The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1258: Ryan Holiday | Wisdom Takes Work

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Wisdom isn't about what you know — it's what you actually do. Author Ryan Holiday breaks down why virtue requires action, not just good intentions. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1258What We Discuss with Ryan Holiday:Wisdom isn't knowledge — it's the consistent application of knowledge when nobody's watching. Ryan distinguishes between knowing something intellectually and actually living it. You can memorize every Stoic principle ever written, but if you don't apply those lessons when you're stressed, angry, or tempted, you don't possess wisdom — you just own some expensive bookshelf decorations.Reading is a legitimate superpower that lets you download decades of human experience in hours. Books give you access to conversations with the greatest minds across history — people you could never meet, asking questions you'd never think to ask. It's not about collecting titles; it's about systematically absorbing hard-won lessons from people who already made the mistakes.The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why fools rarely doubt themselves while the wise remain perpetually curious. True wisdom requires intellectual humility — acknowledging the vast ocean of what you don't know. The loudest voices in any room are usually the least informed, while genuine experts understand their knowledge has limits.Ego is wisdom's silent assassin — it convinces you that you've already arrived when the journey never actually ends. Ryan's refusal to obsessively check book rankings isn't false modesty; it's strategic protection against letting external validation corrupt the creative process. Soaking up applause feels good but produces nothing new.Treat learning as a lifelong practice: absorb knowledge as if you'll live forever, but act with the urgency of someone who might not see tomorrow. This ancient Latin wisdom reframes curiosity as non-negotiable and action as time-sensitive — a powerful combination that turns passive information consumption into meaningful, immediate application.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Caldera + Lab: 20% off: calderalab.com/jordan, code JORDANCookUnity: 50% off first week: cookunity.com/jordan or code JORDANQuince: Free shipping & 365-day returns: quince.com/jordanAirbnb: Turn your house into a host: airbnb.com/hostAG1: Welcome kit: drinkag1.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. You read a lot about America. You spend a lot of time in America, you're like, Americans do this. You know, Americans fuck this up. This is the importance of both travel and the study of history is because you read about Rome and Sparta and Athens. And you go, oh, wait, every country does this stuff. Every country is bad.

Yeah. Every country has shameful secrets. Every country has weird, hilarious quirks. Every country has practices that make no sense. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, war correspondent, or real-life pirate. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, social engineering, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a

taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash starts or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, we're diving into something that sounds simple but has ruined lives since people were wearing togas and debating geometry for fun, virtue. The four virtues, actually, according to our returning guest and resident Stoic and Chief Ryan Holiday, virtue isn't something you have, it is something you do, which frankly sounds a little bit like a personal attack. Today we're focusing on wisdom, hard one experience, and no, there are no cheat codes. Today we'll get into why wisdom isn't the same thing as knowledge. It's the act of applying knowledge consistently, not just once when somebody's watching. We'll talk about

reading books as a superpower and kind of a scam that I built my entire business around how the greats used silence, note-taking, and systems instead of ego, and why fools are seldom humble. We'll talk Montaigne, Machiavelli, social skills, why ancient education required both literacy and physical prowess, and why Ryan dropped out a college yet somehow cranked out a small library of bestsellers while his parents waited patiently for him to get a real job. All that and a whole lot more on this episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show here with my good friend, Ryan Holiday. Here we go. How's the book doing?

Is it out already? Yeah, it came out last Tuesday. Yeah, how's it doing? I think good, and I'm trying not to check. Are you able to do that? They told me how it came out on the best seller list, which was good, but I haven't like, I can say this honestly. I have not checked Amazon a single time.

I have no idea what the rank is. I have no idea what the reviews are. It's actually weird. Like, I've tried to get better at not paying attention to that stuff. And it's generally made me happier, and I think generally made me better at doing the important part, which is the writing. but there is something a little weird about it. It's not that I don't know.

It just feels a bit anticlimactic. Like it did come out, right? Like, I'm just, you know. Yeah. I just want to make sure that, like, the copies arrived to people. I'm not, I don't need you to tell me how you liked it, but I just want to make sure that I'm not missing something that went horribly wrong. And the reason the silence isn't because I'm keeping healthy boundaries.

The silence might be because they're all stuck in a factory somewhere. For people who just chime. in on this. And we're talking about the book release and the book ranking. I feel like for me it would just be very hard to work on something for years, release that thing, and then be like, I don't want to look at it. I'm getting deja vu. Maybe we've talked about this before, but this is how I think like Johnny Depp and some other actors, they never watched a movie that they're in. They just won't do it. So this is like a little different. Like I definitely don't like to watch videos of myself, like on stage or I would never watch movies that I was in because I would be mortified.

I don't like that kind of performance. That's not my jam, right? I have no problem going over something I've written and I look at the book proudly. It's just to me when Johnny Depp's or, you know, and he's a problematic figure, but when you take any sort of performer and they're like, I don't like to listen to what I do or I don't like to watch what I do, that I understand. That's like this weird, uncomfortable thing. To me, though, the more dangerous thing is if you love the sound of the applause.

Whether you like to watch your work or not is secondary to, I think, a more insidious form of ego narcissism, which is like you're sitting in the audience and you're just like soaking up the adoration. Like, look how great I am. So for me, it's not that I'm like done with the book because it's out. it's more like I tried to take all my winnings off the table before it came out in that like I enjoyed working on it and I think I did my best work and I think I said what I wanted to say and then I think I did everything that I can do from a marketing and promotion standpoint which is important too. I'm not just some like pure creative who's just well I hope it comes out.

Yeah. I obviously I'm doing a podcast right now with you like yeah. I care about telling people about it and I want them to read it. I think I've just learned that it's not healthy to spend, this is the culmination of six years of work for me, that I'm going to spend six years working on this series, and then somebody who got a free copy from the publisher, Amazon, write some shitty review missing the entire point of the book.

And that's the first thing that pops up, the day it comes out and because I'm frantically refreshing, the whole experience is now tainted in some way. And I've had that experience before. Of course. Sure. Because I was setting myself up to be exposed to it and I just decided, hey, like, this is not the best use. And then the weird quirk of publishing, I guess this is most art. There is a huge lag between finishing something and it coming out. And so what I try to do is always be in the middle of the middle of the world. And so, what I try to do is always be in the middle of the next thing. And then what that does is it actually means that there's a real cost to getting obsessed with how the thing that just came out is doing because what it's taking away

from is what I should be doing now. I see. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Someone who's never written a book. I mean, podcasts are different, right? Because some people will like an episode. And if people are like, I hated that episode, I don't really care. I mean, I care in that I want to create good things for my audience, but any episode I create, someone will hate it for some reason. Sometimes it's a good reason. Like, wow, Jordan was sick and he just wasn't on his game and this isn't his best work. Other times it's like, I hated the fact that this guest's voice sounded this way. And I'm like, who cares, right? I just, but if it's a book, there's just so much more work that goes into it. You also have another one coming two days later. Yeah, it's like a train.

You know, it's like, this is when it comes in and it comes out. This is what it does. So there is something, yeah, about a release or a launch that is different. It's higher stakes. But I do imagine that when you're looking at the Spotify comments on the bottom of the episode, very rarely are you getting constructive, informative feedback from that? Like, feedback is essential. And criticism is important.

But like somebody firing off an email or posting a comment, that's not what. what you let in if you're trying to get better. That's what you let in if you either want to fill up your ego or you want to feel like a piece of shit. Yeah, that's interesting. I have more questions about critics later, but I want to jump into the content of the book because there's so much here. I have to admit, whenever I read your books, I'm always like, okay, I'm probably going to understand like two thirds of it. One third of it is going to go over my head or be like so in the weeds on something historical that I'm not going to really apply that or have many notes for it. This book, I really enjoyed it because I was like, oh, wisdom.

Like, this sounds deep. I don't know if I'm in the mood for this, but I plod through it in one sitting, which is a good sign. Oh, well, thank you. And you didn't invent wisdom, but you wrote a good book about it. So I'll give you that. Well, I will say one thing, this is feedback. One thing, obviously I've done a lot of podcasts over the years, you are one of the only shows that you can count on for sure to have actually read the thing.

as opposed to, you know, they're just riffing from the back cover, having been briefed on who the guest is a few minutes before they go on. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, there was a time at which I probably told you this story five times because you've been on the show like seven or eight times by now, but I was doing a show with Robert Green. It was up in a couple weeks, and I was like, I really want to knock this one out of the park.

And I think maybe you'd even introduce me to them or something like that. I don't remember it's been 15 years since that first episode or something like that. But I decided to read his entire book, which at the time, I think, was, it was either the 48 laws of power or like the one after that. It's going to be a big book either way. It was like a thousand pages, right? I mean, maybe literally 700 pages or 600 pages. So I've read the whole thing on paper, took notes. And he was like, this is really good.

And I was like, wow, I got a compliment from a guy who's done like a zillion media hits. And, you know, it was tired and still enjoyed it on Skype of all media. And so I was really stoked. and I told my wife, I go, yeah, I did a good job. He really liked it. He sent me a note afterwards. It was really nice. And I was like, it's just such a shame that I can't read the book for every guest. And she goes, this is like one of the best pieces of feedback my wife ever gave me. She goes, well, you could. You just have to decide if you want to spend the requisite amount of time and effort into every episode. And I sat with that for a while because I was like,

my knee-jerk reaction was, of course I can't do that. That takes days. And she's like, you just have to decide what your job really is. Do you want to make a really great show every time? Or do you just want to have some shows that are okay and some shows that are good where you spent the amount of time needed to make it great? And I was like, damn, I can't really go back from this. I can't go, no, I am satisfied with mediocrity. Thanks, anyway, Jen. Yeah. That was kind of what she was telling me. That's totally right. It's that Nick Sabin line. It's like, how good do you want to be? You know, like, and we all make these decisions. it feels like a decision about, you know, hey, do I have time or not?

Right. When really it's a decision about what are the standards I set for myself or not. Yeah. And unfortunately, sometimes people come by and they raise the bar a little bit or they remind you that you've raised the bar. And you're just like, well, shit. Like, I don't want to. And I don't mean like, oh, this book hit number one in the New York Times.

So now every book has to hit it. It's not about the accolades. It's about, it wasn't about the note Robert Green sent me after that. It was, I just felt like I was so prepared for this because I read the whole book and I had pages and pages of notes. I don't think I could go back now. I don't, riffing without reading a book at this point is actually terrifying. Like, if you were just here and I was like, okay, it's about wisdom.

I think it's part of his virtues series and go. Like, that actually scares me now, being underprepared. Whereas that was how I rolled 15 years ago. I was like, read the book. I don't think so, pal. That sounds like a lot of work. That goes to kind of what we're just talking about, though. like, I think it's good to be competitive. It just matters what you're measuring against. So if you're like,

hey, I want to win a lot like this person, or I want to hit the same spot on the New York Times best seller list, or I want to sell as many copies, where I want to win these prizes or get this kind of, if what you're looking at is like what the Stokes would call the externals, the results, and then you're trying to match that, you're probably thinking about it wrong. But if you read something good or watch something good or you see someone pull something off and you're like, how did you do that? How did you do the thing? Not how did you get the accolades or the reception or the recognition for the thing, but physically how did you do it? You're listening to an album and you're like, that guitar tone is something that I'm interested in or the sound or you're looking at an athlete and

you're like, how are they hitting that shot? How is Tom Brady releasing the ball that quickly? those are the kinds of things that you want to look at and not just be like competitive about, but be curious about. What is the technique you are using? And can I try to learn that technique and add it to my game? That's kind of what I think about. Like I read all the time and I'm just like, wow, okay, I really like what this person did. The book could have sold 16 copies. That's not what I'm jealous of. What I'm jealous of is what is on the page. And then jealous isn't the right word. I'm curious slash inspired to see what it feels like to do something like that. And that's the ingredient I'm trying to identify.

Yeah, I think once again, the theme that this book comes around to again and again is that it's a lot of work. I mean, this is about, the book's about wisdom. It's a part of the virtues series, as I mentioned before. And this is going to be obvious to you. But I think to me, it was almost a little bit of an awakening, which is the virtues are hard, man. Courage?

Wow. Oh, okay, that's tough. Cowardous is a lot easier, especially short term. Like, I would just rather cut and run from whatever problem I have in front of me, right? Ignorance, path of least resistance, wisdom. Again, sounds like a lot of work, Ryan. Like, why? Oh, man, and you've got to do this all the time.

You know, the virtues aren't something you, I don't know, believe in or whatever. It's like something you do, and it's something applied. And that was one of the big takeaways from the beginning of the book was like, wisdom is not just having the knowledge of everything. It's applying that and doing it when it's hard and doing it consistently. and just doing it every day until you die. And I'm like, man, no cheat codes. Well, it's not something you are or something you are given or something you're born with.

The definition of wisdom is a little tricky. But I think one thing we can agree on is that no one is born with it. Right. And I don't just mean because ego is something you get when you're older because no one just turns 80 and magically has it either. It's the result of work. It is a result of a process. and a way of living and thinking and operating.

And I think that's true of all of the virtues. And if this does make sense, like if they were easy, if you naturally had them, we probably wouldn't hold them up as admirable things to strive for. Like, if you are born courageous or cowardly, if you are born disciplined or not, if you just have a good heart or not, and that's all that counts.

I mean, what good is justice or discipline or wisdom? or courage. The whole point is that not just that it's hard, it's that most people are allowing themselves to get away with not doing it. And no one is making you do it either. Like the discipline of being in the Marines as an enlisted Marine where they are forcing you to do a bunch of stuff. I mean, obviously that's hard. Yeah. And it's nothing to dismiss. But the whole point of the virtue is self-discipline. It's a lot. It's that you have the choice and you're choosing to do it. That's the virtue, not that if you eat this or don't eat that and you go for the workout

or don't go for the workout, you get fired or you get mocked. The point is that you don't have to do it and you choose to do it. That's the virtue of discipline. And that's an important distinction. Again, there are no cheat codes. You had this funny anecdote in the book about this guy. I think he had, this is ancient Greece or something, right? He bought a bunch of slaves who were familiar with the Greek classics and he'd

go to these dinner parties. I don't know. Our slaves, just like his slaves are hanging around. Since they were educated, they would feed him lines and he would say something smart, which is kind of a funny thing to think about. And then some dude tells him, hey, man, you should take up wrestling. And he's like, look at me. I'm 100 pounds soaking wet or whatever. You know, I'm frail. And the guy goes, no, look at all these healthy slaves you got around. And it's like, that was him getting roasted. I guess that's what passes for a sick burn in ancient Rome or Greece or whatever, because it was like, we all see that you don't know anything about these books you're talking about. And whenever your guy leans over your shoulder with a plate of

grapes and, like, says the line, we can hear it happen. You're not fooling anyone. It's the idea that no one can do wisdom for you. As you said, there's no cheat code. There's no hacks. It's something you have to do. You have to possess. And to me, I mean, obviously the story's anachronistic and that, you know, he's this guy owning slaves. It's hard to relate. And then you go, well, I'll just ask chat GPT. Yeah. The timelessness of this idea that like, oh, I don't have to know it. I I don't have to figure it out. It doesn't matter anymore because there's this new invention. There's this thing I figured out that allows me to get something for nothing, that allows me to get to

skip ahead. That is the human experience in a nutshell, people thinking they can get knowledge that you can learn something without earning it. It never works. It never holds up over the long term. What are some modern cheat codes you see people using that aren't working for them? Chat GPT is a really good example. Well, I think speed reading is a scam. Oh, interesting. I don't think it exists. I'll tell you this. I have never met a very wise or well-read person who has ever talked to me about their speed reading techniques. Interesting. The people that I know that are wise and the people that I know that read a lot, the one thing they all have in common is that they spend a lot of time reading. Yeah. Right. By the way, they see this as time well spent and it's not something they're trying to rush through or get done faster.

The only way that you can read more quickly is to have read a lot and to have a basis of knowledge that allows you to not skim, but to not have to stop and look a bunch of things up, right? Like, if you decide to sit down and read a book about the Civil War, you're like, wait, who are all these people again? Where are all these places? And then when you're on your 14th book, which I embarrassingly have read or, you know, when you take something you're really interested in, you have a comfort and an advantage that allows you to go a little faster. So I think speed reading is definitely one. That's a really good one because I listen to audiobooks and I listen at 3X,

but I usually have to start at one and a half or something because I have to get used to the narrator. And if it's a subject I'm not familiar with, I'll stay there. But if it's like my 100th book on cybersecurity or geopolitical stuff, current events, Iran, whatever, I mean, I am flying through at 3X because I might even go, oh, crap, I was changing something in my car at the time that I heard this. But, oh, that was just about the revolution in 1980. Like, there's almost certainly nothing in there that I haven't heard a hundred times. If there is, I'll find out when I ask the guess about this.

Listening to audiobooks on various speeds to me is not, if you took a speed reading course and they're like, okay, what you do is you download a book on Amazon, and then instead of listening to it at the 1x speed, you just press this little button and it's 3x. That's not the promise of speed reading. The promise of speed reading is you can read this thousand page book in 30 minutes, right? We all read at different speeds.

I would say I'm a moderate to average person at this speed that I read. I just read a lot. I'm just saying this idea that you can whip through long, difficult texts without much effort is a scam, right? Have you tried it? I tried it and I was terrible at this. It's like you put your hand down the page and you get the words. It's like I'm picking up 0% of this, like none. It's not only not real.

I would say that like when I'm reading, what I'm actively doing is trying to slow down. I'm working on a project now. They sent me this PDF of stuff. And I'm like, okay, now I have to print out this PDF. I have to get a pen. And I have to sit here and go through it extremely slowly. So I understand every word of it. Most of the time you're trying to do the opposite of get it done quickly.

if what you're trying to do is learn and extract value. If you're reading a novel and you're just trying to be entertained or enter another world, crank up the audio speed however you want, right? That defeats the purpose. So that's like going, hey, do you want to watch this movie? Yeah, but I only have 45 minutes. Let's watch it at 2.5. Yeah, skip the middle.

It's not that good. Skip the middle and, like, there's this whole side tangent that's supposed to be really funny, but I don't have time for that right now. Yeah. It's like you just defeat the whole purpose. There's an Adam Sandler movie, which I'm sure is not on your top list, but it was like he had this remote where he could skip things. He got a bed bath and beyond in the beyond section, of course,

and he would skip through like his kids stuff, the kids play, sex when he was tired, and then they found out later like, wait, I'm skipping through my whole life, you know, and the sort of the metaphor there is like all this hard stuff or this stuff that seems hard in the moment is actually this is the gift that you have. So you're doing the worst thing that you can do with it. Yeah, it's not just that it's valuable stuff you're skipping over. I just, this is a very stoic idea.

But it's like, what are you fast forwarding towards? It's death. Like, you know how the movie ends, right? Every movie ends with you dying for all of us. So, like, what are you rushing towards? I like reading. Why am I trying to get this over faster? So that's definitely one.

I mean, look, another one, people think mentorship is this like hack. Now, it is, right? In the sense that there's a bunch of lessons that you don't have to learn necessarily by painful trial and air and you can have someone teach you. And you see this, people are like, will you be my mentor? I don't get as many of those as I used to. I don't know if that's a me thing or if the moment of mentorship is kind of passed. But I do think people thought it's this like button that you press. A mentorship is something that you will get value in over the course of 12 years or 30 years or 40 years, right? Like it's like you're out doing stuff and

having experiences and then you're bouncing it off this person and you're also watching them and they're asking you, it's this symbiotic relationship that for the most part evolves over a long period of time. It's not like you're pulling your dead battery up to another car and then the jumper cables get yours going again. Like it's a much more involved thing. Yeah, I think when people do that, when people write in, they're usually like, can you mentor me on this? And it's like, will you give me a download of all of the things that I should do right now so that I can kickstart my business. Or like, I started a podcast and I need a mentor. And it's like, why? Well, I want to 10x the size of my show. And it's like, well, I'm not going to be able to do that for you. Like, all of the knowledge

in my head is not going to do that for you. And there's the kind of the also like, why would I do that kind of thing. If you have the power to magically 10x things, you'd just be 10xing your own stuff all this time. Yeah. Or like I'd start another show and I would 10x that one and I have 10 of those, and we'd be having this conversation on my yacht about why I don't have time to do this for you, a person who's a stranger in my email inbox. Back to the concept of wisdom here, you wrote, and I'm paraphrasing here, wisdom is the byproduct of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time, not once, but consistently over the course of a life. And that kind of consistency, I think, is what, I don't know if it's always been hard for people, I guess it has, because this is

something that's even the ancients wrote about, but it just seems like that's the obvious key to being successful. Everybody I know who's successful with things has just been incredibly ridiculously consistent over kind of an insane period of time. Like the kid who played the guitar and practiced the guitar from age seven up to age 27 where they are now. Or the guy who decided to write a book and wrote one in third grade and then in fourth grade and they, you know, they were kid books and then suddenly in college he's like really doing it. It's pretty incredible to watch just the really simple compound returns on a drop of water dripping on a stone over a thousand years or whatever, right? The proverbial stone.

This is where the virtues are related, right? So if wisdom is this idea of like wanting to learn as much as possible and be exposed to as many things as possible and get as much experience as possible and to reflect as much as possible, wisdom has to be fused with discipline because it's not a button you press. There is no shortcut. There is no magic. It's this thing that you do. And the longer you do it, the more you get or the more profound and holistic it becomes. And so, you know, it's not like, hey, I read a lot when I was in college. It's that I read a lot. It's not, oh, I had this formative mentor. It's that I've always looking for mentors and teachers. And I'm not saying, I mean, generally a person, right? It's the day-to-dayness of it. And you're right,

it doesn't have to actually be that much. Seneca's famous book, which we call his letter, is him writing to his friend Lucilius, who's a politician in the Roman Empire. And in one of the interesting essays, he says basically wisdom is this idea of, like, getting one thing a day. Their exchange is he's like, Seneca's giving him a quote or a thing to chew on or something. They're just trading one thing back and forth each day. And he's like, this is the path to wisdom. If you do this every day, at some point in the future, you will have a lot of these

days stacked on top of each other. And the cumulative result of that will be a lot. It's actually not the cumulative result. It's the compounding results of that, right? So it's like you're reading something, and then you're experiencing something, and then you're reading more, and then you're experiencing, and all of that is building on itself. And if you're just making a small contribution each day, it might not seem like much, but not only are you, you compare this with people who are doing none of this, right? And then you also compare it. to who you were then before you did all this work, and you realize it does. It adds up very quickly. Speaking of people looking for shortcuts, Virtue has no cheat codes, but you can cheat your way

into some amazing deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors and thinkers every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build your network, your stable of greats for free over at six-minute networking.com. This is a free course. never charging for it, at least I have no plans to do so. It is non-cringy, down-to-earth, not awkward. It'll make you a better colleague, connect your peer and friend in just a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. They'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course, again, all free

and no shenanigans over at six-minute networking.com. I know that some people will either think this sounds really obvious or they need to hear this. But it's interesting. In the book, you said something like, can you think of anyone wise who doesn't read? Anyone who reads and doesn't wish they read even more. And for me, I always wanted to read, but I didn't want it enough to actually do it. And I kind of needed a does that make sense? Like, I needed a forcing function to read. So I basically designed my life in this business, this podcast, around reading. And then I built the show, this is so funny to think about now. I built the show as kind of a gimmick to get access to authors because I was like, I want books, but I'm poor because I'm in college.

And there's libraries, but they don't have the new stuff, right? They have, like, old stuff, and I want new books on things or books that libraries don't buy. So I wanted to get the books for free, and then I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge by talking to the authors, and most authors are not interested in talking to one random reader for two hours. Like, it's not scalable. And so basically this podcast is like an elaborate scam to get free books and then be able to ask questions of the people who wrote them. So thank you for participating in this elaborate scam. What you basically just described is graduate school, right? Like, yeah. You get assigned a text,

and then you have discussion sections, and you have to write papers or produce a distillation of what you read, right? And you do that for a long enough time. You build up a pretty big base of knowledge very quickly. Like, same with me. I mean, I dropped out of college at the end of my sophomore year, But my education really began then when I started reading, not because I was assigned reading, but because I was genuinely curious about things. And then I was reading about things that pertained to what I was being paid to work on. And that's really where the, when you can combine study and research with the ability to put things into practice and get real-world feedback, and that can be a tight reinforcing loop,

that is a really, really powerful process. Yeah, that's a good point. For me, I needed a forcing function to read, the ability to fill in the gaps, and also a reason to do something with it afterwards. Because if I read and I don't have to do anything with it, it's pleasurable, but I mean, I probably retain like 1%. Sure.

Right? But if I'm reading your book and I'm like, I find myself looking out the window or something, it's like, no, no, no, you're going to have to talk to this person in front of hundreds of thousands of people and you're going to look like a real idiot if you don't remember the core idea that you're snoozing through right now or whatever. But also add into the fact that you might have somebody who has one point of view one day,

and then three weeks later have a different expert who feels very differently. And now you're taking these two ideas and you're pitting them against each other or you're asking them questions. And so it's not just this process of I'm learning about stuff, but that it's actually a somewhat rigorous or challenging environment. I think is really important too. Like, if you're just reading about stuff that you like or you're just reading about stuff that you're comfortable with or watching videos or listening to podcasts, I mean, obviously, again,

this is better than nothing. But it's into wrestling with and the having to think over and weigh and contrast these related but also unrelated, potentially contradictory ideas that I think you really get some real insights. You know, I didn't realize you dropped out of college. I guess I didn't either forgot about that or didn't know that. Are your parents still waiting for you to make something of yourself after dropping out of college? You know, they took it very hard when it happened. I bet.

It hasn't come up since I gave a talk at the college that I dropped out of earlier this year. And I was like, at some point, does 15 books qualify me for any way of wrapping up these additional units? Yeah. And they were like, we'll look into it. In some ways, I'm like, I'm jealous of people who just get to go in a classroom all that. Like, it's funny, I was so excited and desperate to get out. and now I'm like, that seems like the life. Law school was like that.

I remember one of the professors, we were talking with him, and they were like, I just want to get a job. We have so much debt. And he goes, calm down, man. You got three years. All you have to do is hang out and talk to smart people for three years. It's like, you should enjoy this while you can. Because once you get to Wall Street, it's going to be a different game, man.

Yes, that's exactly right. You'd think they would give you like an honorary degree that you could hold up for your parents at this point. I mean, what do you have like 15 bestsellers? And after I dropped this podcast, 16. bestsellers. I mean, you think they could give you one of those. I would take an honorary degree, of course, but I'm just like, what would I be doing in a classroom that's not what I'm doing out here? Like, you know, you used to be able to become a lawyer. You could study on your own. As long as you could pass the bar, you got the degree. I think you can still do that in California

or there's a few states where they'll let you do that. But I feel like I should be able to do that for a college degree. Like, just give me the test. Tell me to write the papers and let's see if I can do it. I'm pretty sure I could. Or I would figure out how to do it. I want to that. Do academic departments that talk about stoicism, are they like, this Ryan Holiday guy is repopularizing our field? Or are they like, he's wrong about everything and I hate him because he's making money in this field where I should be the one who's like stoicism guy? Well, this is how it usually goes. If they're being interviewed for an article, because like it's an article about the rise or the resurgence of stoicism, they're usually kind of snarky and negative and, you know, say something

about it. And then when they put out a book, they email me. me to ask for a blur. Yes. You know, or if they can come on my pocket. So, cool. That's how it tends to work, which is that in the abstract, they talk shit about you. And then when they want something, they are shameless and asking for. And this is not just academics, but you find this anywhere, right?

It's like, the college student will talk a lot of shit about insert industry, but then when they have to get a job and they're being interviewed at said company, they're all very nice. Oh, yeah. Many of the guys I worked with on Wall Street where the guys at law school who were like, yes, screw the man, dude, don't work for the man. I'm like, this is the man. Yes.

This is the man on top of the man. Like, you think the government's the man, Wall Street is the one pull in the strings. So how's that spreadsheet come in there, Andrew? And it's like, yeah, I'll be done with it in six hours. You sell out real fast when you see that you have $300,000 in student loans. Of course. Not much of a choice.

This is a complete tangent, but I'm curious if you know what, This guy, Montaigne, you write about, you say that he asked Rome if he could be made an honorary citizen after he retired and was traveling. What does that mean? Because it's probably not the same thing as like, hey, I'm traveling. Can I be Canadian now? There's got to be something more to it. Like what benefits are involved in this? Obviously in the 16th century, the 15th and 16th century, citizenship was a little bit different and borders were a little bit different. I think what he was saying is that, you know, he's French. But when he grew up, Montana had this fascinatingly unique education. His father wanted him to learn Latin. So no one was allowed to speak anything but Latin at home.

Right. So like he grew up as if he lived in ancient Rome where they still spoke Latin. Wow. And so I think he just had this lifelong fascination with Rome. And I think he asked the Pope or, you know, whoever the mayor of Rome was, if he, I think he just wanted some sort of honorary certification that he was adopted by the tribe that she's so identified with. This is like your honorary college degree that you don't have. Exactly. Exactly. I just want to identify as a graduate of a reputable academic institution.

We'll look into it. You can offer your next keynote. You could waive your fee in exchange for that piece of paper. I don't know what you're charging now, but it's probably cheaper for them to print out a diploma. I don't know. That's actually a good point. Almost certainly cheaper for them actually to print out one of those things.

Yeah, it's like, hey, I will teach a, class if at the end of it you allow me to graduate from said university that's funny that's a good idea man to put that seat in there and see how that shakes out i shall you also write about machiavelli which i read that in high school and i remember being like damn this guy's ice cold but you focus more on his hours of focus and how you build this into your life and i'd love to hear how you do that because i think the hours of focus thing i mean it's challenged this is like the cliché is like we have all this technology and it rips us away from focusing and it, you know, it's harder than it ever was. But I don't know, man, history is rife with people that if they'd focus more, they would

have been able to build something better. Well, Machiavelli is fascinating because obviously, yeah, he has the reputation for being what we would now call Machiavellian. You know, he writes the prince. So obviously he's about tyranny and power and control. I mean, he was a literal Republican in that he wanted Florence to be a republic, so much so that he was taken prisoner by the Medici family and tortured for being a radical. And that's why he dedicates the prince to them as a way to restore himself to their graces.

But it's actually a very subversive work that's sort of in some ways criticizing what a prince is. None of that has to do with what I talk about him in the book. So after his torture, he's basically exiled, he's thrown out of politics. And so he lives in the country. He writes beautifully of what his life was when he was not in the sort of hustle and bustle of things. He would work on his farm and then he would change into his nicest clothes and he would spend literally hours, three to four hours a day conversing with the ancients. When Cal Newport talks about deep work, he's talking about like extended periods of deep work, which is a beautiful, I think, even kind of sacred thing. My schedule has been pretty busy because of the book launch.

So, you know, I was on the West Coast for a week and then I was on the East Coast for a week. week and then I had a bunch of stuff and then the latter half of this week is the first week I've gotten to go back into my routine. Basically from 815 to 1130, I was like just in with my ideas and my writing and the book that I'm working on now. And that's like, that's my life. That's what I love. That's the thing that keeps me going is like that period. I mean, it's hard work and it's exhausting and tiring and my brain hurt sometimes, but it's also deeply restorative and, and it's also deeply restorative and peaceful and stimulating. People think this is something you can do

while you're doing 20 other things, right? They're multi-day. And like, what is the job of a leader or a creative or basically insert profession that's not built around periods of that? And you look at people's calendars and it's like, so you just have meetings all day? Yeah.

When are you thinking about the things that you would stay in the meeting. In the shower. At night when you're supposed to be sleeping. When are you doing the work that makes having those meetings worthwhile? The actual decision making and forecasting and understanding and all the things you have to do, that's the job. And then like the meeting is talking about it. But like people's lives are built around the managing side of things. and not the making, thinking, big picture side of things.

Yeah, that's funny. My friend who was in the C-suite at Amazon showed me his calendar once, and I was like, at what point of the day do you work? And he's like, I either come in on weekends or I stay late because nine to five was meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, call, meeting. And I remember my friend who used to work at Twitter, this is like 10 years ago, maybe even more. He had a meeting pop up.

And I was like, oh, do you have to go? Because your phone notified you have a meeting. I don't mean to be all. And he goes, no, every meeting. for us is optional because we're in sales. And I thought that was so interesting and so telling, right? So corporate meeting all day, meeting all day, but the salespeople who actually earn all of the money to keep the company afloat, if they have a meeting, it's completely optional. And he was like hanging out with me in his office and we're going to go eat something. He was not

busy per se. And he's just like, I'd never go to these. And I'm like, but you don't miss anything? He's like, nope, nothing. If it's important, it comes in a company-wide email and I'll read it eventually or somebody will tell me. He's like, no, I'm supposed to be selling ads on Twitter. And I just thought that was so damn telling, right? Like, when the rubber meets the road and you really need those people to do something that's not a meeting, suddenly the meeting's not important. But meanwhile, you're paying this other guy $3 million a year to be the head of whatever. I don't want to out my boy, but like the head of whatever at Amazon in the C-suite. And it's like, nope, meetings for eight hours a day minus your lunch hour. It's just absolute insanity.

Well, at some point in Amazon, the meeting culture got out of control and they sort of switched things. I talk about this in the book. There's a famous shareholder letter where Jeff Bezos talks about this policy where basically like if you wanted to call a meeting, you had to spend the preceding couple of days writing a two to three page memo about what the meeting was about. Yeah, yeah. And what we were supposed to be thinking about. And the idea was like, you start the meeting, everyone sits down, reads the memo. And then the meeting's pretty short because all the arguments have been laid out on the page and now we're just deciding, right? Yeah, smart. That's wisdom, right? The wisdom is sitting down, learning about the problem or the issue, laying out all the options, and then making a

cogent argument about what should or shouldn't be done. But that's not what most meetings are or what most people do. What people want to do is sit down, extemporaneously and bullshit about it and then act like what is happening is in any way educational or informative. I've been riffing about this a little bit. You might appreciate this. I think this is a fundamental problem with podcasting as a medium. Like you were just talking about how you do, you read the thing, you do prep,

you know what you're trying to get. It's not that you have a script, but you're like, these are the things I want to talk about. These are the directions we can go. These are things I want to learn. So that is very different than, you know, when you're pulling up these two comedians or this comedian who's interviewing this public health expert or whatever,

who knows nothing about the thing. And then the two people are just pulling out of their ass, they're need jerk opinions. And then that feels to you because they're smart, they're good at talking, that feels to you like you're learning. And really, you're just watching a meeting, you know? It's so funny.

I had not thought of that, but you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I don't want to hear a comedian talk to a, virologist who knows a lot about a subject, and the virologist gets 1% into the meat of the book because the comedian has not read that book at all. And you're right. That's just, I'm wasting my audience's time if I don't come with like receipts, prep, eight pages of notes about stuff that I think they want to learn. It's not even just stuff I want to learn. Like, there's stuff in here that I'm like, I probably know the answer to this already because I've read about it a million

times, but I don't think I've talked about it on the show. I'll still put it in there because I know that a non-trivial percentage of my audience is going to find that interesting or educational. Sure. You have to do that. Otherwise, you're wasting, like, think about it. You waste an hour of your time. You read a book you don't like for an hour, and you're like, ah, and you put it down. Imagine wasting hundreds of thousands of other people's hours in one week.

If you add that up over the course of a podcasting career, that is a Nobel Prize cure for cancer amount of time that you have wasted listening to yourself talk and make jokes about a book about vaccines or something like that, that nobody need to. to hear. No, no, I think that's exactly right. And to me, and a bit of evidence of wisdom is knowing the value of time, your own and other peoples. I just think sometimes we just get distracted by things that look or feel like thinking or look and feel like they have some kind of intellectual rigor to them and actually they're bullshit. Like one of the things I talk a lot about in the book is just how easy it is to fall prey to cognitive biases, how easy it is to get led down the garden path, as they

say, or just to sort of mistake something because it appeals to you emotionally with fact or information. And obviously in a world of AI and slop and unending amounts of opinion tied to algorithmic valence, it's just really easy to go like, well, I'm reading. But, you're reading something you shouldn't be reading because it's nonsense. So people think that they're thinking or think that they're becoming informed and actually they're going in the wrong direction. Yeah, that's interesting. There's a part of your book where you talk about how smart people value silence and learn from others and how the ego often wants us to talk and contribute. And it's really you have to resist that to really learn from other people and to absorb the right

kinds of things. The greats write things down and use a system to remember and access it. And I'm wondering what sort of systems you have for remembering important concepts and accessing them later. I know when you write your books, you have those cards. You know, you and Robert Green, you got the cards. But how do you access things like in your brain? Or do you just reread books that you find really compelling? I do reread books. I think that is important.

It's not just like, oh, I'd like to read more. But there are definitely books that you need to read more than one time to wrap your head around. But I'm always reading. I'm always taking notes. And then I'm trying to write that stuff down and organize it in some way. that obviously professionally as a writer, but I do it personally too. I write down, I read books about parenting and I try to write those things down or I read books about money and I try to write those things down. As I'm reading and learning, it's not just enough to be like,

oh yeah, I think I get it. One of the things Mark's real is thanks his philosophy teacher for at the beginning of meditations is he thanks him for teaching him never to be satisfied with just getting the gist of things, which I think is kind of where a lot of people live, right? People are not like actively ignorant or disinterested in knowing. It's that they think they know. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. And to me, it's like I hear something interesting or I learn something or I read something. To me, that has to be the start of a process, not the end of a process.

So I want to go read and learn and watch. One of the things I do where I do think AI can be interesting in is like, you can go like, hey, I heard about this. tell me everything about this or point me to five articles that I can read about this or are there good documentaries to watch. You can use it to help you go down the rabbit hole, which I think is really important. But then when you're doing that, how are you capturing and synthesizing this information? Because I think a lot of times it just kind of goes in one ear and out the other for people. That's my problem. Even when I look, I read a book and I'll take notes and put them into Google Docs, which I use for the podcast. But man, even then it's like people write in and go, how do you

apply all the things you learn on your show and I just honestly have to say that I don't. Of course I don't. Are you kidding me? I'm reading two books a week. I can't apply everything from all of those. That's a superhuman feat to be able to even apply half of that stuff, I think. Well, all is an interesting word. How do you apply all that you read? Well, part of wisdom is reading a book and knowing that 80% of this doesn't pertain to you at all. Or is not worth retaining, right? that is no small feat either. When I read a really, really amazing book, I might mark 10% of it.

10% would be a lot, right? That would be like the greatest book I've ever read and marked up 10% of it. So a lot of it is kind of filtration. And then another part of it is putting things to go like, I never knew this word before. I need to look it up. I've never heard of that.

I want to know more about this. So I think it's not like I read this book. And then today I'm going to change everything. That's the other part is like a lot of what you're learning and the reason you want to capture the information or put it somewhere is you read something and then 20 years later, you're like, isn't there something in that book about this? Yeah. You read books about parenting when you first have kids and then it's like, okay, well, this will be relevant when I have a 16 year old, but I currently have a 16 day old. So I got to squirrel this away somewhere. Abraham Lincoln used to

defend his friends after they were caught having sex with livestock. That's not actually relevant right now, but it sure is icky, and I wanted to highlight it once again. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment, support the sponsors who make the show possible. All of the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor and you can't find the code, email me. I am happy to surface codes for it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan Holiday.

Another concept I love from the book is you say never confuse gathering information with doing something with that information. And in another life, I used to teach guys how to meet women and stuff like that, teach the dating stuff, the social stuff. It's almost embarrassing to talk about it, but, you know, let's not hide the ball. But one of the problems that I had that many people in that industry had is they would spent hours, guys would come into our programs and they'd be like, I read all these books, I've read everything, I'm on the forums, and I'm like, oh, this guy must be really good at this

because he's spent hundreds of hours learning. And then you realize, oh, man, they have confused reading books about being social, talking with other dudes about what to do and how to make things work and good date ideas, whatever. They've confused that with actual social experience. And they're actually so far behind the curve now because they've got all this information in their head. They've never applied. It's actually just complete confusion. Well, and sometimes the gathering of information is actually a form of procrastination. Yes, exactly. They were scared to go out and talk to people because they were shy. So they're like, ah, I'll stay in every weekend for the next year and read the forum posts going back to 2007. Not the same thing. You know, you need both. If you're like,

oh, no, experience is the best teacher. Sure, but it's also a very inefficient teacher. It It takes hundreds, thousands of hours to learn every lesson by trial and error. And the idea then is like you want to read about the best practices and the best insights and the things that other people, not just one person, but people, plural, have learned in their experiences. You want to start there. And then you want to apply it in the real world, getting reps and whatever the thing you're doing is. And then from these reps, you're you're able to layer on top of the academic knowledge that you have an understanding of what's still true and what isn't true anymore, what makes the most sense for you, what you're best at,

you know, what makes sense in the environment you're in. Again, it's the fusing of these two that's really important. Like, to just learn how to write by writing, I mean, you can do that. You're just going to have to write a lot of shitty things for a long time. But when you read the greats, and then you read what the great wrote about writing, you're able to not skip all of that, but you're able to skip some of it. And that's the fusing of study and application. I thought it was interesting. You must have written something about this. I don't have the quote from the book. But I thought it was interesting back then that people thought you were uneducated, not only if you didn't know the classics, but you also couldn't swim or you were out of shape. They were like, oh, he's uneducated.

And it's kind of like, wow, PE class was not just recess with softball skills thrown into it. People were maybe more well-rounded back then. Like, you had to, if you couldn't swim, it was like, jead, do you know that guy can't swim? And it's the equivalent of almost like not being able to read. Crazy. Yeah. The physical component, there's a Latin saying, but basically is just like, you need a strong mind and a strong body. And certainly for the Greeks and the Romans, the school included not just PE, but wrestling and fighting and hunting.

and it was an active thing as opposed to a passive thing. I do think that's important. And I also think there are multiple forms of intelligence, knowing what the body can do, specifically what your body can do and what it's capable of, is a kind of self-awareness and self-discovery. It strikes me as strange that you wouldn't want to explore. Fools are seldom humble, wise people often are. It's not that you're always wrong. it's that you realize you could be. It's funny, right? Socrates is wise because he knows what he doesn't know. Some people don't know anything.

Like, they just don't know anything. And I guess knowing that you know literally nothing means you know one thing. That's a little bit of some self-awareness. And that's great. Just because you're humble doesn't mean you're wise. But I certainly think you are not wise if you are not humble. Wisdom is going through life being willing to change your mind. What's something that you have.

really changed your mind about in the last five years? Dude, I have never had a good answer to that question. Do you have a good answer that question? I mean, I change my mind all the time. I don't feel like, hey, I had this opinion and I was extremely vocal about that opinion. And now I admit I was a huge idiot and I'm totally wrong about it. I've definitely evolved on things. So I guess my point is I do see it more as an evolution.

My beliefs are changing and evolving and I'm layering new understanding on them. I haven't had those same conversion moments that some people have had, which I do talk about in the book. Yeah, I haven't had like epiphany level. Oh my gosh, everything I knew about this was wrong. But I before when I was, this is a fraught example and not the best one. But I remember being like, oh, COVID is obviously from a bat at a wet market. And now I'm like, eh, very possible from a lab that we're just not talking about it. I don't know if that's like a life changing thing.

It's just a current events related thing. The other one is immigration. I used to really think that people who were against immigration were like just purely racist. Yes. After talking with a lot of people about it, I'm like, oh, actually, that's not really the perspective of most of the people I talk to. They were much more worried about a whole lot of other things. And they weren't as black and white on the issue as I thought. That was actually like a nice realization because I was like, wow, so many people in this country are just purely racist. And it was like, no, actually, I really am worried about being able to keep a job because of the economic concerns. And I would say my opinion on both those things have evolved as well. To me, the problem is the certainty. Right. You're like, this is true because X, or I think this is true and therefore the people who disagree are X, I tend to find that those opinions don't hold up well, especially if you decide to keep

learning. I'll give you one. I grew up religious. Oh, you did. I think I knew that. I was confirmed Catholic. We went to church every weekend. So I didn't necessarily believe, like, I just came out of the womb thing in this way. But I remember going to church often enough that I felt compelled to do the work to figure out how to believe in this thing. Everyone was telling me to believe it, right? I see. And then when I got to college, I read Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. I read all those, this was right in the sort of boom of those atheist books. It was like, okay, obviously God does not exist, right? I read those books and I was quite certain. I went from not so much certain, but I was like, I was of one view and then I had another view. And now people

ask me what I am. I say very confidently that I'm agnostic, which people think means atheist. But what it means is I don't know because how would you know? I've definitely found myself evolving on a number of issues where I don't know exactly what the answer is or I don't know exactly what the right thing is. I just know that this is wrong and this is wrong. And it's probably some complicated combination in the middle. And again, this sort of intellectual humility. I've had the distinct pleasure and by pleasure, I mean torture. experience of updating a couple of books that I did a long time ago.

Like I've done a 10-year anniversary edition of one book. I'm about to do a 15-year anniversary of one book. I will tell you that the most difficult part of that is when you read a sentence that you wrote at 23 or whatever, 25, or whatever your age was. And you're just like, where the fuck did this person get off? You know? How dare I? The certainty does not age well.

Yeah, that's interesting. How do you teach that sort of mental flexibility to your kids? Your kids might even be too young for this. I don't know. We do tend to come down really hard on people who change their minds as if that's not the whole point. I feel like we need to do the opposite. I will say that thing that I said earlier about immigration. I will get notes that are like, aha, I always knew you were a fraud. And it's like, you're mad at me for agreeing with you now? Yes. Yes. Where were you before when I disagreed with you? It's like, be mad at the person who has all the evidence in front of their face and it's like, well, I'm not going to admit that I'm wrong.

So, you know, you're still wrong. And be mad at that person with a totally unwavering, ridiculously inaccurate perspective. Why are you mad at me for being flexible and changing my mind with new evidence is presented? Come on. And this is something that Socrates talks about. He says, you know, it's important. And the Socratic method is built around this, obviously. But he says, remember that nobody's wrong on purpose.

You think back to all the things that you now admit you were wrong about. You did not know you were wrong. at the time. Like you thought you were right. Of course. It took time and it took patience and it took little things here or there to eventually get you to understand or moderate or change your position. That's obviously also how you're going to change other people's minds. Once again, a small non-related tangent, but it's wild hearing travel stories from back in ancient Rome. Surely you've read a lot of detail about this. Do you have any idea or concept of what that was like? Because I'm like, Oh, man, when I traveled in the 90s, we didn't have the internet.

You could maybe email and people would check it occasionally. And then I think like Cold War travel must have been wild. You had this iron curtain. You really couldn't get past it. And maybe you were adventurous and you figured out like you could go to East Berlin with a little temporary thing and then maybe you try to drive to Poland or something or you had family there. I can hardly imagine traveling without banks or mail service or like roads everywhere that you want to go that are paved.

Obviously, yeah. I mean, you could just die of the plague or be attacked by pirates or road bandits or... Exactly. You know, you could get dysentery or whatever. It was rough. Have you ever read Herodotus? No, I have not. I read your books. That's as close as I get to that kind of stuff, I think. Herodotus is both the first historian and the first travel writer. Because like, you think about it, like, to write the first history book, he couldn't go read other history books because they didn't exist. He had to go to the place and go like, so you were here when it happened. Tell me what happened. Or what is your country believe? Where did you come from?

This book, The Histories by Herodotus, is this fascinating history book. And actually, many of the stories that we have come to us from Herod. Like, he's one of the first ones that tell us the story of the 300 Spartans, for instance. He traveled all over the world and thousands of miles, as you said, over dusty roads and via ship into foreign countries. the fascinating thing he picks up is that every society refers to the other society as barbarians. I've noticed that. I have noticed that. Even I've learned languages so often, and the word in basically every Slavic or Yugoslav language for Germans is the enemy. Yes. It's just like any Germanic people, and it's like, oh, it didn't refer to just modern day Germany. It was like any

Germanic people were the enemy. That's just the word for it. This is the important. of both travel and the study of history, you read a lot about America, you spend a lot of time in America, you're like, Americans do this. Americans f***ed this up. And then you read about Rome and Sparta and Athens and as you said, and you go, oh, wait, every country does this stuff. Every country is bad. Yeah. Every country has shameful secrets. Every country has weird, hilarious quirks. Every country has practices that make no sense. One of Herodotus's famous stories is he talks about these two different, it's like the meeting of these people from India versus these people from Greece. I forget what it was exactly. But he's basically like one of them is describing

how they treat their dead and the other is like disgusted and appalled. And then they go, well, what do you do? And they say, and then they're disgusted and impuls. Like one of them burns their dead, which if you think the body is sacred is like the worst thing you could do. And then the other one, you know, like ate a piece of the dead. And then. If you think the body is putrid and disgusting, that's the worst thing you could possibly do. And his point is everyone thinks what other people do is crazy because they think going into it that there's only one way to do things. And that wisdom is, again, part of the reason for the humility that comes along with wisdom is that you learn there's a lot of ways to do things. There's something I've read about recently.

I think it might be Zoroastrian. I could be wrong about this. They take their dead up this mountain, I think, in India, and they leave them there. And there's just this huge gaggle of birds that eat the dead bodies. It's called a sky burial. And that to me is just like creepy and crazy to me. Imagine you go up there with your dead relative and there's just thousands of bodies and bones. They're just being devoured by these birds.

For some reason that reminded me because I feel like you tell that to anybody but someone from that culture and they're like, wait, back up. What are you talking about? Well, this is a fascinating thing about Montaigne. and I talk about this in the book, while Montaigne is living in Reformation and Counter-Reformation, France, the new world is discovered. So there's these reports coming back of these cannibalistic tribes and these primitive savages on the other side of the ocean.

And he writes this famous essay called On Cannibals, which you'd think is going to be sort of racist and close-minded. And he's like, do they draw and quarter their enemies? Do they burn people at the same? steak. That's what we're doing right now in this religious, we're arguing over whether God wants you to do this or that. And if you don't agree, we burn you at the stake as a heretic or we tie ropes to your arms and legs and pull you in different directions by horse until you come apart while you're still alive. I'm not sure they're the barbarians. Yeah. And so part of what study and being open-minded

and then, of course, travel. What it does is it allows you to see your own practices from a new perspective or through the reflection of somebody else's practices. And then it should ideally open you up and get you to question, well, why are we doing it this way? And is this the best way to do things? And that's the exchange of cultures. Some of the stuff you include in your books, I'm always like, why did he include this?

There was one here where you're talking about Abraham Lincoln and his thirst for learning and his character and you're like Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves. And then you explain that he represented many of his clients and friends against charges of bestiality, which if people don't know what that is, that is having sexual intercourse with an animal. And I had to reread that because I was like, wait a minute, hang on, that's not what he said. He represents multiple cases of people like pigs and cows and stuff. And I think it's like he tries 5,000 cases as a lawyer.

Like we tend to think of Abraham. Again, we think of these people as like coming out fully formed or like Abraham Lincoln read a lot of books as a kid and that's how he became wise. Now, we spent 25 years as a lawyer in on the circuit. Back then, like, there wasn't enough people and resources in each town to have like a functioning legal system. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, wow. The judges and the lawyers would travel to a little town, a little town. And then for like three weeks handle all the cases they have until they would come back.

In the old days, even the Supreme Court justices traveled. It's called riding the circuit, and you would have to sit on lower courts. There wasn't just, hey, you work in this courthouse and enough cases come to you. And so his understanding of human nature and how to resolve conflicts came from, yeah, representing cases that involved some weird twisted shit, right? My favorite Lincoln story in the book, just to let you know that he's not this saintly figure, he loved practical jokes, right? And he was funny. And he tells this story about he's riding the circuit with another lawyer and they're having to camp outside. You know, they're sleeping up on this rock or something. He waits for his friend to go to sleep. And the prank, he's going to climb down from where they're camping. And he's going to shit in his friend's hat.

That's going to be the friend's going to wake up and find that someone took a dump in their hat. And so Lincoln does this. And they wake up in the morning. And the friend anticipating the prank has. switched their hats. And so he shits in his own hat. And again, you think of him as this black and white photograph. Right. The man whose face is wrinkled and worn by this horrible civil war, which it was in the loss of his children and the pain and the heartbreak. And he's also a guy

with a sense of humor. Right. He's a human being. And he learns, by the way, that humor is how you deal with what must have been a dark, disturbing look into humanity as he traveled to these towns and he had to represent slaves and slave owners and wife beaters and people who stole the savings of little old ladies and he was a funny dude and I love that story. That's a great story. I mean, like future president of the United States, like you just think, oh, the country is falling apart. You did a trial where someone went to prison for having sex with a pig. This other person killed his neighbor. What's your plan for the evening? Well, first of all, I'm going to get some food. And then I'm going to shit in my friend's hat, go to bed and wake up and watch him put it

And you're like, okay, everyone deals a stress in their own way, I suppose. I'm going to go for a swim. I tell this story. It's like Christmas Day or New Year's Day in the depths of the Civil War. And Lincoln calls his cabinet in for like this emergency meeting. They have to discuss something. And they come in and he's reading this book and he's laughing. And they're like, what are you doing?

He's like, let me read you this. And he sits down and he reads them. There's this humorous named Artemis Ward. And he reads them a chapter from this thing, which he finds hilarious. is. And they clearly had a sense of humor that not everyone appreciated. Most of his cabinets like, dude, it's Christmas. What are we doing here? He said, if I don't laugh, I think I would die. All of us are greatly strained and we need to have something to lighten the mood. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, okay, anyways, the reason I called you here is let's talk about

the Emancipation Proclamation. So like one of the greatest, most elevated moments in American history is preceded by this humorous, silly, distracted moment of American-Nish, but they're inseparable from each other. And I do think very often the wisest people, I would say as a general rule, every wise person I have met has a pretty good sense of humor. Certainly being stupid makes it hard for you to find things. People think humor is low and base. I actually find that real humor is based in your ability to perceive and understand the absurdity of the human experience. plus shitting in people's hats. I was going to say, and also shitting in people's hats.

Exactly, yes. Doesn't have to be elevated to be funny. What's funny about that is the juxtaposition of the person who did it, right? I mean, if some degenerate shits in a hat, especially his own, you're just like, serves you right. It's less funny than when it's the president of the United States. One of the most important, the guy on the $5 bill got a story about this guy. Oh, is it going to be a historical lecture?

Not exactly. Not exactly. It's so good. It's so good. The book has some wisdom on Christmas. You touched on that at the top of the show. Listening to your critics is important and you need thick skin, but if it's too thick, you never get the information that you need to improve.

And I'm wondering how you balance this. I mean, you kind of talked about it. We hinted at it in the beginning when you're like, look, don't read the Amazon review, the first one from a pre, what are they called galley that some guy got for free, didn't want to read it, had to do it as part of his job. That's not the guy's feedback that you want. I'm wondering how you balance this. And if you have any wisdom from historical figures, that's fine too, but not mandatory.

No, I was actually thinking about this with someone I know recently who's kind of struggling at what they do. What they need to do is very clear. The changes they have to make are very clear, but they just cannot hear it. I'm sure you've had people that have worked for you that are like this where it's like, I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. But if this feedback or information, this thing I'm trying to teach you does not get through, you cannot work here anymore. That person's ego or their sense of self or whatever it is, they would rather get to. fired than change. Yeah, interesting. Right? Or they would rather not improve and get fired than go through the discomfort of having to try to do things a different way. And so the ability to hear information that you don't want to hear is really important. Again, this is very different

than like random people hurling things at you on the internet. But it is when I send in a draft, I'm going to get a lot of notes back. Some of those notes are going to be wrong and I have to ignore them. And a lot of those notes are going to be good. And then a lot of those notes are going to be somewhere in between and the ability to filter and sift through this criticism and know what to take and what to ignore. That is the art of taking and receiving feedback. Like you said, it's an art. It's not something that would come naturally to me, I think. Even now, I probably take it. Unfortunately, I pay attention to the peanut gallery far more maybe than I pay attention the person, I'll get a three-paragraph email about somebody who does something.

It's really nice. This changed my life. This set me on this path. I got a job because of this. And then I'm like, but look, this guy left me a one-star review because he doesn't like my haircut. Sure. And my producer's like, you read the thing I put in the slack, right?

The three-paragraph letter. Did you read that? And I'm like, yeah, but this guy, he said something mean about the shirt I was wearing. And it's just like, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's sadly not that much, unfortunately. The unsolicited feedback is one. thing. But it's more like what's the team you're building around you, whether it's the president has the cabinet and then the kitchen cabinet, like they're formal and their informal advisors. You have your producer, you have your peers, you have your advertisers, you have your friends,

and then you have your spouse. These are all the people you want to be, what can I do better? What are you liking? What are you not liking? What do you think I should do differently? That's where you get the criticism and feedback, I think, that actually meant. matters. At the end of the book, you have this interesting aside about how the virtues are something we aspire to, but you also can't signal them. You can only do them. You can only be them. This might even be a silly question, but tell me the difference between virtue signaling and actually exhibiting virtuous behavior, because while it seems obvious on its face, most people are actually just virtue signaling instead. And obviously, look, there's this backlash

today against virtue signaling, which some political junkies have, and super online people have started to take is, well, actually saying anything nice or caring about anyone is actually something to be mocked and like, it's actually better to be an asshole. Now we do this sort of vice signaling. It's like, are you paying lip service to the idea that wisdom is important or are you like actively learning? A great example would be like in the virtue of justice, right, which is probably when people are talking about virtue signaling, it's like, so someone might go like, hey, you know, I think minimum wage should be X, right? But when I have the opportunity to set the salary of someone who works for me, I choose to pay them as little as possible, right? Like what you think or how you would

like the world to be is one thing. I do think there is something in obviously saying nice and believing nice things. But what really matters is like what are the decisions you are making when it pertains to things that are in your control. Another quote I loved, learn as if you're going to live forever, live as they are going to die tomorrow. Is that going on your next coin? Is that going on a coin any time?

It should. It's a good one. That's a famous Latin expression. Yeah. Okay. Live as if life is short, but learn as if life is going to be very long, which is to say,

always be learning, always be curious, always be asking questions, always be trying to get better. And I think when you fuse those two things together, you're set up ideally for a good life. I don't regret anything I've learned. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's nothing.

I'm like, it was so dumb that I studied that thing. Even if I don't use it, even if some of it turned out to be wrong, I'm glad that I took the time to do it. Ryan Holiday, thanks for coming back on the show. You might actually have the record for the most appearances on this podcast. I have to go count, actually. I'm not sure. Well, that's a record I'd be very proud of. You keep writing them.

I'll keep reading them, my friend. Deal. What is the next book? Are you out of virtues now? Do you have to switch gears? The virtues was a four book series because the virtues are courage, discipline, I'm working on the next book now. Can you say what it is or it's a secret still?

No, no, it's not a secret. I'm doing a biography of Admiral Stockdale. So I'm trying to write a very different book than I've done before. Yeah, that is different. That is different. Who is that? I don't even know what that is. I guess I'll find out when I read it, but I'm curious.

No, no, I'll tell you all about it sometime. Ryan Holiday, thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you. What if the biggest threat to your career isn't your workload? It's the jerk sitting two desks over. Tessa West breaks down the seven types of toxic coworkers and how to handle them without losing your cool or your credibility. So jerk, I think, is really just kind of a loose word to describe. You're doing something to piss somebody off, and you might not even mean to be doing that.

You might actually be hurting someone while helping another person. Even people who are actually motivated to do good can turn into jerks to other people if they're not paying attention. I think we underestimate how awful day-to-day stress is. Even little small things like hearing someone's footsteps walking down the hall or knowing that if you're going to go heat up your coffee, there's a 30% chance you're going to run into that, you know, that journey work. We'll just make you drink your coffee cold. Don't little things really add up and they really affect us in ways that we often underestimate.

It's not that you are a jerk, it's that someone sees you as a jerk. So for solving these problems, for coming up with strategies, learning conflict management, that's essential. And 90% of these problems you cannot go alone. And social connections are really critical to kind of getting those new positions. We learn technical skills. We don't learn people management.

We get promoted because we're good at old jobs, not because we know how to actually talk to people or give feedback or do any of these things. Yeah, I think a lot of us think of ourselves as unique snowflakes that have special contributions, but at the end of the day, most of us are replaceable. And I think we just have to get to, get more comfortable with having relationships with people who aren't our best friends.

And seeing them as such. And I think that's okay. You're going to need those social connections. So I hope people feel like after reading this, they can handle these difficult people in a kind of more manageable way. To hear more with Tessa West on what makes these office saboteurs tick and how to make sure you're not accidentally becoming one of them, check out episode 706 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks so much to Ryan Holiday for joining us once again. At this point, he may actually hold the record.

for most repeat appearances on the show. And honestly, I'm not mad at that. Ryan, you keep writing them, I'll keep reading them. And yes, I will happily continue this elaborate years-long con where I built a podcast empire just to get free books and force brilliant people to answer my questions. In fact, doing so has been one of the greatest joys in my entire life sharing this stuff with you guys. So I hope you enjoy it as well. And remember, virtue can't be signaled, only practiced. Learn like you'll live forever. Live like you'll die tomorrow. Love that. All things Ryan Holiday and the show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount, codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting

those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, speak in a writing. I love writing this. Y'all love reading this. You can hit reply and reach me any time. The idea is to give you something specific and practical that will have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships. It is a two-minute read or less every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It really is a good companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace,

Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in philosophy, stoicism, virtue, or just a big Ryan Holiday fan, definitely share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show,

you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting.

So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.