You’re Addicted To The Illusion of Control | Sebastian Junger (PT. 1)

After you have faced death, you can’t believe what people care about online. In this episode, Ryan sits down with bestselling author and legendary war reporter Sebastian Junger. Sebastian talks about why he refuses to get a smartphone, how technology gives us the illusion of control, Ambrose Bierce, and the multiple times he was nearly executed as a war reporter. Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author ofThe Perfect Storm https://www.sebastianjunger.com/the-perfect-storm,Fire https://www.sebastianjunger.com/fire-by-sebastian-junger,A Death In Belmont https://www.sebastianjunger.com/a-death-in-belmont,War https://www.sebastianjunger.com/war-by-sebastian-junger, Tribe https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/tribe-on-homecoming-and-belonging-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=1&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r,https://www.sebastianjunger.com/freedom-by-sebastian-jungerFreedom https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/freedom-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=3&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r andhttps://www.sebastianjunger.com/in-my-time-of-dyingIn My Time Of Dying https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/in-my-time-of-dying-how-i-came-face-to-face-with-the-idea-of-an-afterlife-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=2&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r. As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film"Restrepo" https://www.sebastianjunger.com/films-1, a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is also the founder and director ofVets Town Hall https://www.sebastianjunger.com/vets2021. Follow Sebastian on Instagram @SebastianJungerOfficial https://www.instagram.com/sebastianjungerofficial/?hl=en and on X @SebastianJunger https://x.com/sebastianjunger?lang=en Grab signed copies of Sebastian’s books Tribe https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/tribe-on-homecoming-and-belonging-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=1&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r,https://www.sebastianjunger.com/freedom-by-sebastian-jungerFreedom https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/freedom-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=3&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r andhttps://www.sebastianjunger.com/in-my-time-of-dyingIn My Time Of Dying https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/in-my-time-of-dying-how-i-came-face-to-face-with-the-idea-of-an-afterlife-signed-by-sebastian-junger?_pos=2&_sid=5ebfd94a0&_ss=r at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=sebastian+junger* 🎥 Watch Sebastian Junger's first episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kApbOu6bXt0 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving break, if you are in fact on one, because you're listening here in America. If not, sorry. But it's funny, we were at sort of like a Friendsgiving before we went out of town. I was sitting with some parents talking about things, eating, and Samantha, my wife, walked by and I said, hey, could you grab my phone? I think it's like somewhere on the other side of the house. And one of the parents was like, what? You don't have your phone with you? They weren't like, oh, you're not watching your kids? Because the kids are there. They were like, how do you just not have it on you all the time? And I usually do, although I do try to actively sort of practice, you know, just like setting it down and walking away from it. I try to spend less time on my phone. I've talked

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  about this before. One of my rules, I don't touch my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake. It doesn't always go that way. Sometimes I need directions, or I'm listening to music, or whatever. The idea is I'm not getting sucked into the phone right when I start the day. And we're all sort of amazed at different people who use their phones less, or use their phones more. Most of us are just used to being on it all the time. Although I can imagine if you're from another time, or if you've been to war, or witnessed war up close, or seen like some real shit, social media.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  The things people are doing on their phone might seem ridiculous. I can also imagine if you've ever been shot at, if you've ever been lined up for execution, as today's guest was, not just once, but twice. You're going to have a different perspective on social media. That people scrolling their feed, people getting in fights, people chattering about stuff, people monitoring their followers, all that's going to seem, I think, silly to you, ridiculous to you, almost offensive to you in some ways. One of the Stoic practices, right, we talk about this idea of memento mori. And I think when you have experienced

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  different things, we've got that clarity that can come from understanding how quickly life can can leave you. You know, it turns down the volume on some stuff. It gives you a different view on some stuff. And certainly today's guest knows all about that, Sebastian Younger, because he doesn't have a smartphone. And, you know, you always meet people who are like, what? How do you do this? And you just realize different people have different experiences. And from these different experiences, they experience life differently. And we get so used to the paradigm, the lens on which we experience reality, that it seems inconceivable to us that there is any other way.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  I'm like, I was to him, you don't have a smartphone at all. And another parent was saying to me, you don't have your smartphone on your physical possession at all times. But yeah, we're all we're all different. And he talks about that in today's episode, talks about how technology gives us the illusion of control. Talk about one of our mutually favorite authors, Ambrose Bierce. And he tells some stories from his experiences as a journalist covering war. But I have loved reading today's guest's books over the years. Sebastian Younger is the number one New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom, and most recently, In My Time of Dying, which is one of my absolute favorites. He's an award winning journalist.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  He's a contributor to Vanity Fair, special correspondent at ABC. He's won a National Magazine Award and a Peabody. He's a documentary filmmaker. You may have seen his form, Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Just an incredible thinker, writer, philosopher. I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with him. And I really liked this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to split it up into two because we really got into it. You can grab signed copies of Sebastian's book, Tribe, Freedom and In My Time of Dying at the Painted Porch right now. And I'll let you get back to whatever you are doing with your family. And I hope you enjoy this episode.

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  So only a flip phone?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Only a flip phone is all I've ever had.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  How's it work for you?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Because I can't do all this stuff that everyone gets sucked into. Like, I can't get my email.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  You know, I can't navigate. I can't book a taxi. I can't do anything. I have to do it all myself as a human being.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Do you actually book taxis? Or do you call someone and they book you an Uber?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  No, I wave my arm. I live in New York. I wave my arm when a taxi stops.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  But what about like when you're traveling? You go places.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I call, I tell the hotel, like in the old days, hey, can you call me a taxi?

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  That's funny.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And I don't count on being able to just go anywhere whenever I want. Like, that's not part of what life is. You know what I mean? Like, it's just not my reality.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  How do you think that change? Like, how do you think that changes your reality? Like, what does that give you that I'm missing with my smartphone?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the problem with the smartphone is that it's designed to be an addiction.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Right? And once, I feel like, once you crack that door open, suddenly there's social media. In, you know, as part of your, every moment of every day.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Right? And email is this weird sort of Sisyphean task where...

• 6:16Speaker 01

  More email you do.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  The more you get.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  More you have to do.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  With every other job in the world, you do half the job, you only have half left. With email, you do half the job, you have three quarters left, right? And so the less email you do during the day.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  The less you have to do.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Right? So, and it's just peace of mind and the inconvenience. I mean, for me, an incon- for me, an inconvenience is an opportunity. So I don't know how to get to the, where's the restaurant, you know, like. So I'll ask someone like, hey, do you know how to get to the Italian restaurant? You know, whatever.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  So I've just had a little human interaction.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Right? And then this is why it drives my wife crazy, but like she has a smartphone. But sometimes we don't want to know where we are, we're driving. And I was like, listen, don't look at it. I'm just gonna do this by the seat of my pants. The sun's over there. I know that's west. We're heading, I know we're basically going south.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Like, you know, like, we're gonna, we're gonna like do this the old way. And it works. Like, I mean, it makes your brain engage with the world.

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  I was thinking about this the other day and I had some sympathy from my parents. And like, like when I leave to go pick up my kids from school, I know how long it's gonna take me to get there. Not generally, but that trip, like it's telling me it's gonna take forty one minutes. And so I can, and I was just thinking like, how stressful. And you know, like, oh, stuff happens, you get stressed, you try to pick them up on time, whatever. I think like they would leave work every day in the dark, not knowing like, would they get there in time for, right? And like, just the, the stress of that, that I as a kid was like, you made me wait for one minute in front of the school. Like, and just going, oh yeah, like, not that long ago,

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  you would leave and be like, it generally takes thirty minutes, but it could take ninety minutes.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Right. I would say there's also a stress, a terrible stress of thinking you can control your life to within the minute.

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  Also true.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Right? And then when life doesn't accommodate that.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  It feels like everything falls apart, right? So, so there's a, there's a, I feel like smartphones increase anxiety by increasing the illusion that you have control.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  And you don't.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, you don't.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Right? And so the old way, it's like, yeah, it might take half an hour, it might take an hour. I'm gonna bring a book in case I'm early. You know, they have a book in case I'm late, you know, like whatever, like it's a.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  And, and then that's how life is for humanity for, and, and is still like that for most of humanity.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, even just as an invention as simple as a clock, right? How it changes your sense of the world. Like you, you talked in Tribe about what life must have been like for people who weren't constantly aware that it was 12:30.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  The clock in the mirror, right? I mean, you don't have, you don't know what you look like, really, except in a very rough sense.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Right? And you don't know how old you are.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Except in a very rough sense.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And you don't know what time of day it is. And so if you're going to meet your, you know, the, the other clan that you're, you know, the, at the summer gathering at the forks of the river, you know, you head there like a little after the, the apple blossoms come out.

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  We generally leave at this time.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then there's a lot of hanging out, but that's what, what's the point of life? It's, it's, it's appreciating the moment with people you love, like in safety, right? I mean, whatever. It's like, well, I mean, what else is there, right? And so the problem with the phone is it deprives us of that in a weird way.

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm just like, whenever someone is like, living very differently than you.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  It might not be for you, but it's always interesting to go, okay, what is, what are they getting out of that? And so I'm, I'm curious about how it, it changes your just, your interactions with the world. Yeah, probably more people focused, larger margins for air, less awareness of certain things. Like you probably get home at the end of the day sometimes and find out big things happened.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  You're like, oh, wow. But everyone else knew about this for eight hours. It didn't change it happening or change what they did about it, but they just carried it for eight more hours than you.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Right. And the truth is that, I mean, collectively, rates of addiction and anxiety and depression, all that's in suicide are just climbing and climbing and climbing. Right? I mean, it's, if, if the outcomes for society were good.

• 10:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I'm like, whoa, maybe I'm missing out on something.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Right? And, you know, I think antidepressants have helped the society quite a lot, but it's interesting that we need so many of them.

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Right? You know what I mean?

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  But the outcomes look horrible. Like on the plane today, coming from New York, I sat next to a young couple who seemed to be married because they each had a wedding ring and they were acting married. And the plane landed and they each took out their phone and, and they were too young to be, have been married very They each took out their phones and while we're in the back of the plane row thirty five, right? So we had twenty minutes till. And they didn't talk to each other. They each took out their phone and watched TikTok videos separately on each of their phones. And one of the video that the young woman was watching was of a man who was saying it was a wedding and the groom was sort of like saying something to his bride to be and he

• 11:12Speaker 01

  was saying it by reading it off his phone. I'm like, what are you guys alive for?

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Right? Like, what? I mean, why even bother with anything? And if you have kids, you're going to stick the kid on your on the screen as soon as you can so that you can get back to your screen. Like, let's just blow up the planet now and be done with it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I just don't understand it.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  But what did you do on the plane? Are you one of those people that, as they say, you raw dog a flight? Did you just sit there stare at the seat in front of you?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I had to get up before I am, so I slept the whole way. But I could sleep anywhere. But I have, you know, I have two books with me.

• 11:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Right? And I read. Or I just sit and I think, you know, I mean, one of the great things about not having a smartphone is that your brain winds up in this sort of in neutral, in this idle gear, right? It's idling and it's not, doesn't have to do anything. You can't do anything distracting. And so you just sit there waiting for the bus and, you know, I make my living with my mind.

• 12:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And those sort of neutral moments are way more productive in some ways than when I'm focused at my desk, right? That's a very forebrain cognitive, like, you know, word oriented state of mind for me.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  But when I'm sort of spacing out somewhere, even driving, you know, it was a minimal task, you know, driving or in a plane or whatever. Yeah. Thoughts that come to me.

• 12:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Are intuitive and powerful and sometimes brilliant and totally essential to my work. And I would lose all of that.

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think most of the writing that I do at my desk is synthesizing and polishing thinking that I did elsewhere.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  And the problem with the smartphones is that you could endlessly distract yourself with like mundane, this mundane task. And these are things that don't matter.

• 12:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  They don't endure. They don't affect your life. Like, they're just, they're, it's garbage. I mean, in some ways, it's like, really is garbage. I mean, it's garbage, like, fast food is garbage. It doesn't, it doesn't have nutrients. It doesn't sustain you. It just passes the time.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  But it tastes good.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  But it tastes good. It keeps you from feeling hungry. Exactly. But I would say there's a great power in feeling hungry sometimes.

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  What do you do for music, though? Do you also have an iPod? Or do you just don't listen to music unless you're like sitting?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  I don't listen to music unless I'm at home.

• 13:20Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a CD player.

• 13:22Ryan Holiday?

  A CD?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I have an eight-track. No, I have a CD player and I listen to music at home. Yeah. I would never walk around listening to music.

• 13:29Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  No, I mean.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, that helps me get in the vibe, like in the headspace that I find music unlocks my things.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. Yeah.

• 13:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I can, I can kind of see that, but you know, the more you're injecting your brain with, the less you're.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  You're turning off different sounds to listen to specific sounds. I, I, I would certainly.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And I love music. I play music. I love music like, and my, our home is filled with music, but I just.

• 13:53Ryan Holiday?

  Not out in the world.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Not out in the world. And you know, partly I live in New York City. I live in the Lower East Side, right? Which it's not like the eighties or something when it was truly a dangerous place. But there's a lot of troubled people out there and you know, frankly, I want to be, I want to have my awareness about me.

• 14:06Ryan Holiday?

  Or just not get hit by a car.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. And particularly I have young children. So I'm like, I mean, it's not like I'm on combat patrol, but I do want to be switched on and observe and, and you know, music, because it's so lovely, you know, it take, it blunts that.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, hearing this about you, it makes, gives me a little context because one of my favorite stories about you, it's in the beginning of your episode with Tim Ferriss, you're going to meet him to do his podcast. I think you get to his house early.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:32Ryan Holiday?

  And you just start going through the book. He's like, he's not there. So he tells you to let him in. And you walked in and you started going through the books on his shelf and you, you had started reading Seneca. And you guys talk about this at the beginning, but that sort of, that sort of little bit of extra time that not, oh, I'll immediately go into my phone or I'll immediately go into work mode. It introduces a lot of serendipity and then a lot of time for reading, but that, that was, I guess, your, one of your introductions to the Stoics.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, yeah, it was my introduction to the Stoics, although I remember my dad talking about him. He was sort of classically educated in Europe. So, you know, all the, all those Greeks and Romans, you know, he knew them all cold. But, uh, yeah, there's a great, um, there's a great pleasure in, in that.

• 15:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  For me. And you know, I have a flip phone that I can make calls and I could text.

• 15:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Right. Which is, you know, a great blessing, you know, particularly with young children.

• 15:23Ryan Holiday?

  A couple of years ago, I worked on this project that got nominated for a Grammy. And so I went to the Grammys and they were like, you know, it's from like, there's two different Grammys. It was not the, the main musicians' Grammys. It's all the jazz albums and the classical albums. There's one where they, they get through all the awards and then the one on TV is a separate ceremony with like 10 awards. But anyways, they were like, hey, it's from, you know, it starts at four and then it's done at nine. And I was like, I'm not sitting somewhere for nine hours. And I brought a book and everyone looked around and looked at me like I was insane. And I was like, I'm probably the only person walking the red carpet into the Grammys carrying a book. But I was like, what am I gonna do for five hours? My award thing is gonna be eight seconds if we're lucky.

• 16:06Ryan Holiday?

  And also, um, I'm just gonna spend this whole time on my phone. What am I gonna do?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  When I was a kid, when I was in college, one summer I got, you know, my dad was a reader. He was brought up in Europe. I had a great education. I just read all the time as a kid. I was a little nerd. And, uh, one summer after my freshman year in college, I got a job with the, the highway department in the little town that I lived in. And, you know, there are a bunch of World War II vets and Vietnam vets, basically, and mostly white town. And there was a heat clause. And so if it was over, you know, 96 degrees or something, they couldn't send us out. But they couldn't send us home either. So we were stuck in the, in the garage, right? This sort of maintenance garage with the bulldozers and the dump trucks and all this other stuff. And I just lived in terror of having eight hours to spend in the town garage on a hot day, right?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  So I, no matter what, I always had a book with me. And I was an anthropology student and totally enamored of anthropology. And I remember I brought, I don't know why they just didn't beat me up right then and there. But I brought Cloud Levi Strauss.

• 17:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Right? The raw and the cooked, I think it was. And I was sort of reading my way through that. And so there was one day, it was a heat clause day and I sort of curled up in the, in the bucket of a bulldozer.

• 17:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Right?

• 17:17Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Or a backhoe. And, and I sort of curled up and the steel was nice and cool. And I was reading my French anthropologists.

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right. You couldn't have imagined his book would ever be consumed in this setting.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. And right. And this old guy, I mean, to me, old guy, he was probably, you know, my age now, 60, but he, he came over. And he tipped the book up to see what I was reading, right? And all the guys were playing, playing poker and looking at like girly magazines and that, you know? And I mean, it was, you can imagine, and smoking, you can imagine. And he tipped the book up to see what I was reading and just sort of frowned. And I was sort of braced for like, So, you know, I was the only college kid there.

• 17:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Like, I was braced for the inevitable comment, right? And, um, and he nodded and he said, "You keep doing that, kid, so that you don't wind up in a job like this."

• 18:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And so that's the, that's the power of reading and, and the, and sort of the power of not having some other distracting thing to do. And it forces you to curl up with Club Lovey Strohs.

• 18:13Ryan Holiday?

  No, so sometimes your life has to be like, look, it would be wonderful if every subject was riveting and every author was compelling and they're not. And sometimes your life has to be boring to a degree that you could sit through things that otherwise would be too boring for you to sit through. Like, you need eight hours to sit through some dense tome. If your life is incredibly stimulating or you have access to unlimited stimulation through your phone.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 18:37Ryan Holiday?

  How, it's an impossible ask to, to make someone read that book.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I, you know, and you, and so if you don't have that sort of easy task of, of scrolling through your social media all the time, you have to develop things that are harder to develop, but they're more rewarding. So I can, I, I play, I play music, right? And so I've, I've been in many boring situations and I can practice music in my head because it, I, I can hear the notes in my mind and I can move my fingers in ways that correspond with the notes. And I literally can practice music. Like, if I'm stuck somewhere for an hour, I could say, okay, I'm going to practice this song, which is I've been having trouble with. And, and they did, they actually did a study and they found that people that practice music in their heads, they took beginners and taught them, you know, guitar or something. And the ones who practiced music in their heads were told to practice in their heads.

• 19:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Developed much quicker, much faster. They learned much faster than the ones who did not.

• 19:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  So if they, if they just practiced on guitar and didn't also practice in their heads and they had a limited amount of practice time, the people that practiced internally developed really quickly.

• 19:42Ryan Holiday?

  I, I heard someone say once, it's very hard to be good at something that you don't think about in the shower.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  Like, if you're not, if, if it's not so captivating to you that it is filling that all the time, it's insatiable. It, you're probably not gonna.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're just gonna, well, you're gonna be beaten by the person who is thinking about it in the shower.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And the unconscious mind works in really powerful ways. So there's any number of, you know, mathematical problems that have been solved when someone's asleep.

• 20:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Right? Or physicists have solved problems in their sleep.

• 20:13Ryan Holiday?

  Archimedes in the bath or whatever.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But there's something about sleep that is very, very powerful as or unlocks the unconscious in ways that is like so powerful and intuitive that it will solve problems that the, that the sort of like slow moving, like forebrain doesn't just can't quite do. And, you know, what I've found is that I'm, if I, if I'm practicing a really hard passage of music and I can't get it and I can't get it and I go to sleep, when I wake up in the morning, my brain has worked on the neural pathways involved with that piece of music in the morning, I can play it.

• 20:47Ryan Holiday?

  I don't think everyone needs to go get a flip phone because not everyone's life is conducive to that. By the way, like we, I think we have some freedom to be a little bit more eccentric than you know, your average person. But certainly you can decide that it's not going to be the last thing you see before bed and the first thing you, you see in the, in the morning. And that gives you space to take advantage of that subconscious working while you're asleep. And, yeah, I go to bed, I have some ideas, I write them down, I wake up in the morning. That, when you wake up in the morning and you're fresh and you don't know the awful things that happened in the world while you're sleeping. You didn't get any stupid emails from people yet. Toni Morrison talked about how she, she had to do all of her writing before she heard the word mom for the first time.

• 21:32Ryan Holiday?

  But it's like, there is something about that space, that there's virgin mental space in the morning.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 21:38Ryan Holiday?

  And a lot of people soil it before their feet hit the floor.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:43Ryan Holiday?

  I like, I have a friend who, they go to sleep with the TV on. And I'm just like, your mind's definitely working all night, but you're stressed about whatever the CNN ticker is saying. So anyways, I think that, that fresh time in the morning, you've, your mind has just done a reset. How much are you going to stay in that freshness before you soil it, I think is, is really essential.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And I hear you about some, you know, some people have jobs that just require apps that do this and that. But there is no reason for all of us to be carrying around social media in our pocket.

• 22:15Ryan Holiday?

  Definitely. I have no social media on my phone.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, done like that, the smartphone is a real tool.

• 22:20Ryan Holiday?

  Basically, music, navigation.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:24Ryan Holiday?

  A camera that I take lots of pictures of my kids with. And yeah, notes that I, you know, I can Google stuff or whatever. But for the most part, I'm, you got the thing. What are the things that are going to make you use it 10x more than you ordinarily would? Don't have those on your phone.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Right. And those, you know, those are the things were, that were designed as addictions. And, and, and those addictions, the companies that developed those addictions have monetized your addictions to the tune of trillions of dollars.

• 22:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Right. You're trading your, your peace of mind and your, you know, an addicted life for their money. Right. And that to me is just like, I'm not doing that. Sorry. I'm just not giving you my money. Why? And you give me your disease. Like I said, I'm not doing it.

• 23:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And if Steve Jobs is alive, do you think he'd have social media on his phone? Or do you think he probably would have created ways to like, this is a Zen sort of Buddhist dude, right? Like, I, I think it's interesting to look at the technology habits of the people who run these services. They're, they're telling you, it's like finding out the smoking execs don't.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Don't smoke.

• 23:30Ryan Holiday?

  Or, or have, are upset if they catch their kids smoking.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Totally. Well, I mean, I haven't run this story down, but, but I heard that in Silicon Valley, all the, you know, the people working in those, in the, the tech industries, the private schools that they send their kids to do not allow smartphones.

• 23:47Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Right. So, you know, that's where Congress should sort of make some inquiries. Like if you, if this is unhealthy for your children, you develop this shit. Right? Like what, what legislation can we enact that would protect all the nation's children from the toxic effect of these addictions?

• 24:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, look, we were about to ban TikTok, which is the big, one of the biggest social networks, controlled by our primary foreign adversary.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:10Ryan Holiday?

  And we got to the one yard line. And why didn't we? It's because the people in power realized, oh, by saving said social network, they'll probably tweak the algorithm to be more favorable to us. And since the political leverage of, hey, do you want to get rid of something? That's bad for everyone, or would you like the thing that's bad for everyone to be slightly more favorable to the messages that you want out in the world?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and social media increases political division.

• 24:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Right? And polarity and you know, there are both parties, but I think right now the republic is particularly are invested in division.

• 24:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  As a form of political power.

• 24:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, look, the executives that he had in the front row, and again, I think this is less a political thing and more of a like politics thing, right? The powerful billionaires that he had sitting in the front row of the inauguration were not, you know, munitions manufacturers. They were attention merchants, right? They're not people who own casinos even, right? They were the billionaires who control the social networks, who control what consumes most of our cognitive power as a society, because those are the people that you have to have have on your side or have have properly intimidated to not fuck with you.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you know, if you can generate sort of rage in people, right? You can get them out to vote and social media is great for generating rage.

• 25:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Right? So I, you know, I can, I can totally see in today's political environment, like, I don't know, we don't want to get rid of social media. This is, I mean, that's the soil that our plant grows in.

• 25:49Ryan Holiday?

  Like the opium of the masses also.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 26:04Ryan Holiday?

  So in the book, In My Time of Dime, you open with this story of you almost drowning, right? And you know what I thought of when I read that? I was like, is this a occurrence at Al Creek Bridge situation?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 26:16Ryan Holiday?

  The first thing I thought of was Ambrose Spears.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:19Ryan Holiday?

  And then it made me think when you're talking about this sort of subconscious is this like. How do you know if you're dead or not? This could all be a flash of fleeting existence. And I mean, I think that's one of the greatest short stories of all time.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Oh, it's amazing. I remember I read in seventh grade, my seventh grade teacher told me I would like it and I did. And so I wasn't thinking about that explicitly when I wrote that section, but I did. That story came out of the same question and fear that I had after I almost drowned, which was afterwards, you know, I sort of had heard somewhere, sort of, and it's a sort of urban myth, maybe, but that when you drown, like you can live sort of an entire lifetime.

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  If time slows down.

• 27:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  And you might have the illusion of living out the whole rest of your life.

• 27:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  And then you drown and that happens at 30 seconds, right? And I just started to obsess over the idea that I might have actually, that I might still be drowning right now.

• 27:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And I think I'm 63, but I'm only 23 seconds into my 30 seconds of drowning. And how would I know? And I, you know, I don't really think that, but I couldn't disprove it.

• 27:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, Richard Linklater, who lives out in Bastrop, he has this whole movie called Waking Life about that, that premise. The idea that we're, you know, you have these dreams and they feel interminably long. And like they can tell from brain scans, it actually only occurred over, you know, one second. You know what I mean? In the dream, everything is, it's happening, right? And, and that, yeah, what if that's your life? It's kind of this philosophical, mind blowing of a thing.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Right. And then, then you can sort of get into the quantum physics of everything, which is just, you know, it's equivalently surreal and unanswerable and bizarre. And I find, you know, pretty terrifying.

• 28:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. You know, Ambrose Bierce's father's name was Marcus Aurelius Bierce. And his.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 28:09Ryan Holiday?

  His uncle, his father's brother was Lucius Verus Bierce, the two brothers that are co-emperors.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  That's amazing. Who were those parents?

• 28:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right. Somebody was a Roman history nerd.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:21Ryan Holiday?

  And then I'm fascinated with the, he's like, I'm going to give one of my sons the good brother's name. And then I'm going to give my other son the shitty brother's name.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 28:31Ryan Holiday?

  My god, just the heaviness and the lightness of that I find fascinating.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing.

• 28:37Ryan Holiday?

  He's such an amazing writer, too, it's sort of similar to you, and there's a handful of these, where it's like, I think a lot of his stories come out of the PTSD from his horrible civil war experience. I mean, he's there at Shiloh, he's terribly wounded, and then basically never is able to fully reintegrate into society after this experience.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things civilians don't get, because war is, in their minds, and it is truly, so terrible, right? So you would think that coming home would just be a welcome relief, right? And so I was talking to this guy who was in the special forces in Vietnam. He was a LRP, a long-range patrol, crazy dangerous work. They drop these guys behind enemy lines, really outside of any air support. So their faces are painted and they just, if their position's revealed, they'll die, right? And so he said that they would, at night, there was only like six of them, right? So they couldn't have a regular person on guard, because there's just not enough hour, you know, you need your sleep. So they would sleep, they would create with their bodies the spokes of a wheel, with their heads at the center,

• 29:44Speaker 01

  and their feet all sticking out like the spokes of a wheel. So if they were compromised and everyone sat up, someone would be facing the enemy.

• 29:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Right, and as my buddy who was in the platoon I was with said, it gives a new meaning to the word spokesman.

• 30:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, right.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  So the problem with vets in the civil war and on, you know, on back for eternity, like, the problem with vets is they don't get to come home, they're no longer spokesmen.

• 30:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, they're not part of a wheel anymore.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  They're not part of a wheel.

• 30:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  You're by yourself, so you're in danger, right? You're more in danger by yourself in a society that's at peace than you are as a LRP in Vietnam, like with your bros.

• 30:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  That's where, at least emotionally, that's what it feels like, right? And it's a very, very tough thing.

• 30:31Ryan Holiday?

  Well, with Ambrose Pierce, I think what's so interesting is he comes home, what was perhaps one of the most moral crusades of a war, it doesn't start that way, but it Becomes that way because he fights for the Union. And I think that's one of the, one of the things that you sort of miss in that story is the guy that's getting executed is, is a shitty guy. He's a Confederate soldier, right? Who is a spy, that's why he's being executed. But anyways, he comes back to what almost immediately becomes like Gilded Age America. And so it must have been

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 31:01Ryan Holiday?

  So, like, the moral injury of the war, but then coming home to this decadent, corrupt, corroded society where these people who didn't serve in the war are now effectively billionaires because they hired a substitute. And then they've, they've hijacked the government. You know, he, he starts in San Francisco, comes west as a, as a political reporter. So he's familiar with Stanford and, and Huntington, all these sort of barons who have purchased the government effectively. And he's just like, do you know what happens to Ambrose Spears?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  No, don't, don't tell me.

• 31:37Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, it's a crazy story. So he, he becomes this sort of muckraking reporter, powerful, sort of cynical guy who's, you know, tearing everyone down. And then at some point, he, he writes his sister, hey, I can't do this anymore. And he tours all the battlefields that he goes on, kind of like your thing where you go on your walk, tours all the battlefields. And then heads to Mexico where Pancho Villa and the sort of revolution is happening. And he's like, I'm just going to cover this. But he writes a letter, he goes, I'm probably going to end up lined up. His, his last letter is, I'll probably end up, you know, put in front of a wall somewhere and shot. But if not, you know, I'll say, you know, I'll, I'll see you again. And then that's what ends up happening. He predicts his own death and he's executed.

• 32:20Ryan Holiday?

  Like they can't, the, the Mexican army just can't wrap their head around this guy coming down to see what they're doing.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:26Ryan Holiday?

  For the lark of it and suspect he's some sort of spy and he gets, he gets executed and is never seen again. And there's, he's kind of one of those first guys that gets killed that the rumors are, maybe he's still alive somewhere. And so he, his legend lives on, but yeah, it's, he can't, he tries to reintegrate in society. And even though he achieves all this success and fame and, you know, reaches the peak of his he just can't make it work.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  There was a great journalist named John Reed, Jack Reed, who was down there at the same time as well. And he, he made it back, he was just a kid.

• 32:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And he made it back and he wrote, he wrote a book called Insurgent Mexico. And there's a, there's a paragraph that the, that describes the tropa, Pancho Villa's troupe.

• 33:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Coming at a gallop towards him. And it's extraordinary paragraph because basically Cormac McCarthy took that paragraph. I was like, I can do this. And his famous paragraph of the Comanche attacking the soldiers in Mexico. That is a famous paragraph, right? From Blood Meridian. Yeah. I adore Cormac McCarthy, so I'm not dissing on him at all, right? Yeah, you can see the influence. You can see that you could totally see the roots. It's extraordinary, totally extraordinary. Even the cadence and there were some of the repetition and the attention to detail, the frock coat worn backwards. You know, like, I mean, just all this sort of Cormac-y in detail. I was like, oh, that's Jack Reed. Right. It was totally amazing. After I finished my book in my time of dying, I came across this amazing anecdote about Dostoevsky that I didn't know.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  So when he was young, he was sort of a radical, like lefty, sort of like radical. And he had some sort of lefty friends and they would get together and talk about like ending serfdom. Like freeing the serfs and things like that, right? And the equivalent of like defund the police or something, right? You know, and, and you know, it got the czar's attention and you know, these are like sort of elite, elite society, you know, like intellectuals. And the kids were, they were rounded up, arrested and put in jail for eight months for speaking against the czar. Yeah. Right? And wasn't a particularly serious crime, right? They just needed their, this are hand slapped, basically. And then after eight months, they were released and loaded into a wagon, into a carriage.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  And they thought, there were like six of them, and they thought they were going to be driven to the court and, you know, processed and discharged their families, right? Of course. And instead they were driven to a town square and tied stakes. Yeah. And a firing squad was arrayed in front of them and the orders were given, you know, like charge your rifles, ready, aim. And it was a mock execution, but of course they didn't know that. Yeah. So two of the six men were insane for the rest of their lives. Yeah. The last moment, a rider galloped into the square and said, the czar forgives them. So two of the six men were insane for the, it broke them psychologically, right? Dostoevsky was made of stronger stuff and he wrote about it indirectly in one of his novels. But what he said was that in that moment. Facing the rifle barrels, right?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Like, in that moment, he noticed sunlight glinting off the steeple of a church. And he had the extraordinary thought, in moments, I will join the sunlight.

• 35:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And I will become part of all things.

• 35:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, like the overview effect that astronauts talk about.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:34Ryan Holiday?

  He basically has there in that moment.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  A part of everything, right? And I'm about to join everything. And he also had time to think, if I should somehow survive this, I will turn each moment into an eternity. Right? So that's what you were saying about, you know, when you're dreaming.

• 35:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Like, one second could last, feels like it lasts an hour.

• 35:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  So there is that sort of elasticity of time in these moments of like psychological extreme.

• 36:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, two things. One, how fucking insane is it that we are still executing people by firing squad? Like, that was brought back? Like, what does that say about who we are as a society? That that is a fucking real thing? That is deranged. But two, there's another Amber Spears story. It's called Parker-Addison Philosopher. And it's about a soldier who's captured and he's going to be executed. And he thinks he's going to die by firing squad. And he's sort of very philosophical about it. And, and he's sort of cribbing, like, some of the Stoic stuff. He's like, you know, I knew I was going to die when I was born. And he's talking with the general of the Confederates or whatever. And he's sort of, he's saying all the things that a philosopher, Seneca going to his death. Right? He's doing it.

• 36:45Ryan Holiday?

  And then they have this long conversation and then the sun comes up and the general goes, okay, take him out to be hung like a spy. And immediately, all the artifice of it collapses because in his mind, he, he saw himself getting, you know, an honorable death, firing squad, and then the shift. And then this whole, not spoiler, it's a two, almost a 150 year old story. But, but he, he sort of. Freaks out and he, in the, in the scuffle, he grabs a sword and he ends up killing the general. It's this crazy story, but I think, you know, the, the meta-ness that you find out that Ambrose Spears is killed as a spy is kind of mind blowing, but he has this sense that like, hey, I'm going to be able to meet my, my death bravely because I prepared for

• 37:27Ryan Holiday?

  it. And then in the face of the overwhelmingness of it, it breaks him psychologically, just like the Dostoevsky people were talking about. I thought it as Ambrose Spears kind of making this commentary of the, it's all well and good to talk about these things and then you don't know until you face your own imminent demise for real in that moment.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. I've twice in my life as a journalist been in a situation where I thought I was going to be executed. But so now there's not a combat situation, you know, but like there's nothing I can do and it's going to happen. And I just, I remember feeling incredibly weak. Like, I mean, like physically weak, weak and numb and not entirely there.

• 38:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Right. It was really, and, and the psychological consequences later of that state of mind, even for an hour were profound.

• 38:15Ryan Holiday?

  What do you mean?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, the sort of trauma of spending an hour thinking I'm going to be shot is like lasts for years.

• 38:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Right. But it was a really, it was really interesting. It was, it was so frightening that it wasn't frightening. It was, it was just a form of sort of a profound muscular weakness and just a removal.

• 38:32Ryan Holiday?

  Like a disassociation?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Just hollow. Like, yeah, extremely unpleasant.

• 38:37Ryan Holiday?

  When you are under the impression you were about to be executed, where does the mind go?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Well, I was, you know, in one case I was told I was going to be, and I didn't quite believe them. Right? I'm like, I don't know. I'm in Nigeria. I was, I was detained by this, this sort of rebel movement that accused me of being a spy. And this one guy walked up to me with a machine gun and said, when we kill you later, I'll be the one to do it. I just, I was like, he's not the commander. There's a lot of reasons to be worried right now, but I'm not convinced this is gonna happen, right?

• 39:06Ryan Holiday?

  Is that a protection mechanism, you think?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was both a protection mechanism and, you know, I think I was right. Like, I was right. I mean, obviously, here I am, right? And, you know, they would have been executing an American spy, like someone from the US military who was spying, US government who was spying. That's a big deal.

• 39:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, I sort of knew, like, okay, maybe there's nothing I can do about it, but this may be a bad move for you guys, right?

• 39:33Ryan Holiday?

  You maybe have sensed other profound recklessness, if that's what...

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And I bet you guys know that.

• 39:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And in the other, I was stopped, I was stopped by rebels in Sierra Leone on a remote road with a couple of government soldiers and there's like these 20 rebels stepped out of the jungle with machine guns and, you know, extremely bad situation and, you know, they were like sort of, it was a little like the SAVs here, so leveled their, cocked their rifles, leveled them. One guy shouted, "No, no, no, don't shoot." You know, like, they were arguing about whether to shoot us.

• 40:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right. And not, so it's not a planned thing? It's like, this could happen right now?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an ambush and they stopped us and I was with government soldiers, they were the, these guys were enemies, right? And, and a couple of journalists and, you know, that went on, the argument went on for maybe 10 minutes and it was a long 10 minutes. But I just felt, all I remember thinking is, it's gonna suck for my parents. I didn't have kids, I didn't have a family then, but it was gonna suck for my parents and I really hope it doesn't hurt.

• 40:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  I just remember that, I hope this doesn't hurt. Yeah.

• 40:44Ryan Holiday?

  In the book, you say that, like, what a near-death experience does is, like, introduce you to death. Like, you are now on nodding terms with this thing that's kind of an abstraction prior and to basically everyone else who hasn't had that experience.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and my, you know, my sort of like self, psychological sort of defense mechanism was that all the other times that I'd come close to getting killed, and, you know, maybe three or four times in my career, right? That it always always been in war zones. I mean, I was going to places that are dangerous. That's the deal. You you're going to go into a casino? You might lose some money, right? I mean, that's the deal, right? And you might make some money, but that's the deal, right? Yeah. So I sort of knew that. So after my buddy Tim was killed in Libya, I made a movie called Restrepo with Tim. He and I shot it, directed it, produced it, the the whole thing. And in Eastern Afghanistan and and we were very, very close and went through a lot together. And after he was killed in Libya, I just I got out of war reporting. Yeah. I'm done.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  And I had the idea, this delusion, that now I'm I've slid into home base. Yeah. I'm safe. I'm not going to war zones anymore. How could I die? Yeah. Right? I'm not gambling with my life. I got married. I had children. And I just thought I'm fine. You know, I'm I was a very fit 50 something year old, right? And I'm not a walking heart attack. I'm like, you know, I drive carefully. I mean, I sort of did check every box you can check, and I'm not going to war zone. So I had nothing to worry about. And what I didn't know, of course, is that your human body is a huge liability. It can be a huge liability and you can be extremely healthy and still have something going on in it. And entropy is working on us at all times. At all times. No, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And and, you know, I of course, I knew, okay, you get cancer and, you know, you're going to die in a few months or a few years. I mean, of course, we all know we're in that lottery. Yeah. But what I didn't realize is that there's things that can kill completely healthy, athletic people. Yeah. Kill them, you know, a brain aneurysm. Sure. Or whatever, like, you're dead by dinner. Yeah. You know, you think you're just having a normal Tuesday and you're not you're not going to be here by dinnertime. Yeah. Right? And that really shook the foundations of my reality in a way that the war zone stuff didn't. And and it was, and what I had was I had undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery. An aneurysm is sort of unnatural ballooning of the artery for, you know, various reasons, but I have a ligament in the wrong place.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And it's a very, very random freaky thing, right? And it's extremely rare where I had it and extremely deadly. And, you know, in mid-sentence, like literally in mid-sentence, talking to my wife, I felt a pain in my abdomen and I was dying.

• 43:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  That quickly, I was dying and I had an hour and a half to live.

• 43:24Ryan Holiday?

  I was in Australia last summer and, you know, the walk from Bondi to that, that walk along the coast there, there's this cemetery, I think it's the Bronte Cemetery. It's the cemetery right on the coast, one of the, maybe the prettiest cemetery in the world. And I'm looking out over it and I was just thinking, every single person here was surprised when it happened. Like, they all thought they had more time. Almost nobody dies and goes, I'm past due.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:53Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Like even people who are old, even people who have cancer, everyone thinks that it's gonna happen a little bit further in the future than it does. And, and here we are, walking around our normal life, acting like we're not that person, like we're not gonna be surprised by the thing that's obviously gonna come too soon and surprise all of us.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had this, as I sort of tried to process what happened to me, because, you know, I barely survived and, and the psychological consequences for me lasted way longer than the physical consequences of almost dying. And I had this thought, like, okay, if I was in prison and I knew I was gonna be executed tomorrow morning.

• 44:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And I had some books, I had a musical instrument, like I had, you know, whatever, the things that have given me solace and comfort in my life, I had them available. Would I play music? Would I read my history books?

• 44:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Right? Why would you? You're gonna be dead tomorrow morning, right? But then it's like, okay, but I'm gonna be dead at some point tomorrow morning. Why do anything?

• 44:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Right? And so I was, it was a real question, like, who do you wanna be? If you know this is your last 24 hours, who do you wanna be in those 24 hours?

• 45:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Right? And that's where I come down against like smartphones, not to bring it around, smartphones. Like, would you scroll through social media in those last 24 hours? And if you wouldn't? What the fuck are you doing, doing it today? Cause you don't know.

• 45:17Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's, it's a tricky thing, right? Like the memento mori idea from the Stoics and from the philosophers, like someday you're going to die. Right? Or Marx, really, in meditation says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do in saying that. Now, if you knew you were going to die in 24 hours, like there, there's something existentially obliterating about knowing that an asteroid is coming or, you know, you just caught an infectious disease that kills in seven hours or what, right? If you knew for certain you were going to die in a short amount of time, it, it's kind of, it's actually not that sort of morally and philosophically clarifying because everything becomes meaningless in some sense, especially if you don't believe in an afterthought. But the-

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Afterlife.

• 46:02Ryan Holiday?

  Afterthought.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I believe in afterthought.

• 46:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. After, especially if you don't believe in it in the afterlife. But I think it's more that you could go in 24 hours. You could go in 24 years, whatever it is, right? And it's not so much the certain looming of it, but the fact that the uncertainty of it, that's what provides, I think, the moral clarity of like, hey, I gotta be pretty good about how I spend this time. I might have a lot of time, I might have a little time, but I do know it's a finite amount of time and will I have a good accounting for it whenever it runs out?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I actually, I think, I hear what you're saying. I think you could argue it either way, right? So you could also say that the fact that I only have 24 hours left makes those 24 hours more meaningful.

• 46:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sure.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Right? So you, do I want to spend those 24 hours with my children? Yes, I do.

• 46:51Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right? How would I be with them? Would I be distracted and not paying attention? No, they'd be on my lap. I'd be holding them. I'd be telling them I love them.

• 46:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  And then I'm going, but they, you know, we always with, you know? That's the parent you should be really, in some ways, all the time, right? And so I think you could argue that it's more meaningful and less meaning. And that's the irony of life.

• 47:12Ryan Holiday?

  Remember a couple of years ago when there was that missile alert in Hawaii? And they like, like, what do you do, right? Like, obviously, I just mean, like, you basically don't do anything. You just do a couple, you just, you make a- Couple phone calls, depending on where you are, and then you kind of sit there and wait for it to happen, right? So there's, I just mean, there's something obliterating about that. And so maybe people are intimidated about thinking about that. But it's, it's also for certain that it is going to happen at some point. And so thinking about how do you spend your life day to day and not, not eliminating the enormous inefficiencies and time wastes and anxieties, that, that I think is very helpful.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Obviously, you know, for whom the bell tolls by Hemingway. And you know, the sort of like central drama of it is this is the night before this military operation where Robert Jordan, I think his name is the narrator or the main character, he's pretty sure he's going to get killed.

• 48:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Right. They're blowing up a bridge. They're blowing a bridge in the morning, right? And, you know, he's just met this young woman. And I remember, this really struck me when I was young, I read this and, and he said, they had, you know, one night to have a love affair.

• 48:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  And he said, we have to make an entire lifetime together. We have to, we have to fit it all into one night.

• 48:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  And so I think what we're both saying is true in different ways. But one way of looking at life is because I don't know.

• 48:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  How do I fit a whole lifetime into today?

• 48:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Because it might be, that actually might turn out to be what happens.

• 48:42Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Seneca talks about, can you close the books on life each day? Like, can you, can you go, this was a good life up till this point?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  If it ended right now, yeah.

• 48:49Ryan Holiday?

  And then if you wake up tomorrow, you're with house money. And that I think is incredibly powerful and helpful. I've talked about this before, but I think about so many of the things we're doing. It's, it's because like, we're working on this project so we can get the rewards when it comes out. Right? Like you work on a book and are you, are you miserable while you're doing it for the reward of having done it? Well, in light of the fact that you could die before it comes out, that seems like a bad strategy.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:17Ryan Holiday?

  So how do you, how do you make some subtle shifts? So when you save the draft for the day, you're like, I am proud of where it is now. And I'm putting it out now when I'm saving it. And I'm putting it out tomorrow when I save it. And the day after, it's just that you're seeing this all as this kind of self-contained thing and going, hey, this is good. This is, I just try to think like, this is enough. Up until here, this has been so much as opposed to, I need tomorrow to make the shittiness of today worth it.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Right. Well, you know, this, I mean, there's a sort of lesson in there for parenthood. I mean, parenthood is hard, right? It's really hard. And some, for many people, I think it's just about the hardest thing they've, they'll ever do.

• 50:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  And one of the things that parents tell themselves, I think, is, well, it's going to get easier later. Just get through this part.

• 50:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  It'll get easier later, but you're cheating yourself.

• 50:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Right. Get through this part. What are you talking about? You have a two-year-old.

• 50:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're gonna mourn that two.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, just because something's hard, doesn't mean you can't take meaning and pleasure out of it.

• 50:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Right? Hard, this society is like allergic to things that are hard. I'm like, listen, life is hard. Like if that gets you to check out, if hardness gets you to check out of everything, you're gonna lose.

• 50:34Ryan Holiday?

  You're gonna hope you get lucky.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, you know, you have to do is like, no, no, no. Having an 18-month-old who's, who's colicky and crying all the time, that is enough.

• 50:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  That's what I want. That's enough. Yeah, it'll change. It'll get easier, but it won't necessarily get better, right? This, this is it.

• 50:54Ryan 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.