Why You’re Not as Hard to Manipulate as You Think | Rebecca Lemov

Most people think manipulation only works on other people. That belief is exactly what makes it dangerous. In this episode, Ryan sits down with historian and human behavior expert Rebecca Lemov to talk about what actually happens when people are pushed, pressured, or slowly pulled into systems of control. From prison camps and cults to propaganda and social pressure, they discuss how people break in ways that still feel rational, why belonging can override reason, and why almost everyone believes they are immune right up until they are not. Rebecca Lemov is a historian of science at Harvard University. Her research explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences. 📚 Grab signed copies of The Instability of Truth by Rebecca Lemov https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-instability-of-truth-brainwashing-mind-control-and-hyper-persuasion-signed-by-author?_pos=1&_sid=b2f8ba7db&_ss=r at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-instability-of-truth-brainwashing-mind-control-and-hyper-persuasion-signed-by-author?_pos=1&_sid=b2f8ba7db&_ss=r 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Maybe it's a little crazy. Maybe it's an addiction. I don't know. Maybe I should do it differently. But but my sort of system is like, I finish a book and then I start the next one. Finish a book, I start the next one. There's actually advice that Stephen Pressfield gave me. He's like, just start the next one, start the next one. Because you never know how one's going to do. And by the way, it's not about the outcomes. It's about the process. It's about doing the thing. So the Stoic Virtue Series, which I've been working on since 2019, that finished back in October. But actually, it didn't, right? Like, I turned in the manuscript for what became Wisdom Takes Work. Like, this time in 2024, like, in December 2024,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  I turned it in for, like, the last time. It went into its final stages of editing and then production then. So I was still working on it. But but basically, like, the creative thinking part of that book ended.

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  Around this time last year. So the idea that I would wait for another 12 months or 10 months, or whatever it is exactly, to start the next one, that's always struck me as crazy and kind of inefficient. So I always think about like my next project. So I'm working now, I've I mentioned it here or there. I don't usually talk about projects when I'm working on them, but this pertains to today's guest. I've been working on a biography. I'm writing about Admiral James Stockdale, one of the few modern practitioners of Stoic philosophy, who's a hero of mine, is a fascinating character. Maybe you know about him as a failed vice presidential candidate. Maybe you know about his time in the Hanoi Hilton, where he was imprisoned and tortured and subjected to solitary confinement for years on end. It's an incredible ordeal.

• 2:34Ryan Holiday?

  But he said famously that it was an experience, he said, that allowed him to test Epictetus's ideas in the laboratory of human experience. So that's what I'm writing about. And I ended up interviewing today's guest because I thought she might have something to teach me about this. Rebecca Lemov is a historian of science at Harvard. And I wanted to know if she knew anything about the sort of prisoner of war experience, particularly as it pertains to Stockdale, because he wasn't just in camp or a prison cell, he was subjected to this sort of Marxist brainwashing. It was essentially a communist reeducation camp. So I asked her, you know, if she might have anything to say about that.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  And she says, as it happens, I used to teach a whole unit of my class on the Vietnam experiences of imprisonment that POWs went through. And she said, there's a natural link to the Korean War POW experiences at the root of brainwashing's history, but it's not always brainwashing per se. She says, it's really asking the question of what a human being can endure and how they survive. I used to show a film, not about Stockdale, but about John McCain and generally the Hanoi Hilton conditions. That's what they called the prison that those pilots were in. She said, I'd be happy to make this a focus in a hinge of the interview and bring topics of the S E R E training. That's what they train pilots in about evading capture and withstanding torture, interrogation, resistance, and similar questions. She says, I'm not an expert on Stockdale,

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  but I can review what's available on him and talk about this in a larger context. She says, the Stoic perspective would be fascinating to weave in and discuss. So I said, you gotta come out, which she did. We had a lovely conversation. She came out to Bastrop and we talked about POWs and brainwashing, operating in what you would call the veil of ignorance. And we talked about the differences between heroes and cowards and much more. I love this conversation. I think you're really going to like listening to it. Rebecca is a historian of science at Harvard. As I said, she's been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute, and her research explores data, technology and the history of human and behavioral sciences. And she has a new book out called The Instability of Truth.

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  And you can see more of her work at rebeccalemov.com. And by the way, the subtitle of that book, I think is interesting. It's The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper-Persuasion. So a lot to teach us about this moment in time. Thank you to the professor for coming out. I think you'll really like this episode. Let's get into it. I'm going to get back to work. I'm working on the book right now. And so that's what I'm going to do. Talk soon.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  I'm excited to talk. I didn't know you taught a class about Stockdale.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I mean, not about him, but I taught a class on brainwashing. And I used to show a film of McCain in, you know, his resistance.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Stockdale referred to that as the laboratory of human behavior, that experience that they all went through. And I find that fascinating, that you had these people exposed for years and years and years, isolated from the world. There's kind of a Rip Van Winkle-ness to his story too, where he misses like the moon landing. He misses all like the 60s and 70s. Like, America remakes itself and they're all in solitary confinement. And he talked about how they basically had to reinvent society in this prison.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, it's fascinating.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  That is fascinating. I think there is two CIA operatives who are held even longer.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Like 20 years. And when they came out, yeah, it was really that time capsule. I mean, it also happens with cults when people emerge, they just don't know how to use a bank machine or the latest technology, if it was a low tech environment. And it's just a shock to the system. But with CIA men, there was a film about this too. But yeah, they had to get their back pay. Well, there's a big movement for them to get.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, that like, are you on active duty? Of course you are.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. They'd written them off as dead, so they weren't paying them.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really profound point about it is a sort of active duty.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. I mean, you're, you're exposed every single minute of every single day, which is probably what makes, which is obviously the point. But like, the amount of sort of resilience and fortitude you would have to have to not break under that, or to, to break only in certain ways and not in other ways is that, I think that's what he meant when he was calling it a laboratory of human behavior. Just like, what can a human being take? That, that's sort of what I think Stockdale and McCain and a bunch of these other prisoners experience is really sort of testing.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  An unasked for.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Lesson, but like a deep one.

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  That's really profound. I mean, in a way, what all my work, what the theme that brings it together is this idea of a laboratory of human behavior.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  And the way scientists have often sought to build them.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And they sometimes took deeply coercive or abusive forms, whether it's testing animals in certain ways, or human beings against their will, or things like that. That's the dark side. But also, there is this deep question at the heart of it, which is, I guess, what makes you human in the end?

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Stockdale, because he went to Stanford and then taught at Stanford after he, so people would ask him about the Stanford Prison Experiment. And he just had no, he had no patience for what's, he was like, he was like, you can't even begin to know what a person is capable of, or what they will do until. They've been in there for months at least.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I mean, obviously, it's revealing that some people would do things like in the course of a few hours in this university experiment. But I think his, his point, and this is what I think is fascinating is like, you really can't replicate this stuff in a laboratory because it's so profoundly unethical and, you know, unreplicable. But you get from certain, certain stories, like whether it's the prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton, or the prisoners in Korea, or, or the CIA officers, or, or just other, you know, sort of freak instances, you get a glimpse into what humans are capable of doing to each other, and then also what humans are capable of potentially withstanding.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's profound because in the social sciences, there's this fantasy, like, could we create ethically, if like ethics were removed, could we create this perfect laboratory? But really, as Hannah Arendt apparently said about the Milgram experiments, she said, you didn't have to run those experiments, we have history.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  We can see what people did.

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And in a way, there's a kind of ambiguity about the word laboratory. Is it actually real?

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  You know, if you're artificially constructing it.

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what struck you about McCain's experience? Like, why would you show that to your students?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I mean, the film is, I think it's called Return With Honor, something like that. And I just thought it was profound, what he went through, and it raised, I thought they would benefit from seeing it. And it's not typically taught as a form of brainwashing.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Because brainwashing has to do with, I mean, the way we think about it is the attempt to instill new, a whole new ideological system where that wasn't happening in Vietnam. They didn't really care if they ended up converting them in some way.

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  No, they were just trying to break them and get information out of them, which,

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right, in, in, what you talk about in the book, in Korea, it was this sort of communist program to try to either turn them into communists, or then the paranoia is like, were they trying to? Secretly turn them into communists and then return them as these sleeper agents. That's what the Manchurian Candidate's about.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, but breaking is always, it's actually a key component and it's the one that often is most successful. But McCain was just, I think it just struck me that students might not be exposed to what he had gone through and how much, you know, you could learn from it.

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  What was fascinating about McCain is like, his father is the theater commander. And so like, again, you like, you could never have created this in a laboratory. So in McCain and Stockdale, so the two Navy pilots shot down over Vietnam, Stockdale is in the Gulf of Tonkin, the night of the incident and watches, like, he's there, he's the wing commander, and he says nothing happens. Like, so he is there as he watches the country deliberately or unintentionally fabricate its reasons for going to war. And then he ends up in a communist prison camp, like, with the country that would be desperate to find out this information. And then, then in McCain, you have the son of the theater commander.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Like, you can't even, you couldn't, if that was in a movie, you'd be like, you can't have both of them. You could have one person with a terrible secret or a conflicted, you know, like a tie to the, you know, the upper echelons of command, but you can't have both.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're both very high level, which is also interesting because one thing that happened with reeducation in the Korean War is that they would divide, I mean, the officers were treated very differently from the GIs who were seen, so they translated into class terms in Chinese society, so that GIs were seen as peasants and therefore they should be treated more gently because they sort of, their class consciousness had to grow organically, whereas the officers were seen as inherently needing to be taken down or sort of.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Just, I mean, they, they were kind of brutal to both, but in different ways.

• 12:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  And some of the officers. Yeah, so they had more out and out torture and the kinds of things you would see in Vietnam.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like the Hanoi Hilton Stockdale points out that like, almost all of them have advanced degrees, right? So like to be, I mean, to become a fighter pilot, you're not just like fresh out of basic training. There's a whole thing. But most, like what he thought was so remarkable about it and why he thought there wasn't some of the brainwashing and there wasn't the sort of betrayals that happened in Korea is that these were highly educated, highly specialized professionals who had a sense of self and also a kind of training that, that yeah, I'm sure a random, you know, Marine pulled out of a, you know, captured in a, you know, in a seek and destroy mission somewhere else in Vietnam is probably not going to have.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it was also the first people to break in Korea, at least publicly, were the Air Force pilots who were actually quite high level, but they were under extreme duress. But I mean, one thing later, they hadn't, they hadn't yet instituted the code of conduct. So there was some murkiness about what you were supposed to allowed to say or not. But actually, some, many of them were educated and it was pretty tragic. You know, Frank Schwalbe is maybe the most famous of them, where he just said, I became, you know, someone I didn't know. We just watched this happen, but he didn't know. I mean, resistance eluded him. When he returned, he, he had been extremely high level and well respected

• 13:38Speaker 01

  and lifelong military. And then he just was, he kind of left in dishonor, even though, you know, I don't know, it was, there's more to that story. I mean, each story is interesting, but it's hard to explain exactly why, what happened in Korea and why it was different in, in Vietnam.

• 13:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Do you think it was a matter of leadership, right? Like Stockdale and Denton and McCain, I think part of them, I think their answer would be, yeah, there was a little bit of the instructions coming out of Korea, but they, they said that they tossed that out the window pretty early because it was so woefully insufficient. Like, the idea that you're going to have your arms bound behind you and hung from the ceiling, that you're only going to give name, rank, and, you know, serial number is insane. So they, they felt like they tossed that. But what the prisoners said they did, and actually Dave Carey, who was one of them, sat in that chair, that they kind of created a system, like, and they said, like, look, you're obviously going to break, but you can't, you have to make them pay for it.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  That reminds me, yeah, you said earlier, they break in certain ways.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  In order to, it's almost like a pressure valve release. And I saw that in the accounts of even people who went through SER, who, because that's a program that actually sort of practically breaks.

• 14:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Soldiers sometimes or, but we, a difference in Korea was that many of them had been prisoners for several years before they got there.

• 15:00Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And they had been gone through, I mean, suffering, it's hard to even put into words. I mean, three examples would be, you know, they'd gone through the tiger death march, where if you even, men would just stop and then die. Because they couldn't put another foot in front of, or if they tried to help a companion who was slumped beside the road, they would also collapse and both would either be shot if they couldn't keep walking. But also things like, once they got to the camps, they were, you know, they would lose half their body weight and just be so diminished. And one of the GIs I wrote about, he, and he was only 17 when he signed up, he said, he watched the social fabric disintegrate very quickly.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And one of the places it did was even before he was captured, when his own officer told him to go shoot some Korean prisoners they had just captured. And he said, it was so against the, it was so dishonorable, this idea that they were breaking their own code.

• 15:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  That he saw this, and then later he saw the social fabric fray further, like people were taking more than their share of the little food there was, or.

• 16:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  You know, not, not everyone was, there was also racial, like, conflict or tension or the lack of solidarity. Although there was the other thing as well, there were incredible stories of solidarity or helping each other. So, but by the time the Chinese arrived and the conditions at the camps got better, and they actually enacted their own sort of experiment in the camps, many of them. The occupants had been there for two and a half years and they had just lost hope and they had lost faith in their own government and they didn't necessarily have a faith to replace it with.

• 16:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I wonder then if it does sort of come down to leadership, the social fabric, the culture being so important, like being able to look to someone for orders or like, hey, what am I supposed to do? That strikes me as a part of the Vietnam experience. And then also Stockdale talks a remarkable amount about like how you deal with shame and guilt. And they sort of set out this process by which, you know, no one, like basically the idea that once you accept, hey, everyone's going to break, including yourself, then it became imperative in this sort of culture that they built. How do you reintegrate someone who is feeling terrible about what they just spilled? Especially because they're trying to get information about the fellow prisoners, which have consequences for each other.

• 17:25Ryan Holiday?

  So this thing of like, oh, okay, I did, I told them who was the leader or I told them how this code works or, you know, there's.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  So making it communicate, the communication system of their own was really important because it broke the totalizing.

• 17:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And how do you, how do you forgive and reintegrate someone who, if the whole point is how do we divide and conquer?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:49Ryan Holiday?

  Then when you exile or excommunicate someone or allow them to sort of downwardly spiral, what you're creating is precisely the kind of vulnerable people that are going to get picked off.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, because in Korea, they did separate out the officers. They weren't even there. They were being held in, you know, confinement of different types. So the, they were leaderless, which is one thing. And sometimes they would nominate, they had, they would nominate someone to be, say, the spoon man who's supposed to be the most trusted person, who would be given the responsibility of allocating food. But this was not sufficient to kind of develop that sort of code. And they were also being, other things were being immersed in this whole system. So the classic to come out of the Korean War was called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert J. Lifton. And in it, he does have a section on resistance, which I was reviewing. And he found several people who did resist. They were, who resisted

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Maoist reeducation. And a couple of them were priests. And one of them was somebody he calls Bishop Bastorp. I don't know his background exactly, but what Lifton described was, he said, he did initially break. And because you would, when even the religious and civilians and missionaries and things, when they were arrested and put in the reeducation camps, they would be chained. And, you know, often their wrists would be bleeding. They'd be, have to hold standing positions for 36 hours, even, you know, priests and things like that. And, and humiliated in different ways. And that, in that situation, initially wasn't clear to him what resources he would be able to summon for, for himself. And so

• 19:28Speaker 01

  he gave away certain things. And, you know, he started to move towards a confession.

• 19:32Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  But then, at a certain point, I guess Lifton says there are four qualities that allowed resistance to flourish in him. One was having his own, his own faith in the end.

• 19:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  He's like, he had a system.

• 19:43Ryan Holiday?

  A countervailing belief system.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. Countervailing, exactly. That, that he was able to kind of institute for himself. And that gave meaning to his own actions and a kind of code of his own.

• 19:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  That broke the code that was being imposed on him.

• 19:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  A second, I mean, one of them was having a sense of humor in the face of someone who's relentlessly forced, occasionally having a smile on your face or telling, you know, this is

• 20:07Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  A heroic, even a image we have sometimes from World War II films is, you know, the hero making a joke in the face of

• 20:16Ryan Holiday?

  Gallows humor.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or someone who's trying to break them, just showing like, not only are you not breaking me, but you're not breaking my spirit, or that this tragedy you're attempting to relentlessly impose on me. Isn't able to completely capture me like I'm in a different narrative. And also ways that they didn't succumb to the same communication system. So sometimes just refusing to learn Chinese or pretending to be unable to see.

• 20:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  So they couldn't learn the language that the their captors were using to exert thought control.

• 20:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, we tend to think of resistance as being like an armed insurrection or an escape attempt. But often, and in retrospect, it actually is very inspiring. Like, there's the famous Jeremiah Denton one from the Hano Hilton where he's he's he goes on to become a senator, but he's being forced to give this television broadcast and he can't not opt out of the thing. So he blinks Morse code, blinks torture in the midst of his thing. Or like they would talk about how they'd be like, give us the name of all the generals or all the and then they'd like name all the characters from a TV show. So it was this.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  That was like a code that would communicate outside of.

• 21:29Ryan Holiday?

  I think it was more like your point about humor, which is like they're finding these subtle fuck yous to the captors because they had no, it wasn't like the internet now where you just have typed in the names and seen what were like they they would be bragging in propaganda that they identified X, Y, or Z. And then it would become immediately clear or the the Vietnamese would take this to, you know, like sort of sympathetic figures from elsewhere in the world who would become invisible. And they'd be like, look what we got. And they'd be like, I'm sorry, but these are all baseball players.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Or somebody like Captain Crunch is in a real superior office.

• 22:03Ryan Holiday?

  The sort of humor as a form of defiance is probably underrated, whether we're talking about imprisonment or even under like an autocratic regime, like satire becomes a weapon.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Or even in an abusive relationship.

• 22:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Because it another point, which is kind of related was that Lipton said, he called it, and this was seemed apropos for our conversation. He said, a humane stoicism is the is maybe the most powerful. It's very, very difficult to, he said, very few people can actually. Do this, enact it, but if it's a kind of being passive in the face of the whatever aggression is being imposed on you, that's how he defined it.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  That's his definition of humane stoicism?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  That's part of what he was talking about.

• 22:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a fascinating sort of.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Like exhibiting a kind of passivity that would often be taken as a challenge. In other words, I'm going to accept these conditions on some level, submit to the conditions you're imposing, but it's not going to take my humanity or something. In some way, that he said, when that happens in front of other people, say, if you're in a cell where the cellmates are supposed to actually be the social force that's pushing you more towards confession through struggle. He said, in some cases, when this would be displayed, humane stoicism, it would actually have this profound and lasting effect where it would demonstrate the inhumanity or the brutality that was otherwise sort of invisible for that moment.

• 23:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, isn't that the logic of passive nonviolence? Or Gandhi and Martin Luther King? It's putting a spotlight on the moral hypocrisy and the, in being degraded, the person is degrading themselves. The aggressor is degrading themselves.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it reminds me, then it loops back in my mind towards this, the various Buddhist monks who have been tortured and by oppressive governments. He said that if they ever lost sight of the humanity of their tortures, that was when they were lost. In a sense, that seeing their brutality is also seeing their humanity.

• 24:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. When there's something also very demoralizing for the aggressor to not get the reaction that they are trying to get. Like, the defiance is almost an accelerant to the violence, but the passivity in the face of it, it's sort of not having the intended effect. And it sort of exaggerates your position. You know what I mean?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  The non-reactivity, it highlights the situation itself, maybe, in a way that.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Bravado wouldn't really do because that would allow.

• 24:46Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to break your bravado, whereas if there's no bravado, it's a harder and more enigmatic target, perhaps. And then maybe the humor and the other forms is kind of more subtle, you know, evasive resistance also is exasperating in its own way. You can't break someone of their humor the same way you can break them of their defiance.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, now that you mention it, it reminds me of some examples from the oral histories of the Korean War where they would make these, they were forced to sing songs that were patriotic or things for Chinese communism, but they would change the words and make them a sort of homage to

• 25:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  you know, American life or cars and things that they missed. And that, but it's just sort of a fuck you really to them, which wouldn't necessarily come across to them.

• 25:39Ryan Holiday?

  Right, but it's empowering to the person doing it.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and see others witnessing that, it could be empowering too. It starts to recreate a social fabric.

• 25:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  But also, yeah, they sort of get divided into who's considered, well, resistors and non-resistors.

• 26:07Ryan Holiday?

  I was curious too, because one of the things I was struck by when I was reading about Stockdale's experience is like, he was like, brainwashing doesn't exist. He was like, it's a cop out, it's for weak people. And it struck me as I was reading about your history with addiction too. You know, some people are like, addiction is, it's just weak, right? You know, like, it's this kind of debate that we have. And sometimes the people who are really strong, who get through things, have a sort of lack of empathy or understanding that anyone else might be wired differently or have a different experience. And I wonder if, if when you look at, like, it strikes me as unfair to look at these prisoners and go like, the mentally tough ones made it out and it was the weak and the, you know, immoral that broke.

• 26:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's obviously more complicated than that.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there was a temptation or tendency initially to break them into these two groups.

• 26:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Whereas it turned out to be so much more, and to test them each separately to say, well, what was the secret sauce in the, what was the personality components? We could identify, isolate and perhaps replicate in those who resisted. And what were the flaws in the others? But they actually found when they did extensive testing on the returned POWs that they all evidenced to some degree collaboration or capitulation. And they were all mentally, I mean, there wasn't so easy to separate the groups.

• 27:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  There wasn't a convenient lesson to be drawn along those lines. And one of the maybe ironic outcomes of it is just that there is a, this kind of concerted effort to just build a program that would somehow insulate people from it in the future or operationalize it or something.

• 27:46Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like with addiction. It's like some people believe it's a personal choice and other people believe it's a disease you have absolutely no power over. And obviously it's some spectrum, right? It's some, not just different individuals exist in different places on the spectrum, but there's some parts of it that we have control over and then some parts of it that make us, like, you could imagine the same person, to go back to the prisoners, at a different time in their life might have had a different outcome. Like, maybe you're 20 or you're 40, you're subjected to the same conditions, who you are and what you bring to it could bring something up very differently. Or, or just a singular event. One thing happens to you on one day and it changes the direction or the trajectory of you in that experience.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  That's a very humbling fact of the matter is that, I mean, if you look at the stories of people who get inducted into cults, it's often that they took a left instead of a right and ended up encountering someone. And they were vulnerable because maybe they had broken up with their boyfriend or girlfriend that day. But, and in my own case, I mean, it's interesting that you say Stockdale, that he had that reaction, which I wasn't, I mean, I believe that. And I think maybe you would feel committed to that position.

• 28:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  And in my own case with addiction, it didn't make me think that, that it's all just, I don't know, it just made me feel that we're all, that no one's not susceptible. It just depends on. The moments of your existence and, and some of it's just accidental, or you could say fate, you know, why, why did I, why did these convergent circumstances arise in my life? For some reason, I do feel that they arise for ultimately for our benefit.

• 29:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Even if it seems like sheer suffering.

• 29:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I heard someone say once that like the difference between a hero and a coward could be like a good night's sleep and a sandwich. Or, you know, like, like who you are in that moment, not just morally and your training, but also just like physiologically in that moment. Like you're coming down with a cold and you react differently to a set of stimuli or circumstances than you might 48 hours later. And so to me, there's something very humbling and it's kind of a there but for the grace of God, go I situation. It's like, you don't know what they were going through, what led up to that. And if you think that you know for certain how you would react in that situation because of what you've been through, to me, that's a sign that actually I wouldn't bet on you.

• 30:11Ryan Holiday?

  Like I'm that, because to me, that's, that's ego and hubris that it's probably makes you actually quite susceptible to all these things that you think you could resist.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  I mean, that's one of the conclusions I draw or one of the things I noticed in doing this research for many years is that, is that there's a tendency. And I think that's why cult documentaries are so popular and, and narratives about scams. Because there's actually a part of us that loves to differentiate ourselves and say, I would be safe. At this point, I never would have believed that Keith Renary was handsome or, you know, that the rain fell only on, you know, there was a point at which I wouldn't have fallen for this or that poor person, but I'm safe because I'm not susceptible or I'm not vulnerable to that. But it's actually what you see is that we all can be and that it, you know, that they present themselves and it's an unfolding.

• 31:03Ryan Holiday?

  I was thinking about that too. Like it's interesting how we have different moral judgments about sort of different ones, or we hold different types of people account. Like I'm not angry at the people who fell for Bernie Madoff's scam, right? I see them as victims. And then if someone has political beliefs that I believe they've been sort of suckered or manipulated into, I somehow hold them more morally accountable, even though it's arguably the same thing, you know, like, like someone has sold them a bill of goods. They made promises or representations that are not true, and they slowly steadily convince them of a version of reality that when it all gets ripped away, it turns out to be

• 31:46Ryan Holiday?

  embarrassing or wrong or damaging. And so it is interesting how we have strong moral judgments about different ones. And really, probably the proper response is a kind of empathy. And again, an understanding that it could happen to anyone and happens to all different types of people in different walks of life.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't have the answer to that, but I share your tendency to find one culpable and the other not. I mean, maybe the more profound point is to see that we're all operating in veils of ignorance. But it doesn't mean that you can't take a political stance. It means look to yourself, you know? And it's hard to know what goes on in someone else's heart or why they came to believe one thing or another. And I do think it has more to do with emotions and perhaps the manipulation of feelings than we think, than it is the embrace of an idea.

• 32:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Lincoln, one of the remarkable things about Lincoln was his ability to understand. Like, I think if I was teaching, and I talk to my kids about this, when I explain what the South was, I explain it as a sort of cultural military cult that was built around a bunch of flawed, ridiculous premises. And Lincoln talks about how he was like, if you were raised in the South, you would be exactly as they are. And this is what happens when you first, you force an economic system on someone and force maybe seems like they were passive in it. But if you put a predominant economic system on a part of the country where it's now very expensive to consider anything other than this, you raise generations of people, not

• 33:25Ryan Holiday?

  just with the idea that this is okay, but that it's a Positive good, like slavery goes through this transition from the early republic to the civil war being the height of this, where slavery isn't this thing that's hidden away and rationalized, but turned into a positive good. Like it's actually good for them. It's good for us. And anyone that's trying to take it away is, you know, a usurper. They're trying to kill you. They're anti-American. And so you, Lincoln had this unique ability to understand, to go like, what they're doing is morally abhorrent and has to be ended. And I'll fight any battle and however long the war takes to win this. And at the same time, sort of

• 34:06Ryan Holiday?

  suspend some of the moral judgment against the individuals caught up in said cult.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  That's a perfect way of describing it. It reminds me a little bit of this book that I got very deeply into when I was writing my dissertation, which was by John Dollard. It's a classic ethnography of the 1930s where he went to, wanted to understand racism in the South. Jim Crow South. And he, so he's a northern sociologist with psychological training. And he heads to the Mississippi Delta and he's living in this town. And he said, and this is actually what I think W. E. B. Du Bois ended up reviewing his book. And he said, Dollard doesn't completely, well, so what he saw was a society where everyone was being constantly policed, not simply the black inhabitants of the town where, whose behavior

• 34:54Speaker 01

  was highly scripted. Like you had to say sir, and you had to be constantly, really show signs of submission all the time. But also the white population was const, if you didn't demand it.

• 35:06Ryan Holiday?

  You'd be persecuted for not upholding that system.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  You would be persecuted for not playing your part. You had to play your role too. And in a way, it was even more highly policed because there were outlets by which you could escape, you know, to some degree as an African American. And he himself is a northern liberal. Like he found himself on the edge of being ostracized. And then when he wrote the book, Du Bois said, Dollard understands the white Southern mentality better than anyone I've ever read. Because it's not, you know, he went out to understand something else, but he kind of absorbed it.

• 35:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and it does take an immense amount of fortitude to exist in a world where there is a predominant system and then to be outside that system. Like, we are not meant to stand alone and be apart. That's, that's not what we're, it's easier to leave. Part of it, like, I was thinking about, I think it would be a fascinating piece. I think some of the, like, I saw this with people I know who have been, become sort of politically radicalized, or I think if you look at a Clarence Thomas is a good example of this. Like, what happens when your spouse becomes radicalized or develops extreme political beliefs? Right? You are faced with this vexing choice, which is, you either have to radicalize your own beliefs to normalize theirs, or you have to break apart your marriage.

• 36:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And like, who's, who, very few of us are gonna be like, I've been married to this person for 20 years, we have kids together, we love each other, but they now believe things that I think are stupid or abhorrent. There's no, like, inciting incident, right? Like, if there's an affair, or an addiction, or a, you know, you drift apart, that's different than, like, what do you do when someone you thought you were on the same page with is not on the same page with you anymore? I think if you don't, if you're not a self-aware person and you don't, and you don't have a good sense of your bearings, the natural human thing is to just slowly turn up the temperature of your own beliefs so theirs don't feel crazy to you anymore.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  So you would sort of align yourself, like, I guess Patty Hearst, I love the sentence she had, what she said, when she was talking about her own brainwashing, she said, well, she didn't necessarily refer to it as brainwashing, but she said, "I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs." Now, in order to survive, and in a sense, if, you know, if you do want your marriage to survive, that was probably happening, but there are, you hear about, and I know of cases where people's marriages do split up, or they're on the very edge of it, because that alignment can't or doesn't happen for one or, I mean, it's really... If I were a sociologist, or that would be interesting to study.

• 37:44Ryan Holiday?

  It's totally fascinating.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:46Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, it's classic cognitive dissonance, right?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Like, how do you resolve it? Or do you end up seeking your, seeking your natural tribe as you think? But then where would you be?

• 37:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  You'd lose this relationship.

• 37:58Ryan Holiday?

  But yeah, I think, I think a lot of the, like, what we think of as radicalization is not a solitary thing. It's part of a group or a scene. And it's like, I can either continue to be part of this, or I can lose my friends. And, and this is what goes on with cults, this is what goes on with marriage, whatever. Is, is you have to go like, okay, I'm, I'm 20% disagreeing with what they're talking about. But we largely agree, you know, they're just getting more extreme. Or I could 100% be on the outside. It's just an easier calculation to be like, I'll just turn up the volume of what I believe. Or I'll turn down my, my disagreement.

• 38:35Ryan Holiday?

  And, and I think human beings as these kind of tribal species are, are just always kind of intuitively trying to figure out like where we exist. And that, that's what gets exploited. The irony is, yeah, we have these sort of nightmares about Manchurian candidates or brainwashing or whatever. But the reality is that the more day to day brainwashing of just society and peer dynamics and social groups, that's acting on all of us all the time.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  That's what the book is stealthily about, is that we use this extreme and seemingly absurd, or just seemingly caricatured idea of brainwashing. But actually, we see that it's just this, it's the water we swim in.

• 39:15Ryan Holiday?

  You're worried about the thing that will never happen to you. You will never be shot down over communist North Korea and brainwashed. But you are currently being molded and manipulated by your social group algorithms.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  In countless ways.

• 39:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  That we're all in, and that the tendency to find it only happening over there to that set of people, or to these fools, or dupes, or. You know, evil folks, or you know, that that is in itself part of the process.

• 39:46Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I just thought it was so funny during the pandemic. Like, I don't know if you know any like sort of prepper people, like people that were always worried about the world falling apart, you know, they're they're training for the breakdown of society, etc. And like, they've been training for a moment like the pandemic for so long, right? This is like, but then because their group was like, actually, no, taking COVID seriously is like politically problematic for us. They had to go like, okay, actually, no, it's not real. Like, the cognitive dissonance of being a person who was looking for exactly something like this to happen and preparing for it. And then because like the influencers in the media you get is like, actually, no, it's not a big deal. That sort of, you have a choice now.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  This is not what I'm prepping for, or it's not that kind of a big deal.

• 40:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  It's, this is a, you know, the way it's defined, you have to accept that definition to keep your place in the group.

• 40:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I mean, I saw that profoundly happening, but not not that exact version, but a version of it where I live. And yeah, it's amazing. And so it can be so destructive, but yeah, it's this line from Cheslaf Milo, she kind of inspired the book. Because I found his book on the sidewalk one day many years ago, The Captive Mind. And he said, "A self-respecting human being, humans are such, we're so malleable, that a self-respecting human being might, if he hears that it's the fashion, or it's necessary to crawl about on all fours with a tail of feathers sticking out of your behind, they will do it in all, in all due, you know, regard." And it's just that this incredible malleability that we constantly underestimate, and maybe it's also a saving factor.

• 41:36Ryan Holiday?

  The other thing I thought was fascinating in this book is you talk about Neuralink, which a lot of people are sort of paranoid about and worried about, like, what they're going to be putting computer chips in our brain and then manipulating us. What I find so fascinating about that is it reminds me of, yeah, people are worried about being brainwashed in some prison camp. And it's like, the person who's doing that is himself an example of being brainwashed. Like, he brainfucked himself without any computer chips in there, using a social network that most people who are concerned about something like that happening are using multiple times a day, right? Like, we're worried about these, like, extreme, sort of totalitarian, forms of mind control and brainwashing.

• 42:18Ryan Holiday?

  And then you're just watching one of the smartest people alive destroy his brain by spending too much time on Twitter.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's partly a society-wide blindness to just the reality of the fact that we're social beings in some sort of matrix with each other already, because it's easier to focus on the cartoonish, you know, the technology you've been fearing and the thing that looks like technology, you know, from circa 1960, like a crude thing that's going to be invasively, which could happen, that's also happening. So that's concerning. But the fact that the manipulation has, is ongoing and that we're, we're all subject to it is, you know, is the thing that tends to disappear.

• 43:03Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe it's similar to, like, where people are scared about disinformation or government propaganda. And I think it, it might have been Kasparov. Someone, some Russian expert was pointing out that, like, most of it is stuff that people want to be true. Like, it's not, it's not the government inventing something from whole clock and then ramming it down your throats, like, the sky is, is not blue. It's more like you're already suspicious of this immigrant group because they look different than you, and let me tell you why they're responsible for the increased price of housing. Just like in, in cons, I think people are worried about some grifter coming up to them on the street and tricking them into giving them their life savings.

• 43:45Ryan Holiday?

  No, like, con men and grifters, they play off your greed, like-

• 43:50Speaker 01

  They play off, yeah, something, there has to be a fertile soil of some kind. And that's usually, I think, the, you know, the unacknowledged emotions or feelings that are unresolved in each of us that everyone has.

• 44:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Unless you've really done an incredible amount of, you know, personal development, I guess. There's going to be a resonance that has to exist. It's not just simply the implanting. I mean, that's the cartoonish version of brainwashing is that these ideas are so irresistible or they're chemically implanted or there, there's like a formula.

• 44:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Or some new science that nobody ever knew about before. But actually, it's, I mean, if you even just look at the history of how table manners, we share collectively.

• 44:30Ryan Holiday?

  A delusion.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  We collectively decided that we wouldn't, it's no longer polite to blow your nose into the tablecloth.

• 44:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Other people are there. And that's a rule that's actually written out in the 16th century or something. And, but, you know, a hundred years later, you didn't have to write the rule down. You did have to teach children that.

• 44:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  But these things get inculcated and they're almost, now it just seems unnatural. Of course, I know that.

• 44:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like a form of technology, right? It's like, like, maybe they understood there was something unsanitary or dangerous about that and not just disgusting, but that it was bad.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:05Ryan Holiday?

  And so you stop doing it and it becomes, it's this sort of virtuous cycle. Yeah, I think about that now too, like with some of the pushback against like PC stuff. Like people are using the word retarded again, or, you know, there, there's just this sort of crassness that's being re-injected. And like what alarms me about that is like, we didn't just arbitrarily decide some words were not okay. Like, this is part of a, a process by which we are slowly, steadily tamping down the kind of baser, more violent and brutal parts of our human nature, which is always there because societies that let those run wild tend to do horrible things, right?

• 45:48Ryan Holiday?

  Like, there's that quote about how like a society that burns books eventually will burn people. It's not that like books are like, because you become ignorant, you then. Think it's okay to burn people. It's that when you unleash, when it becomes culturally acceptable to just get rid of stuff you don't like, then it just becomes this sliding scale as what counts as stuff.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:12Ryan Holiday?

  Books are stuff and then undesirable people are stuff at different ends of the spectrum. And, and so the reason we, we don't do things is that it's been this technology, this process of like keeping those desires in check. And then what happens is a demagogue or a political movement puts those things back into play and it's hard to tamp down on them again.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's actually a brilliant point. So it seems like what we're saying is that manners are not inconsequential.

• 46:43Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And there's a sort of arc to, I mean, we don't urinate in the corner. That used to be what people did. And then, then it started to be certain classes don't do that. And then it was like, and you, you don't blow your nose into the hand where you're about to shake hands with or things, these have.

• 46:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Then it becomes widespread and then you don't really even have to teach it anymore. But there is a kind of a social evolution. I don't think.

• 47:05Ryan Holiday?

  You're not openly using racial slurs and then all of a sudden we're all equal.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  And like politeness is a profound force, you know, that we learned that maybe you don't ask a person the first thing when you meet them and they look a certain way, like where are you from? And it's another, but the, the eagerness to re, reassert certain, you know, because it feels free to use some vocabulary that became, I mean, I could see why, I could see why people feel that way. But it underestimates, yeah, the kind of what we're seeing, which is that the backlash actually feeds.

• 47:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Kind of license, like a new license.

• 47:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, isn't that kind of a component of cults, right? Like it's, they break down a lot of the norms that society has built. So it's like, hey, we're all going to share our boyfriends and girlfriends. Or hey, all the kids are going to be raised over here. Actually, we, we don't talk, we don't talk to our parents anymore because parents are oppressed. They break these different bond. They, they find things that are sort of just bedrock. Principles of civil society, they knock out the legs of that stool and then, and then it become, not only does that become destabilizing, but then because you're being looked at askance by people outside the cult, it creates this insular dynamic where it's like they're persecuting us.

• 48:27Ryan Holiday?

  They don't understand us. They're weird. We're not the weird ones.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Right. You create a miniature. Yeah. And there's an energy that comes from that breakdown of the prohibitions and bonds and this, the normal or the way things are done. I mean, I think what caused Milos to write his book is that he said, just living in Warsaw during World War II. But he has this description of watching human society fall apart.

• 48:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Where he said, you know, the first people are just trying to live their lives and everyone's trying to go to their jobs and keep their retirement savings going and just keep the family together. And then, you know, the men in jackboots arrive, people are divided up by races into different quarters of the city. And you're, you know, maybe you're saved at that point.

• 49:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  You think you're safe, but at a certain point, he said, when people know the day that they're going to be shipped off or shot, they copulate in the street next to the barbed wire. He said, there was like no more human.

• 49:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. The rest of the technology collapses too.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything collapses. And what he said after seeing that, you know, I didn't want that knowledge.

• 49:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he was never the same after.

• 49:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, as you talk a little bit about the sort of right wing sort of online media system in the book too. People are probably going to be watching this on YouTube. And I think, what I think is interesting is the way that people whose work was kind of initially interesting, whether we're talking like a Jordan Peterson or something, how they have kind of themselves been a microcosm of this process, right? They started like, let me tell you how to make your bed. And then let me tell you this, and let me tell you this kind of transgressive idea. I'm going to push back on this, you know, political correctness thing. But then it kind of descends into this like madness or craziness. Like when I watch videos of him, I'm like, this is not a person who is doing well. Like there's something off, right? All of a sudden, as it becomes more strident and more extreme.

• 50:23Ryan Holiday?

  The people who came in because they liked it and it seemed normal then, now you're just kind of in, you're in that sphere, right?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Because people trust him, I think. And also, I do think he was placed in a position that I can only imagine being pushed. I have just so much pressure put on him and so much antagonism that I almost feel like it's a rare person who wouldn't be changed by that.

• 50:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's not good to be that famous.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  It's so difficult. It's hard for anyone to survive that, those pressures. And of course, you're going to want friends. When maybe your natural allies no longer will speak to you, you're going to seek associates. And I, yeah, I don't, I don't really know. I tried not to talk about it too much, just because I want it to be something everyone can use to reflect on themselves.

• 51:11Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like the intellectual dark web became very dark very quickly.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Right. And I still follow some of the, some of the people are super interesting, too. They still do interesting work and you can find nuggets in it. That's one practice I have is like, listen to all kinds of people and just find what you've, be able to not have to take everything, but take some parts of it and keep what seems sane, but keep your saneometer functioning if possible.

• 51:38Ryan Holiday?

  I think people are bad at spotting what is like, maybe, maybe it's how their parents were. I mean, look, if mental illness is very prevalent, then that means a good chunk of people have parents who are mentally ill or spent time. And so there can be, maybe it feels normal or even safe in some ways. But like, sometimes I'll watch clips of these people and go, this is a, this person is nuts. And I think that's what's interesting when you, when you watch like the cult documentaries you're talking about, you're like, they thought that this was like a, an elite, well-adjusted, successful person. It's unrecognizable to anyone else, right? And I do think people have bad radar generally as to like, like a good example, this I think is very clear in the financial space where it's like,

• 52:23Ryan Holiday?

  the people who are actually good with money, actually good at investing, you know, they're not like showing off their Ferrari and telling you how. With this simple investment, you can triple your money, you know, or whatever. But if you aren't financially literate, it's hard for you to recognize the distinction between a savvy investor and a scam artist. You just don't, you just don't have the experience to set to, that all looks the same to you. And being able to see those gradients is a skill. And I think that's definitely true. When I, I watch certain people, I'm like, that person is nuts. But if you're not, if you don't have a good grasp on these things yourself, you're like, oh, they seem really smart.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  That's true. And it also does not transferable, like financial intuitive savvy and acumen doesn't necessarily, it's not, doesn't translate to, you know, you could, it could even, you could be blind to a different type of dimension or invitation. Like maybe you develop that part of yourself, but not others. You see this in academics all the time, just like highly, you know, just brilliant capacity to even on that level of emotion and intuition, just being well attuned to their field, but it doesn't necessarily apply. And, uh, so, so it's difficult because there is, there's often going to be an arena where you are vulnerable, you know? And then, and then others who, who aren't may think that you're just a fool.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Well, I had this funny memory yesterday, talking to someone where I, I was remembering that my father was, my parents were invited to go to this cult meeting. I mean, they didn't think it was a cult. It was a large group awareness training where they put you in, they kind of lock you in a room and their friends had been through it and had changed their lives. So you're, you're in this room and you can't leave and you can't go to the bathroom and kind of people start to break down, but they also, you know, have transformative experiences. And when my dad had to go to the bathroom, he's just like, I'm leaving. I just, I'm going. Nothing, he's just too grouchy to be brainwashed. No.

• 54:27Ryan Holiday?

  The funny thing is, sometimes you realize like Cassandra's or people who are really right about something. It is one of those things where like, the majority was wrong and this small minority about it was right. A lot of times, what they all have in common is just a kind of disagreeableness. They're actually wrong about a lot of things, but it was like a broken clock was right here. Cause they just, your dad's like, also reject, not that, I don't know. But I'm sure there were lots of other things that he was invited to, that he just left because he was too grouchy.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know what I mean?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Grouchy-ness could occur in various circumstances and not always, not always productively. But, you know, I mean, maybe Stockdale was like that, too.

• 55:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  It was like a profound superpower.

• 55:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you don't tell me what to do.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:11Ryan Holiday?

  That's a personality trait that's also kind of a uniquely necessary skill in that thing. Yeah, definitely.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  It's hard to really make sense of, but it does seem like it's part of inquiry that everyone, I guess, has to. I mean, mostly a lens you can turn on yourself. Like, what are the parts that I can strengthen maybe? Because I know these are areas where I can be, where my issues arise, where my...

• 55:38Ryan Holiday?

  I remember once I was at a meeting at this company I worked for, and we were all talking about some idea. And everyone was sort of in agreement, except for this one guy who was sort of an older consultant, which there weren't a lot of at this company. And he like pointed out what he thought was the problem with it. And, you know, I was arguing against it and the other people are vehemently, but, and he just went, all right. He's like, I'm okay standing alone on this one. He was like, I think I'm right. I don't need you to think I'm right. And I don't need to convince you that I'm right. And I just remember think, I think about it all the time because people don't do that. That's a unique thing.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  That is unique.

• 56:13Ryan Holiday?

  Just to be like, hey, I'm, I'm okay not being part of the crowd on this one.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, he gave you that example.

• 56:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  It's really, that does seem stoic, too.

• 56:22Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  So like, how old were you when that, when you saw that?

• 56:24Ryan Holiday?

  23, 24.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also you didn't know that was part of human vocabulary.

• 56:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  And I think that's one of the amazing things about being young, too. Or just, also just some of us in our backgrounds, we don't get that. We don't get like a shining example of.

• 56:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there's this Stoic named Agrippinus who lived in the time of Nero. And so you can imagine you're in Nero's Rome, like you don't want to stand out. That's a good way to get executed or, you know, exiled. And someone was sort of asking him, you know, like, why are, you know, he was, he wouldn't attend Nero's dinner parties. He was always, you know, taking the contrary stance. And the person's like, what are you doing like? And, and he said, uh, life is a tapestry. Or he says, um, it's like a garment. And he's like, most people are the white threads and I am the red thread that makes the garment beautiful by contrast. And I was like, I, I heard that probably in my twenties also. And you go, oh yeah, like you actually need those people. Those people provide an important role.

• 57:25Ryan Holiday?

  And, and also there's something kind of heroic and beautiful about being that. And, and at some other level, we all are unique. So why are we trying to match with everyone else?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Very true.

• 57:37Ryan Holiday?

  But I was thinking about recognizing crazy people. I don't know if you, did you, have you seen the clips of the actor Terrence Howard talking about his mathematical theories?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:45Ryan Holiday?

  So he thinks he's like a mathematical genius and that he like, actually one plus one does not equal two. Or like, he has these like theories and, and what's, it's actually an interesting litmus test. You should check it out because he was on Rogan and like Rogan's kind of like pretty credulous about it. But you look at the.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  He walks them through the steps of why one plus one isn't two.

• 58:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. And I, I don't think that's actually a theory, but it's something like that. Like what one divided by one does not equal one, some, something like that. And he claims to have like invented all these technologies. You're watching it and it's an interesting litmus test because when I see it, I'm like, this dude is kind of screw loose. Or it, it's very manic. Like if you've ever been around sort of manic people or read much about manic people, you're like, oh, okay. This, this is all the signs of that, right? And, and oftentimes manic people are very brilliant at some things. The problem is they can't. Turn it off and they have this sort of grandiosity that propels them. And then you look at the comments and people are like, I don't know, it makes a lot of sense. And you go, oh, okay, like, we're coming at this with different frames of reference.

• 58:49Ryan Holiday?

  And to me, what is throwing up every red flag that I know how to recognize, you're just like along for the ride, right? And I think a lot that that is kind of one of the problems of our time, which is as information technology makes it easy to get a platform or get information out in the world in the way that you used to have to bump into the cult leader, like in your small town.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  And they used to think that it would be impossible, that it would be impossible to recruit people online or that it would decontextualize. And they used to carry around the power of, I read a little bit about deprogrammers. It was an occupation, but they would carry around a briefcase of precious information that would show the, hopefully show the cult member that this was wrong. And the information that had been shielded from them because they're under a milieu control. And that could be powerful, but often just, you know, maybe the deprogramming looked like you were just brainwashing them back and then maybe tying them to a chair. Sometimes it took these kind of, it involved kidnapping and they'd just snap back when they were re-exposed to those stimuli, which is just this kind of,

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I mean, sometimes it was successful if the family reasserted itself and the deprogramming would take. But we are so susceptible to these things that we don't realize are

• 1:00:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  are a pre-existing level. For whatever reason, you have an incredible, you've honed a sensitivity to it. And so you see that first.

• 1:00:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Like you see the affect and the destabilized person first before you see this kind of elaborate theory. But many, many people are just drawn to the elaborate theory.

• 1:00:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  And we're getting so used to being decontextualized in other ways that we don't even, we don't even have the cues we used to have.

• 1:00:30Ryan Holiday?

  Right. When also like if, if an idea is on its face absurd to 99 out of 100 people looking at it. And we go, okay, everyone sees this as dumb because most people see that it's dumb. What we're missing is what information technology allows to happen is for that idea. And sometimes we're showing it because we're laughing at it, or we're saying it's abhorrent or stupid. But we don't realize that for every hundred people we're showing it to, it's resonating with one person. And so over enough exposure, you've now accumulated a group of people who don't think that it's crazy or abhorrent or, you know, dangerous.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Oh, because they can find their, they can find each other.

• 1:01:14Ryan Holiday?

  They, they found each other and just like typically, if the crazy street preacher's message is on its face absurd to 99 out of 100 people, they're not going to be able to reach that many people over the course of their life. It's not a viral message. But if a message is made viral because of how controversial it is, Alex Jones, we think we're laughing at him. You're actually just telling more people about Alex Jones.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  I totally agree that in most cases that is true. But there is this possibility, just thinking about the classics in history of science, which is Thomas Kuhn wrote the book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Like there are occasional periods when we genuinely are in a revolutionary period of ideas. And so most science, this is what was radical about what he said and shocking to people. He said, most scientists are just those white threads where, you know, they're just like reinforcing the existing paradigm. Their work is just putting another little tiny brick, you know, in the wall. And they're very conventional and they're honing these tiny differences. And, and you see that around you, but there's just, at a certain point, the, the incommensurable start to add up and you, and the structure,

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  maybe one, the one point, the one plus one, or whatever it is, falls apart in certain ways from certain, in certain respects. And they start to add up and the, the existing structure begins to crumble.

• 1:02:39Ryan Holiday?

  You need those disagreeable, kooky people because sometimes they're the, the first one that kind of starts to, oh, maybe actually this doesn't add up. And maybe they're right for the wrong reasons or yeah, maybe.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  And then it's a revolutionary period. And that, and so say it's tragedy if someone had the capacity to contribute in that period, but they just weren't born in that time. They were just a crank, but you know, so this, this, there is always the possibility that this.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Crank theory is something that could and should flourish.

• 1:03:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, have you heard this, that one of the arguments for what's happening now politically is called the crank realignment? Have you heard this theory?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:03:19Ryan Holiday?

  So basically, like, the left used to have cranks and the right used to have cranks, right? For different reasons. And now, it's sort of like, and a lot of the cranks have cut, like, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a Democrat until really recently. But now, all those sort of people that used to be in the sort of left, the extreme, or the, "we don't talk about them," or "we're happy to have their votes, but we don't actually let them tune in," we don't give them the levers of power inside the left. A lot of those people have moved to the right.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:46Ryan Holiday?

  And this actually damages both parties in an extreme way, because you don't have dissenting voices or counterbalancing voices inside your own party.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:03:56Ryan Holiday?

  And so, I agree. You need to have people who say crazy things, who are very different, who march to the beat of their own drummer. Obviously, it's a broad spectrum between sort of the malicious ones and the harmless ones.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:07Ryan Holiday?

  But you need that, you need those people.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  You need room for a paradigm to shift. Because that's what ultimately you do want, I think, for collectively, for us to get wiser and get better science, you know, a more capacious science that understands.

• 1:04:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if everyone's thinking the same thing, nobody's thinking.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, yeah. Otherwise, it contributes to what you're describing, that realignment contributes to this paralyzing situation of polarization.

• 1:04:35Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. You want to go check out some books?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:37Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do it.

• 1:04:43Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.