't feel this like

pressure from society to appease everybody and keep everybody happy all the time because it's just, it's not possible. And if I live that way and I'm constantly working for the critics or speaking to the critics, then I'm going to drive myself insane. Well, the idea is that you should have a, a, a, a, a sense of honor and rectitude and standards that you live by that ideally are higher than whatever the crowd will let you get away with or not get away with, as opposed to, oh, I should comment about this because people are yelling at me in the comment section of my post. Like, I, when I decide to talk about an issue, it's because I think that issue is important. I think it's imperative to speak about And there's other issues that I don't feel qualified to talk about or that I don't feel are

imperative for me to talk about or I don't feel like it's appropriate for me to talk about. But the idea should be like Chris Rock had a joke about like you don't take care of your kids and not beat your spouse to be a role model. You don't do those things because they're wrong. And so you, the idea of like doing it because that's what like the pressure of the ecosystem is pushing it towards is sort of missing the point and kind of meaningless and that's what I'm saying. Empty.

Yeah. You have to cultivate this standard of like, here's what I think. This is creatively and morally. Here's what I think is good. Here's what I think is right. Here's what I will do. Here's what I won't do. And then you live by that code.

It's not to say you could ever be not wrong and updated and change it in midair. But like, you should be relatively insulated from like angry people that dislike you. Yeah. And the reason I mention it is. And there's a lot of aspiring creators that are listening to this is because I think I watch this now observing it so many years later and working with a lot of young creators. And so many people I think now are so worried about a misstep. Even if they believe that this message from their perspective is the right message, they're like, well, what's everyone going to say? What's everyone going to think?

What's ever going to do? I think that's really difficult to put anything out there that's meaningful if you're constantly worried about what everyone's going to say all the time. How do you think about everyone? in your comments, in your DMs, the reviews, what's your vibe on it? I don't. I mean, so the daily stoic email goes out to a million people every day. Me. So, thank you.

If I read the responses, first off, I would have zero time. But second, I would have no sense of what is good or not good, working or not working. Am I hearing from the right people? Am I hearing from the people in the time zone who happened to be seeing it first? Am I hearing it because they're, you know, responding to something in the moment and actually I'll be vindicated by subs. So like, I try to be as insulated as possible from the stuff. Chelsea, who does our social media.

I don't have any of the logins like on my phone because I don't want to look at the things. Sometimes I'll check here, there. But like, I have never gotten that feedback and been like, this has made me better as an artist. There are human beings that I know whose opinions and feedback matters to me. But you get to a level where if you were to like listen to the people, you would, I think, drown. It's not a healthy or sustainable amount of data that a person can possibly process. And sometimes like I'll do someone will, like, they'll be so upset at something I wrote or said that they'll find out,

they'll find my personal contact. So I'm already like, okay, this person is like super triggered, right? But they'll be like, how could you say this? Why did you say this? And I go,

because that's my job. Like my job is to say what I think is true. That is my job. And what I think is important. Not my job is not to grow my audience. My job is not to make as much money as possible for my audience. My job is not to make my audience feel good. My job is to say what I think is true to the audience.

And sometimes I'll reply, I did not build this audience to not say what I think, right? I built it to say what I think. That's the whole, I built it by saying what I think, and I built it to say what I think. And you have to, you have to ask yourself, like, who owns who, you know, are they your followers or are you following them? And I think a lot of people are, in the last couple of years, have been super destabilizing, I think, for people in this regard, but like they're following the audience, not the other way around.

Well, you just said it much more articulately than me. That's exactly the point, though, is what you said is, is, is, are you doing this because you're serving them or are you doing that because you're taking orders from them, right? It's two things. So, okay, your first three books, well, not your first three, but the first three in the series, obstacle, ego, stillness. We talked about all of those on the show. We haven't had you on to talk about courage or discipline. Yeah. This is the third one, right thing right now. But there's going to be four, right, in the series. Is that the idea?

Yeah. So the cardinal virtues of Stoicism are courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. So I've been working on the series now for. So this is justice. Yeah. This is the fifth year of the series. I sold it in 2019. And I always start the next project right when I finish.

So like this book has been done almost eight or nine months. And I'm like well into the third one. The fourth one. So gnarly. But yeah, the idea of, like, because if you think about these other virtues, right, so courage or discipline, for what, aimed at what, you know, you could be very brave, you could be very dedicated, but if it's, you know, you're an asshole or you're, like, actively harming the world. Like, how impressive is that? So, so I think, I think about this actually,

It's funny, like with my audience, I know when I talk about how to manage your routines, when I talk about what stoicism can do for you, people are all about it, right? And I relate because that's what drew me to it originally. But then when I say what stoicism asks of you, and that's where this discipline or this virtue comes in, then people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, like, why are you talking about this? And they get mad. And so, like, when I did this series, I sort of went into it knowing that. at least at first, this is going to be the sort of, not the hardest cell, but this is going to be

the one that there's a headwind about it. And I had to think a lot about, you know, what do you call it? How do you approach it? How do you talk about it in a way that doesn't make people think, you know, this is, this is moralizing or it's full of lectures or it's judgmental because I think in broad strokes, most of us agree like what, there's a reason like essentially all religious and philosophical traditions have, even when they develop totally independently, have some formulation of like the golden rule. We're all pretty clear about like what it means to be a good person. There are very specific cases where we have some disagreements and these possible vexing choices, sure. But like I just tried to, I try. I'm very, I've noticed it with my audience too. Like just this,

if you think stoicism is a recipe for being a better sociopath, like you're missing the whole point, you know? Yeah. And I think a lot of people really focus on this sort of self-help, self-improvement stuff as a way of like just, they're like, I want to live forever, I want to be in great shape, I want to make lots of money, and fuck everyone else. You know, that's like, that's, that's like baggage. And I think that's, that's one very sad, but two, totally missing what all these people were talking about. So if someone's like, what is this book going to do for me? How would you explain it in a pretty package with a pink bow? Yeah, I don't, I would, I don't know of a single person who's like,

I'm as good of a person as I could possibly be. Yeah. And I don't want to be any better. I think all of us go like, I'd like to be more generous. I'd like to be kinder. I'd like to be more responsible. I'd like to make more of a positive difference in the world. And like the people that we admire the most at the end of the day, we're not like,

and look how much money they made. Like we would go like, look at the impact that they had. look at the good that they did and how little they thought of themselves, both in the sense of ego, but also how they put others first. So I just tried to write a book that was a celebration of those sort of timeless traits that make us go, wow, that person's amazing. Like there's this line in Marksruos in Meditations where he goes, like, you're working so hard to be a better wrestler.

That was like one of his hobbies. So he trained in basically mixed martial arts, 2,000 years ago. He's like, you're trying to be a better wrestler, but not a better friend, a better forgiver of faults, a better, like, resource. You're not trying to be more generous. He's like listing all these other areas that he's not putting in any work on. And I think that sort of captures the both like the space of self-help, but also the trap we kind of find in. It's easy to measure whether your deadlift is higher or not, or whether you're, your mile time is higher or not. It's easy to measure your bank balance. So we spend all this

energy trying to be like better, but not better. You know, like it, it, it, there's an expression, it's easier to be a great man than a good man. And I think that it's hard to be a great, it's hard to be great. But at the same time, when you look at how many great people were fucking monsters, it's actually true. It's, it's easier to be great. than to be, like, decent. And it's extremely hard and extremely rare to be great and successful and a pretty good person. Really? Is that your opinion from what you've seen or just from what you've studied and researched? I mean, look, you look at athletes, right? There's like, there are these athletes who are utterly dominant what they do and then just like abysmal human beings.

Right. In the art world, they call them art monsters, right? Like people who were, they wrote amazing books are amazing songs, but they cheated or they abandoned or they abused. You said earlier, like, there's balance. It doesn't exist. And I think, like, to be great at something, you do have to be somewhat unbalanced. I think at some point, you have to make a decision between deciding to take it to an extreme and not. Yeah, as I've gotten older, I think what we admire most people for are the things that make the most noise, right? You're a great athlete or you're a great musician or a great actor, whatever it is. But you, there's very little discussion about some of the other areas and some of those people's lives. And as I've gotten older and I start to look,

okay, like who are the who are the guiding lights? Who are the mentors? A lot of times you find them in books. But I was just speaking on stage and I said, I'm very cautious now. Like if I see someone who's just killing it in business, but their personal life is in shambles and they're out of shape and they're not and they're divorcing their wife and they don't spend time with their kids, like maybe that's not the North Star you want to point to. Yes. Or you see somebody that's an entertainer. You're like, wow, look at like how great they're doing. But they're just, you just don't know. So like, those are the things I think I look now for the good. Yes. And not as much for the great. And mostly because we have the luxury of we meet a lot of the great. And listen, there's a lot of amazing people. But sometimes

you're like, oh, like, that's amazing. But there's a lot of stuff here where like that's not so great. Yeah, yeah. And I think I've tried, I'm working on this in my own life of going like, okay, how does my single-minded dedication to this thing affect other people? And what are the consequences for that? And how will I think about that later? You know, how will I go, well, I'm sure glad I got two extra books in and my son is in jail or whatever. Or, you know, like Peter Attia talks a lot about this too. You know, people are like, oh, what do you? They'll, they're really focused on like what age they want to live to or how healthy they want to be at that age. But they've also made a lot of assumptions about the people that will be around when they're that age

and are not willing to do any work or prioritize those things in any way. So like how do you, yeah, how do you decide what you want? Not that legacy really matters, but what do you want your legacy to actually be? And also, when is enough enough? Totally. I mean, that's a question I think all three of us need to ask ourselves. Like, when is enough enough? I think about that all the time. Yes. That's a trip to think about when you constantly get attention for overachieving. I'm trying to get to a place in my life where I'm doing the thing from a place of fullness, then emptiness. So that's good. Like there's two kinds of poverty that Stokes would say. There's obviously the worst and most unjust kind, which is like you just don't have enough. You've been exploited or

you know sort of screwed over by society. You can't feed yourself. You can't feed your family. That is real awful poverty. But then there's this other kind of poverty. And sometimes you don't believe they exist until you meet them where their poverty is their insatiability or their tendency to compare themselves to other people. So they might be, I was talking to this football coach once, and he was saying, you know, every year I would open the newspaper and they would be the story of like who the highest paid college football coach was. And he was like, if I wasn't at the top or near the top, I would call my agent and scream at them. You know, so you go, this person has like one of the greatest jobs, the job they always wanted, but to them it's not enough because they're not

also the highest paid. They're not even going like, I'm having the most positive impact on the kids. I'm winning the most. I'm having the most fun. I built the best program. They're like, I am only the best if I have the most, you know? And that's just a shitty way to measure your life. And it's a way you'll never win because, I mean, you can achieve all kinds of success in your life. And then you meet someone and you're like, you made more money last week than I made in my entire life, you know?

And off this insane thing, you know, you did it speculating in cryptocurrency. or whatever, and you're just like, oh, okay, if this is what I'm saying is good or not, that's a losing battle. So you have to pick something else. And I think deciding like, hey, like, I have had a positive impact on people's lives or I've been a really good parent or I've been, you know, a positive member of my community. These are the kind of thing. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to, it's not that I don't want to do what I want to do anymore, but I want it to be extra as opposed to filling some hole in my soul. The Skinny Confidential him and her podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Lauren and I could not be bigger proponents of therapy, especially online therapy. Not only because we think therapy is so important, just getting your ideas out there, sharing with someone else, not bottling it in, not holding your feelings back, but the efficiency of being able to do it from the comfort of your own home or office, right from your digital devices with BetterHelp. I love an efficient platform that saves you time and makes you better. Lorne and I have spoken to hundreds of high performers on this podcast, and one of the go-to tools in their toolbox is therapy. So if you've been thinking about starting therapy, this is the platform for you.

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Give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com.com slash skinny. Betterhelp.com slash skinny to get 10% off your first month. One thing that I'm really passionate about right now is air quality. We had the founder of Jasper on our podcast and it blew my fucking mind. I think people are so concerned about what water they're drinking or about their beauty products that they're using or even what they're eating.

but no one is talking about something that all of us are in all day, every day. The air we're breathing. First of all, the Jasper air system is so pretty. I have one in my room. I have one downstairs. I have one in my media room. And then I just got one in Towns and Zaz's room. And it's been a game changer. It tells you how good the air is in the room. So I can go at night and check that they have excellent air in their room. They're breathing it all night, so this is important. In my own room, I put the lights on like red light. I have a little hatch to wind me down. I turn my Jasper on. I get the cleanest air. I'll turn it on like turbo right before I sleep. And then I put on my skinny confidential mouth tape after I drink my magnesium water and I go to bed and feel so relaxed. Jasper is awesome for sleep.

I love it for sleep. It's awesome for mold, allergy, skin, aging. asthma. Really incredible. And due to high demand from the podcast, Jasper is extending the $200 off offer until the end of June. You can use code Skinny. You get $200 off per Jasper. And website is j-a-spr.com slash skinny. I had my period and I took a cycle soothing spray, which is essentially like magnesium. And I sprayed it all over my stomach. And then I took a gently weighted neck pillow with lavender on and put it on top of my stomach with the cycle-soothing magnesium spray, let me tell you. I mean, I felt so much better. I had cramps.

And magnesium is this magical mineral. It's known to ease discomfort and soothe period symptoms. So when you spray it on your stomach and then you pair it with that gently weighted neck pillow, you are going to feel so much better. The one that I use is by Primally Pure. They have this aroma blend. It contains nine sweet and spicy essential oils. It smells so good. It's so relaxing. If you want to just calm yourself down, especially when you're on your period, this is for you. I would also pick up while you're on the site. They're non-toxic body lotion. The one that I like is the almond vanilla. How I use it is after I get out of the shower, I put it all over my body. So good and delicious. It doesn't have any toxic chemicals in it. It's all natural, non-toxic, all the things. If you're tired of discomfort during your monthly menstrual cycle, try the cycle soothing spray.

You can get it at Primely Pure. Visit primallypure.com slash skinny. That's www. p-r-m-a-l-l-Y-p-p-U-R-E.com slash skinny. Use code skinny at checkout for 15% off your order. Visit PrimallyPure.com slash Skinny and Intercode Skinny at checkout for 15% off your order. One thing that I personally respect so much about you is that you kind of moved out of the city, for lack of a better word, and you opened your own bookstore, the painted porch. And to me, that feels really true

to who you are and it feels really intentional. And it feels like you're doing something and correct me if I'm wrong, not for money, not for glamour, but more because you just are so passionate about books and you want to,

you want people to keep reading books. I don't know though. I heard you on about half the town over there now. So it's okay. That's real estate. You got to have your books. business sense too. Yeah, look, if the goal is to make money, opening a bookstore is a bad idea. Like, it's not, there are many better ways to make money. And that's actually, so I remember

really early on, I was at American Apparel and I was talking to Dev one day. And someone was like, you know, if we do this, you'll make a bunch of more money. People were always saying, like, hey, move the factories overseas. Your profit margins will like quadruple overnight. And he said, he's like, if all I cared about was making money, I'd just be a drug dealer. And I remember going, wait, what? And then I realized, oh, yeah, there are so many things you can do in life, legal or not legal, honorable or not honorable. I could be a prostitute tomorrow. You never know. Yeah, there's, there are things where if the main thing you care about, we should all be Wall Street bankers or run hedge funds or, you know, there are so many things you can do where the main and exclusive reward is money and where, by the way, the whole thing is optimized around making money.

And so sometimes like when I, I'll be like, this person selling more books than me or this person's doing better than me. I go, hey, genius, you chose to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. You, you publish books for a living, you idiot. You know, like this is, you already chose that that was not the main thing. You know, like you chose this. You chose classical music instead of pop music. Like, one has got a lower ceiling than the other. That's not to say you can't be great at it.

That's not to say you can't be successful. And that's definitely not to say you shouldn't get paid every penny your worth. Like, fuck this. I'm just happy to be here shit, especially that women will sometimes accept. Like, I just want, you know, like, you should get paid every penny. And whatever the maximum you can get paid for that thing is, you deserve that thing. But understanding that every choice you make has tradeoffs and limitations and reality. And so, yeah, I oriented my life around a thing that is never going to be the most lucrative thing.

So it seems weird to then decide that I'm not good at what I do because I'm not made a lot of money. So I just tried to remind myself, like the bookstore, like my wife and I go, we did this because we thought it would be meaningful and we thought it would be fun and we thought it would be a positive impact. Okay. So when we're judging whether it's successful or not, sure, is it still in business? That's a criteria. You know, is it, are we bleeding from it? You know, that's the thing. But then we go, is it fun?

You know, is it, is it sustainable? Is it, we have, we're just thinking about it differently. And I think understand, that's why like public benefit corporations, I think are interesting. Like, you're making this decision that, like, maximizing shareholder revenue from the outset is not your main thing. And that's good, you know. You just see people there like, I don't care about. money. It's like, then why did you make a venture-backed startup that you're going to have to

have a huge exit from to not have these people yell at you? Like, you fucked up, you know? And so thinking about the decisions you make and then what you define success as is really, really important. And look, when Dove was motivated not like by meaningful, positive things, like he wanted to change the fashion industry and you wanted to have a non-negative impact on the environment and all this was one of the fastest growing biggest companies in the world. And so he was getting both. And then when he sort of put that aside and became very obsessed with other not good things, he destroyed it. And he destroyed himself in the process. And so like your North Star, what you decide to measure success by is like maybe the most important. Did he ever recover?

He has another company now. I mean, he's running Kanye West fashion brand right now. So, you know, that's a buck. Yeah. That's a book. Yeah. That's a boy. You want to write that? That's a good book. Go! It's going to be going to write that book. You've made a decision about what your values are as a person when you take that job. And it's, I would say, not good.

Speaking of obscure categories, though, and I see this and I know you've seen it, it's all over. The algorithm is blessing this. Jerry Seinfeld all over Stoicism is. That's cool. That's super cool. I sent him that copy. I'm saying I was going to ask, like, okay, you so you are responsible in many ways for that. But I imagine that is really cool for you.

to see someone like him, I assume you admire him and what he's done, and then to see him kind of talking about that everywhere. Yes. So, okay, so when I saw that video where he did a thing for GQ where he's holding up like the 10 things I can't live without, and he held up a leather edition of Daily Stoke that I published, or a leather, he held up a leather copy of Marks Roses Meditations that I publish. That what flashback to me is I'm in my college apartment and someone recommended this obscure ancient philosopher to me and I bought it and it came on Amazon. And that's the addition that I read. And I remember reading it and thinking, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I wish I had known about this earlier. I wish I want more people to know about it.

And I said like, this is what I wanted this. At some point I decided that that's what I wanted to do is to tell people about this amazing thing. And then there it is happening, right? Like one of the most famous people in the world, a person who's work I admire. is talking about. And I've had a lot of moments like that, but I just, I have to remind myself going back to that period. Like, that's what I, the fact that I've, I've also made money and gotten to do things I love doing and I've learned a lot, that's all on top. But the main thing that I was trying to do was that was get people who I thought should know about it to know about it and I did it. And so you kind of got to go back to it. Yeah, what was I, you're like, my dream was to like step on to

the field of, you know, the football field. And at any level, I wanted to do that. And then you're going to feel like a piece of shit because you lost the Super Bowl. Like you have so far exceeded what was actually your goal. And remembering that and then everything is extra. Like I wanted to write one book. My goal is to write one book. Like I just thought, if I could write a book, that would be the dream.

What happens is then you're like, and then I want to sell it to a major publisher for more than somebody else. And then I wanted to sell a certain number. of copies. And so you're adding, you're moving, you're moving what you defined as success. And so that's why it's never enough because you're not able to go, I did it. My, I did my thing. Again, you should get to a place where you're still trying to get better and do more. You're just, it's your value, your sense of value as a human being is not rising and falling on whether you're reaching the goal that you deliberately move right outside your grass.

you need to take the picture of Jerry Seinfeld holding that book and put it above the no that's a good yes put that one there put Sam underneath Sam if you're listening put Sam underneath Sam you can ice roll in the picture because I'm going to be an ice roll I'm an ice roller for Sam okay and that's your that's all you need around your no she does that mask thing that you guys recommend every night the one that makes you look like man in the iron mask I love it the red light yeah I love that before you go I want because I have to ask you this. You do daily dad.

And I want you to talk about, yes, I want you to talk about how you think about being and showing up as a father to your kids, how you want to be as a parent and also how you want to show up as a husband. Michael's going to get his composition notebook out. I'm just kidding. Michael's a great husband. He's a great husband. I'm just trying. I'm just, I'm trying to work as hard at being better at that stuff. as the other stuff.

I'm not religious, but I read this story about Jimmy Carter. He'd run for like his first public office, which he lost. He's a very devout Christian. And he hits him, he sort of, you know, sifting through the loss. He's like, I just knocked on like 10,000 doors to try to get people to vote for me. And he was like, how many doors have I knocked on to like preach the word, right? So again, I can't really relate to that, but I could relate to the idea of like, oh, he's saying like, I did all this work and sacrifice and I put myself out there for this like professional thing. And then I'm essentially putting in no work in this thing that I'm, I believe is actually more important. And I think that's the, it's like we'll work so hard to make more money or to get in better shape or whatever. And then we're just kind of like winging it at home. And and so I am trying to just actively get better. at those things and to be not just like what is societally accepted, which for men is higher than

it's ever been before, but also pretty fucking low. Like the bar is like pretty low. Trying to like be what I'm capable of being in that thing. That makes sense. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. It's hard though. It's hard because it's very rewarding, of course, but effort and success are not necessarily correlated. There's a book called All Joy, No Fun. By the way, it is fun. Don't go fucking wild on YouTube. But I'm just saying like there are moments yesterday I had one where I was just like, oh my gosh, the tantrum is tantruming. Yeah, my almost five-year-old just would not get in his car seat this morning. And like I lost it. He lost it. I lost it. Then I feel like we salvaged it. And then One of the things I'm working on is like repair.

Like how do I own, how do I own it? How do we talk about it? How do we get better for it? What if you just handed you the daily stoic when you're losing it? What are you going to do when he's 16 years old and you're yelling at him about something? And he just hands you the daily stoic. There's this story I have in the book about this guy, James Lawson. He was this civil rights pioneer.

He was like, one of the pioneers of nonviolence. He sort of took Gandhi's strategy and brought them to the civil rights movement, particularly in the sit-in demonstrations. And so he's very close friends with Martin Luther King. And after Martin Luther King is assassinated by James Earl Ray, he decides, like, I'm going to go visit this man in prison. Like, I'm going to visit the man in prison who killed the person I love more than anyone. And, you know, he killed like a saint, basically. Shot him down in cold blood, a horrible person.

So he goes and they sort of develop this relationship where he goes and he talks and he meets him. And at one point, James Earl Ray asks James Lawson to, officiate his prison wedding. And he claims to have found God in prison. He asked him to prison. And so James Lawson is telling his family, like, I just, is at dinner. And he's like, I just, I don't know what to do. He asked this.

And his son's, you know, just teenage son's just eating. And he goes, well, dad, if you believe any of this shit you've been talking about, you'll do it. And then he just goes back to eating. And there is something that, like, just like, an honesty. see and a clarity that I think kids have where they see they see through it. It's great. I mean, it humbles you.

Before you go, last thing on this subject, or I think it's relevant, you are a student of history. These last few years have been contentious. Insane. People are at each other's throats. If you could wave a magic wand and point people maybe to history or wherever, what would you try to tell the general consensus, the general collective, I guess, the population, how we should be behaving, how we should be treating each other? And does this correlate? I mean, there's obviously been much more contagious periods in history. And the elections coming up.

Yeah. But when you think about this, like, if you could just one message. Well, look, one of the things that happens when you study history is you realize it's always been terrible and it's always been crazy. And hopefully the last few years have given people some empathy for what it feels like to live through history. Because like we feel like we're just living through the present moment, but actually we're living through what people will read about 100 years for now, right? And so when you live through a pandemic, you go, oh, okay, right. The depression wasn't fun. It was terrifying. And nobody knew how it was going to go. And some people did good things, some people did bad things, nobody was perfect. So I think one of the things that helps, like, I would, I would just urge people on

like a really practical level talking about saying no, say no to the news and say yes to reading history. Like you would have been far better reading about the Spanish flu in 1918 than watching CNN or Fox News every day during the pandemic. That is such good advice. Like read about moments of history that allow you to understand the moment that you are in. And you understand what you see. It's so crazy. all the same actors and all the same people are existing in every moment. And it just turns down the volume on things. It doesn't make it you go, oh, it's all going to work out because it very,

sometimes it gets worse, right? And sometimes it doesn't work out. But I think that's something I try to remind. Like you're consuming way too much real-time information and you're not getting in a philosophical perspective. You're not studying humans generally. But I think there is this sense that Stoicism being about self-help, self-improvement, and focusing on what you control, so self-discipline, that it's

like indifferent to the things that are happening. And I think that's wrong. There's this stoic named Hierocles who he said, like, there are these circles of concern. So your first circle is you, then your next circle is your family, you know, then it's your extended family, then it's people who live near you, and then it's your country, and then it's your, you know, it's like these bigger and bigger circles. And he said, like, the work of, philosophy and the work of life is the art of trying to bring those outer circles inwards. And so I do think there is, look, there is such a thing as virtue signaling, which is annoying and obnoxious. And there's a bunch of people just acting like talking about stuff is making a

difference, which it doesn't. But there's also kind of this like performative heartlessness that I feel like I'm sensing. It's like, I don't give a shit. Nothing matters. Fuck those people. There's almost this like energy of like liking to piss other people off or showing that you don't. And like that's not stoicism. That's not cool. And so if I just the idea like there's this great Huffington Post article I think of all the time. It's for maybe like 10 years ago. But the headline is just, I don't know how I'm supposed to tell you that you have to care about other people. Like and and there is that that seems to be a thing that people need a reminder of that what the decisions you make and the policies you support or don't support have positive or negative impacts on other people.

And that this isn't like, this isn't a game that we're like playing on the internet. Like real people live and die by these decisions we make. And that like we all have the ability to have a positive impact sometimes really big. So it was really small. I tell the story in this book about Thomas Clarkson, who was this graduate student in the 1700s, who just is asked to write this essay about whether slavery should exist. or not. And he decides that it shouldn't exist. Like it's just an abstract moral question of whether owning a person is right or wrong, which was a open question at that time. And he decides,

he writes the essay. He says, no. And then when he finishes, he goes, if the answer is no, maybe I should do something about it. And this man singularly ends the slave trade in the British Empire, which leads to the abolition movement in the U.S. of War. Like one person does have this big impact, right? And what you also find when you study history is that a lot of the worst things that have ever happened, you could lay at the feet of one group or a small group of people and some of the greatest things that have ever happened. You could lay at the feet of one really committed, passionate person or group of people. And like, you could be that person. So I just, I dislike this idea of stoicism as apathy or indifference if fundamentally wasn't and

isn't. Ryan Holiday, right thing right now, good values, good character, good deeds. Where can everyone find you the book, Pimp Yourself Out? When is it out? I believe it's out June 10th. June 10th or 11th, I don't know that, yeah. Do you have to read them all in order? Can you read them individually? I read it out of order. Would you read discipline first? I read discipline first. You know, come on. So you can read any, anywhere can everyone find you, everything, Pimp Yourself out. Yeah, daily stoic and daily dad. So that's a daily parenting strategies for from ancient history and wisdom. And then Daily Stoic is one Stoic idea every day. Those are DailyStoic.com, DailyDad.com. And those are the Instagrams. And no big deal. It says on your book,

a message all of us needs to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don't know a lot of people that have Arnold Schwarzenegger as their person that recommends a book on the front. I mean, that's pretty, that's a big deal. That's right. I also recommend personally to everybody the Daily Stoic. I love that book. I've Michael introduced it to me. I'll give. Your dad's out there, I think the daily dad's incredible too. I've been reading that. Did we get you on time for bedtime is the question. Yeah, I can get home in time for bedtime.

Perfect. Well, this is full circle. Ryan, thanks for coming on. Go listen to the other episodes of them. Be sure to use the code mint at shop, skinny confidential.com, and you get 15% off the mint roller. It's the cutest thing on the planet. You guys are going to be obsessed, superior, thick silicone, beautiful.

And, of course, looks so cute on the vanity.