The Peter Attia Drive - #101 - Ryan Holiday: Finding stillness amidst chaos

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Ryan Holiday, bestselling author and author of Daily Stoic, discusses practical ways to find stillness and apply the insights of stoic philosophy in the midst of COVID-19 chaos. Ryan discusses the importance of taking back a feeling of control, the benefits of structure and routine, and the idea of being prepared for anything. We discuss: Using times of adversity to evaluate and reflect how you’ve set up and prioritized your life [2:30]; What insights might the famous stoics provide amidst this COVID-19 pandemic? [8:15]; The possible consequences of the socially isolating nature of a pandemic (and why we need good leaders) [13:00]; Stoicism—what it means and how to apply it [18:45]; Lessons taken from the life of Winston Churchill—stillness, structure, routine, hobbies, empathy, forward thinking, and more [23:30]; Alive time vs. dead time—taking control of your time and making it count [38:45]; Auditing how the world (and its leaders) are handling the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of stoic philosophy [44:15]; Asserting control and using routine to find stillness in an environment not conducive for it [52:15]; Why you should find a way to exercise, especially now [58:30]; How to find purpose during this time—goal setting, having a project to work on, and the benefits of keeping a journal [1:02:00]; What is Ryan most optimistic about and what is he most concerned about over the next few months? [1:08:45]; How can you follow Ryan’s work and messages about stoicism and stillness? [1:17:45]. And more. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/ryanholiday2 Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.  

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn

more now, head over to peteratiaMD.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. Welcome back to another episode of The Drive. I guess this week is Ryan Holiday, previous guest and a close friend. In addition to the conversation we released on Tuesday with Sam Harris, I also wanted to bring back Ryan to talk about stoicism and how it can help us during these current times. We talk in this episode in particular about some of the measures of stoic philosophy and how moments like this are sort of tailor-made

for examining those principles and more importantly figuring out how to apply them to our lives. But worry not, this is not an episode that gets deep or philosophical in any way, shape or form. It is mostly about us talking about balancing the challenges, trying to think through other things that folks are experiencing that perhaps Ryan and I are not experienced, for example, Ryan and I happen to live in largely rural areas and therefore, at least we're not space constrained during this period of time, but we're aware that many people are.

And the question then is, okay, well, what would you do if you're stuck on the 17th floor of a 600 square foot apartment in New York? How can you apply some of these principles? We revisit some of my absolute favorite stories from some of his books, including the one that I think about the most, which is that of Winston Churchill during the Second World War. And basically we extract insights and lessons from a number of Ryan's book. Again, his most recent stileness is the key obstacle is the way ego is the enemy, et cetera. Let's just get right to this one.

It's about 90 minutes long, and I think most of you will find at least something of value in here. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion today with Ryan Holley. Ryan, thank you so much for making time on pretty short notice. Yeah, of course, anytime. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Overall I think I'm doing pretty well. I feel pretty fortunate to be with my family during all this, I think

sort of reflected on it the other day and thought, man, this would be a lot worse if all this were going on and I wasn't with my family. So despite the inconvenience of this, which I think is, it's obviously inconvenient in different, different extent to different people. Yeah, I don't know. I'm doing better than I was a week ago of seeing the potential upside of this. Now you from the beginning, right? I mean, I was in contact with you right away and you seem to

immediately find a way to be productive in this and I think part of that is you're one of the people that has the luxury of being able to work from home. But aside from that, is this also kind of pose for you a new laboratory in which you can examine your own reactions to this sort of thing and then that of others? Yeah, I mean, to me, that's the only potential positive of any sort of dramatic setback or adversity or obstacle or whatever it is. Is it, it is a chance to sort of see things differently

or look at things differently. Almost always the status quo is something we had some sort of part in setting up, so we kind of like things the way that they are. So sort of given a choice, I'd probably have left them exactly as they were. But then when you sort of experience these sudden shocks, suddenly you're working from home or suddenly you're not doing this anymore or in my case, like, a whole bunch of stuff that I was planning to do later this month and then in all of April was suddenly

canceled. And so obviously the economic hit of that is very large and very unpleasant. But at the same time, so I never would have canceled them, served deliberately, but then when you find yourself feeling relief that they got canceled, you're like, oh, maybe my feelings on this were a little bit more mixed than I understood. I mean, for me, I am very lucky. I work from home, not only can I work from home, but I live on a fair amount of property

outside of a major city, so, and I had some mutual friends, you being one of them, that sort of gave me some heads up on stuff that was happening, so I was able to prepare. So I wasn't sort of caught off guard or as harmed by it as some people. So I have a little bit on the hierarchy of needs because I'm not that worried about food, let's say, or not that worried about where my parents are or how my kids are doing or whatever. I do have some time to think about it, but I have been feeling this weird feeling of, oh, maybe this pace and this setup is actually closer

to what I want my life to be than what the life I had that was supposedly disrupted was. Yeah, that's an interesting thought, right? Because as you said, there are a lot of things that there's probably nobody listening to this who hasn't had to make an enormous sacrifice in something with respect to their professional life and their personal life. And for many of us, those changes, like the example you gave, are not things we would have done on their own. If someone came to me in January and said,

from March 1st until, I don't know, I'll just make it up and say, July, you cannot get on a plane. I would have said, that's impossible. I just say, like, that's incompatible with my job. That's incompatible with what's expected of me by the people I help. I could have come up with a hundred reasons why that could never have been done. And yet, guess what, that turned out to be untrue. Yes. A lot of the things we think are non-negotiable.

We're just actually not willing to negotiate, but of course, aren't non-negotiable. Weirdly, that is something that kids sort of teach you as well, I think, is suddenly all these things that you thought you couldn't do, that you thought had to be a certain way, get, get blown up, and then you're forced to sort of question them. But yeah, I'm in the same boat. Obviously, this is the way that it had to be. Obviously, this is the system.

It only works this way. But so much of that is just sort of a status quo bias that we have for a sense of what's normal. One of the really great things about being a writer, of course, although I think there's probably a metaphor in it. I remember early on in my life, Robert Green told me he was all material. He's like, every shitty thing that happens to you is material.

Every thing you mess up is material. Every person that breaks your heart. Every dollar you lose, every sort of missed opportunity is material. There's a Jorge Luis Borgis quote, it's similar where it's like, you got to use it all basically. And so the one thing that I think in situations like this is like, how can I channel what I think in situations like this is like, how can I channel what I think and feel about this into the output or the work that I actually do?

And I think there's probably an analogy there. If you're an investor, if you're a psychologist, whatever it is that you do, and this is not at all a full redemption for the tragedy and the enormous losses that are going to come from what we're experiencing. But it's almost sacrilegious, I think, to decide not to study this and understand it and sort of realize a deeper understanding of humans, of yourself, of leadership, of clients, whatever it is. I think deciding that you're going to experience this in a way that you emerge from it, at least sort of wiser and better at what you do, to me is sort of the way to think about it.

So, you've been writing a lot of really great stuff, Ryan, in the past three weeks, building on obviously the themes that you've written on in the past, namely around stoicism. What are some of the most important things that stand out to you specifically with respect to this type of uncertainty around pandemic? And as you point out, it's really now sort of reared two very ugly heads. The first is the head of the pandemic itself and the risk it poses physically to people and all of the uncertainty around that I mean we still don't actually know how bad this virus is unfortunately because we don't know the denominator of testing We don't really know if this virus kills 1% of the people it infects or 0.1% of the people it infects

So that's a tenfold difference that makes all the difference it in fact. So that's a tenfold difference that makes all the difference. But if that weren't enough, as you alluded to, there is now an undeniable economic tragedy that's being imposed on many people that itself and by itself would be problematic, just as it was in 2008, 2009. So if you could bring epicetus, Marcus Cerrileus and Seneca back from the dead, bring them here today, walk me through what you think they would say about this, this specific example and situation were in my instinct is typically to do that, right? There's this quote from Churchill, he's talking as sort of World War II is breaking over Europe. He's not quite been brought back into power. There's this letter he writes

to his friend and he says, the last couple of days, he says, I've been trying to put a thousand years between me and the 20th century. And he was just talking about reading and writing about history. And so he was trying to sort of get perspective. And I think we can do that really easily. And in a way, it's more informative than watching CNN. Like obviously you need to watch CNN to know what the local authorities are telling you to do this day or that day. There is value in the news in that sense. Although the news is also sort of compounds hysteria and it passes on propaganda and misinformation, but I think looking backwards gives us in some ways more insight because as unprecedented and new as this is, it's also like one of the oldest things ever. I mean, Marcus really is who I write, it's probably the main character in most of my books,

died of a pandemic in 180 AD. So it's not as if humans have not experienced pandemics and plagues and massively contagious viruses. And I think Marcus really is a particularly interesting example, what they call the Antonin plague hits Rome and it lasts for 15 years. So you want to talk about sort of a humanitarian tragedy of epic proportions and then massive economic and geopolitical ramifications. When

Marcus really writes meditations, he is writing in the exact scenario that a lot of us are in right now, trying to keep ourselves from being exposed but also trying to do our jobs at the same time. He was a leader in a time where they had a lot less visibility into this thing that was horrifically deadly, very contagious, and spreading fear almost as quickly as it was spreading disease. And what I found in Marcus' example particularly was just sort of calmness, clearheadedness, sort of courage. My favorite story for Marcus, which I told in a lot of my different books, but like at one point the sort of treasury of Rome is starting to run dry.

And Marcus walks through the Imperial Palace and he starts selecting various treasures that belong to the Emperor and their family. And he sells them on the palace lawn to pay down Rome's debts. When I say that, it just makes me feel so sad, sort of, how far we've gotten from that, from a leadership perspective. But Marcus really talks about, he's like, look, plagues are very bad. No one would say that they're not. But he's like, a plague can only threaten your life. The real problem, the thing we actually have to be worried

about is sort of selfishness and greed and panic. These things sort of ruin your character as well as your life. And I think what we're seeing now is people kind of struggling with that tension when we're so sort of removed from mortality, from danger, from anything that makes us not do what we want to do at the moment we want to do it, that people are really struggling with how to sort of temper themselves and how to limit themselves and have self-discipline and put other people's needs above their own. So I think from history we can see that these are sort of timeless struggles that we've always

had. I read something a few weeks ago. I think it was a column that David Brooks wrote in the New York Times. And the gist of it was that there are certain externalities that are very difficult that can be uniting. And certainly Sebastian Younger has written very eloquently about this in his book Tribe. So in a post 9-11 in New York, the suicide rate went down. People were united in a common sense of urgency and a common sense of having been wronged. And it also probably helped to diminish some of the sort of useless pettingness that defines our existence and showed us what really mattered and

what didn't. But the point I think that Brooks made in this article was, hey, pandemics are different, it still has all of those same things of telling you what matters, what doesn't, what's a threat, etc. But it comes with this bit of isolation that actually tends to be quite negative. isolation that actually tends to be quite negative. Now, I'm not sure I actually agree with David in that setting because I think that might be true historically, but I wonder if connectivity today is making it a little less so. In other words, it'd be one thing if it's 1918, Spanish flu is ripping through the world, and it's clear that you basically have to hunker down and be fully isolated. But today, even if we had to resort to those levels, you and I have the ability to speak right now. Look at each other on a computer screen. There's

much more intimacy today than there was then. So what does your take on this specific nature of a pandemic that causes physical distance between people and how that factors into the sort of the challenges that we face as humans being quite social creatures? Yeah, I read that piece too and I think the sort of the seed of the point is right, but there's some, you could argue against it in a lot of ways like I was in high school during 9-11, but I remember concerts got canceled and sporting events got canceled and travel got canceled and people were scared and they stayed inside their house. So there is an element of social isolation in those tragedies. It doesn't last as long, but I think we forget very quickly how we were all hunkered down for a short period of time. What I think, the difference between, I think it's actually less a nature of, is a pandemic,

a particularly vicious kind of tragedy or sort of crisis because you can't see it in a sense, it almost pits people against each other, it forces you inside. I mean, I think that's an element of it, but in a way, it also connects us in that it affects everyone all at the same time. Like, the world wasn't suffering from 9-11 at the same time. Even World War II did not actually affect large swaths of the planet. So, it evens out. I think to me, the defining feature, and when I sort of look at these things historically, the defining feature between whether it sort of makes us better or makes us

worse, or how it manifests itself culturally, is what the leadership does. And to me, when I look at this crisis, I think it's a historical in the sense that very rarely has there been such a failure of leadership at Essentially every level from the geopolitical level to the specific world leaders to the governors to the government agencies It's been sort of quite horrendous in every sense And I was just reading Doris Kern's Goodwin's book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, which is very good. And she had a story in there that I remember from Robert Carrows' book on LBJ. But he talks about when LBJ takes over for Kennedy,

it's a crisis, at least on the US level, that it's difficult to wrap your head around. I mean, like a beloved president is assassinated, then the assassin is killed and it was done on television and everyone saw it. And nobody knew who was responsible, nobody knew what would come next. We were just a few months past the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a traumatic event without precedent.

And here you have a vice president who is not particularly, LBJ was everything Kennedy was not. He was a smoke-filled room guy, he was not photogenic, he did not have charisma, he was not a good speaker, and most importantly, he was not elected. And LBJ tells this in his sort of folksy Texas way, he says like, look, when I was a kid, he was like the cattle would get stuck in a crevasse or a ravine or mud. And he was like, it's in these moments that the foreman has to charge in

and sort of lead the cattle out of the swamp with confidence and aggression and clearness. And sort of all the things that you associate with somebody coming in, taking charge morally, physically in all senses of the word. And I think what we're experiencing now is less to do with the pandemic. And to me, more a result of what happens when something really scary and bad and alarming happens. And you realize we've been operating, we've been in a rudderless ship and remain in a rudderless ship. I think that's what everyone is experiencing right now.

And I think you can say that wherever you happen to sit politically. I don't think it's a political question. I think it's a leadership question. What is a person to do? It's funny. You and I spoke in, God, we probably sat down in late October, early November. That was released in January. I mean, basically at the time that you and I spoke, we didn't actually know what this

was. Nobody, there hadn't even been a single case. And yet so many of the things that we talked about seem even more relevant than they did at the time. We spoke about kind of consequences of having an overly secure life and how that gives you this false misconception of unlimited time. Well, certainly we're realizing that's not true. We spoke a lot about stillness and I want to come back to that because I tell you if there's one

character you've written about that I can't get my mind off as I struggle. It's Churchill, but I want to come back to that. And then there's kind of this idea of dying well and how it helps you live better. So let's just start with, let's assume someone hasn't listened to us speaking before, and they don't know anything about stoicism. Let's go back and kind of encapsulate a little bit about what this philosophy or as Tim, our mutual friend likes to call it, I think he calls it an operating system. How would you describe it in the context of that? Well, I think the sort of central preceptive stoicism is basically that we don't control what has happened or what is happening, but we control how we respond to those things. And so in a way, it's kind of this resignation where it's seeding a lot of the things that

we would like to be in control of in favor of focusing on the things like that we actually immediately are in control of. So, and you might think like, oh, you're talking about the reactions. Does that mean be reactionary? No, it's just saying like, okay, what is in my immediate purview? And I'm going to start on that. I'm going to make sure my family's okay. I'm going to make sure financially that I'm making some good decisions here. I'm going gonna focus on, hey, even if I did get caught off guard

or I was naked when the tide went out, how am I prepared for this to get worse? How am I prepared for what may happen after this? So it's this kind of focus on the immediacy, but it's focusing on doing what you can where you are with what you have. And so you can see, for the still weeks, yeah, they are dealing with pandemics like we're talking about.

They're also dealing with exile and war and mob rule and all sorts of plus just the normal stuff, whether it's a problem and a marriage or a business partner that's a cheat or it's that they fell and broke their leg and now they're stuck in bed for six weeks. Life is capricious and random and Murphy's Law is real, what can go wrong does. And so obviously, ideally, you want to be prepared for those things, the Stokes say, but it's more about what do you do when stuff goes wrong?

How do you respond and how do you focus not on who's to blame? How unfortunate it is or any of those things? How do you instead focus on, okay, here's how I'm going to move the ball forward. I talk about that in the books and I've read about that, but I'm also just a human being who's trying to figure that out day to day, just like everyone else. What happens when 30% of your income disappears or what happens when you've got to now pay for employees that can't work or what happens when you watch your years of retirement gains disappear? What happens when you can't go visit your grandmother one more time.

Shit happens to people. Philosophy isn't supposed to be this kind of abstract theoretical thing that you do in a college classroom. It's designed for this. It's designed for when you're hold up in your house and you don't like how things are. Yeah, I think that last point, Ryan, is so essential. People like me never found philosophy that interesting in college,

probably because I wasn't smart enough. And now my attraction to it is not academic. It's what can I extract from this way of thinking that will help reduce my suffering. Yeah. So going back to the point I brought about Churchill, you know, I've read stillness is the key three or four times. I absolutely love it, Ryan. It is actually of the 57 books you've written. It's my favorite. No, I'm just kidding. It's only 12. How many books have you written, Ryan? I think it's 10. I think it's 10. Okay. Well, I have probably gifted stillness

seven or eight times in the last three months. As I said, I've read it three or four times, and the section on Churchill really speaks to me. And rather than me trying to explain for folks who haven't read it, the story of how Churchill went about creating routine and ritual during what I can only imagine is the most stressful experience any one person could have really contemplated for a sustained period of time what I can only imagine is the most stressful experience any one person could have really contemplated for a sustained period of time in the last hundred years. I mean, maybe that's not true,

but boy, it would be tough to make a case that there was somebody that for months and years on end felt the angst that Winston Churchill felt. So I find myself thinking, and I want you to kind of explain what that was and how he managed it, because I was floored by sort of the ability that he had to maintain stillness through that. And that's something I've thought about, which is Peter, is upset as you are about this, as much as the uncertainty torments someone like you who's a control freak. And as

much as you feel the obligation to your patients, and you want to make sure every one of them is okay. And blah, blah, like that's a pittance compared to what Churchill experienced. And oh, by the way, Peter, you're like three weeks into this. You better buck up and get ready for it. So tell people a little bit, A, if they're not familiar with exactly how the war unfolded and B with Winston Churchill the man prior to the war and then during the war give us a bit of a story because it's just such a beautiful story. Yeah, I mean Churchill's life obviously is incredibly privileged in some senses but then is an unending stream of adversity in pretty much every other sense. I mean, he's born early enough in the 19th century

that as a young war correspondent, he witnesses the last cavalry charge of the British Empire, and he dies sort of well into the space age. You just see that the scope of history that he experiences. I mean, Churchill's first talk in America, he was very well received and it was highly anticipated. He's introduced on stage in New York City by Mark Twain and then basically...

After having sailed across the Atlantic. Yeah, in a boat, right? And the last time he visits America, he flies in like a 727 or something like that. So you get this enormous scope in the span of history that's punctuated with he's not a bright kid. Nobody has high hopes for him. His mother is sort of promiscuous, has a terrible relationship with his father. His father dies. They think of syphilis when Churchill's like 20 assuming that his son will never amount to anything. Churchill has taken a prisoner of war at like 22 years old, nearly dies in Africa in this prison camp, escapes. He writes a series of books. He stands for his first election and then sort of climbs his way to the top of sort of

British politics and ends up being sort of the fall guy for the Gallipoli campaign in World War I, has a nervous breakdown, thinks his career is over, sort of emerges a little bit back, and then ends up sort of destroying his political career by advocating very strongly against the rearmament and the rise of Germany, and spends what they call sort of 10 years in the political wilderness. He spends basically 10 years sort of run out of town. He's radioactive, everyone thinks he's an idiot. They think he's lost his mind and he is 100% right and no one listen to him and Hitler rises to power,

Germany rearms, World War II is the inevitable result of this, and it could have been prevented and nobody listened to Churchill. And Churchill is only brought back in after he has ignored for 10 years. And then yeah, he sees himself, he basically saves the free world, puts Western civilization on his back,

draws the United States into the war, famously wins the war, and then is rewarded for this by promptly being thrown out of office days after the war comes to an end. And that's not even the end of it, right? It goes on and on, it ends up dying as a very old man having sort of another series of triumphs and setbacks in that. And then I would say, if you just look at, so that's the span, this guy wrote 10 million words in his lifetime was one of the highest paid most successful writers in the world during his lifetime,

holds office for 60 years, Nobel Peace Prize, invents the tank, it's just an incredible life. Probably one of the most ambitious, busy people of the age. I think proof of the great man of history theory like the world we live in today is a result of Churchill saying, fuck Hitler, I will give my absolute last breath defying this person. There's a famous story I love. His daughter-in-law says like as it looks like the Nazis will certainly land and invade Britain. His daughter-in-law says like as it looks like the Nazis will certainly land and invade Britain. His daughter-in-law says like, what can we possibly do in Stinley?

How can we possibly, what do you expect us to do if this happens? And he said he looks around the eye and he sort of grouse and he says, I expect you to go in the kitchen and get a butcher knife and take one of them with you when they come in the front door. His point was like, we are going to fight this thing down to the absolute last man. And that stand, which was partly a bluff, but also sort of a hundred percent real courage and commitment, turns the tide of history. And so I'm fascinated by Churchill because that is an epic life.

I want to add one thing to that, Ryan, before you get into the next part. I don't want to distract the thought. The other thing that is amazing to me is, here's a guy who a decade out calls Hitler. He basically says, this guy's a fascist and he's going to do really, really bad things. Your point, he is completely exiled. bad things. And your point, he is completely exiled. And by the time Chamberlain is finally forced to resign, and they very reluctantly bring Winston Churchill back as the Prime Minister, I mean, the Germans are basically knocking on their door. And what I find, it's another subtlety of this, which I have to remind myself of. I have a tendency in a situation like this to say,

this was inevitable. How did we not see this coming? How is it that we shut down the branches of government that should have and would have had us prepared for this? How is it that we didn't put, you know, testing, I can rattle off all the things we did wrong. And so when Churchill inherits a huge mess, it seems almost unfair. It's like, well, now I have to be the one to fix the mess that I told you for the last eight years was going to be the big mess.

But again, the great ones don't seem to dwell on that because there really isn't a lot of benefit that comes out of that backwards looking thing. So do you want to say any more on that because there really isn't a lot of benefit that comes out of that backwards looking thing. So do you want to say any more on that in addition to sort of everything you've already said? Yeah, Churchill had this sort of code that he lived by and I'm forgetting the exact phrasing of it, but it was basically it was like savage infighting, magnanimous, invictory, sort of gracious and defeat.

And part of that, what I think is not only did nobody listen to him, but they like viciously punished him. They like destroyed his life basically and then said, hey, now that the battle is already lost, we're willing to sort of put you in charge, what I find remarkable is was Churchill's sort of empathy and compassion, even for those leaders. He kept some of them in his cabinet. He managed to work with them. There was no recriminations, no punishments. He was Lincoln-esque and his ability to sort of go, okay, this is just the hand I've been dealt. I mean, there's a famous expression, a famous statement he makes about the French general who surrendered to the Nazis. Obviously, he's like, this guy's got to go or not collaborating with this guy.

rendered to the Nazis. Obviously, he's like, this guy's got to go or not collaborating with this guy. But he says something like, let us be sympathetic that we never faced the predicament under which he broke. And so there was this, for all of his combativeness and determination, there was also an understanding, I think,

in him having experienced, along to Moucho's life, shit happens. What matters is, how are we gonna to solve this? And I think when you look at what he did, was like he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. And even those 10 years,

it's not like he spent 10 years of idle time. One of the reasons, ironically, that Churchill was so able to understand Hitler, Churchill was like the only one of the leaders in Britain who like took the time to read mym comp and actually study it and look at it. And so Churchill had in a way that 10 years of exile was the best thing that could have happened because it put him in a position to not be tainted by the incompetence of the people that sort of brought everyone into this mess.

It gave him a much longer and larger perspective, and it put him in a position to sort of figure out what to do next. And what I'm fascinated by, even if you sort of take out the war stuff, how was Churchill just to write 10 million words in your lifetime, just to do that in an addition to a political career, how does he pull this off? He was a sort of a creature of habit and routine. He had this sort of ritual. He would write at the same time every day. He would nap at the same time every day. He would eat and dress Dressed for dinner. He had this rule that I've been joking with my wife about. He said spouses should not see each other before noon

That was the secret to a happy marriage. He took long walks during the day. I was actually just in, this is maybe two months ago. I was in three months ago. I was in London. I had a talk in London. I was in London for maybe like 18 hours. And I went, landed at Heathrow, took an Uber to Chartwell, which is Churchill's estate, and then went back, gave my talk in Fluhom. But to experience, when you look at where Churchill lived, it starts to make sense. He had his goldfish pond that he would visit every day. He had the swans that he would feed.

He had a little studio that he attached to his house that he did his painting in every single day. He had even his estate, or his house house is surrounded by this brick wall. He laid the bricks for the brick wall himself. He would write every day, he would paint every day, he would lay bricks every day, and he would work every day. And this sort of rhythm or ritual, I think, was what allowed him to get into the headspace, to get into the tap into the flow state required to do what he did.

I find, and you wrote obviously about this in terms of JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but to me, it's something about the way Churchill handled this because it was much longer. Maybe it's in terms of the normalized value of stress, the Cuban Missile Crisis was greater, but it was over in 13 days. This was years. And I just find it amazing, the discipline in making time to be still and how that mattered.

And obviously he wasn't writing, he wasn't as prolific from a writing standpoint during those bombing campaigns and such, but he took his bath every day, for example. And it's funny, I was sort of talking to my daughter about this the other day, because we see like every kid around now, she's going through,

you sort of she's homeschooling effectively, right? And she was lamenting how much work she had to do, and I was like, I sort of introduced her to, I can never remember if it's Parkinson's or Peter's law. I think it's Parkinson's law, which is work expands to fail available time. And I kept trying to say like you have to make room for moments of detachment every day regardless.

I mean, it's just non-negotiable. Because otherwise you could spend the whole day buried in your history lesson or whatever other thing you're doing. And as important as that is, it would be very easy to say whatever it is I'm doing right now, whether it's trying to stay in touch with my co-workers or trying to figure out a way that we're going to pay that next bill. I mean, those things are vitally important, but it's not necessarily clear to me that you're going to do a better job of those things if you neglect that sort of self-care that comes from being in nature,

being still detaching from it, right? It's like a bipartisan complaint. We have about presidents that they, it's like, why are they playing so much golf? They're spending so much money playing, it's so much taxpayer money playing golf. And I don't think it's a coincidence that presidents choose that game and that they pretty much all universally play it going back at least to Eisenhower and before. It's because what other excuse and I think CEO similarly gravitate towards golf because if basketball is your game, you get maybe 30 minutes of basketball, right? Or if running is your game, you get five or 10 miles. But golf is a game that takes three or four hours, and it's three or four hours or you're not supposed to be on your phone where you have to

sort of mentally focus. You have to be present. It forces you to control and master your mind in a non-work context. And Churchill happened to be famously terrible at golf, so he painted instead. But he said actually like the most important thing that powerful people can do is have one or two hobbies. I would argue that's something that's a problem for Trump. If Trump had more interests, whether it was reading or sports or even socializing, he'd be watching less cable news and be able to see the bigger picture. As a nonpartisan example, I was the director of marketing in American apparel for a number of years.

And that was a company that self-inflicted. And then also the financial crisis was sort of in a perpetual state of crises and sort of chaos. And I remember talking to one of the girlfriends of the CEO, his name was Dove, wearing his sort of huge mansion. It's like totally empty of furniture. He's not married. He works 24, 7, 365. He's sort of perpetually on the never taking a vacation.

He's perpetually on the edge of sort of descending into insanity. And I said something like, does he have any hobbies? And they were like just sex. Like sex was his only hobby. And I think that was directly correlated with a lot of the self-inflicted, unforeseen errors that he made as a leader because he was never stepping out. He was never disconnecting. He had no structure. Everything was always

urgent. Very minor example. There's something I'm dealing with some supply chain issues with my company and it was like someone who worked from me called me. They were asking me about it. I was sitting down for dinner with my family to be able to go like, Hey, I'll call you back in an hour. I'm having dinner with my family right now. Obviously, that's what you should do from a family perspective. But that forced one hour break made me handle that situation better, because if you'd forced me to deal with it at that moment, or if I was a bachelor eating Chinese food in my house, when I got that call, I would have lost my temper. I probably would have made a rash emotional decision. I would not have forced myself to take an hour to sort of let it sit. And so one of these things, these hobbies do and relationships do and a little bit of sort of order and structure in our lives do is they kind of just protect us from just reacting and reacting and reacting all the time.

You've written both in your book and in your newsletters about a live time versus dead time. And even though you didn't use those terms a moment ago, you basically gave a great example with respect to my favorite Churchill, which is he's booted out. He's in exile. He's a political pariah. He's the scum of the earth.

And you'd think, I mean, he could have done the equivalent of watching Netflix every day in the 1930s. But he didn't. What did he do? He's reading everything that he can read about this crazy guy in Germany. He's writing. He's being as prolific as anyone can be, and it prepared him for when the chance came that he was going to come in and basically help save the world. And so what advice

could we offer people, myself included, by the way, I'm just going to be completely transparent about my own selfishness and having this podcast with you, Ryan. It's mostly just a therapy session for me. It's really tempting sometimes to just turn on YouTube and Netflix and take a break from the news. The news is pretty upsetting, but is there any harm in just watching Breaking Bad for the fourth time? How would you help us guard against the temptation to seek pure distraction? And how would you counter that and why? What's interesting about Churchill is it's not like he was only preparing.

Churchill also by nature of his writing and the speeches that he gives and the radio broadcast that he does Becomes almost more famous in America than he gives and the radio broadcast that he does becomes almost more famous in America than he is in the UK. And I'm not sure he would have been able, his credibility with Americans was so great. Greater than it was with his own people at that time, that when it comes time to sort of sell the transatlantic alliance, that work that he did was sort of very paid enormous dividends. And this idea of a lifetime dead time, it's like, look, you didn't control the fact that you're stuck in your house.

You don't control that most operations are set down. You don't control any of this, but you do decide what you're going to use this time for. I guess the question is, when else are you going to get? The good news is basically for for a lot of people, very little is expected. I mean, some people, nothing is expected because they are unfortunately not employed at the moment. But what's unique about this period is we are being,

I think, pretty understanding about the fact that things have ground to a halt without anyone's consent. And so, nothing is expected of you. So how are you going to use, you've essentially been gifted time. And how are you going to use that time? I think it's absolutely appropriate to use some of that for self care, for relaxation, for tuning out, because that's not a terrible use of this time. Anyway, if Churchill had emerged from those 10 years in the wilderness and the only

advantage had been he was well rested, I think that would have been beneficial, right? Like how is he able to basically be active in politics up until his death when I think most people would have burned out? I think that 10 year period was not a vacation, but it was, what do they call it in the NBA load management. It forced him to recharge and rest and figure out what was important. So I think at the very least we can use this time for that. But now is also time to really question a lot of things about our lives, about the decisions

we make, about the businesses that we have, about the goals that we've been striving towards. It's also a chance to experiment with new things, to try new things. I mean, like as a very small level, right? I don't know about you, but I've got like a million requests to be on like people's Instagram lives. And I saw this, this meme where they were like, it took a global pandemic to get anyone to try Instagram live. But that's sort of what I'm talking about. It's only in the sense it's like, oh, because people now have a minute, they are experimenting with and trying things that under ordinary circumstances, they would have never allowed themselves to try.

And so I think that's a good use of this time for people. What I'm trying to do is focus on writing, on reading, and just sort of spending time with my family. Those are sure my big priorities. I'm also using it as practice to like the financial blow has been so significant. It almost makes everything seem comical. And so I'm almost using it as practice to like say, notice stuff. Do you know what I mean? Like it's like, oh, if I can take this, I can do a lot less generally. Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, if I can take this, I can do a lot less generally. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So it gets back to that point earlier, which is if you had said to me in February, Peter, you know, I think it would be a good idea if from late February until late June,

you did not travel. I would have said, Oh, that's a beautiful idea, Ryan impossibility. Don't you know it fell in the blank, right? Don't you understand? Blubbubble, blah. And of course, then it's imposed on you and you realize, well, actually these things are much more possible than we believed and therefore we've kind of imposed our own barriers to sanity at times.

And that means, yeah, we could probably live with less. And we can do less. So as awkward as this is, this feeling, this helplessness, a, there's not a huge amount of value in just being upset about it. I mean, it feels good in the moment, but it doesn't really produce much benefit in the long run. Stoicism says so much about this. And one of the things that it talks about that we don't like to think about is having a plan if things get worse. How do you think about that personally,

and how can others kind of apply that insight to themselves? Yeah, it's certainly not pleasant to think about how it could get worse when it's already so bad. But again, we want to focus on moving forward rather than sort of staying in the same place or looking backwards. I think what this is teaching a lot of people myself included is that we thought about everything but this. There's a great line, Senna Kekwot's Fabius, who's one of the great generals in Roman history, he defeated Hannibal, and he says, the only inexcusable thing for a military commander to say is that

I didn't think it could happen. It's not that you can't lose, it's not that you can't mess up, but what you can't do is confidently say, here's the realm of what's possible and what's not possible. And so I think what this is reminding me of what we're sort of making plans at my house for is it's like, hey, look, don't be prepared for a rainy day where you're out of work for two months. In a sense, that's almost something that you're more able to quickly adapt to and resolve. But are you prepared for shit to really, really hit the fan? And I think that's where a lot of us were more caught off guard. Actually, here's a great example of this, and I think we're going to have to figure this out as a country. The American system of being sort of 50 strong states backed by a stronger central government, it was designed to be really adaptive and resilient

because, okay, a hurricane hits New Orleans. Now New Orleans can get the full benefit of the American federal government. Florida gets hit by a hurricane. California gets hit by wildfires. Wall Street is struggling. Our system was designed for isolated but serious short-term black swans. What we are really clearly struggling with is massive interconnected problems

that are affecting everyone at the same time. And I think you could argue that on an individual level, hey, I've got life insurance in case I die or I've got some savings in the bank in case my wife loses her job or we have a babysitter on call in case there's an emergency. We have a couple things here or there, but what we're much less prepared for is everything to go wrong at the same time. And I think that's something we're gonna have to adapt

and figure out how to do, especially because it's that same weakness that sets us up to be very poorly equipped to respond to, say, climate change, or an invasion from a foreign threat. We are just not in a position to deal with serious catastrophe. It's like we're set up only for minor catastrophes. Yeah, the difference between centralized and decentralized organization. Again, I try not to spend much time thinking about all the reasons we're in this situation, but I can't help but sometimes think,

I hope we don't forget this. I hope we don't go back to business as usual when this is over. I hope that a year from now, this lesson hasn't been forgotten. Distoicism tell us anything about the likelihood that we as a society will learn from this. If you really look at history, the truth is like, yeah, we don't learn very much. But I think Stoicism is, there's a Hemingway quote I love in it's in farewell to arms. He says, the world breaks everyone. And afterwards, sometimes the broken people are stronger in the broken places. But the people that don't break the world kills. And so that's something I've been thinking about because the myth of stoicism is that it

makes you unbreakable. It's the David Goggins thing. You can't hurt me. It's the James Stockdale, superhero, unbreakable, sort of sheer, almost inhuman strength and endurance under crisis. And in a way that's almost too aspirational because it doesn't feel real. I don't think stoicism is about making you unbreakable. I think it's about making you stronger, but I think the reality is really bad stuff happens

and we have no choice but to sort of ascend to it. No amount of defiance as we are seeing from a leadership standpoint right now. No amount of defiance and denial stops a pandemic. No amount of invective stops a pandemic. You roll over and you take it to a certain degree. It's about sort of damage mitigation more than anything. But where I think philosophy really comes in what it's actually about is emerging from that better and stronger.

And so to me, the ultimate tragedy would be for the people that are unfortunately gonna pass from this and that could be you or me or people we both love or just, you know, sort of countless faceless strangers we've never met. The worst thing we could do to those people would be to emerge from this and essentially learn nothing, to go back to business as usual. And I don't just mean that in, are we gonna have better preparation for disasters? The thing I keep coming back to, the thing that makes me saddest

and that I'm sort of struggling with trying not to be resentful about and trying not to be angry about is that we, I don't just mean in the United States, we put these leaders in charge, even though their flaws were very well advertised, even though their lack of competence was almost something they bragged about, even though the sort of obvious holes in their strategies and skill sets were there, we put those people in charge because

they agreed with certain policies we wanted because we thought they would juice the stock market because we wanted to stick it to the other side. We made a deal with the devil and I'm talking about a lot of different countries. We put woefully unqualified leaders, but more importantly, even if they were qualified because some of them were, we put leaders with enormous character flaws, people of genuine bad character in charge. And we knew it.

And we knew it. And we said to ourselves, I would never want to be this person. I don't want my kids to be like this person. I don't like what they say. I don't like what they do in their personal life. And we said, I know that they don't actually believe in the things that I believe in But they're paying lip service to them. We said all of that is okay It doesn't matter that there is shitty human being what matters is they're gonna get what I want accomplished or

They are going to make me more money or reduce my taxes. And as you're seeing now, because what leaders are actually supposed to do is be there when shit hits the fan. We are seeing the ramifications of that. Look, it wiped out all the gains of the market. So, and there's nowhere to go but down from here. And so I think that's really what we have to learn.

To me, I think it was a betrayal of my parents' generation, to my generation, but I also think I hold myself responsible too. I think we mortgaged our children's future by not wanting to get involved, by not wanting to say anything. This doesn't just affect us. It's going to have generational impact. And to me, that's what's gotta change. Bringing it back to right now,

because at the time that we're recording this, which is very late in March, my kids ask me every single day, how much longer, how much longer. And I think, honestly, for them, it's mostly just, they miss their routines and rituals, they miss going to school. It's not like they miss their routines and rituals, they miss going to school.

It's not like they're suffering. And I say, I don't know. I really don't know, guys, you know, could be this long, could be that long, but I really don't know. I'll have a better idea in two weeks, blah, blah. You're fortunate. You live on a farm and you live outside of a city. So you can always spend time outdoors.

And I know for you personally, even before this came along, that was the epicenter of your grounding. You and I sort of have that in common, which is I think we sort of like solitude outdoors. What about the people who are listening to this, who don't have either of those options? You are living in a small apartment in New York City, or you're living in a small apartment in New York City or you're living in any city and you look out your window and you can see people locked up in their house. I mean, from a medical standpoint, my view is everybody should still be outside every day regardless of where they live. And one just has to take extreme care when those are areas that are high risk like New

York and in which you have to be careful what you touch and how close you get to people. But what other sort of practical insights do you offer people that don't have the luxury of being on a farm and being able to work from home? So we're back to the, you're thinking about applying for unemployment. I just read today that over a million people in California have filed for unemployment. At least that's according to a story that I read. I get who knows at this point. I have the things I read. I don't even know if they're being taken out of context. But there's no doubt that there is a staggering number of people that are in the process

of filing for unemployment, managing a life at home with kids that are out of a routine that means you and now have another job, which is trying to help educate your kids and basically homeschooling them. And just none of this seems amenable to stillness, right? None of this seems amenable to letting your mind get out of its own way.

So how do we force it? Yeah, my sister is in a apartment in Park Slope, and I've been trying for a month now, it's probably too late. I was trying to get her to leave. That's one of the interesting things to me, I think a lesson that we have to learn. And again, putting this out,

sort of following the health authorities, et cetera. But just the sort of amount of sort of passivity about, it's like we saw the train coming and we froze or we just went about our normal business as if we had no agency. I would say one and 20 of the people I talked to had any sort of plan for how they were going to weather what was so obviously coming some form of quarantine, right? And if people had been a little bit smarter about it, sure, there might have been some spreading of the virus, but maybe New York wouldn't be so overloaded if the people who didn't have to be in New York right now were not sort of going about their business doing the de Blasio strategy of working out into the last possible moment at the gym and then

accepting the quarantine. Do you know what I mean? So I think a lot of people are unfortunately stuck in less than ideal situations. What I'm trying to think about, I'm trying to message friends of mine that I know, at least in Austin, it just says some, it's like, look, you can come to my house and walk around the farm or go in my pool. I will wave to you from inside and then I'll wave for you to leave before I go back outside. I think, I think that's something we're going to have to figure out sort of culturally and relationship-wise is like how do people that have resources or have sort of access to things. How can we get in a place where we share them sort of effectively so without endangering

anyone? I've got a place in Florida that's sitting there empty that would be better than a place in Park Slope, but that's sort of reality of the situation. For me, a couple of things that one of the last purchases I bought on Amazon before, as this was starting to sort of happen, is you're stocking up as up. I bought like an old school alarm clock and I have young kids, so I always get up early, but for a long, I don't keep my phone in my room because I try not to use my phone in the mornings. But so it would be like, okay, yeah,

if I have to get up by 5 a.m. to catch a flight, I would set the alarm in the other room or whatever. But I was like, you know what, as part of this, part of sort of the routine and I was like, I'm gonna set an alarm and I'm just gonna wake up really early every morning intentionally. I don't have to, I could just wake up up really early every morning, intentionally. I don't have to, I could just wake up and drag myself through the morning and just be kind of like killing

another day, but one of the things I wanted to do was just decide to be like, just deliberate. It's like, I can't be deliberate about where I'm spending the time, like I have to spend the time here, but I want to be deliberate about the order that I have in that. I don't know if you read anything about Hurricane Carter. You was this. Yeah, Rubin Hurricane Carter. I know his story very well. Yeah. My brother actually met him. Really? I think he's a fascinating person. He's sort of wrongfully accused, spends decades in

prison for this triple homicide that almost certainly did not commit. And one of the things I remember reading about him doing just as a more extreme way of what we're talking about, he was like, okay, I'm physically in prison. That's not my call. He's like, but I am going to rebel in every other way that I can. He's like, I'm going to be awake at night and sleep during the day. I'm going to wear my uniform this way or that way. I'm not going to ask for this favor or that favor. He decided that how he was going to wrap his head around the lack of control that he had was he was going to assert control in other ways. And I think that's

an interesting approach that might be worth thinking about for people. So how can you find some ways to assert agency in the midst of all of this powerlessness. And I think you'll find that that's really reassuring. I like that idea a lot. I mean, those of us with kids, I think are naturally in a point where we're still getting up at the same time and things. But when you wake up, making your bed first thing in the morning, it's these things sound stupid and trivial. I think having a schedule allows you to maintain some control over something. Exercise to me is also a really big one. I think, obviously, for most people, it's harder to exercise now because for most of us, it's going to the gym that is exercise, which has now been taken away. But there are tons of great apps out there that are basically saying,

look, here's how we're going to modify this. And here's what you could do with limited equipment or taken away, but there are tons of great apps out there that are basically saying, look, here's how we're going to modify this. Here's what you could do with limited equipment or here's what you could do with simply only your body weight. To simply take 20 minutes a day and do that, no matter what, and say, hey, like a 10 o'clock this morning, I am absolutely doing my app-based workout, even if worst case scenario, that's a day that I just can't get out there

and take a walk for whatever reason. It's hard to imagine not being able to make 20 minutes to do that. And yet, it's much easier to spend that extra 20 minutes tooling around on Netflix or YouTube, and yet the dividends of that 20 minutes are huge, not just sort of physiologically, but I think psychologically,

and I think, I mean, I hate the word spiritual, because I'm not really, but I think psychologically, and I think, I mean, I hate the word spiritual because I'm not really, but I think you know what I mean when I say spiritually as well. No, no, I think that's right. My wife likes future, which is like a sort of remote. You have a personal trainer that gives you a workout every day, but you don't actually see them and they design it based on what you have in your house. I hope it drives people towards some of the more sort

of solo endurance sports too, because I think there's all sorts of psychological and philosophical benefits to distance running or distance bike riding or swimming if there's some way that you could do it. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do swimming since this has all happened. There's no real like rivers or lakes that are available at the moment or oceans.

But I think realizing like, oh, just sort of practicing that muscle of like, I'm going to tell my body what it's going to do. I think it's probably as important or relevant as ever in this moment. And I like, yeah, in New York, the one or two exceptions to the quarantine is like going outside for your physical or mental health. You've got to take advantage of that. And when we're talking about sort of a lifetime, dead time, like what good can come out of this,

you were saying like a lot of people are sort of already on a schedule with kids. We were always on a schedule with our kids, like they had to go to school at a certain time, but we just sort of always had sleep training, it was really tough for us. We made a lot of allowances. We sort of just leaned into the chaos of it a little bit. There wasn't a ton of structure. What we use this for was a chance to really

force that and practice it. And I would say like, it's weird. We're just experiencing. So it's crazy and disrupted as our lives are in some respects. In other respects, the machine is operating more smoothly than ever. We're doing the same things every day, eating better, we're bedtime is more on the dot. And so again, no one would say like, hey, global pandemic is now a positive because I've got a better routine at home. That's cold comfort. But you can find redeeming qualities inside of the shits sandwich, so to speak. You can say, Hey, you write off the losses as a sunk cost, but where you're able to find some good is that you made these marginal improvements

across a bunch of aspects of your life that will hopefully last longer than however long this goes on. Right. How has your journaling changed in the past couple of weeks? You're a prolific journalist. Well, journal or I don't know what the word is there when you're... Yes. Yes, journal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, journal. Have you noticed anything in your journaling of late that maybe wasn't there prior?

Yeah, journaling is weird for me too because my writing is also an outlet where I get to work out a lot of thoughts. So I really have just felt on fire as a writer recently. I'm not, I'm currently researching some books, but I'm not writing for any book projects. So I found that the daily stoke email that I do every day and daily dad, like I've just been like in the zone zone more productive than usual, it's better than usual. So I've really felt good about that. For journaling, I've felt I'm really trying to think about, I'm really trying to use it as a place to sort of remind myself and reiterate

to myself how I want to be inside this. Sort of reminders of, hey, you're worried about X, Y, and Z. One way not to think about that is to think about other people instead. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to just sort of buck myself up a little bit in the morning, kind of remind myself of what's important to me. I'm trying to use it. Again, I think journaling is not just this stream of conscious sort of thing you're doing. It's not performing for history. To me, it should be, it's like playing scales on the guitar

or on the piano. You're running yourself through it over and over again so that it gets more imputed into your memory and kind of into your, into your being. Yeah, that sort of makes sense. Again, I think you get to write every day for those of us who don't or when we're writing it like for me, I'm writing all the time, but it's usually kind of technical stuff. This outlet has become something that I think is a, I don't know,

I'll tell you what brought it to my mind recently. So when maybe about three weeks ago when we sort of pulled our kids out of school and just decided we were gonna do something that at the time seemed outrageous, but basically play the lesser of two risks. My daughter was like, this is crazy. There's no way I'm not going to be able to go out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, Olivia, what do you think about Anne Frank? And of course she didn't know who Anne Frank was. So I was like, all right, well, I want you to tell me by the end of today who Anne Frank is. And let's talk about her.

So of course, she goes about read about her instead that the, but the interesting thing is my daughter didn't know what an attic was. I said, Olivia, do you want to come see our attic? She goes, we have one. I said, oh, yes, we do, honey, buns. So I got the ladder out, took her in the closet, took her up to the attic.

I mean, she just about had a cow. She couldn't believe how small and miserable the attic was and that this girl spent years up in an attic writing this journal. With another family. Yeah, yeah. And like, you read what she wrote in her journals and it's unbelievable.

You cannot believe a child could have written this. You can't believe how she could turn to that journal and say, you are my best friend, you were the person to whom I can say all these things. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And again, I just, I don't say that to sort of begrudge the way we've raised our daughter to not appreciate how good she has it relative to a girl growing up in the second world war. But it is a little bit of a phase shift. And it just brought back to my mind a few weeks ago how powerful this tool can be. And it brought me back to our first discussion actually about it. Yeah, it would be difficult to be a 13 year old girl at any time. And then to be a 13 year

old girl in an attic in a country you're not from right because she'd already fled Germany to the Netherlands. Then you're trapped in this attic with another family. It would have been horrendous and her journal is so good that it's actually something like Holocaust deniers used. They're like it's impossible that a 16 year old girl could have written it. But she was just a precocious brilliant girl. And what I think is interesting is that she wrote that journal partly inspired. I think it was the queen of the Netherlands wrote, put out a call over the BBC saying like, Hey, we're eventually going to get through this. we want your help. Please keep a record of what you're experiencing in doing. And so that idea of finding purpose in something that you're doing, even if she

had no idea, the impact that her journal would actually ultimately have, she had no idea that it would be sort of final legacy, that it would be the sole sort of creative work that she would be allowed to do, which is all tragic and totally unfair. But I'm sure that, because she not only wrote the journal, but then she would go back and revisit the journal and she clearly edited it and she responded to parts and she organized it. It was a project. And so I think that is something we're thinking about with our kids is just what goals or things can we give them to throw themselves into that allows them to sort of escape from this in a little bit? And I don't think that's terrible advice for adults either.

So what's a PR you're going to try to make in your deadlift if you have weight rack at home. Are you and your wife going to try to lose five pounds? Are you going to try intermittent fasting? Are you gonna try to read the entire Harry Potter series as a fam? You can create things to throw yourself into that allow you to feel some momentum and accomplishment and purpose. And if I knew how to do this it'd be something I was doing. But like, you know, just the people that are making masks right now. I mean, that's to me another great example of trying to find where you can contribute

and where good can be done, rather than wallowing in your resentment or anger or boredom. You're generally a pretty disciplined guy when it comes to social media. Have you created any new rituals or routines around avoiding it or selectively utilizing it for some benefit but not getting sucked into it? Yeah, so I don't check Twitter because I've found that it sort of triggers me the most and I don't have Instagram on my phone and I don't check Facebook either. So I've been sort of very actively not using those platforms. At the same time, I have been sort of stepping up what I put out on those platforms. So I've been, I've been starting to do sort of lists of things or explaining stoic topics on the different

media. I've been enjoying the creative element of them, but trying to distance myself or protect myself from the, let's call it the sort of manipulative and anxiety inducing characteristics of social media. What are you most optimistic about in the next couple of months and what are you most concerned about in the next couple of months? And that can be either about you personally in your family or just broadly your fellow citizens. I mean, upside, I hope this redefines the role of the president

for a lot of people. Hopefully this redefines the importance of a lot of the alliances and relationships internationally that we have with a lot of different countries. And those things were, people were, Trump was not wrong in sort of questioning some of them, but also sensing that the public wasn't that possessive of them. Hopefully, this redefines internationally how we operate in just our understanding of China, our relationship to other countries.

I'll say like, I'm very glad that for daily stoic all of our products We manufacture in the United States because it is dramatically protected our supply lines and allowed us to have inventory on hand It's allowed us to keep the lights on in the business It's allowed us to connect with and sort of work more collaboratively with the people we work with I wish that maybe some of the stuff was even closer to home, like I wish I had even more oversight or control. I think positively, I think this is a wake-up call in a lot of ways. I think it sort of knocked people out of the stupor or the slumber that we are in. I hope that's a positive. Tyler Cowen

wrote it an article and I think he's crushing it by the way. Anyone who's looking for smart stuff, I think marginal revolution and Tyler Cowan is putting out awesome stuff as always. But he was saying he thinks the pandemic has killed the sort of progressive woke left that it sort of woke us up. Like why are we arguing about transgender bathrooms and neglecting this or that. Why are we fighting about cultural appropriation and not sort of coming together on things that matter? Why are we talking about healthcare for illegal immigrants and not do we have enough ventilators and emergency rooms? At the same time, I think one worry would be actually it doesn't kill the sort of revolutionary extremes on either end of the party, but they seize upon the wreckage that emerges from this and are actually empowered. That's something I'm worried about.

And I think a little bit selfishly, but I also think it's going to have big ramifications. I'm a millennial, it's a smack in the middle of the millennial generation. My generation, 9-11, catastrophic wars in the Middle East, which wasted trillions of dollars, the financial crisis, and now whatever we're going to call this financial crisis. I mean, it is a betrayal of one generation to the next generation that I'm not. We talk about the lost generation in the 1920s. I mean, people I know were just getting their shit together. They just bought their first house in already expensive markets. They just started putting money away for their retirement.

They were just recovering from the last time the world was melted down by irresponsible adults. And boom, it just fucking happened again. I'm going to be okay at least right now, but I'm certainly not so okay that I'm not thinking about, yeah, what does it look like? What does it do to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security that even the people that survive this are going to have long-term health damages. What does it do that people who are about to retire just watched years of their gains evaporating

the more? If there's anything I'm worried about, it's actually more the economic than the medical. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. What are you worried about? I think in the short term, I'm certainly worried about a handful of geographies that I don't think under non-optimistic scenarios will have this supply to meet the ICU demand. So I think New York is very likely going to be overrun. And I think that that's obviously disconcerting because it puts doctors in a position that I don't think anybody ever signed up for when they went to medical school, which is, and again, it's something that's so foreign to us in the United States, but it's not foreign to doctors outside of the United States, which is the truest form of triage. How do you look at two people that if you had

endless resources, you could probably save both, but in a situation where you don't have endless resources, you have to prioritize one over the other. There's no, you didn't take a class in that, and even if you did, it wouldn't have helped much. I'm just, I guess, I'm glad I'll never have to make that decision, I suppose. But a bunch of people might have to make those decisions, and I find that very, I find that frustrating through the lens that we've discussed, which is a little bit more preparation, not a lot, believe it or not, but a little bit more preparation

could have thwarted that. I think the economic consequences of this are, as you said, at least as staggering, if not more staggering, then what comes of it, though, again, it's still so unclear what is coming of this. And unfortunately, you can make a model say anything. And that's a little frustrating because there's models out. You can basically find a model that will say whatever you want it to say. So that's not entirely helpful. But but there are scenarios under which this thing is a problem that could

on the one end result in a million deaths in the United States, which would be enormous, right? That would be a third of the total. That's like basically adding a third or 30% more deaths to the all-cause mortality we experience. That's hard to fathom through this lens. At the other end of the spectrum, this could end up being a small fraction of that. It could end up being the same number of deaths that you would get from influenza. Again,

I don't think either of those extremes, by the way, are what's going to happen, but they could. And in the latter case, it would be, boy, we paid an enormous economic price for that. You bring up an example of comparing this to the 2008 recession. Well, it's going to look and feel a bit different. And that scares me a little because I don't think we have a playbook for this one. Maybe it's not as necessary. I mean, you know, as of when we're recording this, the federal government has announced basically a six trillion dollar stimulus package of which 2 trillion is in hard assets and 4 trillion of that probably less so.

But that's so much money and it gets to the point you raised earlier, which is unless you can keep interest rates at zero, the debt service on debt we've accumulated over the past 18 years is unbelievable. And I've asked people that I think are some of the smartest people on earth when it comes to fiscal policy. I just asked them point blank, tell me what we do when we can't pay our debt. Tell me what it means for the United States to default on its debt. Those things are troubling. So all of that said, I still come back to something which Sam Harris and I talked about a few days ago on the podcast, which was, it's okay that those things are upsetting and it's okay that I can worry about them a little bit. I'm trying to check myself to make sure I'm not worrying about

them at the point where it ceases to be productive. Worry is only productive when it motivates me to do something. And at this point, I'm not worrying about them at the point where it ceases to be productive. Worry is only productive when it motivates me to do something. And at this point, I'm pretty freaking motivated to do something. I'm doing everything I can with my little narrow band of skill set to do everything I can. And therefore, I realize that there is little to be found in worry. And so what I've been doing is making a point, has been time with my wife and kids every day

and reiterate to them how happy I am to be home with them. And in part, that's just telling myself that as well. It's sort of trying to combat that anxiety that still slips into me, especially when I'm sleeping, frankly, and my dreams are pretty, pretty distressing, but I'm just trying to basically curb the worry and focus on what's here and what's here at the moment.

And believe it or not, I've actually had weird thoughts, which is when this thing's over and I have to get on a plane and go back to New York, I don't think I'm going to look forward to it that much, not because of New York, but because it's like, yeah, back to traveling again. Yeah, no, this could be a new normal that we appreciate more. Maybe we all were flying more than we needed to be and working more than we needed to be. And yeah, saying the rest of things we didn't need to know about because we'd never sort of been fully forced to appreciate what home and life was. And to me, yeah, that is a positive that emerges from it. Again, not worth trading a million lives, but certainly a positive we can sort of pull from the

wreckage of this. Yeah. Well, Ryan, I made a plug for it in the past that I'm going to do so again if I was very bullish on people becoming daily subscribers to the daily stoic, I'm even more so today. What's the best way that people can sign up for that if they haven't done so? Yeah, you can sign up at dailystoke.com or dailystoke.com slash email. And then the other one I do every day that I've actually been liking just as much as daily dad, which is daily dad.com. And people can follow you how on Twitter.

Yeah, I'm at Ryan Holiday and then also at Daily Stoic, if you want a piece of Stoic wisdom every day as well. Okay. Any of your books at this moment, you think people should go back and reread or read for the first time. Yeah, I mean, I think obstacle is the way is probably particularly well-suited. If you're, especially if you've sort of been knocked on your ass here and you're trying to figure out what next, that's what that book is sort of designed to try to tackle.

And then if you're maybe more like you and I are and some of the things you and I were talking about, or just the stress and anxiety and worry and calming that kind of racing part of your mind. Stillness is the key is the most recent book, not one sort of talks about a lot of things we were talking about today. Well, Ryan, thank you for making time today to talk and thank you for sharing your insights. They mean a lot to me personally, and I think they're going to mean a lot to folks listening. Oh, I appreciate that. No, this was fun. And again, by the way, this is a, I don't know about you, but I didn't think my mind was not racing.

I wasn't distracted. I wasn't catastrophizing because we spent an hour and a half actually engaged with each other. And I think not everyone has a podcast. But one way to calm that race in mind is to go have a real long conversation with a human being. and I think you'll be surprised at both what you find and then how much you get out of that experience. Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Connectivity matters. Yes. Alright, Ryan, best of luck, Rest of today. Thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid

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