Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) BONUS: This Is The Stoicism Talk The Navy Banned (Ryan Holiday At The U.S. Naval Academy) About this episode Check out the previous lectures from Ryan Holiday at the U. S. Naval Academy here:Courage: The Power Of Courage Discipline: The Life Changing Art Of Self-DisciplineJustice: Stoic Habits To Help You Live And Be Better🗞️ Read Ryan Holiday's opinion piece in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/opinion/naval-academy-speech-censorship.html📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.
0:56 Ryan Holiday? I was supposed to give a talk at the Naval Academy today. I just found out about 20 minutes before I was supposed to go on that it's not happening because I was going to talk about this reaction against controversial ideas or ideas that we disagree with. I love my time here at the Naval Academy. It's been one of the honors of my life. I'm terribly sad and somewhat bewildered. This amazing Institute of Higher Learning is now banning books, and not just banning books, but not allowing criticism of that decision as well. Some people have resigned in protest over it. I felt like I couldn't, in good conscience, go and deliver this lecture.
1:37 Ryan Holiday? Now I am back home. And on my flight home, I thought, I don't want to allow that to happen.
1:48 Ryan Holiday? They can prevent me from going onstage, but they can't prevent me from delivering the talk. So I'm going to give the talk that I was going to give at the Naval Academy now. This is obviously a slightly different environment. I was planning to do it onstage. I was planning to have slides behind me. I was planning to address, you know, 1,000 people in person. And that's a little bit different than doing it here. And my Studio in Texas. But here's more or less the talk that I would have given to those midshipmen. And the idea that the obstacle is the way. Now, anyone and everyone can watch it. Hopefully, it will reach a larger audience than it was going to reach had everything gone as planned. So whoever you are, wherever you are, but most of all, if you're at the Naval Academy,
2:31 Ryan Holiday? I hope this resonates with you. With that said, let's talk about wisdom.
2:38 Ryan Holiday? I want to take you back to the summer of 1943. A young man from Illinois is sworn in and inducted to Naval Academy. And so, as a young James Stockdale gathers with his fellow plebes to be sworn in to the Naval Academy as World War II rages across the globe, he swears his oath to the Constitution and to the country. And his father, who had dreamed for many years that his son would one day enter the Naval Academy, gives him a parting word of advice. He says, "I want you to try to be the best man in that hall." Now, what did he mean by this?
3:20 Ryan Holiday? When he urged his son to try to be the best man at the Naval Academy, did he mean class rank? Now, ultimately, James Stockdale ranks about 130th in his class at the Naval Academy, which although impressive, is, I think, by no means the best. So his father must have meant it at some other level. And certainly, Stockdale himself understood it at another level. And later that month, he writes a letter home and the advice from his father is still pinging around in his head. He said, "Dad, when you left, you told me you wanted me to be the best man in that hall, and I'm going to try to do that." I think what his father was saying was something similar, actually, to a piece of advice that a Stoic philosopher gave another great soldier, Pompey the Great.
4:05 Ryan Holiday? As he set out to battle pirates in the Mediterranean, he stops in to visit the Stoic philosopher Posidonius. And he asks him if he has any advice for him before he departs. And Posidonius says, quoting- The Odyssey that you must be best and always superior to others. Now, again, was Posidonia referring to winning all of the battles? Was he referring to the greatest conquests or the greatest feats of intellectual achievement? Or piling up the most money? I don't think so. He was, of course, referring to the idea of virtue, the Stoic virtues of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.
4:48 Ryan Holiday? You're saying be the most virtuous man, be superior to others in that sense. This is what Stockdale's father was advising his son. Reminds me of another story about two Spartan wrestlers who, after a long, hard battle, wins, and as the other reaches up his hand to shake that of the victor, he says, "The better man won." The wrestler who won corrects him and he says, "No, the better wrestler." It's a story about sportsmanship, but also this same idea that winning is not everything. Class rank is not everything. Rank is not everything. Achievements are not everything.
5:28 Ryan Holiday? But who you are, the standards you hold yourself to, the character that you possess, this is everything. And certainly, when they say, "The better man won," or they say, "Be the best man in that hall," these were different times. When Stockdale entered the Naval Academy in 43 as part of the class of 47, although he graduates in 46 because of the war, women are not allowed in the Naval Academy. It is, in fact, not until 1980 that Elizabeth Rowe and Janie Mines are the two first female graduates of the academy. These two powerful, inspiring women are a reminder that, as the Stoics, in fact,
6:12 Ryan Holiday? talked about, there is nothing gendered about virtue or greatness. Long before the controversies about DEI, Musonius Rufus, the philosophy teacher of Epictetus, is not only teaching a slave like Epictetus, but writes a fascinating essay about why women also need to be taught. Philosophy. He would say that it should be obvious that there is not a different set of virtues for men and women, that virtue is virtue, erit is erit, excellence is excellence, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom is demanded of each of us as individuals and
6:55 Ryan Holiday? that it is what we ought to aspire to, whoever we are, whatever we do. It is the compass that guides us. It is our true north. And there is a reason that wisdom is considered the mother of the virtues, because it tells us when to apply courage. It tells us what is right and what is wrong. It tells us what the right amount of things are. It tells us what to resist and what to accept. Wisdom is probably the most ineffable of the virtues. It is hard to define. It is many things, of course. It's being smart and it's knowledge and facts and it's insight, it's intelligence and intuition, it's experience and education
7:38 Ryan Holiday? and philosophy and practical understanding and awareness and wit and perspective and perspicacity. It's even the prudence, as the ancients sometimes called wisdom. It's all these things and more. And yet, it's also quite simple, I would say. Wisdom is knowing what's what, what you need to do here, what matters here, what counts here, what to do, when to do it and how to do it. And while we might quibble over the exact definition of wisdom, I think we can all agree that it's not something you're born with. It's not something that someone can give you. Wisdom is something you have to earn. It's something you have to get. It's not something that can be given. As Seneca would say, no
8:21 Ryan Holiday? one is wise by chance. Certainly, we can all agree about that. You have to earn it. It's the result of toil and struggle, trial and error and so many things. Wisdom is work. And it's really the work of our lives. And that's what I want to talk about today. It was certainly the work of Stockdale's life. He graduates from the Naval Academy in 46. Then he spends almost 20 years in the Navy, rises to the rank of commander, and then he's sent to Stanford to get a master's degree. Now, it might seem strange that the Navy would send a fighter pilot in their late 30s to Stanford to get an advanced degree, but Stockdale knew exactly why he was there.
9:03 Ryan Holiday? And in fact, he was a bit frustrated his first year or so at Stanford. He said that one of the things that struck him was that he'd taken all these classes, he'd spent all this time, but the one thing that he hadn't gotten was wisdom. He said, I was lacking an inspiration or a pole star to guide me. He'd just been processing relatively tedious material at first. And then, as he walked through the halls of Stanford one day, a man approaches him, at first confusing him for a fellow professor. And this man is named Philip Rhinelander. Rhinelander had himself served in the Navy during World War II. And he asks Stockdale what he's doing and what he's looking for, and they strike up a friendship.
9:45 Ryan Holiday? And in the way that the hero's journey often involves the seeking out of a mentor, Rhinelander becomes this for Stockdale. And he gives him a book off of his shelf. He reaches behind him and he grabs the Incoridion of Epictetus. And he hands him this book, a book that would change the course of Stockdale's life. As Marcus Aurelius would say, that a mastery of reading and writing requires a master, so does life. And so, in this way, Rhinelander becomes a mentor and a teacher to Stockdale. He spends countless hours in his office, getting reading recommendations and life advice, discussing big ideas, and ultimately takes Rhinelander's course in philosophy.
10:26 Ryan Holiday? As it happens, this introduction to Epictetus is a rather timeless encounter. Marcus Aurelius himself would be introduced to the writings of Epictetus by his philosophy teacher, Junius Rusticus. He thanks him at the beginning of Meditations for loaning him his copy of Epictetus from his own library. And these may have been notes on Epictetus's lectures that Rusticus wrote down himself, having perhaps attended some of Epictetus's lectures. In any case, Marcus would say that just as a mastery of reading and writing requires a mastery So does life. I think in Stockdale's case, the meeting of the teacher is an essential
11:09 Ryan Holiday? part of the hero's journey. The person who opens up the door, who gives us the material we need, who teaches us. Marcus Aurelius has this teacher not just in Rusticus, who he remains close to for the rest of their remaining lives. But he is given a second gift when he is adopted by the Emperor Hadrian. And Hadrian senses that Marcus is too young to become emperor by himself. So he adopts a powerful senator named Antoninus, who in turn adopts Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian probably imagines that Antoninus will live for a few years. Instead, Antoninus lives for more than two decades. And Marcus decides to learn under him. Instead of them becoming rivals, instead of seeing Antoninus as an
11:54 Ryan Holiday? impediment, Marcus assumes the role of a willing student of an apprentice and gets 20 years of on the job teaching. History affords us almost no other example of two heirs to the throne getting along in such a fashion, learning from each other in such a fashion. And when you read the effusive praise that Marcus gives Antoninus and all the things that he learns from him, the beginning of Meditations, you are given a textbook example of what good mentorship looks like. Admiral Michelle Howard, a class of 82 graduate of the Naval Academy, would say that we sort of have two choices in life. We can try to figure things out on our own and stumble,
12:38 Ryan Holiday? or we can talk to someone who has had the same shared experiences. We can learn by trial and error, or we can learn from the experiences of others. That's the choice that we get to make. This question of who we are apprenticed under, who are we learning from, who is our guide, who is opening doors for us is one of the most essential questions of our education. And are we really listening? Because as the Stoics say, you know, it is impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Ego gets in the way. Our ambition gets in the way. Our entitlements get in the way. Our conceit gets in the way. There's a famous statue of Nero,
13:18 Ryan Holiday? who was also given a great teacher. He is attached to Seneca himself, one of the wisest minds in the ancient world.
13:27 Ryan Holiday? And he too had the opportunity for years and years of on the job study. But he resents Seneca's leadership. And as you can see in the statue, the body language resembles that of the petulant teenager. It resembles the person whose ego tells them that they already know everything they need to know. It is the sulking, petulant, close-minded, deliberate ignorance of a petty narcissist. All the things that Nero was and all the things that ultimately proved to be his undoing. Look, learning is not always fun. Mentors are not always nice. The course they set out for us is not always easy. But as Epictetus said, as Stockdale would have read in his copy of The Ingridian,
14:10 Ryan Holiday? "The philosopher's lecture hall is a hospital. It's painful." He says, "You shouldn't walk out of it feeling good or pleasurable, but you should still be in pain because you weren't well when you entered." The work, the rework, the changes, the remedies that philosophy applies to us, that the doctor that is our teacher subjects us to, won't always be fun. And it will take time to recover. But where we end up, that is what matters and that is what's important. Our greatest mentor has to be the past. Although our teachers are essential, the most successful teacher is the past. Cleo, the goddess of history, is there and prepared to mentor and teach all of us.
14:54 Ryan Holiday? Patton famously believed he was the reincarnated spirit of countless warriors from the past. As he would write in a famous poem, "So as through a glass and darkly the age-long strife I see, where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me." And there is a story about him touring the Civil War battlefield, where the awful and violent Battle of the Wilderness was fought. And as he discussed the battle with his tour guide, he began to argue, saying that the tour guide's version of events were incorrect, that it had happened this way and the troops had traveled that way. And as the argument got heated, an old man walked-
15:36 Ryan Holiday? Up to him and and said, no, no, no, the general here is correct. I was at this battle as a boy, and that's precisely how it went. And Patton too believed that he had been there as a boy and that this experience remained within him in some form. And as convincing as Patton's belief in this sort of mystical, otherworldly cycle of regeneration is, I think there's actually an easier and in some ways more impressive explanation, which is that as a young boy, Patton was almost debilitatingly dyslexic. He did not write or read until he was 12 years old. His parents actually kept him out of school.
16:21 Ryan Holiday? They were worried that he would never do these things. They wondered if he was mentally disabled in some form. But instead of giving up on their son, what they did was they read to him a lot. His aunt nanny read to her favorite nephew constantly, and so did his father. They read him The Odyssey and every classic they could get their hands on. His father also used his connections to bring in Civil War veterans and politicians and any well-known person that he could meet. And Patton would buttonhole them and ask them every question he possibly could. He grew up surrounded by history. History became almost real to him.
17:02 Ryan Holiday? These myths, these legends, these great moments, great battles, these great personalities, he had lived with them in a way that his fellow schoolchildren never could have even imagined. And Patton himself would hint that this is where his genius came from. He would say that the road to high command leads through the long path called the history of war. He said, to be useful to you, military knowledge, not unlike discipline, has to be subconscious, that simply memorizing is futile, that an officer has to be soaked in military lore to the point where the military thing becomes automatic, becomes
17:46 Ryan Holiday? Muscle memory becomes part of their identity, their sense of the world. And this is what books ultimately became to Patton, who did learn to read and became a lifelong reader and was seen reading in all of his campaigns. He read widely, he read critically. It was said that by the time World War II broke out, he had read nearly every book about war ever published. He read books about religious history. He read books about psychology. He read books about economics. He read books about everything he could get his hands on. And the reason he did this, the reason that almost all great men and women have been great readers, is that through history, we annex, as Seneca said, all the eras and
18:29 Ryan Holiday? wisdom of the past into our own lives. Another great American, Harry Truman, never goes to college, but is a lover of books. He said at one point that he believed he'd read nearly every book in the library near his house as a kid. And he would say that the only new thing in the world is the history we do not yet know. The reason people study history is that it is literally a form of time travel, literally a way to be tipped off about the future. And the founding of Stoicism is itself an echo of that bit of wisdom. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, is a young merchant. He travels the Mediterranean, dealing in Tyrian purple.
19:12 Ryan Holiday? That is the dye that would make the fanciest and brightest cloaks of the Athenians and later the Romans. Until one day, he suffers a shipwreck and he washes up penniless in Athens. We're walking through the Agora. He stops by a bookseller and he hears that bookseller reading aloud a story of Socrates, asking the bookseller where he can find a person like that. He is introduced to his teacher, the philosopher Kritis, whose nickname at that time was the door opener, which is what great teachers do. They open doors to other worlds to us. It was listening to that bookseller, listening to Socrates come alive, a man who was at that point quite dead, that a prophecy that Zeno had heard as a young boy finally made sense to him.
19:56 Ryan Holiday? Had asked the oracle at Delphi, "What is the secret to a good life?" And the oracle had told him, "You will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead." And that's what Xeno was doing there in the Agora, listening to that bookseller. It's what I do every time I pick up a book. It's what Patton was doing when he read. It's what Stockdale was doing when he was introduced to Epictetus. They were participating in what we call the Great Conversation, the great works of antiquity, the authors of which are long since dead. But they feel alive to us on the page. They come alive to us on the page. It's why I called my bookstore, "The Painted Porch", after the Stoic Pochele,
20:41 Ryan Holiday? where Xeno was introduced to Stoic philosophy and began to have his conversations with the dead. Reading is a superpower. Because when we are reading, we are not just conversing with the dead, who created it, but all the dead people who have read that book since. Your predecessors, your ancestors, who picked this book up in a library, whose parents read it to them, who were recommended it by a friend, whose lives were changed by the ideas in those books. The great General Mattis, or former Secretary of Defense, who spent 40 years in the Marine Corps, would say that reading is an honor and a gift. He said, "It's a gift from a warrior or a historian who, a decade ago or a thousand decades ago,
21:26 Ryan Holiday? they set time aside to write." And they distilled their wisdom, their hard-won experiences down into these pages to have this conversation with you. It is a gift. It is a superpower. Why do we reject this gift? It is insane. Who would decline such a supernatural experience? Yet this is precisely what so many of us do, to follow breaking news, to gossip. To veg out in front of the television, to distract ourselves with social media. We could be communing with the wisest minds who ever lived. We could be traveling through the centuries. We could be being briefed on the future, as Truman said, by studying the past.
22:10 Ryan Holiday? And yet we choose not to do this. It's not just reading, of course, as Mattis would say. If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate. He said, "Our own personal experiences are not broad enough to sustain us." I would say that that reading occasionally is not enough. And simply reading is not enough. "We have to linger on the works of the master thinkers," Seneca said. "Reading them and rereading them over and over again if we want to," he says, "derive the ideas which shall win firm hold in our mind." You have to understand, the Stoics are not authors you have read. They are authors you have to be reading. You don't read Meditations. You are reading Meditations.
22:54 Ryan Holiday? You haven't read Epictetus. You are reading Epictetus. After he was introduced to the Inqueridion, Stockdale travels everywhere with his copy and with related books. He would say that on his bedside table, no matter what carrier he was on, he was deployed shortly after his time at Stanford. He carried his Epictetus books with him. He had Inqueridion, he had Discourses, he had Zenith's Memorabilia of Socrates, which had so influenced Epictetus. He said he had the Iliad and the Odyssey because Epictetus expected all of his students to know the plots and the themes of the Odyssey. Stockdale said that he didn't have time to be a bookworm while he was a fighter pilot,
23:38 Ryan Holiday? but that he still spent several hours buried in them each week. I don't know what definition you have to have of a bookworm to think that reading for several hours a week doesn't make you one. But he was a bookworm. And this copy of Epictetus he reads, not only on his deployment, but for the rest of his life. My own copy of Meditations is pretty worse for the wear after 20 odd years with it. Its cover is falling off. Nearly every page is marked or folded. But that's the point. I am not just reading it, but Rereading it and rereading it. And each time I pick it up, I take something new out of it. As Herakles said, how we don't step in the same river twice.
24:19 Ryan Holiday? Although the book doesn't change, you change, the world changes, and thus you take something new out of it each time. And I am communing, not just with Marcus Aurelius, who's dead, but I am communing with a younger version of myself, who captured a bit of myself in these pages, in these memorabilia that I left behind. And I can see who I used to be, what struck me then. I can disagree with myself. I can talk with my younger, more ignorant self as well. When I say that we have to read, I don't just mean we read the popular books, or we read the acceptable books. We have to read critically. We have to read dangerously.
25:01 Ryan Holiday? Seneca said that we have to read like a spy in the enemy's camp. And this is what he was doing when he quotes Epicurus throughout his own writings. He says, quoting bad authors, even when the line is good. Seneca wasn't afraid of a rival school of philosophy. He wanted to learn from them. He wanted to absorb their wisdom, too. You could argue that the class that influences Stockdale the most, that he relies on most in the ordeal that lay ahead, was actually not Epictetus. In the fall of 1961, he enrolled in a class he'd eagerly been trying to get into, which was a class on comparative Marxist thought. And he said that what struck him about the
25:42 Ryan Holiday? class is that they didn't read criticisms of Marx or summaries of Marxism. They read only the Marxists themselves. He said, "We read no criticism of Marxism, only the primary sources." He says, "For almost a full year, we read nothing but the works of Marx and Lenin." He was reading like a spy in the enemy's camp. He would write a letter home to his father that one of the things he'd learned from his parents is that you can't beat something you don't understand, that you will be better equipped to beat something you understand than something you don't understand, something you have closed your mind to. And we should think about what Stockdale would think about the news that Almost 400 books have been removed from the Naval Academy library.
26:26 Ryan Holiday? And that this was no accident, but in fact, the official policy of the United States government. And when I first saw the news on, on April 1st, I, I suspected at first that it was an April Fool's joke. The idea that, that the best and brightest students in the country are seen as too fragile, too easily manipulatable, too susceptible to be exposed to works that people don't like or disagree with. This transgresses the very ethos, the, the very purpose of higher education, which is to challenge, which is to open doors, which is to allow you to understand things.
27:10 Ryan Holiday? And understanding and being familiar with something is not the same as liking or endorsing or embracing it. The Naval Academy is not the only place where this energy is being directed. In the small town in Texas where I live, where my bookstore is, there was an effort to remove a number of books from the high school library. And thinking of the lyrics to one of my favorite Rage Against the Machine songs. You know, we think of censorship as the burning of books, but they don't burn books anymore. What they do is they remove them. They deprive us of our right to access them. And I partnered with this company Scribd and we just gave them out to every student who wanted them. Right? Because when people tell you, you shouldn't be allowed to read something, you shouldn't be able to engage with an idea.
27:54 Ryan Holiday? It is precisely those ideas that intellectually curious people ought to go towards. Secure and confident and smart people ought to try to understand. And look, one of the reasons we study history is, is to understand that none of these debates are new. In the 1950s, there was incredible political pressure to censor what books could appear on federal installations, largely on embassies all over the world. And in 1953 Eisenhower was asked about this at a press conference. You know, would he ban communist books from US embassies? And he said, look, my view is that censorship and hiding solves nothing. And he pointed out the fact that in the run up to World War II,
28:39 Ryan Holiday? as people were astonished and horrified by what happened, it was obvious in retrospect that more people should have read Mein Kampf. He said, you know, they laid it out and we didn't read it. He urged people to read Lenin and Stalin and Marx. He said, if we're going to run a free government, let's educate ourselves. I just refuse to accept that young people are sensitive little snowflakes who have to be protected. There's a great dichotomy. What kind of learner are you? Are you a soldier or are you a scout? Even if you're training to be in the military, you don't want to be a soldier when it comes to learning. A soldier is trying to defend what they know, what they've been taught.
29:23 Ryan Holiday? A scout, a scout reads dangerously, reads curiously, plunges into unfamiliar territory, gets behind enemy lines and seeks to understand anything and everything, particularly the things and the points of view from the people they disagree with. They steel man rather than straw man. They investigate rather than persecute. This is what Seneca was saying. We must read like a spy in the enemy's camp. I think it's essential to point out here that the books that have been removed from the library at the Naval Academy are not Marxist texts or Mein Kampf. They are, in many cases, art, literature, works of legitimate, if not controversial scholarship.
30:07 Ryan Holiday? They are criticisms of America and American history. That is, Maya Angelou is not the enemy. If Stockdale can, can read the enemy and try to understand it, certainly can make room for some of our greatest poets and writers. And you never know when this information is going to be of use to you in the future, when this understanding, when this curiosity will benefit you. In the Hanoi Hilton, where Stockdale was repeatedly interrogated and tortured.
30:40 Ryan Holiday? He was able to withstand in part the propaganda and the misinformation and the barrage of criticism and questions that were thrown at him because, as he said, he understood Marxist theory more than his interrogators did. He would tell of pushing back against one of his interrogators nicknamed Rabbit, he said, "That's not what Lenin said. You're a deviationist. You're paraphrasing. You're deviating from the party line." And it was his familiarity with these ideas that allowed him to do that. General Mark Milley would talk about this in a congressional hearing, that he's read Mao and Marx and Lenin. He said, "This doesn't
31:22 Ryan Holiday? make me a communist." Says, "What's wrong with having situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?" This is what great thinkers do. This is how wise people educate themselves. Because we are going to need to be able to deal with complexity and discomfort and contradiction. The poet John Keats would talk about this idea of negative capability as this beautiful metaphor of the mansion of many apartments, that there's these different rooms and that the mark of a good mind was the ability to hold contradictory ideas in it at the same time. That America is good and has done bad
32:02 Ryan Holiday? is one of those ideas. That people are awful and people are heroic and inspiring. That issues can be simple and complex at the same time is a form of complexity that a simple mind cannot handle. Admiral James Rickover, class of 1922 at the Naval Academy, the father of America's nuclear navy, would say that "So many of our present ills stem from our chiding faith in the search for perfect answers." He says, "It requires a degree of maturity to realize that all solutions are partial." And I would add to that, that things remain unclear, things contradict each other, things are confusing, understanding is sometimes
32:45 Ryan Holiday? elusive. If you cannot handle that, if you need things to be simple and clear. Clear you are going to have a rough go of it, particularly in this line of work. If the history you are reading doesn't make you uncomfortable, you are not reading history. If you are only looking for stuff that you agree with, that confirms or supports what you want to be true. If your deepest held beliefs aren't regularly being challenged, I don't know what path you are on, but it is not the path to wisdom. Things are not simple, and if they are simple to you, you are doing it wrong. We have to be able to think for ourselves, right? Leaders must be independent thinkers, or they are by definition not leaders.
33:26 Ryan Holiday? The famous charge of the light brigade, maybe you know the Tennyson poem about it, or hopefully you know the Iron Maiden song about it. But the the Tennyson poem, it's an illustration ultimately, I think of this idea. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. All in the valley of death rode the six hundred. Forward the light brigade charged for the guns, he said into the valley of death rode the six hundred. Forward the light brigade was there a man dismayed, not though the soldier knew, but someone had blundered. There's not to make reply, there's not to reason why.
34:07 Ryan Holiday? There's but to do and die into the valley of death rode the six hundred. But the six hundred didn't need to ride into the valley of death, although their heroism was incredible. It was also pointless. And if at any point in the process, someone had seen and questioned what was so obviously a blunder, had the courage to push back on these deranged orders. If the commanding officer himself, who knew that the charge was almost certainly mistaken, had the courage to question what obviously resulted from a miscommunication, that heroism wouldn't have been necessary, they could have been saved for another day.
34:47 Ryan Holiday? And it was precisely this hard headedness, this lack of independent thinking that Florence Nightingale would bump into in the Crimean War, where she fought with equal heroism to introduce basic sanitation and medical reforms to prevent so many men from needlessly dying. In military hospitals, she would lament that these officers and their superiors, their heads were so flattened by the boards of military discipline that they were basically children. And she spent needless energy fighting this resistance, this status quo bias,
35:27 Ryan Holiday? energy that could have saved lives and many, many lives, many, many men, a generation of soldiers died needlessly because of the inability to conceive of doing things differently. Rickover himself would say that subordinates who agree with their superiors are useless parts of the organization, that leaders need criticism and feedback and to be challenged. And I would argue that all change, all innovation, it comes from this disagreement. It comes from these challenges. It comes from this questioning. I mean, look at the history of the Navy. Steamships were resisted and ironclads were resisted and submarines were resisted
36:12 Ryan Holiday? and aircraft carriers were resisted. And so too was integration. So too was the allowing of women to enlist. All along the way, every important change has been resisted. The status quo has been upheld to so many people's detriment. We have to figure out a way to respect tradition, but despise convention. To preserve traditions that are worth preserving, but be willing to embrace change and to abhor complacency because our lives, your careers, the future, one thing we can say about it for certain is that it will be filled with
36:53 Ryan Holiday? change and disruption and innovation and new ideas and new problems. And those who are being trained for leadership are being selected for their ability to think and to learn and to adapt, to think for themselves. That is what they bring to this future. That is how they will guide us and lead us in that future. And that is what wisdom is made from and for. The great physicist Richard Feynman was once told about some theory from a colleague. And Richard said, that's bullshit. What are you talking about? None of that makes any sense. And the colleague replied, not by defending the idea, but by saying, Professor Feynman, this theory has been commonly accepted for some time.
37:36 Ryan Holiday? And Feynman looked at him and he said, so not only is it bullshit, you're telling me it's old bullshit. Just because something has been true for a long time, just because it's been repeated, just because it's comfortable, doesn't mean it's right. As Rusticus would teach Marcus Aurelius, we can't fall for every smooth talker. And I would include myself in that. Just because you like what I have to say, doesn't mean you should exempt me from being questioned, from being challenged. You should be curious. You should investigate. You should put everything to the test, as Epictetus said. Find out for yourself. Do your own research.
38:18 Ryan Holiday? It's why we don't need to be scared about the books you have access to. And if we do need to be scared, if you can't think for yourself, if you are vulnerable to being brainwashed, or hoodwinked, or manipulated by a book in the library, what business do you have being in charge of anyone, let alone a cutting-edge fighter jet, or an aircraft carrier, or a weapon of any kind? As I said, this has to be the work of our life, this path to wisdom and education. Marcus Aurelius was seen leaving the palace one day in Rome. He's widely beloved and respected. He's been a philosopher for most of his life. And a friend stops him and he says, sir, where are you going?
39:01 Ryan Holiday? And Marcus says, I am off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. The friend was amazed. He said, here we have the king of the Romans in his old age, taking up his tablets and going to school. It's striking to me that Admiral Stockdale was my age when he entered the halls of Stanford. He was in his late 30s. He had four children. He'd spent almost 20 years in the military. He'd graduated from an elite institution, and yet here he was, going back to school. He must have been quite a sight. He was confused often on campus for being a professor. But no, he was there to learn. As Epictetus said, to say that the time for learning is past and gone,
39:44 Ryan Holiday? it's like saying that the time for happiness is not yet, or that it is now no more. No, this is the season. This is the time. This is the place, whoever you are, wherever you are in life. It's not just about becoming a student. But about remaining a student for the rest of your days. General Mattis would say that there is assigned reading for every rank of Marine, that even generals are assigned new sets of books that they must consume. You think about it, as you go through the ranks, you are exposed to new problems, new ideas. There are people who have been in your exact shoes, who have written about or been written about, and that experience is there for you. You can talk to them. You can travel back in time.
40:28 Ryan Holiday? You can anticipate the future problems you're going to have. He says that at no rank is a Marine excused from studying. And this is true, not just for the Marines, but for all of us. As I conclude here, I want to leave you with this idea that at some point you will come to a problem or an opportunity or a command, at which point you will need wisdom. You will need something to draw on. And it will be too late in that moment to get what you need. The challenge of an education, Stockdale would say later, is not to prepare people for success, but to prepare them for failure. And he said that it's in hardship and failure that the heroes and the bums get sorted out. You're going to want to draw on this virtue, but you can only make that withdrawal
41:13 Ryan Holiday? if you've been making the deposits along the way, if you've developed the compass, if you have cultivated the base of knowledge and experience. For Stockdale, the moment, the pivotal moment of his life comes in September of 1965. He's piloting his A4 Skyhawk over North Vietnam when he begins to take flak and has to eject. And as he is parachuting down into what he knows will be certain imprisonment and quite possibly death, he says to himself, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of apertitus. In this moment, he is thinking of what he had learned at Stanford. He is drawing on the wisdom that he had been studying, not just there in his college days,
41:56 Ryan Holiday? but also in his bunk on the carrier. And there he was exposed to years of solitary confinement, deprivation, torture. He said it was the laboratory. Of human experience. And it was an ordeal that is almost incomprehensible. And he would say that in these early days, as the highest ranking officer there, he had to put a lot of thought into what his orders should be, how he would communicate to the men he was charged with leading, how they would get through this ordeal. He quickly realized that government policy was woefully insufficient, that it had to be more the name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. That he said that had no chance of standing up in the torture room, that there, under the gun,
42:41 Ryan Holiday? as the masters of their own fate, said, "We had to throw out the book and write our own." At Stanford, he remembered Professor Rhinelander telling him that, "A man with a proper education, should the necessity arise, re-found their own civilization." And that is what Stockdale did in The Hanoi Hilton, tapping through the walls in furtive moments and brief encounters, through the letters he wrote home, through the messages that were passed man to man in the way that they resisted in the example he set. He was rewriting what it meant to be a prisoner of war, rewriting what it meant to resist, rewriting what it meant to stand on principle.
43:26 Ryan Holiday? He said, "There we were, founding a prison civilization, that as a group, we had the confidence to disregard bogus orders from home, and we had to become the center of our own world, where we could bring out the best in ourselves." As his father had hoped of him as he entered the Naval Academy, they had to develop their own laws, their own customs, even their own heroes. And that is what wisdom is about, that is what it was for, that is what allowed him to not just survive, but as he says famously in The Stockdale Paradox, "Turn it into an experience that in retrospect, not only would he not trade away, but that all of us, his descendants, able to talk to him and talk to the dead, are better for having..."
44:07 Ryan Holiday? Gone through there in the Hanoi Hilton there subjected to horrendous things. He was best. He was superior to others and certainly he was superior to those who tried to break him. And that's what wisdom is. That's what virtue is about. That is the message of the talk I wanted to leave you with. Courage, discipline, justice and wisdom. It's been an incredible honor to deliver these first three lectures to all of you in person. I wish I was delivering this fourth lecture under better circumstances. My intention was not to embarrass anyone. My intention was not to cause trouble for anyone.
44:50 Ryan Holiday? I just felt like in good conscience, I couldn't give a lecture about wisdom and not address the fact that a few hundred yards away, books are being removed from a library at the orders of the Secretary of Defense. I felt that, given that I had stood in that room and addressed the midshipman on the subject of courage, on the subject of discipline, on the subject of doing the right thing, I couldn't then fold just because the pressure was being placed on someone who was placing it on someone who was placing it on someone who way down the line is putting that pressure on me.
45:32 Ryan Holiday? That felt like a betrayal, not just of Stoicism, the philosophy I have tried to apply in my life, but also a betrayal of Stockdale in whose name I was giving this lecture and whose story I was telling in the talk that I was going to give. And look, I understand the impossible position that the good folks at the Naval Academy have been placed in. These are not choices they should have to make. They should not be having to weigh academic independence and their job security or their pension or negative media attention and angry people on the internet. They should not be having to be afraid of these things. And I understand that I'm in a very different position than them.
46:17 Ryan Holiday? And this is what I said. I said, look, I'm a private citizen. So not only am I not subject to these various constraints, I have both a freedom as well as an obligation to respond differently than somebody else who has slightly more on the line. There have been different times in my career where I have been that person on the inside who had to make a choice between staying and going and all the rationalizations and the very real trade offs that go along with that. But I'm not at that place in my career anymore. I'm in a different place. I think part of that is a result of what I've talked about and been trained in. Part of it is the privilege and freedom that comes
46:58 Ryan Holiday? from the success that I've had. And then also, a lot of it comes from my clarity, my understanding of having studied these things to know where you have to draw the line. And so that was a line I felt I needed to draw. And delivering these lectures has been one of the honors of my life. I've just been so impressed and inspired by these young men and women who chose a course in life very different than the one that I was even contemplating at that age. And just to be able to get to talk to them and learn from them and to walk the halls where so many great Americans have also walked has been
47:38 Ryan Holiday? just an incredibly moving and transformative experience for me. The implication is not just that I wouldn't be able to deliver today's talk, but my access and my welcome at this institution that I have taken such meaning and joy from being a part of and quite frankly, learned so much from, that that would go away. And that's what Stockdale meant when he spoke of extortion environments. Play along or else. Go along or else. Now, certainly, nobody intimated there would be serious consequences for me. But when they said, hey, you got to delete this if you want to be able to go on stage and speak,
48:20 Ryan Holiday? I feel very strongly that Stockdale's example tells us why we have to say no to things like that. Our ability to learn from these people who went before us, to try to make them proud, and to try to add our own experience on top of theirs. That's what the journey to wisdom is about. That's what the philosophical life is all about. And I wish all of you, whether you're midshipmen, whether you're in the armed forces, or just any person in the world trying to live a bit more philosophically, I wish you the best in that journey. And thanks for listening.
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