Are We In A Post-Shame Society? | Elliot Ackerman (PT. 2)

What happens when politics becomes performance and politicians become influencers? In today’s Part 2 episode, former Marine and NYT bestselling author Elliot Ackerman joins Ryan to talk about the idea that “everything’s a racket,” the collapse of institutional trust, and why restraint used to define real leadership. They talk about how cancel culture morphed into shamelessness as a superpower, why we might be living in a post-shame society, Ambrose Bierce’s wild literary exit, and why modern media feels more like professional wrestling than journalism. Elliot Ackerman is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels 2054 https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=elliot+ackerman*, 2034 https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=elliot+ackerman*, Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoirs The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan and Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning. Elliot’s books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and a veteran of the Marine Corps and CIA special operations, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Be sure to check out Elliot’s latest book, SHEEPDOGS https://www.amazon.com/Sheepdogs-Novel-Elliot-Ackerman/dp/059380385X. Apple Studios has actually bought the rights to develop the book as a series with Tom Hanks production company. Grab signed copies of Elliot’s books 2054 https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=elliot+ackerman* and 2034 https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=elliot+ackerman* at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=elliot+ackerman* Follow Elliot Ackerman on Instagram and X @elliot.ackerman https://www.instagram.com/elliot.ackerman/?hl=en 🎙️ Listen to Elliot Ackerman’s first time on The Daily Stoic Podcast: Elliot Ackerman on Storytelling and the Cyclical Nature of History https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elliot-ackerman-on-storytelling-and-the-cyclical/id1430315931?i=1000579760971 🎥 Head to Ryan Holiday’s YouTube channel to see what books he recommends to guests who come on The Daily Stoic Podcast | https://www.youtube.com/@RyanHolidayOfficial 📖 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/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: 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 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 Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope all of you are doing well. Yesterday was rough for me. It was just a rough day with the kids. Just it felt like not a single thing was easy or went well. And I was thinking about Stoicism as not necessarily a thing for making things go well, like it just was what it was. But I was thinking about it as a philosophy that helps you bounce back from those things. Like, how do you go into today, which is what I'm thinking about, and go, today is going to be better. Here are the changes I'm going to make. I'm not going to dwell. I'm not going to ruminate,

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  not going to write it off, not going to give up. I'm going to focus on how we can do better today. To me, that's really what it is. I don't think the Stoics never lose their temper. I think they do. I don't think they never get depressed. They never get frustrated. They never get pissed off. They do all these things. To me, it's about how quickly you recover, how quickly you get back to it. How do you find some of the humor in it? How do you laugh at it? That's, that's something I talk about with today's guest. I've, I've raved about Elliot Ackerman before, just like an incredible guy with an incredible history. I mean, CIA, the Marine Corps, he did five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. What about the Silver Star and the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart?

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  He's been nominated for a National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction. I mean, he is a great writer in addition to having this whole other career before that. He writes for The Atlantic. He's a fellow at Yale. And then his books have also sold super well. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's written these two really great novels with Adamo Stavridis, 2054 and 2034, which are sort of like imagining the future, this kind of sci-fi, like predictive sort of, here's what war in 10 years, here's what war in 20 years will look like. Here's what the world might look like in those years. But anyways, in the episode, one of the things we talked about was sort of gallows humor.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  I thought that was really interesting that the Stoics have some, uh, some interesting things to say about gallows humor. And then we talk about the quote that he uses as an epigraph for his new book Sheepdogs, which Apple Studios just bought the rights to alongside Tom Hanks to produce. But this idea that war is a racket. What is a racket? And there's this great quote from this guy, Sven Lee Butler, who was a general in World War I, about how, you can define a racket as something that isn't what it seems to the majority of the people, but a sort of select few know what's really going on. That's his definition of a racket. I think it's a pretty good one. And obviously rackets are very common today. Corruption is very common today. And so we sort of talked about all that. It's a great episode. I think you're really going to like it. You can listen to part one.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  And then Elliot and I walked around the bookstore after and recommended a bunch of books. If you want to watch some of those bookstore tours, head over to my personal YouTube channel. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Sometimes we put them on Instagram, too. I really appreciate Elliot coming out. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, at Elliot dot Ackerman. You can grab signed copies of 2054 and 2034 at the Painted Port. Sheepdogs wasn't out yet when he came by, but I really recommend a bunch of his books. And I've read a bunch of them. He's awesome. And we've talked on the podcast a bunch of times, so check out both of those. I gotta go pick up my kids, so I'm cutting this intro a little bit short. I'll talk to y'all soon.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, the epigraph of this book, I used it in my media book, and trust me, I'm lying. I think it's one of the great quotes of all time, war is a racket. And he defines racket as a thing that only a small inside group knows what it's about. And it's conducted at the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. That definition of what a racket is, I feel like is a thing they should teach in school.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  They should.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  Because you realize, oh, there's a lot of fucking rackets.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  A lot of rackets.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the open secrets where everyone in the space, they all know how this works. And they have private misgivings about it, or they all complain about it, or they wish it was otherwise, but like to the public, it's something else.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's often, it's often like, you know, the racket is like the mystery that's right in front of your face. You know, everybody, everybody knows this is going on, but no one can exactly see the mechanisms by which it works. You know, it's almost like the, you know, it's the old kind of like David Foster Wallace saw, like there's, you know, from his graduation, he's like there are two fish swimming along, one fish says, you know, the water's great in here.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  You don't know it in the water.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't even know you're in the water that you're in until, you know, you take a step back.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, or I remember I was working for this client this one time, and some media outlet had said something very unfair, and I wrote into them, and my client was very upset, and it was this whole thing, and then the writer responded, and he goes like, I don't understand. He's like, I thought we all knew this was professional wrestling. That's what he said. And I was like, wow, okay, like, that's the racket, right? You're under the impression that we're all in this, playing this thing. And like, I didn't know we were playing this thing, but more importantly, like, they don't know this is happening.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  And you just kind of realize a lot of things that are like that. And I do think it's hard, you know, we live in a world of like conspiracy theories and misinformation, a lot of distrust in institutions. It's hard, once you see one racket, to not start to think that everything's a fucking racket. And that's where the cynicism and the sort of negative spiral comes in.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just sort of postmodern thinking.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  That, you know, everything becomes sort of relativism. And, um, yeah, it's really, I mean, you know, I was even watching like all like the Trump, Elon stuff, like. Exploding everywhere. And I'm like, it's so and then so my, you know, I'm looking through like my social media feeds and I'm getting, you know, just mainlined all of that stuff. And the other thing I'm getting mainlined is, you know, the, you know, stuff, the, you know, or content that's sort of very nostalgic content for the 81st anniversary of, you know, the D-Day landings. I'm like, these are so such like, there's so insanely opposite versions of America. It's like tough to, it's tough to hold those two realities in your head.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, although, you know, McCarthy's not far off from that version of America. Like, there's nonsense then, too.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Right. I'm not, yeah, I'm not saying there's not nonsense then and, and not, you know, not kind of, not engaging in sort of golden age thinking.

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  But more, all of that sort of World War II medium is sort of like the, the height of, you know, black and white. Good versus evil, like not muddled. We all, you know, institutions save the world. And then, you know, and then you kind of look at so much of like our, you know, the political discourse today and the distrust of institutions and this feeling of like complete elitism and that everything is a racket. So get what you can while you can.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yeah, it's hard to read wars a racket and then like look at pictures of D-Day and you go, was that a racket?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Was that a racket?

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  And you know, you know, on some level that's not, but I think that's the point when, when, when an institution reveals itself to be corrupt or self-serving or, you know, not what it seems.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's hard, it's hard not to see that everywhere, even when it's not there. And then I think it's really hard if you grow up and all you have seen is the racket over and over and over again. Like if I'm, if I'm 21 years old right now.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  Like what's an institution that has not either failed or utterly fucked me over, you know?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's tough to say, you know, what are the ones that, that in American life, I mean, are still revered? I think, you know, I think the military is still revered, but, um, but I would also argue it's revered because, you know, it's become sort of a subculture in American society instead of one that's like integrated throughout the fabric of our society.

• 8:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  And it's one that I think is not. Well understood. Right. I'm surprised you just, there's such a huge chunk of America that does not understand. Yeah. The military. I mean, and there's obviously a slice of America that understands it all too well and that lives with it. But like in Sheepdogs, like what I, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to feel like it's funny. Like war is actually very funny. Yeah. And I've Or absurd. Yeah, absurd. Yeah, absurd. But what, but it's, it's almost like the, the humor is this like through line. Like when I would, you know, I've written like several books that all deal with war. And what I would notice was like when I would get together from, you know, friends of mine from that time and we would, you know, inevitably having drinks or, you know, talking about inevitably, we would always just be telling funny stories. Yeah. Like just laugh. We wouldn't be telling serious stories. It always reverts back to the funny

• 9:26Speaker 01

  stories. And I was like, you know, none of these funny stories are ever in my, anything that I write. Like, it's always the serious stuff. Yeah. I was like, and I want to write something that's like in the spirit of those funny stories, because there's a lot of truth there, because it's like, it's a coping mechanism. Yeah. Like, you know, you have to have the humor. You have to have it. And it's, you know, and in the theme of, you know, your work, I mean, it's almost a sort of form of like stoicism. Like the one thing you can control. Yeah. Is how you're going to react to these events. Yeah. And the ultimate way of showing that you're going to, you know, that you're going to, you know, react in a positive way, or that you have control of your reactions. I'm just going to cut a joke. Like right now, I'm so in control, I can cut a joke. Yeah. One of my favorite writers is Ambrose Pierce. Yeah. And he's fucking hilarious. But it comes out of his profound sort of civil war trauma. Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And his civil war stories, some of them are beautiful and tragic, but most of them are like funny. Like, there's a weird punchline to them. He's exposing the contradiction not to be like, look at these hypocrites. Right. Exposing the contradiction to be like, life is ridiculous. Subtle, yeah, absurd. And he has one, I don't know if you're familiar, I love this, his passing is one of the sort of more glamorous. Yes. Literary passings. Although I guess what he was, he was in DC, correct me if I'm wrong here. He got an assignment to go cover the war in Mexico. I think he just went. Or I think he just went. I think he had a death wish. Yeah. He was just done. And as I've read, I think it's, then the last time he was seen was under a tree at Shiloh, where

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  He'd fought because he went up.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  I shy like.

• 10:55Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know the, okay, I'll tell you.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Okay, tell me, yeah.

• 10:57Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so Civil War veteran, sort of Civil War hero, writes a bunch of books about it, becomes an editor on the.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  West Coast, sort of a contemporary Mark Twain. And then he goes to Washington and is sort of like the Gilded Age muckraker columnist guy, gets very disillusioned. It's funny, he's known as the cynic, right?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  But like, most cynics are scorned idealists.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  Right, so he's this, he's the scorned idealist. Actually, this crazy connection, his father is named Marcus Aurelius Bierce. And his uncle, who was also a Civil War general, is named Lucius Verus Bierce, which is Marcus Aurelius's brother. So anyways, I think at some point, he's decided he's done with life because he does a tour of all the Civil War battlefield.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  That he fought in. And then he writes a letter to his daughter, nephew, niece. He writes a letter to someone and he goes, hey, I'm gonna go to Mexico. I want to see what this Pancho Villa thing is like. He's like, I'll probably end up blindfolded in front of a wall somewhere, like a firing squad, but it's like, I want to see what happens.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  And he was executed by a firing squad in Mexico. And there, he's, he's one of the first of those sort of modern celebrities that people don't believe the accounts of his death. So he's seen all over, like, is, is Ambrose Bierce really dead?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Something like, it was like, he was seen, like, someone saw him at Shiloh, because his famous, like, the battle he fought.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  What I saw at Shiloh.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Shiloh, yeah, yeah, what I saw at Shiloh. Sounds like, oh, we saw, like, see the old man Bierce, like, at Shiloh, and then, you know, I mean, who, he disappears, yeah, I mean, he goes to Mexico and is killed.

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and I think the reason we think that is that's how an Ambrose Bierce story would end.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 12:42Ryan Holiday?

  It's always, well, it's always the twist, right? Like, the occurrence at Al Creek Bridge is one of the great stories of all time.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Great twist.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's always the twist.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:50Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea of him just predicting his own death and then going exactly that way is too on the nose. It has to be a twist.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, he's great.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Did you see, speaking of muckraking journalism, there was a great, if you ever read Balzac's Lost Illusions?

• 13:16Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  It's really worth, it was a great novel. It's, you know, one of his, like, you know, his, you know, doorstoppers and the condition Omen, but they remade it as a film in France. So I'm probably not doing a good job selling it right now, but if you want to write, we'll watch like a three hour French movie. It's an adaptation of a Balzac novel.

• 13:36Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Go check out Lost Illusions. It's on Apple, but, but in all seriousness, it's actually great. It's so good. You know, it's all about kind of, you know, France, 1830s, you know, post Napoleonic war. So everybody's just exhausted. Everyone's very cynical at this point. And it's about, you know, a very idealistic poet who comes from the countryside and he moves to France to kind of make his, make his way. And he kind of quickly winds up becoming like the greatest muckraking journalist in all of Paris. And that's sort of his journey of Lost Illusions, but it's very like speaks to this time, kind of this media scape. And yeah, so I'd recommend it. Really well done.

• 14:13Ryan Holiday?

  That Trump Elon thing you mentioned, I think it's so interesting. I was thinking about that. I was looking at some of the tweets and I go, here are the two most powerful people in the world, essentially, or two of the most powerful people in the world, and not an ounce of discipline or restraint between them. It's pretty remarkable because usually you become that way by having a lot of restraint.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  And I can't tell if, are they anomalies? Are they exceptions that prove the rule? Or is this the new world that we live in, which is a terrifying world in that there is no one who needs more restraint. Power is primarily about what you don't use, right? Like, I think when you think of great leaders, there's all the things they could have done and the things they prevented from happening. Like Eisenhower's greatest accomplishment is not using nuclear weapons in Korea, right? Washington's greatest accomplishment is resigning after two terms. The decision to not do things that Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, it's primarily about restraint, what you didn't do.

• 15:13Ryan Holiday?

  And to watch two people who have so much power and so much discretion reveal themselves to be utterly incapable of not acting on an impulse is both terrifying. And then if that's the trend, well, then we're definitely fucked.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  But I think it's, I mean, I don't know, I sort of tend to believe the like, you know, you know, Trump is, and again, this has been said many times, like Trump is the symptom, Trump is the symptom, like he is not. So, so he's symptomatic of the challenges that our society is facing in which there is, you know, massive distrust of systems, institutions. There are, you know, systemic reasons for that distrust, you know, a social contract that kind of like doesn't work as well as it used to. So if Trump had like, or had come on the scene, you know, I mean, he was on the scene for a very, very long time. Then like about the moment he finally met his moment. So the question becomes, you know, what, you know, what events or series of events will sort of be corrective and whatever they are, I imagine they will probably be very painful.

• 16:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. What is the

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Because you need to have, to have the restraint, you need to have felt the pain.

• 16:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Right. Yeah. To, to have restraint, you need to be shown the costs of excess or

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:28Ryan Holiday?

  The lack of, you have regulations because laissez faire failed.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:34Ryan Holiday?

  And so like much of what we had in the 20th century was a reaction against the gilded excesses of the late 19th century, right?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:45Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so the reason you had those, you had Eisenhower and Truman and Kennedy is that they were profoundly shaped by the, how bad it could get.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:56Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, if you have someone who has 200 million followers and says whatever pops in their head with very little concern to what people might do with this information or how it might seem, it's very hard then to expect, I don't know, a 22 year old kid to be like, I gotta take my responsibilities soberly.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and I think some of that too is, is if you look at like, I mean, we'll just talk about wars, like kind of cataclysmic world altering wars have seemed to occur in 80 year cycles, right?

• 17:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  And I would go back as far, you know, like Pollyanna wars, you go, you know, 80, 90 years, you wind up sort of with the first and second world war, which I would Actually, chunked together as one sort of, you know, massive shakeup of the global order.

• 17:40Ryan Holiday?

  And you don't have Peloponnesian War and Peloponnesian War II.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Too, right, exactly. Well, and you also have like a global consciousness now in a way like that you didn't, you know, a thousand years ago. But, you know, and then we project that like we're sitting there right now, like, you know, we're kind of similarly like at that mark. And I would say, why is it, you know, why is it 80, 90 years? It's, I think you are, you are ripe for that type of a massive global social upheaval at exactly the moment when everyone who can remember the last one is dying off and there's no living memory of it anymore. And we're, and we're at that point. There's really no living memory of how horrible that was. And no one will want to live through that.

• 18:14Ryan Holiday?

  I would argue, at least in America, there's some of that wisdom. Like, I was reading this article and it was saying that there's like one combat veteran in China, like one, one general has any combat experience. And it's like, it's like not particularly impressive combat experience. It's just like token experience. And you're just like, okay, so what is it? What does it look like when your main geopolitical opponent is not particularly personally aware of the costs? And then when you have, I think the trend in the US is a lot of sort of belligerence and play acting about things as without the historical understand. It's weird because we actually do

• 18:54Ryan Holiday?

  have the knowledge, but we've just decided to unlearn or to make light of that knowledge.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the

• 19:02Ryan Holiday?

  Our problem is actually our leadership is too old, right? So it's actually there is the learned wisdom is there. There's just some on some other level of flippancy about some of this stuff.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Well, some of it is like is decadent behavior. And I don't mean to use the word decadent like great parties and all that. But like decadent likes it. Once societies become completely risk averse, they just start to repeat themselves because they don't want to take on the types of inherent risks that you need to make something new. You know, that's why we're like, you know, afflicted by, you know, Mission Impossible six, seven, or Ghostbusters 10, or right? Because no one, no one's going to take the risk to do the whole new Ghostbusters. You know, and then that applies like culturally, it applies politically. So you wind up with this type of decadence. But what you don't realize is that actually it's much riskier to just keep repeating yourself because then you become a sclerotic society that is non adaptive. I mean, like, looking at this stuff, the attack in Russia, you know, the Ukrainians launched, it's, it's like.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  There are a lot of US defense systems that we poured a lot of money into that are, you know, every day the passes are looking more and more obsolete.

• 20:08Ryan Holiday?

  Because they're on floppy disks and shit?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they're on floppy disks or because they're like big aircraft carriers or bombers or, I don't know if you saw, there was like a meme going around where it was like, it had a picture of like, the Truman carrier, US carrier, you know, 15 billion British carrier, 4 billion French carrier, 7 billion Ukrainian aircraft carrier, it was like a box truck, it's like $70,000.

• 20:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  But, you know, there's a lot of truth into that and the danger for society is to be so decadent that you refuse to or don't have the appetite for risk that you need to, you know, to innovate and to stay on the cutting edge of things. I mean, I'm not, I'm still bullish on the US and I think, you know, we kind of always muddle our way through and I think we have.

• 20:51Ryan Holiday?

  A couple of years ago, people thought Microsoft was, you know, like, old and past, and now it's, it's easy to underestimate the value of resources and talent and, you know, you could always turn things around. But yeah, I was just struck by, it's interesting that the right is talking a lot about virtue these days.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:12Ryan Holiday?

  And then has actually embraced a kind of, like, a platform and a cast of characters that is about as close to anti-virtue as you can imagine. Not that, not that, like, I think the left is full of these, like, wonderful people.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:27Ryan Holiday?

  But, but I'm just saying, it is weird to think, like, what do you have to do to get kicked out of this?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  It certainly depends who you are too, right? Because I think there's some people who, you know, the ex, you know, I mean, it's the classic Trump style, like, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, no one would do anything. Because I think, like, the cardinal sin of a politician is being disingenuous. So if your brand is completely outrageous, you'll kill someone on Fifth Avenue or do whatever, you know, or like when even Elon was saying, like, I've got the goods on Trump, he's in the Epstein, well, everybody knows Trump's in the Epstein file. I don't think, like, I think if that came out tomorrow, it'd be a news story for like, six minutes and nobody would care.

• 22:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Because also, we know you don't care. You just spent 300 Hundred million dollars to get him elected. You don't care.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  You don't care. And for, yeah, so Elon doesn't care about it and Trump doesn't care about it because it's and it doesn't, it doesn't hurt Trump politically because he's totally on brand for Trump. Now, if something like JD Vance was in the Epstein files, like that would be a problem. I mean,

• 22:22Ryan Holiday?

  I don't even know if it would, though.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  You don't think so?

• 22:24Ryan Holiday?

  No, because I think when your entire identity is sort of built around a grievance against someone else, you're, you're disinclined to kick allies out of your, like, I think it's interesting, right? When someone gets canceled.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  Like, let's say you or I were to do something bad right now. The safest strategy would be to be like, I'm actually super Republican now.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 22:52Ryan Holiday?

  Like.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  To have any cultural valence anymore.

• 22:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's, there's, you know, like, okay, that's a direction. When Russell Brand knows he's gonna go down for stuff, he's like, I'm, I'm going on rumble.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 23:02Ryan Holiday?

  Because that's a tribe that's not discerning.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:06Ryan Holiday?

  As long as you agree to a handful of stipulations, right? It's like the, the gang will invite you as long as you're willing to abide by.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  You can play, yeah, you can play in their sandbox with them.

• 23:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and I think you wanna have a society that goes like, no, no, these are the rules. These are the, these are the, these are the things that we have decided are beyond the pale. And we don't care if you agree with us or not. You're, like, I mean, look, the, the left is flirting with this right now with Andrew Cuomo. Like, yeah, how badly do you want to win? Do you decide to throw all that out because this person is, you know, X, Y, or Z to you? So it's a very human thing, for sure. But I, I, it's like, what do you, how do you have a society that doesn't have the ability? Like, people have made this whole thing about cancel culture, which, you know, I think did get excessive.

• 24:00Ryan Holiday?

  But like, yeah, you wanna have some, some device other than jail where you go. Eh, you don't get to do this anymore.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Ryan Holiday?

  You know?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  But I think the, um, I mean, do people still get canceled? Is that still like?

• 24:13Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's what I'm saying.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  That guy doesn't really happen anymore. But it's amazing to go-

• 24:16Ryan Holiday?

  What do you do as a society that can't go, hey, this person was reasonably accused of this, even if they don't get convicted of it?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  No, but think how quickly this has happened, right? Like, I mean, I remember being in my living room with a bunch of friends and, you know, we were like having some dinner. I was like Friday night, like we had like six people over for dinner, seven people, all who kind of worked in newspaper or media, whatever. And it was when the shitty men in media list came out. Remember that?

• 24:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  I think that was like 2017 or something.

• 24:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And I remember everyone sort of looking at it and we're all like, everyone's good friends, but everyone just sort of like, I'm like-

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  Let's hope you're not on it.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, hopes you're not, hope whoever is like, oh, you know, and not, and, and just this sense of like, oh my God, like these people and knowing one or two folks who were on it and it's as though they had died.

• 25:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Like they had truly just died and then not knowing what to do with our newly debt. And I feel like that just couldn't happen today.

• 25:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and that's probably good.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, and that's probably good.

• 25:14Ryan Holiday?

  And then now it's like you could do something, it's probably the opposite where it's now, it's like, what would someone have to be accused of?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  But I think they're interrelated. I think the shitty media man list gets you to this point where now you can do anything.

• 25:27Ryan Holiday?

  What's the overprescription of antibiotics?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:29Ryan Holiday?

  And then you get superbugs.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:31Ryan Holiday?

  Basically, I think you get a world where shamelessness is a superpower.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And because it's the pushback-

• 25:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  To the over, you know, to the sort of the overcorrection.

• 25:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  But it's also for me too, it's like psychedelic to remember this world. Like I remember, there are a couple of presidential, I remember the 1996 presidential election really well, because it was just like such a non thing. It was Bob Dole versus Dole, like who cares? You know what I mean? It was, and I remember the 2001, because there were all of these questions, you'd been through the Lewinsky stuff and there were questions of Bill Clinton's marijuana use held in contrast with the idea, did George Bush ever try cocaine or something? You know what I mean? And like, and people were lit up about this stuff.

• 26:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Which just seems so-

• 26:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's weird. It's weird to be like how lit up they were. And then also, there's this sort of collective memory that things were calmer then.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  No, but they were wild. I mean, you know, it's not that like, they were wild given, right? Don't you, I don't know what you think. I remember it as they were wild given what norms were at the time. But if you took that same set of events and transpose them on today, you'd be like, who cares? It's so snoozy. Yeah.

• 26:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yo, you would kill for a scandal of that level of insignificance.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Right. But those scandals of that level of insignificance evoked a response as strong, if not stronger than some of the scandals we have today, because I sort of think we're beyond, it's, I don't know, it almost feels to me we're beyond scandal.

• 26:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, I think, what do you do when you're in sort of a post shame society?

• 27:16Ryan Holiday?

  I think what I have learned is that when you read about the founders, despite their raging hypocrisy and secret shames and whatever, there was a profound sense of propriety and honor. And there was this self you were aspiring to be, right? This sort of classical self. And that's why, I don't know, Washington decides not to take a salary.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:40Ryan Holiday?

  There's one scene in the Revolutionary War where his overseer, again, shitty person, overseeing a slave plantation, but rushes out and tries to make a deal with the British to protect Washington's plantation. Washington's like, I would rather be burned to the ground than get special treatment. It's not like he was somehow less self-interested than we are today.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:59Ryan Holiday?

  It's just there was this sort of norm, this culture that said, like, you don't want to be a person.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And he probably knew at a certain level, right? Like if, that it would be worse for him. Like, you know, you don't, like, trust me, you do not want to hold on to your plantation if you hold on to it that way.

• 28:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, exactly. And he probably meant that as far as fitting in with his peers, but also his sense of self, like his sense of honor. And so I think we, we have seen ourselves as this constitutional republic and we saw Courts, we overestimated the value of the machinery and the laws and what they said. And actually, the system was operating much more on norms.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Customs.

• 28:38Ryan Holiday?

  Customs, but also individual restraint. Like, I am not the kind of person, I could do X, Y, and Z. I would just never do X, Y, and Z. And we, we just presumed that it was the system keeping those people in check. But actually, it was all this, it was this cultural edifice, like the books we read, the stories we told, the statues we looked at. And when all that goes away, you're like, oh, we're really just hanging on by like whether or not the person is willing to commit hairy carry or not, you know? Like, that, that, and, and I think you also combined it, like politically, at a moment, when you just look at our politics,

• 29:16Ryan Holiday?

  where, um, you know, the machinery of just the very snoozy machinery that like, no one wants to ever look at because it's really boring, but like the difference between like a 527, a 501(c)(4), a 503(c), you know, is, you know, so like post Citizens United. Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Like a guy like Elon Musk, and like he was tweeting about like, oh, we need another party. Like, he can roll in. Like, if he wakes up and decides next election, he wants to dump $5 billion.

• 29:43Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Into some initiative or on, there, there used to be legal, like, you couldn't do that.

• 29:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there was a reason.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  They can now.

• 29:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Like, he can. He could go get someone on the ballot on his new, you know, party, a candidate that's the Musk candidate. That guy could be on the ballot in all 50 states, totally funded, ready to go. Because the DNC and the RNC don't have the same power they once had because super PACs now can raise so much more than they are. So they have more power. So it's, you know, the ground is like shifted beneath our feet too, without us necessarily noticing. And, you know, and it's the same way in our media, where like, I mean, You know, you once had these sort of story tastemaking.

• 30:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Institutions and they don't, you know, what's a New York Times versus like link versus any other link?

• 30:27Ryan Holiday?

  But it just comes down, but I think, I think at the end of the day, it comes down to this sort of personal thing of like, we've always had influential media figures, but some believe that that bestowed a certain responsibility and restraint. And then now people are like, I don't know, people are interested in it. That's what I'm going to talk about.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  You know, so. But what do you think is like, like, we always had muckraking journalism, right? So, but why do we think or that a hundred years ago that those degrees of.

• 30:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think there was a strong sense of identity of what the job of the journalist was.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Ryan Holiday?

  And the responsibilities and there was a culture around it and there was, I mean, it's like DC is like the only city left in America with a press club.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:06Ryan Holiday?

  But like, you wanted to be able to show your face at the press club.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:10Ryan Holiday?

  That's why you wanted to double and triple fact check your stories.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:14Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it wasn't the fact checker that's the lone line of defense. It was the sense of like, I want to get the story right.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:21Ryan Holiday?

  You know, but I think that's a big part of it. And then, so as that goes away, you get a new culture and the new culture is like, I have a lot of Substack followers and they pay me a lot of money. So that's my main job is giving them what they want, not these are the things that I would rather die than do, right? You know what, like, like there wasn't a legal framework that said, hey, if you get special treatment protecting your farm, George Washington, you're ineligible for office. It's like, you're the mayor of New York and you are indicted on corruption charges and arrested by the FBI. That you're like, no, I'm going to continue to do the day job. Again, whether you're convicted of the charges or not, the sense that like, hey, I temporarily possess

• 32:04Ryan Holiday?

  this job and I'm in this job in the service of others and I have lost fairly or not, I have lost the moral authority possible to effectively do that job. So I therefore have to resign. That's gone. And then the, oh, I'll just go make a deal with the president who I disagree with to get those charges tossed out and then I'll just keep being mayor. Like we live in a world, we live in an upside down moral universe where that's a possible story.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Possible story. I think maybe it's a possible storyline because like, what is the, what is the currency of the realm? Attention, money. Well, attention. I was at this, I mean, I was at a thing with some members and their staffs. And they were talking about, it was like a bipartisan thing, but they're talking about, you know, work they're trying to do across the aisle and, you know, and they're listening. And one of the staffers got up and was talking about like a tough vote that their member had had to make. And how this was, they were really proud. Like this was a real act of courage. They were, you know, willing to reach across the aisle and do this. And, you know, so much so, such an act of courage. And this member did it and lost 10,000 followers on Instagram. Whoa, like this is the act, this is the act of courage, but said totally straight faced, like,

• 33:12Speaker 01

  took that vote and lost 10,000 of their followers. Like, what an act of courage. I was surprised, but shouldn't have been surprised. Like, yes, that's the currency of the realm.

• 33:21Ryan Holiday?

  Mass is slipping a little bit.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Right. But it's like, it's like that's, it's for what, like, it's attention. It's, it's followers.

• 33:26Ryan Holiday?

  That is the racket, right?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the racket.

• 33:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's something that makes sense to a small group of people, but is not what it seems to everybody else.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Because everybody else is still like, postured as though it's this sort of, you know, or is, or many are poshing themselves as if this sort of traditional version of American virtue and civic, civic minded.

• 33:45Ryan Holiday?

  They are acting as though winning or losing elections, the main thing, although that wasn't the main thing. I, it's supposed to be the main thing either, but that they're going, no, actually, this is like, every politician is just an influencer, playing the game of politics.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:59Ryan Holiday?

  Instead of selling you fitness tips or showing their Ferrari or whatever. That's what they are. They're all angling toward, most of them are angling towards some sort of book deal or Fox News contract.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 34:12Ryan Holiday?

  Or they're effectively media personalities that occasionally gather in the Senate or House chambers to cast votes, but primarily are media personalities. And that's why it's so interesting when you talk to them personally, they're like, oh, what Trump's doing is awful, or I totally disagree with that. Like, I had this thing at the Naval Academy.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.

• 34:32Ryan Holiday?

  And I sent it to someone I know who's in office. And he's like, um, yeah, it's such a shame. And it's like, dude, you're one of the votes that put in the person who put in the policy. Like, literally you, you voting differently on this, on added confirmation. Hearing would have made this not happen. It's not a shame. It's like, it's a shame for me because I'm a citizen who has to lament this thing happening. You're one of the hundred people who's supposed to make it not a shame.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  And the only way you can behave that way is if you really, if you believe it's all theater and that it actually doesn't matter.

• 35:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, the racket to you is none of the votes matter.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter.

• 35:09Ryan Holiday?

  Media personality.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Well, and none of it matters and the country is just always going to be here. And the, the big bad thing can never happen. We fly above that. So what does it matter? I might as well get my Fox News deal.

• 35:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Because this is just a, a show that we're putting on.

• 35:21Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And so, no, and it's very cynical.

• 35:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  It's a very cynical view and a very dangerous, because it, because history teaches it always, always ends the same way.

• 35:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it's an entitled view.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very entitled view.

• 35:34Ryan Holiday?

  You are taking for granted the stability of something that you are, you know, what's that? It's that famous picture where someone's like saying something and then they're like sawing out the, the, like the support beams underneath.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:45Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, you can only like, maybe you get away with it. Maybe the, the Jenga tower falls after you're gone.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  No, but you're pulling the pieces out of the tower.

• 35:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Every day and it teeters and, I mean, listen, it's, it'll be, I mean, in our lifetimes, I'm certain the US will like, we will face some cataclysmic. I don't, you know, who knows what it will be, but there will be some type of challenge that, that demands a degree of national unity.

• 36:10Ryan Holiday?

  Like a pandemic that kills a million and a half people?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this was, it was interesting, right? Cause like the pandemic obviously didn't, in no way elicit that type of national unity. The closest thing that I felt that did was right after Russia invaded Ukraine. Like, but you know, it's like six months, maybe gave him six months and you could feel it.

• 36:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, then it quickly obviously dissipated. But the fact that even we had that sort of convulsion, you know, showed like we're capable of it.

• 36:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's also hard, I think, one of the, one of the benefits of history. Is you realize like it wasn't as united as you thought it was.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:49Ryan Holiday?

  Even in, we go like, how would we pull like, you know, today being the anniversary day. You're like, what was it? Sometimes you read, like, I'll read memoirs or I'll read fiction from that period.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:58Ryan Holiday?

  And you're just like, wait, World War II was happening then.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:02Ryan Holiday?

  And it's not in here.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:03Ryan Holiday?

  Because some people lived in fucking Idaho and were just hanging out. And it like, it wasn't, it, it feels like it was central to everything and everyone. And there were the same entitled.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:21Ryan Holiday?

  Checked out, disinterested, whatever people as there are now.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:25Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and we weren't all on the same page. In retrospect, we all act like we were, but we weren't.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  No, and you guys, I mean, the World War II, that time is a three year time horizon, which is like nothing.

• 37:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and right up until Pearl Harbor, it was incredibly divisive. You know, how the US should be dealing with the war that was going on in Europe. And so Pearl Harbor happens and we kind of have, you know.

• 37:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're right. You're right.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  It's like three years of unity.

• 37:48Ryan Holiday?

  We think it's World War, because World War II is actually like, you know, the 30s to the mid 40s. But definitely in America, we were not, I mean, they were having Nazi rallies.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  No, I know. Yeah, I know. I mean, psychologically, you know, yeah, it's, it's, you know, three years. It psychologically takes up three decades, I think, in how we think about the United States.

• 38:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there was a brief, a brief period and you go, okay, if, would we be able to marshal this if there actually was a real existential threat? You would hope so?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I would hope so if it was, you know, existential and clearly articulated. But, um, you know, I don't know. I mean, the things, the ones I worry about are like, are threats like economic threats, like, you know, you go through another 2008 or something like that. I mean, you know, how does the country respond to that? I don't know. You know, I think though, we are certainly in a time of massive, yeah, there's like massive, massive distress of institutions and lots of weak leadership at the helm.

• 38:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Uh, and tons of uncertainty in the air. And we're just kind of doddering our way through it.

• 38:46Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's a happy note. You want to go check out some books?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go check out some books.

• 38:49Ryan Holiday?

  I'll pick out some stuff. Will you sign this one for me?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 38:57Ryan 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.