The Megyn Kelly Show - Ryan Holiday on Confronting Our Fear, the Value of Being "Difficult," and Courage | Ep. 177

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ryan Holiday, best-selling author of the new book "Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave," on the true meaning of stoicism, confronting our fear, the importance of building thick skin, the value of being "difficult," quitting, how to deal with worry, why "stillness" is important, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday. We have a great show for you today. Something different and something I'm really excited to talk about. Ryan Holiday is here. My assistant, Abby, is in love with Ryan Holiday. I confess, after Kevin, fine, and he's her number two guy. Ryan is a New York Times bestselling author of the mega hit, The Obstacle is the Way, and many, many other books. And as of yesterday, his new book, Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Brave, is a New York Times bestseller too. Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Brave. His path from self-described media manipulator to champion

of stoicism, something I've really been looking forward to learning more about, is fascinating. Ryan, I'm so happy to have you here. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's funny to hear about your assistant. Every day you're in her inbox giving her thoughts on Stoicism. And it's funny because she'll sometimes say like, oh, you know, you've got to read more about Stoicism because I'll just say something that she thinks aligns with it. And I have to say, reading your book, I was like, yes, I think I've been living large factions of this without knowing this is what it was called or that it's a whole philosophy. So let's just start with people

who are like I am and don't know anything about what Stoicism is. First of all, this book is the first in a series about what you call cardinal values. So we're going to get three more. But how do you define Stoicism? When I try to introduce people to Stoicism, I don't go back to ancient Greece or Rome or try to throw sort of unpronounceable names at them that tends to create some overwhelm. I try to focus on what Stoicism was as a practical philosophy, a philosophy used by real people in the real world, as opposed to academics or, you know, sort of the sort of figures on the fringes of society. The Stoics were merchants and soldiers and emperors, advisors to kings and senators. And I think at the core of Stoicism is this idea that we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond. So how should we respond? The Stoics argue that there's sort of four cardinal virtues, as it happens, the same virtues as Christianity, courage, temperance,

justice, and wisdom. And for the Stoics, any and all situations called one or four of those virtues from us, particularly stressful, bad crises type situations. This is where the sort of stoic steps up and rises to the occasion. It's funny you should make the reference to Christianity because I will say as much as I've been kind of lame about getting to church as a grownup, though, I'm doing better now. I'm getting my kids there now. I do feel like my moral code came largely, of course, from my parents and from church, going to church every Sunday and Sunday school and all this stuff. sort of comes about in the same way that good dinner table manners come about. Night after night after night after night, the same things are drilled into you, and over a lifetime, they resonate. That's right. It's sort of a funny historical anomaly that Seneca, one of the great Stoic philosophers, and Jesus are born in the same year in different provinces of the Roman Empire. They walk the earth at the same time. Ultimately, they both die at the

hands of the state. But Seneca's brother is in the Bible, Gio. He adjudicates a case involving St. Paul. So all this stuff was kind of happening around the same time, just as we have always been struggling with these same questions like how to live, what should a good person do and not do? What are my obligations to society, to myself, to God, to the gods, whatever you happen to come down on? But we're really just trying to answer this question, and I think Stoicism is one set of answers, to the question of what is the good life? What is the best way to live? And philosophy and religion are both attempts to answer that question. You talk about virtue in the book and set it up originally with a reference to Hercules. Can you just take us there? Yeah, this is actually the

founding story of Stoicism. Zeno, the merchant, washes up in Athens after a shipwreck. He's lost everything. So he's like looking for guidance. He's looking for something to point him in the right direction. And he walks into a bookstore and he hears the bookseller reading a passage from Socrates. And Socrates himself was telling this story called The Choice of Hercules, which is basically that as a young man, Hercules is walking through the hills of Greece, and he comes to a crossroads. And there's a goddess sitting at each of the two paths, you know, the path that diverges in the wood, so to speak. Which direction will he choose? Which will he go? Which god will he choose to follow?

And basically, one goddess is virtue and one is vice. Basically the easy road or the hard road, the road where you get to do everything you want and the road where you are held to some sort of standard. And Hercules has this choice, right? Just as we all do, right? To sin or to not sin, to be good or not good, to contribute or to extract? What is that choice? And so Stoicism is that this choice, just as Christianity and I think all philosophical schools are a choice between these two paths. And so this choice of Hercules is the choice we all face and sort of little known historical fact. John Adams proposed that the choice of Hercules be in the seal of the United States. He thought that this was fundamentally the choice the founders were making as well.

You know the quote about how the entire American system depends on virtue in the people. They were saying, we're giving you all this freedom. You can do whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you should allow yourself to do whatever you want. You have to have your own set of standards on top of that. So you talk about fear. I mean, I think much of the book is devoted to the concept of fear, how we get past it, what it does to us, how we don't have anything to fear, but fear itself. And I loved everything you wrote about this. But before we get to that, you set it up with, we're each called to be something. We are selected, but will we accept or run away? My note to myself was called by whom, by what? And how do we know when it's there, Right. That's half the battle. Like not some people are lucky and they're like, I know I was meant to stand on the stage and sing. I know I was meant to lead men into battle. You know, you write about Jocko Willink. He's one of those guys. He was on the show from a young age. He knew what he wanted to do. Most of us, I would say, are more wishy washy than that. And part of our life's calling is to figure out what the calling is. Yeah. Although I would argue that we all struggle with this. So Joseph Campbell's

conceit of the hero's journey, right? That we all go, this is the myth, the monomyth of history, the hero called to greatness. But the second step in the hero's journey, this is a part in all the hero's calls, is the refusal of the call. So we get it, and then we have our reasons why we can't do it, why we shouldn't do it, or why, as you said, we're not sure if this is the call. And what about all these other things that I'm interested in, right? And so we all struggle with whether we're going to accept the call or not. In the book, I tell the story of Florence Nightingale, which was really inspiring to read during the pandemic. But she gets this call, it's this voice, and she never explains, you know, sort of one way or another, whether it's the voice of God, whether it's her conscience, whether it's an ancestor, but she gets this voice that calls

her to do something, to be of service. But she doesn't know what that service is. She doesn't know what it will look like. She doesn't know if it means right now or later. She doesn't know if it means wait around for further instructions. And so that's kind of what she does. It takes her eight years of just kind of thinking and delaying and living her sort of privileged Victorian life to understand that that was a call to nursing. But the problem is her parents are very much opposed to this, right? A woman was not supposed to work then. And of all of the fields, like nursing was like almost below prostitution as far as like the British upper class were concerned. So the idea that their daughter would do this was not just scary to her parents,

but appalling. And so this holds her back for 16 years. She struggles with, is this what I'm supposed to do? But my parents don't like it. I'm gonna have to give up my inheritance. And she's struggling and struggling and struggling with this. And then ultimately she hears the voice again and the voice says, are you going to let what other people think hold you back from my service? And this

is like the sort of final push that she needs. And so I tell these stories because I think it's important that we realize that not everyone is born knowing and even great people struggle at least for a time with whether they're going to answer the call or not. I was just talking to my kids about this as I dropped them off to school yesterday saying they were talking about grades. And, and I actually haven't even talked to Doug, my husband about this, but I am not a big, you have to get straight A's kind of person at all. You know, I didn't, and I went to Syracuse and it worked out fine. And I got a lot of people who went to Harvard who worked for me in the past. So it's like, it doesn't necessarily work out the way people think it will just getting perfect grades and getting into the perfect school and all that stuff.

But I was saying to them, your main goal between now and graduated from high school and then college, if you choose to go is to try as many different things as possible. So you can see what resonates with you. Like what, how do you know yourself? How do you know what might be your calling? Unless you cast as wide a net as possible and see what you gravitate towards, what fires you up, what makes you excited. And then on the opposite side, that voice in the back of your head is telling you, this one's not for me. The voice is there. I do think if we're quiet enough and still enough and try enough things, the voice is there. It could be God, it could be conscience, it could be the universe, but it's there. Yeah, as I say in the book, courage is calling, but the call is coming from inside the house. And so it requires some level of self-reflection and stillness, as you said.

It can be easy when you're really busy, or as what happens to a lot of successful people, you're distracted by what all your peers are doing. Oh, this person just got this job. Oh, this person just got accepted to this school. When you don't really know what you want or what you are meant to do, it's really easy to just default into following what everyone else is doing. And then you can wake up 10 years later and you're like, I hate being a lawyer. Why did I do this? And so I think that's one of the problems with the system that we do have with young people. And I felt this as a college dropout. We put so much pressure on them and we expect them to figure it out so early. We don't really

give them the space to experiment and try and question. And then they're $200,000 in debt, and they can't change paths, even if they are meant to do something else. Exactly right. You talk about how we have to study fear. We need to understand and explain it, because you can't defeat any enemy you do not understand. To me, this resonated because I've always followed the dr phil piffy short form of this which is answer the what if question but right like that's that's why we don't take the big risk like it could be something as simple as fear of flying or it could be do i quit this job and go to another or do i leave this marriage and go to another it's like what

so what if i do what what if i leave this job and the new job is a disaster? And if you walk through that process, your point is the fear dissipates. Yeah, the fear is often much vaguer and weirdly more severe because we have not actually explored it. Ulysses S. Grant tells this great story early on in his military career. He's on the plains of Texas and he hears all these wolves and he thinks there's hundreds of them and they're about to devour him and the whole party. Then they finally come upon the wolves and they realize there's only two of them. And he said, I never forgot from that moment forward, there are always fewer of them when

they are counted. Meaning that the fears, when you really get up close, you dig into them, you hold them up to the light and look at them, they're usually less scary than you think. When I went to drop out of college, I thought it was this irrevocable, life-changing decision and that if I failed, I'd end up under a bridge somewhere. And I remember going in to drop out and I was like, is there a form to drop out of college? And they were like, no, that's not a thing. They were like, you just take a semester off. And then if you want to come back, you can come back anytime in the next 10 years. So I thought I was jumping off this cliff. And really, there was like this nice staircase right next to it, you know.

And so that's why we have to explore these things, get up in close and personal with them. Because, you know, when they're when they're just sort of hovering above us, they're very, very intimidating. And they're that's often exaggerating what they really are. This is, this is from the book Courageous Calling with Ryan Holiday, tell yourself, it's just money. It's just a bad article. It's just a meeting with people yelling at one another. Is that something you need to be afraid of? Break it down. Really look at the facts.

Investigate. And what I was thinking when I read that, Ryan, is that it's so right. You could either come to the conclusion that it's actually not that bad, or you could come to the conclusion that, no, that is really bad and I want to avoid it. I would say my own past, I've opted for, well, that wouldn't be that bad. And then I've taken leaps in which there were even more wolves than I thought there would be. And my feeling was, you know what? The other point to this is realization of the terrible thing is actually not necessarily bad.

Once the thing happens that you're afraid of, and it is bad when it comes, it's genuinely bad. If you can get back up, then you say, you know what? I'm okay. And the fear's gone. After that, the fear's gone. Yeah. Seneca talks about how a person who has never been through adversity is like a fighter that's never been knocked down.

They don't really know what they're capable of. You have to be bruised and bloodied and knocked around a bit to be able to actually walk into the ring with confidence. Now, you can walk into the ring with ego thinking I'm capable of anything because you're either delusional or you've never experienced anything before. But actually, that experience helps instill real confidence because you know that, hey, I've been through the worst case scenario. It's like a comedian after you've bombed on stage. It is it's unpleasant. Right. I give lots of talks. They've gone very poorly. I once gave a talk at Yale and we're all sitting around on these couches and a student literally fell asleep on me. They fell asleep and then fell over and laid on my shoulder as I finished the rest of the talk, which was horrible, but also quite freeing because it will almost certainly never get worse than that. And once you've been through the worst case scenario, you have a certain confidence or security in your ability to move forward. I also think a sense of humor helps. I was just talking to

Bridget Phetasy on her podcast the other day. Walk-ins welcome. And I was saying, the ability to laugh at yourself will get you through most things. And I can relate to this. I co-hosted an event years ago. It was like broadcasting in cable. I co-hosted it with Bob Costas. And I had a couple of jokes planned. Not one landed. There was absolutely zero laughter in the room. I was completely bombing. I'm like, why am I trying to be funny? This is like, dude, I just like my awkward, you know, discomfort.

And I saw my agent at the time when it was done who was in the room and I'm like, so, you know, it doesn't seem like it went that well. I'm not sure. And she goes, onward. Okay, but it's good if you can laugh your way through it. But I do, I just want to make a point for people out there who are worried about risk-taking because of fear. The worst case scenario is actually, it's not that awful for it to happen. It really isn't like it's somehow the

dust comes off of you and you're like, you know what? I'm okay. But you talk about how fear is a liability and it holds you back. And this is one of the things I want to talk to you about because sometimes, of course, fear saves you, right? Sometimes fear stops you from going off the cliff or touching the hot stove and so on. And so how, like not knowing whether this is a danger that I really need to avoid like the cliff, or this is a danger that I'm just blowing up in my head that's going to hold me back from reaching my full potential. Figuring out which is which is not always that

easy. It's not. It's a timeless question. Actually, 2,000 years ago, Aristotle says that the opposite of courage is not just cowardice, that actually cowardice and courage and recklessness sit on a spectrum. So on the one end is cowardice, that holds us back, but also rushing foolhardily over the side of a cliff or into a conflict that doesn't need to happen is also a problem and is not what we're talking about when we're talking about courage. So he says courage is the midpoint between these two extremes. And that's been very helpful for me to see. So bold is not the same as rash, which is not the same as stupid, which is also not the same as being a coward. So knowing what risks to take, when to go all in, when to fold them, this is really, really important. And if you're someone who doesn't experience fear, that might feel like an advantage, but it's also an immense

liability. You're the person who everyone's going to be saying, no, no, no, no, you're about to crash into a cliff or crash off a cliff and you're not going to listen, right? If you, if you always dismiss criticism or, or, or feedback as coming from the haters. If you say, I don't care about the odds, you know, I'm, I'm invincible, you know, eventually your luck will run out. And part of the battle is figuring out, okay, so where am I when I'm assessing this risk, this opportunity to be courageous, another way of putting it? Where am I? Is this am I thinking about being is this reckless if I do this? Or is this a calculated risk that's smart,

that's going to sort of, you know, potentially improve my life? I think you get to this in the book. I want to get to it later. But how do you find out where you are on that spectrum? Keep taking more risks. Courage, as you point out in the book, is it comes from practice.

You have to take risks every day. That's where we're going to pick it up on the opposite side of this break. Stand by because my guest today is New York Times bestselling author Ryan Holiday. And there's so much more to go over. You're going to love this show. It's going to make you be a better person, genuinely. Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly show here today with author Ryan Holiday, the author of the New York Times bestseller, Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Brave. This is in the context of something called stoicism, which is, I think, just a philosophy. It's a way of getting you through life, which has lots of challenges and difficulties. And

it sort of gives you some tools to handle it, tools that don't leave you crying in the corner in your soup, which is sort of where the society is going. But you don't need to be one of them. You write that at the root of most fear is what other people think of us, that it's paralyzing. Gosh, I never thought of it like that. People really are terrified of what other people think of them. Can I tell you this, Ryan? I talk to Stanford Business School students every year. And there's a course there by a pal of mine called Reputation Management.

And I always laugh because what I always say to her students is, this is a bullshit class and this is a bullshit concept. Reputation is a mirage. It's not real. It doesn't matter what other people say about you. What matters is what you do, how you live your life. You know, are you okay with your own choices? And, um, you know, her whole semester comes crumbling down with my big, my big lecture at the end. Um, but it's hard for most people to internalize that most people are very afraid of

what other people are going to say or think about them. Yeah. Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world in his time, he writes in his journal. So we know that he's struggling with it himself. He says, we love ourselves more than other people, but we value their opinions more than our own, which is such a great way to put it, right? We put ourselves first, but we work on something and then we go, well, what do you think of it? And if someone says that it's great or it's terrible, suddenly that impacts what we think about the thing that we're the expert about. And so a part of stoicism, but I think just part of success generally is not just building a thick skin, but developing kind of an internal metric that allows you to value what you do

and what's important to you independently of what other people say. And this is so important because we see genius work that is criticized in its own time, appreciated later. We see scientific innovation that takes years to be adopted. We see people who we now regret how we treated them, you know, in the moment. So it's really important that you cultivate an internal metric that you measure yourself by, because the mob or the crowd is wrong all the time. And if you can't do that, if you can't remind yourself that what you think is what's most

important to the choices you're going to make in your life, then try to get away from those other voices. Don't go online. Don't look for likes. Don't partake in social media. Be smart and strategizing how you're going to set up your own life for success. You write the following. So true. There was never a groundbreaking business that wasn't loudly predicted to fail. By the way, yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Fox News's foundation. And when I worked there for 13, 14 years, Roger Ailes had signs all over the, all over the building of the predictions that he was going to fall on his face, that Fox News would never be able to compete with MSNBC. P.S. they have three times their ratings and have for most of their history, so on and so forth. Right. So there was, there was never a groundbreaking business that wasn't loudly predicted to fail. And there has never, ever been a time when the average opinion of faceless,

unaccountable strangers should be valued above our own considered judgment. Man, that's true. It's like you meet some of these people who are coming after you online and you're like, oh my God, what was I listening to them for? Yeah. And the great rule I love in writing is that when somebody tells you something's wrong with what you're writing, they're almost always right. This is the tricky part. But when they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. So the idea is the opinions of the crowd or the mob can generally be alerting you to something that you need to think about, that you need to double check, you need to make sure that you're communicating effectively, but then you don't actually listen to them about their opinion. So if, let's say you

have some message and you're morally and in terms of justice, completely correct. But then everyone has a negative reaction to it. It's not that you reconsider those principles per se, but you go, well, clearly, I see something that you don't see. And I'm going to evaluate how I'm going to communicate this more effectively, because obviously, the point isn't to stand alone and be correct in isolation. The point is to bring other people to it. It's like, if you have some genius work of art, but nobody appreciates it, because you don't know how to market it, how genius is the work actually? It's tricky in today's day and age, however, because we've become so tribal and politicized that so much of the criticism is not in good

faith, and they're not really trying to persuade, right. So it's like you got to sort of figure out whether this is a politics issue, um, or a genuine search to change people's minds and communicate effectively and bring people over to your side of the table, like in a business setting. Well, and it's filtered through the economics and the constraints of social media. So it's like you work for two years on a book and then somebody sums it up in a 240 character tweet. You know, up in a 240-character tweet. You know, there's an asymmetry there. So we're lacking the nuance or the consideration. If you actually sat down and had a conversation with this person, you might find that you agree about more than you disagree.

But in the confines of an Internet comment or, you know, a YouTube video, you're not quite getting the same consideration or conscientiousness or good faith, as you said, that one would normally be entitled to. You're right. We shouldn't worry about whether things will be hard. They will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. Thus, you do not need to fear them. Our bruises and scars become armor.

Our struggles become experience. They make us better. They prepared us for this moment, just as this moment will prepare us for the one that lies ahead. Boom. Honestly, that's my life philosophy. I call it building your superhero muscles. Every time life throws something really challenging at you, you should say thank you. The Stoics have this concept of amor fati, which means a love of fate. And Marcus Aurelius uses

the image of fire. He says, everything that you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire. He says, it turns everything into flame and brightness, which is to me is a beautiful, inspiring way to think about it. This is fuel. I'm going to absorb this. I'm going to consume it and I'm going to turn it into heat. Right. But I would say that the caveat to that is that if the fire is weak, if it's just like a puny spark or, you know, a dying ember, you know, you throw something on top of it, it puts it out. So if you have that energy, that drive, that passion, that commitment, then all the obstacles can be used as fuel.

If you're half-hearted about it, if you're weak-willed about it, then the scars and the bruises and everything, they don't become armor, they become sort of mortal blows. So it's about also what you bring to it that allows you to use it and turn it into something. Well, this is why you need to, and I know you have two young kids now yourself, and I've got three kids. This is why you need to let them take some licks out in the schoolyard and otherwise, so they can start practicing, you know, building up that armor and getting those bruises and scars that become their armor. But be there, be at the ready to step in if you need to, because the wounds shouldn't cut too deep. They're not yet ready to handle that. Yeah, they call that a snowplow parenting,

the parent that clears all obstacles and impediments out of the way of their children. And I think this is what leads directly into the college admissions scandal. These were parents who had, up until this point, removed every obstacle or difficulty from their children's path. And then when it turned out that getting into a good school was harder than expected, they had to pull all sorts of strings, unethical strings, one last time to solve a problem for them because they hadn't cultivated children. They hadn't raised children who were capable of solving their own problems. Meanwhile, the damage had already been done, right? It's like you can't getting them into

a good school, however you're going to do it, you know, ethically, non-ethically, that's not going to solve the problems you created in that kid in those first 18 years. Those kids and all those people who got in who weren't outed by the scandal, they're going to be facing the same problems at the end of those four years as they ever did. And by the way, I've seen this firsthand myself where on Wall Street, for example, you can get a job pretty easily if you know somebody, if you play lacrosse with the guy, whatever. And so it's actually not that hard to get a very well-paying job on Wall Street. It is hard to keep a job. It is hard. Like over time, if they find out you can't do it, you get pushed out pretty quickly. So the parent, they're not always going to be able to save you from that. They got to give you the tools. I love makes me a stoic, I'm a, I'm a secret stoic, I guess,

I don't know, a subtle stoic, um, is I don't really have any borrowed worry in my life. I just don't worry about tomorrow's problems until I, until they're smacking me in the face. You know, my sister got very ill recently. My mom was in a panic, you know, she's got to die. She's got this. And I'm like, mom, we're not there yet. Stop those tears. We're not there yet. She's in the hospital. They're going to take a look at her. We might get to the point where we get some terrible diagnosis and then I'm going to be right next to you crying tears, but we're not there yet. We got to, we got to manage our regular, our, our, our emotions. Thank God she's okay. Well, I'm jealous. Uh, that's not naturally how I am. Uh, and so I think part of the reason I write about stoicism is that I need the

constant reminders. Like I found during the pandemic, I thought like, you know, like, let's say I'm late for a flight. I'm anxious. I'm anxious about a lot of things, right? But I was always under the impression that I was anxious about these specific things that were part of what I did that were part of the modern world. And I think one of the interesting things about the pandemic in 2020, when everything shuts down and suddenly you're just at home, not able to do anything, I have all the anxiety still. And I realized, oh, I'm the common variable in all of these situations. I'm the one bringing the variable, which is an interesting concept. Marx, Aiance on Medications, again, says, I escaped from my anxiety today. And then he says, actually, wait, no, I discarded it because it was within me, right? The situations are objective. We bring the anxiety, the worry, the fear to them.

And when we realize that, it gives us a choice. We go, ah, I don't have to worry about being three minutes late. This is something I am choosing to do. Um, I can still be concerned about it. I can still be important to me, but I don't have to make myself suffer because I'm worried about X, Y, or Z. And I really think that there are two ways out of it. So if you're somebody, you know, like you, who's it, you don't want to be worrying. So like my saying to my mom, mom, stop the crying. We don't yet know if we have reason for it. You know, that's not that effective because my mom's like, but I'm upset. I can't get the worry out of my head. I really think there are two things you can do. But basically it boils down to get busier, right? Like distract yourself. I like cognitive

behavioral therapy where like you just, you just insist on taking your mind to something else. I like cognitive behavioral therapy where you just insist on taking your mind to something else. I used to use my puppy's face. Seriously, it could be something as simple as that. But secondly, stay as busy as humanly possible. The more time you have on your hands, the more likely you are to immerse yourself in borrowed worry. I think that's right. And look, cognitive behavioral therapy has its roots in stoicism. The founders of CBT were students of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. They sort of quote Epictetus. Epictetus says, look, there's things that are in our control and things that are outside of our control. And what are we going to spend our resources on? So that's the other key part of worry that I remind myself. I say, this is a resource allocation issue, right? By choosing to focus on this thing that's outside of my control, I am also by extension choosing not to focus on this thing, which is in my control and may in fact be bringing about the very thing that I am worried about.

It may be a better problem to spend time with, something you might actually enjoy. I like this guy, Epictetus. I confess I had no idea who this was prior to preparing for this segment. A Greek Stoic philosopher, and this is the quote I saw about him online. We suffer, or this is from him, we suffer not from events in our lives, but from our judgments about them. Yes. The way I've always said this is your only problem is your belief that you have a problem.

Mm-hmm. Yes. said this is your only problem is your belief that you have a problem. Yes, there was a quip about Lyndon Johnson. You know, he compared to the sort of the best and the brightest was the least educated in the room most of the time. And one of Kennedy's advisors said, he said that it wasn't Lyndon, that Lyndon Johnson didn't go to an Ivy League college. The problem was that he thought there was a problem that he hadn't gone to an Ivy League college. The problem was that he thought there was a problem that he hadn't gone to an Ivy League college. His lack of education never caused him a problem, but his sense that he was lacking in education caused him constant problems. And so, yes, it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about those things. It's the story we tell ourselves about those things that's really the source so often of our anxiety. And this goes

back to fear. Why are you worried? Right? I'm going to miss this flight. Okay. And then what? Well, then I'll have to get a different flight. And what will be so bad about that? You know, you work through it and you realize it's actually not such a big deal. It's just your, you know, your, your, your mind running around in circles about that. That's right. And I think about it like, well, who knows why I, why I am going to miss this flight? You know, maybe there's somebody on the next flight I'm going to meet. Who's really special. Maybe my body was just too tired to get myself out of bed this morning. And I needed that extra 15 minutes and it overruled my mind, you know, in looking at the alarm clock, you just,

you never know. I mean, I'm sort of more of a surrenderer to situations like that rather than an obsessor to them. But I want to read this because I thought this is I'm actually going to print this out and put it on my wall. I love this, Ryan. You quote the poet Wilfred Owen from the trenches of France in 1918. This is on the subject of staying busy and it will help you with your worry. Quote, happier those who lose imagination. They have enough to carry with ammunition. It's when we imagine everything, when we catastrophize endlessly, that we are miserable and most afraid. When we focus on what we have to carry and do, we are too busy to worry, too busy working. Yes, exactly. Fill your life up. Nine times out of 10, the people who are obsessing over the meaningless stuff and tearing you down and making nasty comments on Twitter or in your life or what have you, they don't have enough going on. They need to get busier with more important things. Yeah. You know, Cesar Milan, the dog trainer, he's like, all dog problems are just solved by taking your dog for a walk. Like just take the

dog outside and work it out and it'll be tired and then it'll stop doing whatever, you know, you think the problem is. And I, I I've certainly found that with, with children, uh, there's almost no problem that's not solved by, uh, going for a walk or strapping them into a, uh, stroller. You know, if you can't do that, at least going for a walk or strapping them into a stroller. If you can't do that, at least going for a drive because they'll fall asleep or something. Getting outside, getting to work on something is just a wonderful way to calm the mind down, to occupy it so it stops turning on itself, which I think is what's often happening in these moments of anxiety or worry or fear. You know, several years ago, Gavin DeBecker, who's a security expert,

wrote a book called The Gift of Fear, which everyone should read. 100% you should read it. It'll change it. I have it right up there. It's a great book. Oh, it's so good. And it's really about how you've got this sixth sense, women in particular, but everybody has got this sixth sense that we too often ignore when we actually are in danger. But I think you make a different point in your book, which is equally valuable, which is fear is a sign. It's a sign of opportunity. Like good things

are on the opposite side of fear in many circumstances. And that's where we're going to pick it up. Okay, lots to get to. Fear as a helpful indicator. The fear you feel is a sign. If courage is never required in your life, you are living a boring life. Love it. Explain. There's a story about Theodore Roosevelt when he's thinking about inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House. This would be the first time that a black man had been invited to dine with a sitting U.S. president. And, you know, there's a moment where he hesitates. He thinks of the political consideration.

He thinks what his southern relatives will think. He thinks of just the hassle of the negative press. But then he writes to a friend later, it was precisely because I hesitated that I felt ashamed and knew that I needed to do it, that it needed to happen. And look, it's not a perfect rule, but I often find that the things we are afraid to say or write about or do for political or professional reasons because we think they're going to cost us, these are precisely the things that we need to do. This is precisely the fear we need to get over because I think a good way to think about it is what would the world look like if nobody ever did those things, right? Almost all progress,

all breakthroughs, all moments of heroism and change come from people who pushed past those reservations, pushed past that instinct for self-preservation and did what was right despite the considerations. as envy. It's not necessarily a fun emotion to feel, fear, but like envy, it's a tell about something you feel is lacking in your life or something you want to change in your life. So it is sort of a gift. It is a window. You write, our fear points us like a self-indicating arrow in the direction of the right thing to do. One part of us knows what we ought to do, but the other part reminds us of the inevitable consequences. Fear alerts us to danger, but also to opportunity. Reminds me of the fact that in Chinese, apparently the same symbol is used for both crisis and opportunity. And man, that has certainly been true in my own life. So it's just a reframing of something that's previously been like a dark cloud. I think most people see fear as a dark cloud. Yeah. And almost all the things that we love about our lives that we're proud of are on the other side of something initially that we were afraid of. Right. And so remembering that, I was scared to do this the first time, or I was scared to do this analogous thing. And I'm so glad that I didn't

listen to that fear. Well, how am I going to think about this in the future? And then going back, when I look at my own lives, when I look at places that I've fallen short, things that I'm ashamed of, things that I wish that I'd done differently, my excuse at the time, I was afraid about X, I was worried X, Y, or Z, that has not aged well, right? That doesn't hold up. The reasons felt good at the time. They felt significant or sincere or exculpatory. But now, you know, five years later or 10 years later, you're like, no, that doesn't hold up at all. The things, meaning the things you regret are the risks not taken, not risks you took that didn't work out.

Almost invariably, yeah. You can excuse failure, right? You can say, well, I tried. I did my best. It didn't work out for the following reasons. I wish it had gone differently. But you, for the most part, don't blame yourself the same way that you do

for, say, sitting on the sidelines about something. And then, you know, you're better for having taken the risk. You just know that you're a stronger person. And I also feel like there's just sort of the laws of natural consequences get us to where we need to be. So you you take the risk, you fall flat on your face, you suffer humiliation, the people who you were worried about say the terrible things. And then there's just like a cleansing. There's like a skin changing, you know, like you shed a skin you weren't meant to have and you grow into a new one you were meant to have. Well, let me ask you, in the big moments of

courage in your life, the big stands that you've taken, that wasn't the first time you ever had to do something you were afraid of, right? Do you feel like the smaller moments of courage in your life, the little things that you stood up for, you spoke up about or risks you took, do you feel like that was preparing you for the bigger moments? Definitely. I agreed with what you said where you have to practice these moments of courage because it's not like a lot of people will say, oh, you seem fearless, fearless, fearless. I've heard that many times. And that's not it at all. I've had fears, but I will say I have less now. Practicing courage reduces your fear. But I had plenty more when I was younger, but I just made a point of taking them on. And I wrote in my book, Settle for More, that when I was younger,

I used to sort of get through like a contentious deposition when I was practicing law, where I knew I'd be up against nine times out of 10, a scary guy who had better academic pedigrees than I did, was probably at some amazing firm, probably knew the case better. He was a partner. I was an associate, what have you. I used to just pretend that I was an actress playing a role when I would go into these depositions. And so it wasn't like Megyn Kelly and my ego and my skin in it. It was like this fake person who would go in there, just had to do the job of taking the deposition or what have you. And that worked for me. So that was a tool I used to do when I was younger. I used to tele you. And that worked for me. So that was a tool I used

to do when I was younger. I used to telemarket. That was scary for me because unlike you, I don't consider myself a natural salesperson. And I would use a fake name. I called myself Rachel. And that too was helpful. Put a layer between my ego and what I was doing. So when I was young, I did consciously take risks, but then took measures to protect myself from the downside of it. And over time, it gets easier. One of the things I do is like, let's say I have a contentious conversation. I got to call and confront someone about something or I have to fire someone or I have to go

into a hostile interview or something. I go, this isn't going to be fun, but it's practice. How else am I going to be better at it when the stakes are higher? If I don't willingly go in it now, consciously go into it now and say, this is an opportunity to get better at something that I don't want to do that I'm not good at. And as hard as it's going to be, I'm going to emerge from it with a better set of skills and a deeper familiarity with it. I used to say this to Abby when we were at Fox, she's sitting in the studio with me, your number one fan. She's sweet. She's from Minnesota originally, right? So she's kind at heart and not cutting. And she'd get kind of screwed over by

somebody, let's say in the research department, not to throw them under the bus, but just to take anybody. And she'd bring it to me and say like, this is what they're doing. And ultimately I would be on the short end of it. Like she's my advocate. So I'm the one who's ultimately, you know, going to be the wounded one if she can't resolve it. And I would say, Abby, I can solve this for you. I can definitely pick up the phone call,

the phone and go yell at that guy. But this is an opportunity for you to go in there and handle it yourself, Minnesota, and see if you can turn it around. And now she's just a total bitch. It's amazing how it yourself, Minnesota, and see if you can turn it around. And now she's just a total bitch. It's amazing how... No, no, no. And let's say you cultivate that at work. That's really important. It's good for your career. But then you're on the street and you see someone doing something unacceptable or abusive or whatever. You witness something worse.

Now you also have cultivated the ability that you're like, I don't need to call anyone to my rescue. I'm going to step up and get involved. I've practiced this. I know what to do. Well, because I mentioned this before the other break that you have to practice courage and you say you have to do it every day. So I was wondering, what does that look like? I think most people are out there saying, I don't feel fear every day. How do I practice it every day? Well, you know, there's that cliche, do one thing every day that scares you. It's actually a decent bit of advice. I think it's a cliche with some truth to it. You know, like, this is what we were saying earlier. If you are never doing scary things, you know, you're probably living a boring life. So I do try to make sure that I

am pushing myself in some form or another out of my comfort zone, creatively in relationships or whatever. I try to do that every day. Give us some examples. Give us some examples. Well, my rule is I only write things that I'm afraid to share. So the conclusion of this book was something that I really went back and forth about publishing. I asked a bunch of people if they thought I should publish it. And then to go to the point, precisely because I was hesitant about it, I knew that it was the right thing to do. So what you're saying is I should call into Dr. Laura today and ask her for advice.

Is that something I'm terrified to do. But I love her. You have trouble asking for advice. Just with Dr. Laura, because she's scary. If you don't say it fast enough, she'll yell at you. But she's amazing. So I think like my out was I was just going to have her on the show as a guest and then I'd be able to ask her whatever I wanted. It's much more. I respect the people who call in because, man, you've got to be up and down on your game. Otherwise, this person you deeply admire is going to cut you at the knees. That's yeah, that's good practice when you're used to always being in some form of control in the conversation. I've got to imagine it's intimidating to be on the exact opposite side of it.

Depends on the host. But anyway, I'll work that. I'll work that up at some point. All right. So I'm thinking today, I don't know. You know what? I will say one of the things I don't do that well is put myself out there socially. I'm not that emboldened socially. I'm afraid of rejection in my social life. So maybe today I will like send an email or issue an invitation and take the fear of rejection on. And I love I would love it if all of you guys would do that, too. And the other thing I always ask people to do is try to go a day without apologizing. Women in particular always apologize. Let's do both of those things. We'll take a risk and we won't apologize. And if we take a risk that insults somebody, then we won't apologize

for that either. All right. Listen, we've got much more to do today with Ryan Holiday, my guest, The New York Times number one bestseller. And we're going to get into how taking a break from work actually helped him come up with his new book, Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Brave. Stay with us. I love this part, talking about not trying to check yourself on obsessing over what people are going to say. When we flee in the direction of comfort or raising no eyebrows of standing in the back of the room instead of the front, what we are fleeing is opportunity.

You go on. They will laugh at you. Losers have always gotten together in little groups and talked about winners. The hopeless have always mocked the hopeful. The scared do their best to convince the brave. There's no point in trying. I love that. I try to think of it like this. Why would I pay any attention to those who wish to bathe in my reflective light? Why would I let them dim the light? I remember thinking one time, these people don't work hard enough for me to

care about their opinion. So it's very easy for people who are not busy doing things to come up with creative, even hurtful things to say about the people who are busy doing things. This is what's so great about the Theodore Roosevelt man in the arena speech. You know, are you a person in the arena? If you are, you're going to have to listen to the crowd. If you're not, then you can safely sit in the stands and shout whatever you want about the person in the arena. And I think you make a good point earlier that these things can be particularly difficult for women. Obviously, different genders, different ethnicities, different cultures, people from different backgrounds sort of are taught different lessons early on about what their role is and how this is supposed to go. But I think generally we need people who have the courage to be themselves. Each one of us is born with a totally unique set of DNA that has never before existed and never will exist again.

It's tragic that you would throw that away, or as you said, dim the light of that, to be more like other people. We already have lots of other people. We have zero other instances of you. You should have the courage to be that person. And don't worry about them calling you different or difficult. I like this too. It's good to be difficult. The well-behaved rarely make history. I love that.

It was a personal trainer I met at one gym I was at one time and he knew of me, but he didn't know any. And he kind of came over and was smiling. He goes, only the lions are remembered. There's a story about Margaret Thatcher. She's before she enters politics, she's a chemist and she's trying to get a job at this chemical company. And she can see what the interviewer is writing upside down. Like she can see it from across and she takes, she makes out upside down the man writing, this woman is much too difficult to work here. And you know what? The

guy was right. She obviously was too difficult to work there. That would have been way too small of a place for someone of her personality, temperament, drive, ambition, and skill set. So is it going to be easy being difficult? No. And are people going to accuse you of being difficult? Of course. But if you went along with everything, you wouldn't do anything special or unique. That's the, that's the trick of it. Yes. Honestly, I was just talking to Gad Saad, a professor in Canada, and I love him. And he was saying one of his regrets is he wished he had gotten along better with people higher on the totem pole than he is at his university. He wished he could sort of kiss up a little better than he can

because he thinks he maybe would, whatever, he would have done better in the university system. And I was saying to him, absolutely not, because you now have such a huge platform. His podcast is doing well. Everybody listens to him. He's got a big social media presence. And he's super fun to talk to and to listen to, in part because he's irascible. If he'd made it in the university system, he probably wouldn't have all those sharp edges and he probably wouldn't be able to speak so freely. Yeah, maybe he would have been promoted. Maybe he'd have published more academic texts, but he probably wouldn't have the podcast. He probably wouldn't be on your show. I wrote a lot in the book about Frank Serpico, who I think is a sort of timely figure to study now as we're having this reckoning about police and their role in society. And as he's being

prepared to be cross, as he's being prepared for one of the trials that he's a whistleblower in, a witness in, the DA says to him, like, why are you so difficult? Why can't you just cooperate? And he says, you know, if I cooperated, if I just went along with what everyone wanted, I'd be taking bribes in the precinct right now. The whole point is that I do what I think is right. The point is I'm difficult to work with. That's what got me here. And I think we have to remember that if we go along with what everyone wants, things might be easier, but we're certainly not gonna break much

in the way of new ground. And I also just, I keep coming back to this, but I feel like I've lived it. So I want people to remember, even if it doesn't work out short term, let's say you're difficult and they're like, well, let's get rid of her. She's a pain in the ass

to your point about Margaret Thatcher. That's good. Then you'll land someplace that sees the value in the real you and you're never going to succeed and do well at a place that feels differently about that. You know, Margaret Thatcher wasn't going to do well at that chemist place at that lab because they were honest about how they felt. So you'll naturally land where you need to land if you keep testing the limits and just be adhering to your true self. When I talked about this a little earlier when I was mentioning the conclusion of the

book that I sort of see this thing unethical at work. I don't want to be a part of it. I am not a part of it, but I don't escalate it as much as I should. I decide not to get particularly involved in what's happening. My concern was, as the concern of a lot of people, is I didn't want to lose my job, right? This is a concern we have. I don't want to lose my job. I don't want to get a reputation. I don't want to be difficult, et cetera. But again, with the benefit of hindsight or maturity or age, it's sort of like, why was I so intent on keeping a job that you could lose by doing what is obviously the right thing?

And so we're so often concerned about the bad thing happening as if the status quo is perfect. The status quo has problems. And it may well be that you've come to the end of the road there and you have to do this thing that is risky and dangerous and scary and might not work out perfectly. But wherever you land, whatever you do next is liable to be better because at least it's not whatever this broken thing is. So can we talk about that? Because what's the difference between giving up and having the courage to leave? It's tricky, right? Whistleblowers could obviously just quit and go work somewhere else. There is a certain amount of courage as well to say, like, why should I have to go? I didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to stand up and fight for this. You know, Martin Luther King could have moved to New York City, safely ensconced himself in sort of liberal American life at that time, not been beaten by

the police, not been assassinated. He may well have still been able to affect change through his writings and his speeches. But he said, no, I have to go back down into the valley. He says, I can't be a coward who runs away. So there's a tension here. I'm not saying you should always leave, you should always stay. But we need people who are have the courage not just to say something's wrong, not just to object to it, but also to stand to stand and fight. But you do write about sort of don't don't quit. Don't be a quitter. And yet it all you also recognize the courage it may take to leave a situation that's not working for you. And I think a lot of people battle with this, right?

Like they don't want to just give up on a difficult situation. But you get to this point where you realize this is no longer good for me. Or I just you point. I thought this was a great point. I just need change in my life. There was a line in your book. I wrote it down. Hold on.

It's pretty certain that continuing to do the same thing in the same way in the same place over and over is not just insanity, but eventually a form of cowardice. I too agree with that. Well, look, in a marriage, right? Sometimes it takes courage to stay and try to fix this thing. And sometimes it takes courage to say, this thing has run its course. We are two different people. We are not meant to be together. And this is true for jobs. This is true for a book. You could work every day for three years on a book and then realize the premise is flawed,

right? So I think the question is, is quitting the easy thing or the hard thing? And maybe that's the test, right? Are you quitting so you don't have to do it anymore? Or are you quitting because you are going to do the harder thing? Which again, maybe deciding to file for divorce. It may be quitting and having to start over and walk away from a retirement package or stock options or whatever it is, right? Is quitting the easy thing or the hard thing? If we go back to the choice of Hercules, the hard choice is the one we want to go towards. The dour goddess, right? There's the one hot goddess.

They say she's stern. Stern, not the same. Okay, I got it. I love this. Stoicism, deep, deep courage, is there to help you recover when the world breaks you and in the recovering to make you stronger at a much more profound level. I mean, honestly, like all the likes in the world, that's exactly how I feel. And I have to tell you, it's one of the reasons why I'm so concerned about our society right now where, you know, it's all the safe spaces and you have to be protected from words and books.

And, you know, I just think this is exactly the wrong instinct. How do you feel about what we're seeing in our society right now? I do. You know, what I was talking about in that chapter, Audie Murphy, the most decorated American in military history, in his memoir, To Hell and Back, the last section of the book, is him essentially broken. He's got PTSD.

He's seen horrible things. He's got PTSD. He's seen horrible things. He's killed people. He's seen the worst of humanity. And he's talking about like, I'm going to go back to the, I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to quit. I'm going to try to build a life out of this. I'm going to try to become human again, effectively. And so when we talk about courage, we don't just mean

the courage on the battlefield. We could also mean the courage of the soldier suffering from PTSD or trauma or depression saying like, I need help, right? It is interesting how fragile we have become. I think it's a tension, you know, again, admitting that you need help, admitting that you're struggling. I think there's courage in that. But the idea that you can be shielded from all struggle and pain and difficulty is naive. We have to face these things that make us feel stuff. You can't create a safe space and make sure everyone walks on eggshells around you. You have to go towards that.

You have to deal with it. And of course, this is easy to say, hard to do, particularly the harder or more painful the trauma that you're experiencing is, but we all have issues and we have to face them. James Baldwin says, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced. We have to face the things that are bad and wrong in this world. On the subject of children, we're going to take calls later. And thank you for agreeing to stick around for that, because I'm sure that our audience would love to hit you up with some questions. But I'm going to give you Abby Finan's question for you now.

She wants to know about how do you raise stoic kids? How do you sort of instill this in children? Well, certainly not by giving them quotes from Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. I think it goes right over their head. I think ultimately we teach by example, right? We all want courageous kids, let's say. Didn't I say that? What is this?

I just said that. I told her in the break. Sorry. Keep going. Oh, we all want courageous kids. But what courageous things have your kids seen you do, right? It just says that I told her in the break. Sorry, keep going. Oh, we all want courageous kids, but what courageous things have your kids seen you do, right? If you're working a job that you hate,

if you refuse to speak up about things that bother you, if you're afraid even to ask a waiter for something in a restaurant, you can't then go expect your kids to be extroverted and brave and happy to get up on stage and talk to you. You have to show them what courage looks like. And I think the other way to do it, something I think a lot about is like, what are the stories that you're telling them? So not just showing them in your own life, but what are the kinds of stories you're teaching and showing them?

And I think we used to do a better job of this, the great myths of history, the great fables, et cetera. And now, you know, every children's book seems to be, I don't know, either about silly animals or it's sort of nonsense. Yes, that's exactly right. I could show them some Grimm's fairy tales. That'll put some, that'll steal up their spines. No, but teach them things that inspire them. Tell them about, I don't know, the 300 Spartans or tell them about Florence Nightingale or Rosa Parks. Tell them stories. Sort was that Theodore Roosevelt grew up hearing about the great men of history and decided to be just like them. That's what you should want for your kids.

Didn't you write that Nelson Mandelaics, because it is a philosophy, I think, ultimately designed for adversity. The Stoics were exiled. They were thrown in prison. They were executed by emperors. The Stoics knew what it was like to have to fight for things. You know, to your point, and I won't ask you to comment on this because it was controversial, but I stand by it. When Naomi Osaka refused to play, she claimed she was irritated by the questions that the press corps was asking her. And then she got all sorts of blowback from the other players saying, you know, we all have to do it. You don't get special treatment. And then she was like, well, I'm bailing.

Then she's like, I'm bailing. You know, she claimed she had a mental health issue in dealing with people and that she was going to bail from Wimbledon and so on. And the news media treated her like she was some sort of a heroine for doing my daughter's school, all girls school at the time, celebrated her. They brought her up in class to try to teach the little girls that it was great. She quit. And they framed it as she was taking care of herself, her mental health issues. Meanwhile, I challenged the whole thing. She doesn't like dealing with the press. That's it.

Her sister came out. She doesn't have mental health issues. So this is my own take on it. So my daughter raises how she's like this heroine, this Naomi Osaka for having taken. And I said, no, you know, who's a heroine? Malala Yousafzai. Let's talk about the little girl who got on the bus in Afghanistan, even though she knew that the Taliban was going to shoot her, that there was a very good chance that they were going to shoot. And they did. They shot her in the head and she still went to school like she knew. That's heroism. That is what we all use that word anyway, heroism. But to your point of like setting the right examples, that's the kind of storytelling we need with our kids. Not every time somebody naturally, naturally has a human foible or a

failing or a moment of fear that we now have to celebrate that. We don't have to go that far in overcorrecting. Well, I think there's heroism and there's courage. And obviously, my distinction is heroism is when it's about someone else. Courage is when it's about you. And it may take courage to speak up about something. Maybe you are struggling. Maybe you just decide that this is an obligation you shouldn't have to put up with and you're going to speak your truth and use your power to change the status quo. That could be courageous. I wouldn't describe it as heroic, right? In the book, one of the distinctions I make is, look, the decision of Michael Jordan to walk away from basketball to become a baseball player took some courage, right? He's risked money. He risked his reputation. He risked some of the best years of his basketball career to do

that. Is it heroic? No. I mean, the only person that benefited from that is Michael Jordan. But when Maya Moore walks away from an equally dominant WNBA career to help free a man wrongly convicted of a life sentence from jail, that is heroic. So I think we need stories of courage, but primarily we need these stories of heroism because it's ultimately, and the Stoics were very clear about this, what we do for others, the impact we make, what is our courage being in service of? When Pat Tillman left his career as an NFL player to go sign up and fight for the country in 9-11. I mean, after 9-11, that's like, I mean, I don't, I can't think of an example.

I want to talk about stillness is key. It's, is it, is it your bestselling book? I think my bestselling book is The Obstacle is the Way, but who's counting? Okay, right. They're all great. But I do, because I want to talk about stillness and why it's key. I haven't read that one. And I'm going to ask you about it, plus your old career as a media manipulator and how

you managed to get yourself onto all of the networks and all these papers with a bunch of malarkey. It's kind of a fun story. And it's an insider's view into how dishonest the industry is. So help me understand the books that I haven't yet read in a few lines, if you don't mind. Stillness is key. What's that about? Slowing down is often the best way to charge ahead. In the military, they say slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Our best work doesn't come when we're doing a million things, when our mind is racing a million miles an hour. It's when we slow down, we lock into what's important, and we eliminate what is inessential and ineffective.

So I was offered this situation where somebody wants me to do some stuff for them on a regular basis. And Abby said, don't do it. She said, you're too busy. You're going to regret doing it. And she said, Ryan's going to tell you to say no. But saying no is important. It's important, especially for busy people.

It's the hardest thing in the world. Steve Jobs talks about how it's not just saying no to the things that you don't want to do or the things you don't like. The really hard things are the things that you want to do that are really, really cool, that actually would make things better, but you know it distracts, from what's important.

Uh, I, I gave a talk to the, the LA Rams a couple of years ago and their team motto is keep the main thing, the main thing. I think about that often. Yes. I, my, my friend Terry here and always says the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. And it is an easy way of remembering it. Um, so stillness is key. So it's not, you don't necessarily have to meditate, but I know you, you know, you wrote about how you, you backpack through the woods, you live outside of Austin, Texas, and you've gotten some of your best ideas, just downtime, downtime. Yeah. The, the, the, the courage series that I'm working on now, it came because my wife said, Hey, we should go take the kids out for a walk this weekend. And I said, I'm so busy. I

don't have time to do this. And you know, I'm walking through the woods in Bastrop state park and, uh, the idea pops into my head. And so if you don't make that time, not only are you eventually going to lose the family that you claim to be doing all this work for, uh, but you lack the ability to reflect, to think big picture, to get perspective. Um, I don't think like exercise is a fun thing I do on the side. I consider it integral to the work that I do because I get so many ideas in the swimming pool, you know, at the gym, you know, out on the roads. This is why Doug is always telling me I should read more fiction. I always just, if I read, I'm nine times out of 10, I'm reading more nonfiction. I just feel like

that's an advancement toward being a better person or being better informed. And he's always like, first of all, he told me I shouldn't tell people that I don't read fiction, but I don't listen. But to your point, your brain needs all sorts of care and feeding. It's not all hard charging data. Yeah. And it may be actually that reading some work of fiction published 200 years ago

may give you the perfect insight to what's happening today in a way that you might not have expected. It's like you found it because you weren't looking for it. Yeah. I like that. All right. That's another risk I may take today. Ego is the Enemy is another one of your books. And can you just explain that? Because I know stoicism is about, I think in part, it's like, be humble. I don't know. You know, you need a little bit of ego to make it in today's day and age. But so how do you, what does it mean, ego is the enemy? Are there egos in your line of work?

I would be, I'd be curious to hear. Not that I've met yet. There's a great line from Epictetus that I'll give you since you're a new fan. He says, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. So the problem isn't that you need to be assertive and aggressive and confident. That all is important. But if you think you know everything, if you think you're perfect, if you think you're God's gift to humanity, it really kind of prevents you from

getting better, from working with other people, from connecting to other people. And most of all, it prevents you from learning the things that you don't already know, because you're convinced that no such thing exists. I always say, be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. Nobody minds a learn-it-all. minds. Yeah. Socrates is wisdom is that he knows what he doesn't know, or that he knows that he knows very little. And if you think about the Socratic method, what is it? It's the asking of questions, right? If you ask questions, you can learn. If you, uh, if you make statements, uh, you, you, you won't learn anything. Yeah, that's so true. All right. Now the obstacle is the way now your bestselling book,

according to you, what is, why is that so popular? And what is that about? Well, I have it tattooed on my arm as a, as a reminder, the idea is that there is no, there is no problem so bad, uh, so undesirable, so unexpected that some good can't be derived from it. Um, the very least by learning from it, right. At the very least by being humbled by it at the very least by becoming more resilient because of it. So the Stoics are basically just saying that everything that happens to us in life is an opportunity to be a Stoic, right. To do what you think is right with what you think needs to be done. Um, sometimes the Sometimes the thing that looks like

the absolute worst thing actually has within its seeds of, you know, wonderful opportunity. But I think it's also just about deciding to move forward to make the most of this, whatever it is, as opposed to expecting or demanding that everything go your way all the time. It's like yet another problem to be solved using my new skills, my new resolve, and my willingness to practice all these skills we've been discussing. Okay, that leads me to you and your past. You used to be employed by American Apparel

and the clothing company, and you were the marketing director, I think. And you were young, you were a whippersnapper, and you were sort of director, I think. And you were young, you were a whippersnapper and you were sort of a shit stirrer, like young in your career. So both, as I understand it, both when you worked for them, but also just you sort of went out there and started messing with blogs or was that all in the context of your work for American Apparel? Apparel. I had a marketing company that focused on sort of how the internet operates as a lever inside the sort of media ecosystem, the way that things bubble up or are created on the internet and then become part of culture. Basically, I ended up writing a book

about fake news, you know, 10 years ago, that I thought was, you know, sort of of the moment and turned out to be, unfortunately, a little bit ahead of its time. But the premise of the book was like, look, this is how the sausage is made. And it is not pretty. This is how narratives get created. This is how controversies start. This is how the things that ultimately culminate in, let's say, the evening cable talk shows. This is how Twitter kicks those conversations off hours or days before. And then you're talking about it to your friends the next day because you saw it on TV. And I was sort of showing how that ecosystem works from the perspective of someone who admittedly was taking advantage of said system. Was a master manipulator. Yes. The headline from Forbes on July 18th, 2012 was how this guy lied his way into MSNBC, ABC News, the New York Times, and more. It reminded me of that James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian study where they sort of wrote up a bunch of nonsense and got it published in these journals just to make a point of like, if you're if you say, you know, the craziest stuff as woke as can be, like the penis as a social construct was one of them, you can get it published. And you're kind of trying to do the same thing in media. Yeah. And look, I felt like I was writing the book

from the perspective of like, hey, this is a problem. Let me show you how this works. Obviously, it wasn't always received that way. But then you flash forward to the 2016 election, and literally thousands of Russian bots and fake accounts are cited and quoted across major media outlets relatively harmlessly for a clothing company or an author or a media personality. They have real implications, not just inside our political system, but also for foreign actors. If you don't think that China and Russia look at the vulnerabilities of our media system, how easy it is to get people outraged and turned against each other, I think you're being naive.

Yeah. You know, before I interviewed Vladimir Putin, I had a briefing by some top former intel types. And they showed me in great detail how the amplification was done by the Russians, you know, how they they'd come up with a fake news item. And you could you can track it, you can see you will sort of patient zero, if you will, and then out it goes in these concentric circles out, out, out, out to all of their sort of bots. And if you don't think that we are being manipulated by people who don't have our best interests at heart, you're definitely not paying attention. It's not to say anything about all the Russiagate. It's just 100% we're being manipulated by the Russians and the Chinese in our media. And that's not even counting our own

people who are doing it. So in a nutshell, can you talk about like, how would you do it? Like, is you you worked the blogs, but you worked mainstream media, and you could create really fake news without getting checked on it pretty easily. Yeah, one of the things I talked about in the book, it's called trading up the chain. Basically, it's what media manipulators do. So in the case of Russia, or the case of a reality television star that wants to be famous, is something starts very small. Maybe it's a post on Reddit, or it's a post on Twitter, or bigger media outlets, until suddenly, it feels like real news to real people. And we have this trouble in our media system where outlets report on what other people

are reporting on. So it's a reaction to a reaction to a reaction. And at some point, you'd hope someone would go, hey, what's the source for this? Where did this actually come from? But the system is moving so quickly that this doesn't really happen. And local news is unfortunately a big conduit in the system. People get something on, you know, the NBC affiliate in St. Louis, and then it becomes a national media story as it invokes more and more reactions. Can you talk about what did you wind up like getting on and what did you talk? Because like what I read in the Forbes piece was on Reutersuters he became the poster child for generation yikes don't know what that means on abc he was one of a new breed

of long-suffering insomniacs at cbs he made up an embarrassing office story at msnbc he pretended someone sneezed on him while working at burger king um at man to man manitow boats he offered helpful tips for winterizing your boat. So was that all fake? You weren't any of those things? Yeah, I definitely didn't know how to winterize a boat. I was quoted in the New York Times as an expert about vinyl records, which I know nothing about. I was born in 1987. One of the ways that this happens, there's actually a tool. I think it still exists, but at the time it was called Help a Reporter Out. And basically, instead of journalists going and getting sources like the old fashioned way, they would say, hey, I need a source who's expert about millennials and their retirement accounts. So instead of actually calling up someone who's an expert about this, it's like Craigslist. They're

just looking for people who have things to sell. And the reality is what those people have to sell is an agenda. And there's very little verification. So as part of the stunt, again, the purpose of this was not for personal gain. I didn't get anything out of being a boat winterization expert. It was to show that, hey, look, not only is the Huffington Post doing this, but the New York Times is doing this, right? The paper of record in the United States is trolling for experts and trend pieces that then we all react to go, isn't it so interesting that this is happening? And it's like, this may actually not be happening. This could be literally a figment of the reporter's imagination confirmed by, you know,

willing pseudo experts who are willing to, uh, you know, say whatever needs to be said to appear in the press. You, um, what was the, somebody called only one group called you to see if it was really you, right? Can you tell us that? What happened there? At some point, it was working so well and I was busy. I just had somebody else answer the emails for me. I just said, look, just reply to all these things. Just say whatever you want. And again, the point of this was to go like, guys, this is not good. This is like your password is one, two, three, four, five, six. Somebody is going to hack this. This is not safe. And I wrote this book in 2011. It was published

in 2012. Nothing has really changed. I mean, if anything, our system is more dependent on what's happening in social media, what's happening digitally, you know, what's happening, you know, faster and faster. If anything, the system is probably worse. Yeah, we just did a story a couple weeks ago about some guy who was all over MSNBC claiming that he was an ER doctor and that the ERs had been turning away patients because they were filled with the unvaccinated and maybe it was ivermectin, people who took ivermectin. It was one of those sort of lines. And he was all over MSNBC. Millions of people saw him. And it turns out that somebody actually followed up and called the hospitals and

said, is that true? And they were like, we severed our relationship with that guy months ago. He hasn't been in our ER. He doesn't know anything and we're not overflowing and nobody came in for ivermectin overdoses. It's like a simple phone call would have saved you the embarrassment. But the problem is the embarrassment isn't that great anymore. And let's say there's some random internet website. You get the story and it goes viral. That's good for you. Then it turns out to be disproven. It goes viral again. Then you have to correct it. That goes viral, right? You might get three stories where you should have had zero. It's all clicks. So it all goes to your bottom line. The outrage is the point, right? The attention is the point. And then because we're not...

If you're a subscriber to something, if you're a regular consumer of something and that site or that outlet continually lets you down, you will cease to be a customer of that outlet. The problem is when we just consume internet, sorry, when we just consume our news over the internet via the intermediary of Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or whatever is being spread around, there's not a reciprocal relationship. They say if you're not paying for it, you're the product that's being sold. The purpose of these websites is to capture your attention by any means necessary, sell that to a digital advertiser in a real time exchange. And by the time you're halfway through the article and go, this is bogus, they've already profited from that. This is why you have to be so careful.

When it comes to your news consumption, it's like the same way you wouldn't just choose a random doctor out of the yellow pages, I hope you'd ask friends for a recommendation. You shouldn't just take news off of Facebook and say, this must be real. You should have a news. I think in today's day and age, a news personality who you trust, don't even don't, don't even buy into a whole organization because there may be people who are honest at that organization. There may be people who are not honest. So don't go with the organization, go with somebody who you trust, who hasn't, you know, who's served you well over the years and try to have a few of those people at different ideologically, you know, aligned places because it's garbage in garbage out. Well, this is why I like podcasts though. Like you and I are an hour and a half into this conversation. If this was a cable news show,

we would have talked for 90 seconds, right? The, the, the long form discussion that's not subject to these sort of wicked economics of like, is this spreadable is really important. The other thing I would add to that is like, read books. The best thing that I read that helped me during COVID was John M. Berry's book, The Great Influenza, which was published in 2005 about the Spanish flu, right? And so that's a 15-year-old book about a 100-year-old event. But because it's history, because it's not politically motivated or urgency motivated, I think it actually teaches you more than what's going on right now. So I think we are often consumed with breaking news when really we'd be better getting a historical perspective or a legal perspective or a psychological perspective.

And that would help us understand what's happening in the present moment. So going back to the young you, as I mentioned, you work for American Apparel. You made a reference to it earlier that you had, you include this in the book, but you had an uncomfortable situation with your boss there, the CEO, when you were 23 years old. And it was brave of you to put it in the book. And I think you really beat yourself up for how you handled it, but there's definitely positive moments there too, and you're a young guy. So do you want to talk a little bit about what the position Dov Charney put you in? Yeah, I was asked to effectively leak photos

of a woman that he had been in what he claimed was a consensual relationship. And as the sort of company spokesperson, this would normally be my job. The company sued, what's our response? He said, here's the response, give these photos to journalists. And I didn't do it, but I also didn't stop it from happening. And I remember walking into his office a few weeks later and, you know, observing a conference call where he was giving the photos to journalists who, you know, sort of happily ate them up and published them. And it struck me that, you know, just not doing something is not enough. Obviously, if something is unjust, you should prevent it from happening. But this goes to the debate that we were talking about earlier that I think a lot of us struggle with. We're a witness to something. We're a part of something. We see something that's going on. We tell ourselves, I shouldn't do something now. I'll be in a better position to do it later. And that may be true. I was, you know, a few years later in a better

position to affect change inside that company. But obviously, that's cold comfort to the people who, you know, were on the wrong side of what the company did in the meantime. So you could see this, you know, in the Trump presidency, someone says, well, I don't agree with what's happening, but I'm the adult in the room. Going back to the ancient Stoics, Seneca is the advisor to Nero. And I imagine he told himself, hey, if I leave, Nero will just hire someone worse. So when we talk about fear and courage, it's not an easy, clear-cut thing. You can stand on principle and you may get your head cut off, or you can stick around and try to, you know, have more leverage, be able to effectuate change later. But that can also be an excuse, a lie you tell yourself so you don't have to get involved. I have a different perspective on this because I will say,

I'll say this without calling out anyone in specific, the media industry is dedicated to destruction of anyone within the industry they feel crosses them. And they use people like you who are on staff full time to not just let somebody exit with a bad narrative, but to absolutely destroy them. The company turns on somebody that they employ and it's vicious and it is all out. And I've seen it at more than one place. And so I think you didn't even know you were just young that it was. This wasn't a good guy. Obviously, he eventually got forced out and all that. But you it was not even just him or this company. It is this industry. It's disgusting. I've said it before today. It's toxic. It's set up to attract bad people. Bad people thrive in it because you're the exception. The fact that you had any moral qualms about doing

that and that you managed to find the courage to say, no, I'm not doing that. And then eventually left. It speaks so well of you. You probably didn't realize at the time that you were swimming in a toxic cesspool that was much, much bigger than the company you happen to be at. Well, that's very kind. And obviously, in retrospect, I think I was a 23-year-old who shouldn't have had the profession to begin with. And part of the reason I was probably chosen was the thinking that I would go along with whatever was requested of me. So I do think we have to, it's important that we look back and we evaluate and we grow from the experiences because that is the ultimate way, at least from the

Stoics, the ultimate way to waste them is to not derive lessons from them that you then apply on a going forward basis, which I would like to think that I have. Yeah. So what do you do now? You live on a ranch, You're married. How old are your kids? I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old. And so what does life look like for you? I wake up. I take my kids for a walk in the morning.

We have some stillness. My rule is I don't touch the phone for the first one hour that I'm awake. I do a little journaling. I go in and I write. And I have a little bookstore in this small town that we live in that my office sits on top of. And I live kind of a Mayberry-esque existence in the middle of Texas. It's quite wonderful. And weirdly, the pandemic has been quite clarifying to me in terms of what do I want my life to look like? What do I want my days to look like? And, you know, what's really important to me. And I think generationally, we're going to

see a lot more of that. Everyone I know seems to be moving to Texas for some reason. Well, it's got no state income tax. That's nice. And even if your politics aren't hard read, they're more like leave you alone. And I think even a lot of Democrats like a place that just leaves them alone, lets them live their life. I think that's right. There's something nice about living in a blue city in a red state, kind of checks each other out nicely. Interesting. Yes. Well, and I mean, I feel like I can understand that having worked at Fox News for 14 years and lived on the Upper West Side. Right? One of these things is not like the others. It's okay. Shores up my skin. All right. Now is your chance to call in. Still taking your questions on the COVID show we had the other day.

It's on fire. If you haven't seen the interview that we did with Scott Gottlieb, you really should. It was very spicy and it was kind of fun. And we'd love to get your calls and your questions for Ryan on stoicism, on stillness, on ego. How's your ego doing? Or on a challenging situation that taught you something, made you a little braver or more courageous or steely spined. Call us at 833-44-MEGYN. 833-446-3496. 446-3496. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. We're taking your calls right now. It's not too late. 833-444-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496. And Ryan Holiday, bestselling author, has agreed to stick around, take a call or two. We're going to start with Richard out in the great state of Nevada.

You got to say it, Nevada. They know you're not from there if you say Nevada. Richard, what's on your mind? I'd just like to say that your guest today has given some really good sage advice, and I've enjoyed it. But we all know that some of it, even though you have a tremendous grip for the English language, you know exactly what they said,

but you have to have life experiences to really digest it and dissect it and understand it. And a good example of that is like people told me early in life, experience is the best teacher well actually it's not it it's good for you know weddings and winning the lottery but heart attacks and car wrecks not too much and uh i uh i i agree like i said with your. I think it's some great advice. A lot of really good points. One thing my grandfather said to me when I was young, and there again, I heard him perfectly, but I didn't understand it.

He always said, never get your exercise jumping to conclusions. I like that. Thank you. You know, what about that point, Ryan, of like, experience can be a great teacher, but some things are just really hard and awful. Yeah, look, experience can be a great teacher, but ideally, we also want to learn from the experiences of others. General Mattis talks about this, like as a military commander, you can't learn by experience because that comes at the expense of the lives of the people that you are responsible for. So if you're not reading deeply, if you don't have a mentor, if you're not asking questions, if you're not studying the campaigns and the discoveries of the people who came before you,

you're doing a real grave disservice, not just to yourself and to the men and women underneath you, but also to your country and to your cause. Do you think, is it too rosy? This is one of my concerns. Is it too rosy to say like, you know, every experience I sort of any downside of risk will get you, you know, stronger and you'll learn, you'll be a better person. You know, I think about some people who get a terrible diagnosis, you know, or struggle with something awful happening to a child. You know, I don't want to put too rosy a spin on it. Yeah. it's really easy to be flip about it and say, and this is something that I try to talk

about with The Obstacle is the Way. If you could avoid the adversity, great, you know, you should be. No one should have to learn, as you said, from the death of a child or from a bankruptcy or a robbery or, you know or a natural disaster. When these things do happen, then we have to learn from them. But it's not courageous to, let's say, not wear a motorcycle helmet or something like that, right? If we can avoid it, if we can create a society that helps support and keep people safe, then great, we should do that. But life should not be harder than it needs to be.

And just quickly, I was dying to ask you this, we were up against it, but like, what about regulating your emotions? We talked about fear, but stoics like to regulate emotions. Is there a rule of thumb on that? It's key. You have the reaction, that's fine. Just try not to make decisions

based on that immediate emotional reaction. The stoics are not emotionless, but they try not to make decisions based on that immediate emotional reaction. The Stokes are not emotionless, but they try not to make emotional decisions. That's such good stuff. This is from the book, A Hero Gets Back Up. They heal, they grow for themselves and for others. Ryan Holiday, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. It was an honor. Thank you so much. You guys got to check it out. You're going to love the book. Thank you for joining us today. Next week, we have Sharon Osborne in her first long form interview since the talk booted her off over that nonsense. Also, my pal Dave Rubin will be here. You can download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify and Stitcher. Check out youtube.com

slash Megyn Kelly if you want some weekend entertainment.