Olivia Nuzzi Knows She Messed Up

It’s easy to defend yourself. It’s harder to tell the truth. In today’s episode, Ryan sits down with journalist Olivia Nuzzi for a raw, unfiltered conversation about what it really means to get through dishonor honorably. In the wake of her recent scandal, Olivia opens up about how small compromises compound into big consequences, why accountability still matters in a culture that rewards shamelessness, and the strange grace of being forced off a path you didn’t realize was destroying you. From 2017 to 2024, Olivia Nuzzi was the Washington corre­spondent for New York magazine. Most recently she was the West Coast Editor for Vanity Fair. Her new book, American Canto https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/american-canto?_pos=1&_sid=7298e5193&_ss=r, is out now. 🎥 You can watch Ryan's conversation with Olivia on The Daily Stoic YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 📚 Stay tuned for the video of Ryan giving Olivia book recommendations on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@RyanHolidayOfficial: https://www.youtube.com/@RyanHolidayOfficial 📖 Grab signed copies of American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/american-canto?_pos=1&_sid=7298e5193&_ss=r at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/american-canto?_pos=1&_sid=7298e5193&_ss=r You can follow Olivia onInstagram @OliviaNuzziX https://www.instagram.com/olivianuzzix/?hl=enand on X @OliviaNuzzi https://x.com/Olivianuzzi?lang=en 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:54Speaker 01

  The biggest political media scandal of our time. Since everybody's talking about it. Journalist Olivia Nuzzi.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Had to resign from her job at New York Magazine because it was revealed that she was having an affair with RFK Jr.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. I know a thing or two about falling under the sway of people that you look back and you go, what? That's insane. What was I thinking? I look back on my early 20s and I'm proud of some of it and I'm not proud of other parts of it. I talk about some of it. I don't talk about some of it. You know about some of it. Maybe you don't know about some of it. I wrote about a bunch of it in Trust Me Online, which came out back in 2012. It's sort of an expose and a tell-all slash memoir about.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  My pride through the media and marketing and PR system in the sort of mid aughts, web 2.0 bloggy worlds. It was crazy. I screwed up. I look back and I go, what, what was I doing working for some of these people? What was driving me? I mean, in retrospect, this stuff becomes clear, right? I was clearly imprinting on some of these figures, like that were powerful and successful and controversial and they seemed competent. They seemed smart. They had like an energy that I went to like a moth to the flame.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  Dap Charny being one, a guy who was brilliant and provocative and creative and a genius in many ways, and then tragic and flawed and dark and ultimately quite a scary figure in other ways. I remember towards the end, you know, when he was fired by the board of directors and there were these investigations. I remember, you know, my life was threatened. I remember checking my car for bugs. It was a crazy period. I would just go, how did I get here? What happened? What was I thinking? And, you know, it's not just like it was inexplicable. Like it had consequences for people. I did things that I shouldn't have done. I talk about

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  this in Courageous Calling, actually, like where I got asked to do this thing that was not just illegal, but like morally repugnant. And I didn't do it, but I, I didn't exactly resign in protest. And I didn't because I was, I was scared. I didn't because I didn't want to lose my salary. I didn't want to get fired. Like in retrospect, it's obvious. Like, why would you want to keep a job that not doing something illegal could get you fired from? But when you're twisted up in it, when you're in the moment, when you have made compromises along the way, when you've turned your eyes away from things along the way, when you've said things publicly, you get twisted up, you get upside down, you get in over your head. So do I regret that period of my life?

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, yeah. I also obviously understand that it was formative. It shaped me. I wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened. So I guess I'm just saying it's complicated and something I'm still dealing with and processing my own role in it, what I did, what was done to me, what I should have done differently, what I learned, what I took out of it, which is basically all that you can do in life. And we all have our own versions of that. It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. And, and I, I say all this to segue to today's guest, who I've known for a while. I appeared in one of her stories once because someone she was writing about had read. Trust me, I'm lying. And, uh, you know, we've gone back and forth every once in a while.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  I'm a big fan of her writing. And you've probably read some of her pieces too. I mean, her pieces drove the news cycle many instances over the last decade or so. When Donald Trump first met Olivia Nuzzi, as she writes in, in her new book, American Canto, she says, "Trump looked me up and down and said, 'very young, very beautiful.'" And then the same person, when she wrote a piece that he didn't like, tweeted that, "The reporter was a shaky and unattractive whack job, known as Tough But Dumb As A Rock, who actually wrote a decent story about me a long time ago." Her name is Olivia Nuzzi.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  I guess what I'm saying, if you have no idea who this person is, is that she's been on a wild ride. Here, the Daily So Podcast, we don't usually talk about the events of the news. We don't break news. We don't talk about scandal or gossip. We talk about ancient philosophy. We talk about timeless lessons. We talk about being a person in the world. If you know anything about Olivia's story, you know, well, she got herself into some trouble. In fact, she was supposed to record this like a week ago, but she was in the middle of parting ways with Vanity Fair, the second sort of

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  Shoe to drop in a series of shoes to drop in the last year or so. She talks about all of this in her book, American Canto, which I will read the first sentence in the back cover. It says, "A mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole." Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014 when the political landscape began to reconfigure itself around a singular personality

• 6:51Ryan Holiday?

  whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next 10 years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials, and government in blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation, propelled her to the heights of her profession. Then, in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Nuzzi her job and reputation. Amid a full-blown tabloid frenzy, Nuzzi went quiet, drove west, and spent the next year in self-imposed exile at the edge of the country, where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear-eyed account of what she and we have experienced over the last decade.

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  I will say, this book is actually very good. I thought the reviews did it a complete disservice. I don't know what exactly is motivating some of those reviewers and writers. I don't know what exactly people wanted, but I thought as a piece of writing, I say this as a person who has written books, written a book about media and their own role in it, and as a person who owns a bookstore and loves this genre of writing, I think it's actually a fantastic book. I think it's worth reading, like so many of her articles are worth reading. I'll give you a couple famous ones. I examine Donald Trump's ear and his soul at Mar-a-Lago, the conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden. And then, the one that ultimately led to the events that we will be speaking about.

• 8:18Ryan Holiday?

  Directly and indirectly in today's interview, the mind bending politics of RFK Junior's spoiler campaign. So, look, if you know about this story or don't know about this story, let me tell you sort of what to expect in this interview. I'm not holding their feet to the fire. I am not interrogating her. I'm not that interested in the specifics and the gossip, or the, did this happen? And what about this? And why didn't you do this? I am just interested in what it is like to be a person on one side of something like this. What happens when, what the Stoics would call the passions overwhelm your faculties, your values, your decision making process, and you get yourself into real trouble?

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  What happens when, again, another ancient term, you unleash the furies of the public's sense of injustice upon yourself? Right? What does it feel like to be publicly shamed? What does it feel like to lose your perch at the top of your profession, both deservedly and undeservedly for things you did do and things you didn't do? We talk about the difference between guilt and shame. We talk about who leans in and who leans out in situations like this, how you learn to trust yourself when you have a pattern of behavior or thinking that does not serve you well, that gets you into trouble. I don't know how much more I need to introduce this. I think it's a great interview.

• 9:48Ryan Holiday?

  I think the book is great, as I said. She's signed a bunch of copies. We have them at The Painted Porch. You can go back and read some of her writing. She's worth following on social media. On Instagram, she's at Olivia Newsy X. Paradoxically, Twitter, she's at Olivia Newsy. And thank you to Olivia for coming out. She didn't have to do this interview. She didn't have to reschedule this interview when her life blew up like a second or third time. But she came out to Austin to do it. Then we walked around the painted porch. The video of that bookstore walkthrough posted up on YouTube here, probably tomorrow, maybe. I'm glad this happened. Seems like she's doing better. Better than I would have expected. So that's good to hear for people who are following

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  very closely, who are angry or worked up about it. I would say I get it. Like, I'm pretty, as I say in the interview, pretty understanding of people who get themselves into situations like this because I've been there at least a little bit myself. But also, like, there's no one who is less of a big fan of the other person involved in this than than me. I mean, I think he's one of the chief villains of our time. I think he's done unimaginable harm. I shudder for young children, not just here in America, but in the developed world, that the sort of just found me wrong and dangerous and deranged things he has done to not just like the medical system, but the public good that is public health and the

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  public good that is our information about public health. So I am not a fan. In fact, I will say, just a little inside baseball, back in February of 2024, somebody asked me if I wanted to come to this, like, dinner he was at with a bunch of other podcasters, and maybe he'd come on the show. And I said, thanks for the note. Hope you're doing well. I could not in good conscience attend, let alone donate money in support of someone who has spread so much utterly untrue and dangerous nonsense for so long. I wish Mr. Kennedy nothing but failure and shame, because at this point, obscurity is too much to hope for. So if I can separate my feelings about that to the human being that was involved in all this and have this conversation, I think you should be able to do that as well. And I feel like I learned

• 11:59Ryan Holiday?

  a lot. I enjoyed the book. And as always, I will keep reading what Olivia is writing, because she is a great writer, and I hope she keeps doing it. And she's signed a bunch of copies of American Canto, which we have at the Painted Porch. I will link to that in today's show notes, or you can swing by the store on Historic Main Street here in Bastrop, Texas, to grab it. I grabbed mine at the Seattle Airport, flying back from my talk there. I guess this was Thursday. She was gonna do it on Friday, had to cancel last minute. We moved it to Saturday, and then this stuff with Vanity Fair happened, so we canceled it. I wasn't Honestly, totally sure if it was gonna get rescheduled, but I was pleasantly surprised

• 12:42Ryan Holiday?

  when she popped up at The Painted Porch here on following Thursday. So that would be, I guess, two days from now, if you're listening to this on Saturday when it comes out. Again, grab signed copies of American Canto from The Painted Porch or wherever you get the book. She read the audiobook, which I'm sure is a great listen, and let's just get into it.

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, I have a book for you.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  I just thought about it as I was reading the book. I'm gonna walk you through the books room, pick out some.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  This is actually my copy, but I wondered, have you read By Grand Central Station? I sat down and wept.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 13:14Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know about this book?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 13:15Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so I was thinking of books that might be interesting to you.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Elizabeth Smart, Elizabeth Smart?

• 13:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, not that Elizabeth Smart. Okay, this is a woman, she's in the 40s.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:23Ryan Holiday?

  She falls in love with this poet.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 13:25Ryan Holiday?

  And...

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Did it end well?

• 13:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, she falls in love with this poet, and a love is an understatement for this.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  She falls in love with this married poet.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:34Ryan Holiday?

  They have four kids.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  All right.

• 13:36Ryan Holiday?

  Her family disowns her.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:37Ryan Holiday?

  She is, I think, deported at one point for like moral turpitude. He continues the other family. She's a, she's a famous...

• 13:47Speaker 03

  What made you think of me?

• 13:49Ryan Holiday?

  She's a famous copywriter. She's like, you know, this would be like if Peggy fell in love with Don Draper.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:55Ryan Holiday?

  This really happened, and then she wrote this kind of like fever dream of a novel about it.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Of its time.

• 14:02Ryan Holiday?

  Where she, yeah, she doesn't mention the person's name. She doesn't mention the specifics of it, but it's this beautiful novel about a torrid, life-ruining love affair.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  I can't relate to, I can't relate to that at all.

• 14:18Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure you can't relate to at all.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  I can't relate to that.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  Her parents have the book banned in Canada where she's from. It just like, at one point, I mean, she's so infatuated with this person, she, he's in London, she's in America. World War II is happening, and she crosses the Atlantic to go be with him, even though she's risking being killed by a German U-boat.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  I like the choose deported.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, she's either deported, or it's like a violation of the Mann Act, like you can't travel. It's just craziness across the board.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Well, I look forward to reading about this foreign experience. Thank you.

• 14:53Ryan Holiday?

  But it's a beautifully written, but it's like the source material is torrid and life ruining. But the art that comes out of it is beautiful, but also remains totally mystifying. The reason I thought of you and then the reason I was going to ask you about it is like, she's writing what happened. But I'm wondering as she's writing what happened, does it make any sense to her?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  Like, did you have that experience? Like, could you look back at the events of the last couple of years? And you recognize that person and there's a logic to it? Or are you just like, it's an out of body experience?

• 15:29Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say there's a logic to it, but there's an illogic to it. I guess. Does that make sense?

• 15:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, tell me.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not like I think, oh, boy, what happened? It's not like I, you know, fainted in a field of poppies and woke up on the wrong coast or something. But I can look back and see like the suspension of certain critical faculties.

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  And that makes sense to me, but it doesn't make sense.

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Right?

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, totally.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:58Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there is, I think people think that your life can be heading in the wrong direction. And then you have this sudden epiphany and then you realize you're heading in the wrong direction. Then you change everything.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  And it's usually much more gradual. And then even the exiting out of it is gradual. And then the coming to terms with what happened and why it happened and where it could have gone differently. That's gradual too.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Well, I felt really grateful for the, I think I write at one point that I felt like the hand of God came and like swatted me off the path that I was on. And I felt grateful for that, like it was abrupt and unpleasant. And, um, um, you know, it was not a smooth landing. It was sort of like being ejected from, from a moving vehicle. But I was grateful for it and I'm grateful for it now because I thought, well, if that hadn't have happened. Cause it struck me that you don't just wake up one morning and make a huge mistake, right?

• 16:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Like necessarily, there are many minor or imperceptible mistakes that lead to just like a misaligned worldview, right? Or just a misshapen path that you're on.

• 17:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  And. I look back and when I talk about kind of seeing the suspension of critical faculties, I see my dismissing that or dismissing discomfort in my daily life, right? Like dismissing, um, thinking that it was possible and that there would be no penalty for like pushing aside things that I didn't want to deal with. And all of that seemed to sort of accumulate into circumstances or conditions that made an enormous mistake possible.

• 17:30Ryan Holiday?

  There's another moment in fiction that I thought of when I was reading your book. And then I, I also thought about in my own life, because I have some experience going down a path that I'm like, what was I thinking? And I missed it, like, I missed it when I read it in high school. I missed it when I read it a bunch of times, but in, in Gatsby, uh, there's this moment where Gatsby comes to Nick when he's trying to get in his good graces. And he says like, hey, like, I know you don't make a ton of money doing what you do. I had maybe this business opportunity you could help me with. And Caraway says like, only later did I realize that that was potentially a pivotal moment in my life, that basically Gatsby was trying to draw him into his world. And Caraway sort of dismisses it out of hand because he's not interested in it, but he

• 18:13Ryan Holiday?

  doesn't, that was his chance to enter the underworld.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:18Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And you don't, like, the moments where you don't do it or you do it, don't seem significant in the moment. You're not like, I'm gambling everything on this because they all feel like small little decisions.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think I, you know, I was like this improbable success in the straight world. Right? And a lot of my success came from the fact that I didn't play by rules. Right? And I was willing to walk into spaces where maybe I shouldn't have been or, you know, use my wits or whims to, uh, to acclimate myself to environments. And, um, when you're rewarded for that over and over again, I, I think it kind of, I guess it created a sort of feedback loop where I write about Icarus and, um, someone was asking me about it, like some journalists at the New York Times, I think recently. And their interpretation, which I felt said more about this person, as it's often,

• 19:12Speaker 03

  interpretations often do, was that I was talking about being close to like other people's power, right? Circling too close to other people's power. But to me, it was just like, I had a, a misunderstanding of my own power, right? And my own ability to, um, know, I was so used to being right.

• 19:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and taking risks and those risks paying off rather than blowing up.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  And people deferring to me, right? Like, I got this job at New York Magazine when I, I think it was like 23 or 24, and I was their first Washington correspondent. And I had never been a Washington correspondent, never covered a White House. And luckily, the guy in the White House had never been there before either, right? And there were some great things about having a fresh perspective, but there were also perilous things about that, right? But it's a collaborative environment where there are photographers who've been there since, like, the Carter administration. You could say, is that normal? And they're like, oh, yeah, this is, this always happens. Or, no, this has never happened before. But I was used to, you know, I'd say, what do I do about this? To like, my editor in chief. And he'd be like, oh, you figure it out. Like, and I'd be like, okay. And then I would figure

• 20:13Speaker 03

  it out. And I was correct most of the time, right? And I got, I think it contributed to just this incorrect view that I didn't have to police my own judgments, right? Right? Or I didn't have to just second guess myself as it related to my calculations about right and wrong, and whether or not a risk was a good one, or whether or not there was a, when I was acting out of ego, or fear, selfishness, or whatever. And I think that kind of accumulates into this misconfigured worldview.

• 20:47Ryan Holiday?

  When you're not exactly surrounded by people for whom strong, black and white moral judgments and rectitude is a big priority. I imagine it's destabilizing being around other people who are also not just bending the rules, but questioning why there are rules at all.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Or just ignoring. It's not even like questioning the rules, it's just rejecting the premise of the rules.

• 21:11Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I mean.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Right? Yeah. And I mean, I've said this before, but it's like Trump's lawlessness, that lawlessness animates the whole spirit of the place, whatever place that may be, right? And you feel like in order, it's like every cop needs a criminal, you have to kind of get inside the mind. And the lawlessness inspires lawlessness. And, yeah, I mean, the whole, a lot of the book is about perception, right? And it's about the distortion of reality. And I was trying to accurately, like, reflect.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  The phantasmagory, right?

• 21:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  And what it just has felt like to be here and from my vantage point, right?

• 21:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I had a moment like that. So for people who are listening, they don't know who I am. I worked for a bunch of controversial people over the years. And this was a messy, exciting period in my early and mid twenties. And like, I remember I read this book, again, another work of fiction, which I do think sometimes fiction gets to the truth of it more than nonfiction can. But Bud Schulberg, who wrote On the Waterfront, had this book called The Harder They Fall, which is about a boxing promoter and a press agent. Like, so the boxing promoter is corrupt. It's affiliated with the mob. And he's this press agent who's formerly a journalist, now he's this press agent. And he's sort of in this morally dubious space.

• 22:32Ryan Holiday?

  And to spoil the ending, it's an amazing book, but it's not really spoiling the ending. At some point, he says, and he keeps, he's really good at what he does, you know? He's good at placing stories and creating this narrative. They're building this fighter up so it can take a fall. And he says towards the end, you know, I, I told myself that I could deal in filth and not become the thing that I touched. When I look back on my own story, I feel like I read that and that's what changed the trajectory of my life. That I was like, I gotta get out of this.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:03Ryan Holiday?

  And then I remember I was talking to Tim Miller, who interviewed you.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Loved him.

• 23:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he's great. And we were talking about this because we wrote similar sort of confessional books. And I was like, well, let me go like, see when I read that book.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:15Ryan Holiday?

  And I read that book in 2009. So I, like, many years, like, I understood the information. I understood what I was playing with, and then I didn't do anything about it. So we, we can know the information. We can even know that we're walking a tightrope or that we're playing with fire, or whatever you want to use. And then it can take us a while to wake up to it.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  I think you can understand something intellectually, though, and it takes a long time to absorb it, like energetically and spiritually. But you wrote that book, you were what, like 25 when you wrote that book?

• 23:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, 24 maybe.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. And I reread it when I was writing this and I had talked to you about some of what I was writing because I Was worried, too strong a word, but like I was trying to sort out the puzzle of like, how do I deal without feeling like I'm shirking responsibility?

• 23:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  With things that I was a part of that were kind of just had rotten values or right? Or how do I describe those things without it feeling like I'm putting blame on on anybody else, right, or on systems or something? And it was really, it was important for me to reread that book because I remember reading it years ago and thinking like, man, this guy's crazy. Because it's a really, it's aggressive, it's not the right word, but it's like, it's a machine gun of a of a story, right? It's like, it's really effective because it's narrow and you're not trying to, you're not throat clearing, right? You're not, it was, you know, it's like the opposite of how I write in some ways, right? And I just, I found it very instructive to kind of be confronted with with that on the other side of my mistake.

• 24:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I didn't have any literary abilities, probably.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  No, it's well done. It's well done.

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  But I mean, you wrote, you wrote like a real book about your experience and that was to me, I didn't, I don't think I had the capacity then or the the sense that anyone was interested in it. I was just trying to kind of go like, this is all the things that I've seen. Isn't this fucked up?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's an urgency to the style, right? I guess that's what I was trying to describe. Yeah.

• 25:07Ryan Holiday?

  Is that something you wrestled with? Like, because I know I did with the book where you're like, I'm indicting a system which I am also a part of. And there's kind of a, that's a tricky position to be in.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  I wrote this profile, it was like my favorite piece I ever did at New York Magazine. It was about an anonymous Republican and one of the many anonymous Republicans who would kind of shit talk Donald Trump during the first Trump administration, but was a part of the system, right? And part of that story, and it was part of what informed the the choices I made in this book, but part of the story was about how, I think I say something to the effect of like, the press provides the alibi as it prosecutes the case, right? Like, it was selfishly in my immediate interests to rely on people such as that.

• 25:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Even though every time I would rely on an anonymous person such as that, I was further kind of cementing that system of anonymous contradiction with on the record behavior or decisions and and helping to perpetuate this.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  System that's bad for people, right? And probably bad for American society and was getting worse. And it's not something I wrestled with necessarily with this book, but like I wanted to make sure that none of my decisions, I had rules for myself for surviving spiritually, like a scandal and public shaming.

• 26:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  And among the rules were just, you know, everything has to be from love, not for love. Right? I could never use anyone as a human shield. I could never spare myself and harm someone else. My first order was to have dignity amid my big indignity or honor amid my dishonor or handle my ethics scandal ethically. Right? And I, I wanted to make sure I wasn't, you know, making any decisions on the page that conflicted with those principles or that anything that was coming from fear or coming from ego. And just, you know, like the classic showing, not telling. Right? I mean, that's sort of was the standard the whole way through.

• 27:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I heard you say that somewhere, that you were trying to get through a dishonorable thing honorably. What does that mean to you?

• 27:26Speaker 03

  I mean, I was thinking a lot about honor.

• 27:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Right? Like when you're being, you know, rightfully, in that case ridiculed, you're prompted a lot to think about what you did wrong.

• 27:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  And to assess what you did wrong, to assess what went wrong. And I think there was something very interesting about a crisis, like a public drama, right? Where everyone gets kind of distilled to their essential, like the, the lawyers are their most lawyer-y. The press people are their most press people-y. And I felt like my impulse to not sort of judge anyone by their worst behavior kept running into conflict with the fact that I felt like, well, It's like people who drink, if you're, if you drink and you're like an angry, mean drunk, that always scares me about people because I think, oh, that probably is revealing something essential to their character.

• 28:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  That otherwise is, you know, not accessible or that they're able to kind of keep a lid on. And I don't think it's a small thing, right? And I guess it's the same under the kind of external stress of a scandal or of public crisis, where I just felt like I was experiencing a lot of people making selfish decisions that were dishonest and like just screwed up. But I didn't want to do that. And I, it was a lot of me like having to assess really quickly, okay, I'm going to accept this short-term discomfort or short-term pain rather than eternal suffering, right? And it's actually easy to do that.

• 28:56Ryan Holiday?

  It's interesting that you would respond that way because I think the fundamental innovation, if you want to call it that, of this moment in culture is that people have figured out that if you dispense with honor or shame, it's actually a hack for getting out of scandals and triumphing over them. Like if you just, you throw out any sense of personal accountability, if you refuse to cast a stone at yourself, if you just pretend it didn't happen.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 29:24Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, a lot of the mechanisms that we have as a society for holding people accountable for things, because most of what is a scandal is not actually illegal, you can kind of survive. And that's, I mean, there's always been shameless people, but that's kind of a new phenomenon.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  No, I mean, shamelessness like animates public life in America now in a way that I think it feels not new, but it feels like an exaggeration from how I remember it, you know, in the Bush era or something of my youth. But a lot of people told me like, just keep going, basically, like, these guys don't care, you shouldn't care either, you should just take whatever assignment to go cover the end of the election. And, and it was an attractive thought. I was like, oh, like, could I just, I could just pretend this didn't happen? And then like my insistence that it doesn't matter will eventually like manifest?

• 30:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's not an appendage on Jeffrey Toobin columns in the New York Times.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think there should be.

• 30:19Ryan Holiday?

  But I'm just saying, like, there are people who, things happen and they just keep doing what they're doing.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  But unlike with with Tubin, like I I really I did something wrong, right? Those ethics rules are really important. They exist for a reason and I ran afoul of those rules. And in that way, I hurt the whole industry and I took that seriously. The kind of like public part of what I had done wrong. And then privately, like morally, spiritually, I took it really seriously. It just seemed like this, it was a big deal.

• 30:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Like it wasn't, even if people were like, oh, who cares? And, you know, the few people who were expressing something like that.

• 30:50Ryan Holiday?

  You let yourself down.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  I I cared.

• 30:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  I cared. I did something wrong and I knew better and I didn't do better. Right. And like that struck me is like, well, it struck me.

• 31:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Right. And it just seemed like like something I needed to take seriously. And I just, I couldn't really, I couldn't really like entertain this notion that I would just continue on and continue to, for a second, I was, okay, yeah, maybe I will go cover the end of the election for like Greed and Carter or whatever. And I just like, it would front afoul of the main rule of like, I had to be able to live with myself. Right?

• 31:25Ryan Holiday?

  Where does that come from? Because that that, where does that sense come from? Where did you learn that or where did you pick that up, you think?

• 31:32Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 31:33Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think I'm just, is that an innate sense? Is that something you get taught? Is that a religious connotation? Because it is, it's something that is clearly absent. And I'm just wondering how we lost it or.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's interesting. My brother and I were extremely different. Like he's just really, he's more type A, like he was always in sports and he's a more disciplined person in a lot of ways, like a lot of overt ways. And our, in a lot of ways, our parents were not very disciplined people. Right. Like they struggled with addiction. My mother struggled with, had, you know, mental illness and they both died young. And they were sort of wildly irresponsible in a lot of ways. Right?

• 32:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  But they were really good people and they were really like, in ways that I couldn't have appreciated at the time that that each of them died. Like I, I think most girls who were like, who really valorized her father. I assumed, when he died, I kind of assumed it was grading him on the curve.

• 32:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  You know, like, and I wasn't going to interrogate it too hard. I just kind of thought like, in one part of my brain, very tiny voice, like, I'm probably overstating things, right? But that's okay.

• 32:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And I didn't really know very many people. You know, he died when I was, I think, 21, 22. And then as time went on, and the more people I met, and the more that I just like was on this planet, the more I came around to feeling like, oh, no, he was remarkable in all the ways that I thought and in ways that I didn't know enough to appreciate. And the way that they both were disciplined was like, they were both really hard workers. And they were both, there was a certain honesty to the, just to the way that they lived and the way that they tried their best to like be here, right? And I guess, so I see that with my brother too, where like for him, you know, it manifests more as just like, you know, personal responsibility and like, he does Ironman competitions and like,

• 33:22Speaker 03

  but I think I see sort of the same quality in the both of us. And like, you have to just deal with, with the world as it is.

• 33:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  And you can't kind of, you can't wish your way out of misfortune, right?

• 33:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what I would think, but I don't, not everyone ascribes to that clearly.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  No, but I mean, is that your problem or mine?

• 33:41Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's not my problem, but it's just, it's an interesting, when that was a widely held societal belief, it acts as a check. And it's weirdly, that's actually the fourth estate, not journalism. Like one's sense of shame or honor or reputation, or one's ability to be like, yeah, I guess I, I did fuck up.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:00Ryan Holiday?

  That's actually what journalism was invoking, because the idea that like, hey, if I get caught, that will look bad and I care about whether I look bad.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:09Ryan Holiday?

  As opposed to, I only care if people who like me like me or whatever. And so like, there's a playbook now, right? It's like, you fuck up or you're, you sense of bad stories coming. It's like, like, you call this like the Russell Brand playbook. Like, just become a right winger or good, right? Or conversely, if you're a right winger, you're like, actually become a never Trumper. Like you, you can switch sides and then that side will forgive all your transgressions, provided you hate the other side. And this is this kind of like immunity clause you can evoke, right? Or invoke. And so what journalism used to do would be the, the disinfectant, but you, the disinfectant had to. You had to care. You had to care if you looked bad in this report.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:51Ryan Holiday?

  And when that goes away, or if that isn't a thing people care about, we keep throwing the exposes and the articles and then we're wondering why it's not working. And it's like, it's not working because they, they just decided that it, it doesn't work anymore.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's astonishing. And it's also like, when I, you know, I found myself in this just due to my own error, right? This completely bizarre world of like, sources familiar and like, you know, narratives forming and, and persisting and kind of contorting just into utter, utter delusion. And if you don't participate in that economy, you know, it's, there's a law enforcement cliche. If you're not a source, you're a target.

• 35:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Right? And, and one of my rules is like, knowing that you refuse to be a source anyway. Like, because it's like, you know, if you don't play, you can't lose, you can't win either, but you really can't lose.

• 35:43Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, you can definitely lose, right?

• 35:45Speaker 03

  You've got nothing real, right? Like, I, sure, but you can't lose anything that didn't belong to you.

• 35:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right. You can lose the media narrative, which is not yours to control anyway, but you, you win whatever the sort of sense of honor or the limitation standards you set for yourself.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I just had to like, one of the things I just always instill would remind myself is like, any, what's fake is ephemeral. Like, I have to believe that, right? And if I don't waste this opportunity of this rapturous crack up of my life, if I don't waste the opportunity to kind of, to assess it honestly and to like, figure out how to proceed better, then I will be able to correct those things with time.

• 36:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  But I can't, I just, you know, won't participate in the kind of 3D chess warfare that it would be, that would be required to win a public narrative. And like, also, it's just in public, there's no justice in public narrative. There's poetic justice in public narrative, but there's no such thing as justice in public narrative.

• 36:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And when you look at the people who quote unquote, get away with it, I guess the moral question would be, did they actually get away with it? Or did they inflict some sort of greater injury upon themselves, which is they lost the opportunity to reform, to change, to understand.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  That's what I mean by suffering, right? Like that, to me, that type of suffering is way too high a price to pay to avoid the short term pain.

• 37:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  So.

• 37:06Ryan Holiday?

  What's interesting to me about all that, and I was, I found this as I was reading the book, the book is very restrained. That's what I would say. Like you choose not to use certain names. You don't, you have rules that you set for yourself, right? What you would do and wouldn't do. You're just saying.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm thinking.

• 37:19Ryan Holiday?

  So there's like a restrainedness to it, but it's a restrained person writing about a moment or a person who was so fundamentally unrestrained. And that contrast is interesting. And I'm wondering if you've thought about that at all.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I, I write about it a little bit, right? Where it's just like when your privacy is violated, there emerges this expectation that you're going to further violate your privacy, right? That like you must bear everything in order to receive some sort of absolution. But there were aspects of it. I mean, it was, because at first I was like, I'm never going to talk about this. I'm never going to write about this. Like, I have nothing of use to share about that experience, but I'm always writing. Right? And then I'm out, you know, in LA, like at the edge of the country, watching the end of the campaign. And it was just my necessary context.

• 38:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Right? For, for like the, the literal vantage point and the philosophical, intellectual vantage point from which I'm synthesizing what became the Trump era, this tenure period, right? In which extraordinary things happen, right? He gets elected in the first place. There are two impeachments. He's never been there before. It shows. He's booted from office. He, it's part of what he says is not an insurrection. Others disagree. He, it becomes a felon. He's shot at, right? Like it just, and then he's elected again. It's like this epic, insane story. And I felt, I always felt like I have to see this thing through.

• 38:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Like, I didn't know, when I agreed to cover it, I didn't know that it was never going to end. Right? Like I was this, I was like the cup reporter and he was the unserious assignment. And so when I was asked to cover it, I was thrilled because he was a familiar character and I felt like I understood something of his psychology. He's from Queens. He's from the periphery of New York and that. Kind of to me, I was too. I grew up in New Jersey. That explained a lot of, I thought, the way he operated.

• 39:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  And then it just never ended, right? And it was like this ensemble that kept getting, no one ever left the ensemble, right? It kept getting bigger and bigger and more unwieldy. And I just felt like I was being crushed under the weight of it. And a lot of people that I covered round one with were like, I'm not doing that again. And I thought like, I have to, you know, I actually have to do it again because I have to see this through. I don't like, the context that I possess is important. And there's something important about people having a fresh perspective too. And I do value that, but it's also important for people who've been here and know these characters to be here. And so I was intent on doing that. And then all of a sudden, and in some ways I felt like I was at the height of my powers too.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  And I had this kind of new perspective on him. And I felt like useful in a way I hadn't in a while. And I had a lot I wanted to explore and report out and assess, and then I couldn't.

• 40:11Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Right? Because of my own error. And it just felt like if I was going to write about any of that, any of the last 10 years, the ways in which my personal life and personal story collided with that distortion of reality seemed like really important context for any reader.

• 40:42Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not trying to let you off the hook, but I'm curious like what you think about this. Something I thought of when I was reading the book is like, I do agree you were at the height of your powers. I loved reading your stuff and you're very, very good at it.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 40:53Ryan Holiday?

  Like when someone is at the height of their powers, we make exceptions for, for, not even exceptions. We have certain expectations for people who are great, whether it's like sports, finance, or whatever, like music. We understand there's kind of a crazy and a chaos that follows. Like, we don't expect somebody who's putting up 30 points a night in the NBA to have, or selling, you know, a million records a month to be like orderly and have it all together and have this. Strict like we we just sort of expect like scandal and craziness follows. And then there's something about our reaction to what you did, your story, that it's not a double standard, but it is like a, I'm just wondering if there's something about writing or journalism that we're like,

• 41:36Ryan Holiday?

  no, no, no, talent must go hand in hand with having it together personally. That we're not as surprised when we find out an NBA player has is cheating or is doing this or that. You know what I mean? Do you know what I'm saying?

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's just, there aren't that many rules for journalists.

• 41:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's like, it's not hard to not run afoul of those rules, right? And I just like did. So I I understood last year, I completely understood. And I found a lot of value, frankly, in like, reading the criticism and absorbing the discourse around it. And even when people were being extraordinarily uncharitable or unkind, often they had something interesting to say. And sometimes I agreed. This more recent like chaos that has subsumed the publication of this book is harder for me to take because I felt like, like, wait, I just did that. Like, I just, I did the, I did the, the public ridicule, I fucked up.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  And I felt like I handled that right, like, and I tried really hard to not make any mistakes in how I handled my mistake. And why is this happening again, you know? And I hit this wall and then I kind of came around to as a coping mechanism, thinking that like, okay, maybe I was operating under this delusion that because I had done the right thing, that I had input good, that I should like extract some sort of good. And it doesn't work that way. Of course.

• 43:12Ryan Holiday?

  Shouldn't they appreciate that you're on the same team?

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Like, of course, it doesn't work that way, right? Like, it's, and you must do good anyway. And I, it was, it was important, I think, to be reminded of that.

• 43:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think that's the problem, right? People are going, hey, if I don't do the right thing, I can get away with it. But if I do the right thing, it's still gonna suck. And so we want karma to be real and we want things to be fair and just. And the reality is like, you can do the wrong thing and get away with it. That happens all the time. And you can do the right thing and still be criticized and not appreciated or not forgiven. That's just how life is.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I guess it's like, get away with it. In what sense though, right? Because it's like, I-

• 43:58Ryan Holiday?

  Keep your money, keep your platform.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but at what cost, right?

• 44:03Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure, I agree.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Like, I think the reason why I'm not crushed is because I don't have, I'm not carrying any shame about like, my efforts to wriggle out of-

• 44:15Ryan Holiday?

  Is there a difference between guilt and shame? Because you feel, do you feel guilt about what happened? Clearly, you're holding yourself responsible.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  You brought a Catholic here today to talk about this. Well, it's like, I thought a lot about the distinction between shame and embarrassment.

• 44:27Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Like, I think shame is really important. And I know that's shocking for a Catholic to think shame is really important.

• 44:34Ryan Holiday?

  I grew Catholic.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  But I think shame is important. I think embarrassment is about ego.

• 44:40Ryan Holiday?

  Because that's, you want people to think about you a certain way.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  And you think, and it's about public perception, right? Shame to me is an interior experience. And embarrassment is more about an exterior experience. And I think shame can be really important if you have done something shameful.

• 44:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Like, you should feel shame. You should, you know, sit with that and figure that out. But embarrassment to me, like, none of this has been embarrassing to me. Because my value for this book or for myself as a human being is not derived from-

• 45:14Speaker 03

  The public perception, right? But in terms of guilt and shame, I don't know. That's interesting. What do you think?

• 45:21Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know. I mean, if in the sense you're using shame, which is like, here are my standards and I feel X because I fell short of those standards, or I feel pride because I lived up to those standards, then maybe we're using the words interchangeably.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Maybe, yeah.

• 45:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. It's like, it's good to be hard on yourself.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  I guess guilt implies fault, like, right? You found guilty, you're not found shamed.

• 45:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Right? You experience shame, I think, in a way that maybe you don't experience guilt, right?

• 45:52Ryan Holiday?

  But it's funny that we call it a public shaming.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Not a public guilting.

• 45:55Ryan Holiday?

  Or a public embarrassment, but like, so you're saying it's good, but then obviously the thing we do to other people is not good.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 46:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  No, certainly not. And like the, was it John Ronson?

• 46:06Ryan Holiday?

  Such a good book.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Such a good book.

• 46:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  But that's a totally different thing, right? Like that, I think I consider that more public humiliation.

• 46:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Than public shame. But I guess it's private shame, public shame are different things.

• 46:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's hard because we talk about cancel culture as this thing that we went too far with. It's obviously bad and I would agree with that. At the same time, society does need some mechanism other than the law to say like, this is not what we do and there's consequences for doing the thing we don't do. Like, I think, I think that's been the remarkable feature of the Trump age, that it's like, hey, you can hit your wife on camera and still run a, you know, a professional fighting league. And the irony of also like you run a sport where people just slap each other back and forth. It's like a remarkable thing, right? Like, or you can say horrible racist things in a chat and then not lose your job over that.

• 47:02Ryan Holiday?

  Like, there has to be some kind of accountability for, it's not that you should be eternally damned or sent to prison or into exile, but that society does have to have some mechanism by which we go like, here's the line. When you go over the line, there's consequences for doing that, I think.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think like, I guess it just happens in a slower, invisible way in social situations, right? Where it's like, if you're just, if you're unpleasant, unbalanced, eventually you're not going to be invited to the gathering, right? Like, your social circle, winnows and winnows. But it does seem like just the attention economy, the kind of rotten values of that, or that people who are loud and simplistic, that wins, nuance loses, right? But I always just feel like, okay, the loudest people are probably not who I'm trying to talk to anyway, right? Like, I'm trying to talk to the smartest person in the room. And to me, that's the most open-minded person, the person most interested in and capable of holding nuance.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  And just the most curious person, right? Someone who matches my curiosity. Like, I always think about Michael Pollan, who for me is like, the North Star. And what he is so, among things that he's so remarkable at, he's a great, he's a hospitable guide, right? Like, he, as a narrator, you take his hand and you're reading, and he's bringing you on this journey, whether it's, you know, through his garden, or, you know, into the poppy plant and out into consciousness. He's got this book about consciousness coming out next year that I'm so excited for. I don't know him, by the way. I'm just like, a huge fan of the work. But I like that, I always think about that, where it's like, he is not condescending. He's assuming, he's assuming that you're here

• 48:47Speaker 03

  for good faith reasons. And that you, that he has something to tell you that you're going to find valuable. And like, that is the gold standard for me, right? So.

• 48:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I just, it's like, you live in a world where you can get caught on camera accepting a bag of cash, whether that's legal or not, whether there'll be.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Does that happen recently?

• 49:08Ryan Holiday?

  Who's the, like, the immigration czar, or whatever, right? Is seen.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:12Ryan Holiday?

  And like, the legal system will catch up with that at some point or not. But that, that should, hopefully. But, but the point is, like, I think we're, we're grappling with a society in which the public revelation of that fact does not end anything. It has zero effect. It's like,

• 49:29Ryan Holiday?

  Doctors are prescribing antibiotics and they're just not working.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:33Ryan Holiday?

  And we're just wrestling with antibiotic resistance at a cultural level.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Right. And then the question is like, was incumbent on those doctors to stop and think, well, wait, are we over prescribing antibiotics, right?

• 49:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Should we be more thoughtful in our prescriptions for whatever is ailing our patients? That way, we, we avoid a situation where everyone is antibiotic resistant, like.

• 49:57Ryan Holiday?

  And then we have superbugs.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Right. And so I think when the answer to everything is public shame and cancellation. I mean, our whole system has been, was set up with a, in a consensus reality.

• 50:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Where there was a definition of value or the shared understanding of value. When there were authorities and there was public trust, right? And even as the institutions were being built, there was like a good, a faith that they were being built in good faith. Right. And then like, it's, what is a high crime and misdemeanor? Right. It's open to interpretation. But, you know, why is there no law preventing the bulldozing of the east wing? It's like, well, they didn't think about that.

• 50:37Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Right. Nobody thought about that. There was no east wing then, but you know, it's like.

• 50:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Well, the founders believed that the system, that the system, the final check on the system was the idea of personal virtue. Right? Like, I think Adam says something like, they'll go through the system like a whale through a net. And so we had, it's interesting that they knew that, that, that, that we were vulnerable to the superbugs or the antibiotic resistant man on horseback, so to speak. And that, but they just expected that would never happen.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  I don't, I mean, the, if you can keep it part of the, of republic.

• 51:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Is, is overlooked, I think, right? And like, it's, it's, it's sort of too grandiosely like tie it back to my personal error. It's, goes back to the, maybe noticing on one level, the suspension of certain critical faculties or letting things slide with myself and thinking that I didn't need to judge myself in real time for, in minor things. Right. And then that creates a situation where you make a big mistake. And I feel like in general, there's a kind of. I don't know, part of it's like, we just don't have a, we don't have a formal mechanisms for, maybe it's like the collapse of institutions and the collapse of the family, right?

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Liberal institutions, the family unit are, in theory, like, the midpoint before we get to law enforcement, justice departments involved, right? Like, and if those checks aren't in place, broadly speaking, you can't count on them, then I guess it's like what you're talking about, where there's no penalty in real time for misbehavior.

• 52:17Ryan Holiday?

  If I was talking to you in 21 or 22, could you have articulated these sort of values very clearly? And then there's a period where you sort of, you override them or forget them? Or is it, is it more like you've come to understand them in the wreckage of what happened?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  That's interesting. But I mean, I don't think I was consciously thinking about it, right? So maybe on, I could have had some sort of like eggheaded, uh, intellectual conversation about it. But also in that period, it's like, it was, everything was sort of hazy. And, you know, I was still covering Donald Trump, I was covering, you know, the pandemic and the end of that first term. And, and then it didn't really end and, right? There are all these challenges and, and trying to kind of make sense of like, what that even was. And then it, it's like this lithium fire that like the embers of it just spark up again, right?

• 53:15Speaker 03

  And like, it, I was thinking really very little about my own behavior, where I fit in and my character fit in, in this kind of broad corruption of character.

• 53:39Ryan Holiday?

  I use in the intro of Trust Me, I'm Lying, I was fooling around with that word disintegrated. Like, we feel like it disintegrated in the air, right? It fell apart. But like, if you think about disintegrating meaning not integrated. I was like, that's what, like, I had my beliefs, I had my values, I was studying this philosophy, which now, like, I sort of dedicated my life to. And then I had my sort of day-to-day work behavior. And those two things were not integrated. It's not that they were compartmentalized, they were just not, they were operating independently of each other. And, and like, the reason they were not integrated is that there's a lot of cognitive dissonance between the two. If they were integrated, then you have to wrestle with the contradiction between what you think your character is

• 54:23Ryan Holiday?

  and your day-to-day actions. And so you keep them apart from each other. And you just, I mean, being busy is a wonderful way to keep them from integrating with each other.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Right. And like, that's one of the things I write about a little bit about being a reporter. It's like, I'm someone who really only has a fight instinct. And you can just own almost anything. And with, as a political reporter, the stakes are built in. You never have to wonder, like, am I, is what I'm doing, does it matter? Right? It matters in a really overt way, even, even in like, small little episodes. And the gift of that is tremendous. Like, the few times I've ever been assigned a story about something else, I've always hit this point where I'm like, wait, I need this story to be about the universe.

• 55:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Right? And mankind.

• 55:11Ryan Holiday?

  You need stakes.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  And I need, I need it to, to be life or death here. And this, you know, actor or this, this is not immediately high stakes in a way that I'm used to. And that is sort of like a gift in the same way that like, the great engine for these characters running for office, that's a gift too for a writer.

• 55:33Ryan Holiday?

  And there's something too about, maybe this is what drew you to in the first place, by looking and judging other people. You don't have as that you're you're putting energy outwards that might otherwise go inwards.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I write about it's like when I started writing, it was really like the height of the personal essay boom for young women writers. It was like the, maybe it was like the tail end of the era of like exo Jane, but there was just a lot of that diaristic

• 55:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  writing about young female experience and sexuality. I just could not have cared less

• 56:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  about that stuff. Like, I just thought the stakes were so low.

• 56:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  And I don't care.

• 56:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  You know, I care about things that are going to affect other people and the arrogance of, um, the arrogance of thinking that you ought to be in charge of anyone else's existence at like a, you know, a scale of greater than like a dinner party.

• 56:25Ryan Holiday?

  I should be the most powerful man in the world.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Right, right. I should affect your, your life or the lives of people that you love. And I, you know, I've got it. Right. That to me was just an astonishing premise for anything. I couldn't believe that anyone could, could think that way. And it was endlessly interesting to me.

• 56:41Ryan Holiday?

  But isn't it funny? So like

• 56:43Speaker 03

  And it allowed me to just completely turn away from

• 56:45Ryan Holiday?

  That, that seems like there's a sickness to that, right? And then, but how often does the artist go like, isn't there a sickness in going, the world wants to hear what I have to say?

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 56:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right? And they're, they are similar impulses of different scales and whatever, but

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's more like, I think it's like immediate effect or like less perceptible or just less overt, uh, maybe slower burn effect, right? But I do, I mean, I think that's part of why it's been interesting how all right I've been with like really negative assessments of this book.

• 57:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  And on the one hand, it's just that I anticipated, you know, that there just might be unpleasant reaction, just the premise alone.

• 57:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Right? Um, but the other part is just like, it's a choice to be a public facing person. It's a choice to create work and submit it for like public consideration. And so you really can't be all that broken up when like the public face is slapped, right?

• 57:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you, you control what you write. You don't control what people think about you, right?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:45Ryan Holiday?

  What you write, but that's

• 57:47Speaker 03

  And not really your business.

• 57:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's still nicer when they like it.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, one day I hope to experience that again. But it's like, you've, you assume the risk that it's going to be unpleasant and it's still a privilege to do it, right? And it's not a great tragedy.

• 58:01Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so I have a question. So you have, there's a section in here which you've talked about before, but let me, as I wrote a note on it, and I would be curious what you think. You said, "I was determined the only way for me to survive such a public relations crisis. Tell all, spare no detail, spare my job and my life as it was. This was the offer on the table. You could write your way out of it. The man for whom I worked told me I did not consider this." Have you read Molly Bloom's book? Do you know who that is? Oh, Aaron Sorkin made a movie about her, but she was that famous. She ran those underground poker games in LA, in New York City, that all these famous and important people-

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Is that a Kevin Spacey movie?

• 58:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's a different gambling movie. But she, so she's, she's a, she's an Olympic level skier. She loses, she blows out her knee and applies the, her skills to doing something that you're not supposed to do, right? It's illegal, no one's dying, but it's not right. And she becomes quite wealthy and successful running these underground poker games. And eventually she gets caught, as everyone eventually does. And basically, the FBI comes to her and says, "Look, you can keep your illicit gains if you tell us who was involved in what you did." And she famously gives up the money rather than tell people what she did. Now, one argument is like, you're not, you're not doing it because you don't want those people to come after you. But in both the book and the movie, and I've gotten to know her a little bit,

• 59:21Ryan Holiday?

  she just, she just felt like it was the wrong thing to do. It was her, "I did the crime, all through the time." That was my view of it. Now, I'm always interested when people take certain moral stands that I don't totally understand. Like, you might go, "Hey, you're all criminals, or all committing a crime, and why wouldn't you say it?" And I think people might say to you, like, this is, I thought that was interesting, because this is a central argument of the book, is that, was a conceit of the book, which is that you don't spare yourself, but you don't really talk about anyone. You talk about other people, but you don't name other people, and you don't, you don't-

• 59:54Speaker 03

  It's obvious who they are.

• 59:55Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure you have receipts that you did not show, right? And that's a moral choice you're making. I'm curious what you think of her moral choice, and then how you think about your own choice.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  The two things I was thinking when you were talking about her. The first is just, I guess it's like, it would be a sort of reversed entrapment, right, for her to do that? But-

• 1:00:17Ryan Holiday?

  Reverse entrapment, what do you mean?

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  I mean, like, she's the one who created the environment in which these people engaged in this illegal activity, right?

• 1:00:26Ryan Holiday?

  But some of them are bad people. That would, this would be the, this would be the argument.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I understand her feeling like that's not right. But then also, I know I'm thinking about like Tony Soprano, right? And like the pilots of The Sopranos, one of the great pilots. And, you know, he says something to the effect of, you know, people used to go into their time.

• 1:00:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  And I, it's interesting. I, I get it. I do, I get that. And it's also like using others as a human shield, that type of thing, right? Like why that feels so wrong? And it's, um, to me though, it's, I, at the time that I was faced with that ultimatum, right? I was in this conference room in Lower Manhattan. I thought that I was going to be talking about something completely different. And then all of a sudden I'm faced with this, um, being confronted over this affair. And the ultimatum was basically like sell out yourself and the other party here. And then you, you're forgiven, basically, right? That's your, your penance for this error.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  And at the time it was like, I didn't even know what, I couldn't have synthesized my experience. Like my experience was ongoing and there were all these other factors too, right? Just in terms of like my, the security violation and the way it was colliding with my work absent, the, the confrontation from my employer. And, and then just the betrayal that I experienced that was sort of in process, but had not yet like fully, fully occurred, both, you know, from the, the person I called the politician, obviously it's the health secretary now, or from, uh, from the, the person I called the man I did not marry, right? But I

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  Like, I didn't even know really what to tell at that moment in time, like, write a tell all and say, like, what exactly, you know? And, and there was no good set of facts. There was no, like, version of events in which I was some sort of victim or in which something had happened to me, right?

• 1:02:34Ryan Holiday?

  But there's a version of the book you could have written that I think generally would have been more redemptive. I just mean across the board, yes.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  And then talking about the book separately, I mean, I just kind of felt like I shared what felt like it was mine to tell, right? And what felt like necessary context for what had occurred, both with me and my character, right? And the dynamics of that relationship, right? So like, I don't talk, for instance, much about the man I did not marry. I don't write about why I needed to leave that relationship. You might be able to guess at this point, but there's some clues. But that, to me, there was no public purpose for that, right? That would have just been about me and my own, like, soothing myself somehow, or, and...

• 1:03:21Ryan Holiday?

  It could make you more sympathetic.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, who cares, right?

• 1:03:24Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, people, I'm walking you through what, what people would say or think, right? Like, why, what, what the motivated reasoning of people who might make the other choice would be.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think the version that would have been much more satisfying, which was nothing, I would never have considered doing it, would have been, you know, like, chapters with people's names in which I, you know, on such and such date, I met so-and-so, and, and this is what they did, and, and here is why I am now condemning their, their character. But I just didn't feel that way also. Like, I wasn't angry at anybody else. And even now, like, I'm not angry at anyone else. I'm not angry at, at the person that I, you know, did not marry. And I was not angry at him last year, and, you know...

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Wasn't angry at the health secretary for personal reasons. And I think like being able to make the distinction between I disapprove of that person's actions, or I'm dismayed or disturbed by something that someone has done, but I can kind of like isolate that and assess that for what it is at its appropriate size. And it doesn't have to destroy me or affect my decisions and how I conduct myself in a book or in conversation. To me, that's really important.

• 1:04:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  You know, and I just never, I felt like I had a lot to say about the last 10 years. And I had kind of, I felt this sort of urgency. And I also just, I didn't have a job for the first, right? Like you're someone who knows about stillness, obviously.

• 1:04:55Ryan Holiday?

  There's some forced stillness.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, stillness is important to you. And I had really never, I'd avoided it at all costs.

• 1:05:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right. I sensed that your life was chaotic and busy as a way of not wrestling with or dealing with things that, some of which probably appear in the book and some of which you're probably still wrestling with and dealing with.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Probably will always be. Yeah. But I also, it was like, you know, the kind of the hamster wheel of the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, that busyness and the kind of like righteous feeling around it, that there is something sort of addictive is the wrong word, but really attractive about that and really, and then it's like, it's this linear thing and everything else is organized around it.

• 1:05:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Having a task and like I, someone who likes to have a caper.

• 1:05:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  I think you've got to have between one and three capers at all times to be happy. But that constant motion was a really good way to, to avoid, you know, looking too critically at myself and then my surroundings and questioning, you know, it was easier for me to flee. And then all of a sudden, I have nowhere to go. I have nothing in particular to do. I have no real responsibilities. And I found I didn't really have a choice other than to figure out.

• 1:06:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, but we're remarkably good at finding things to, like, the other option is you double down on craziness and dysfunction and bad choices. Like you also could have done that.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. What would that have looked like?

• 1:06:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, it would have been explosive and.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  I don't have the imagination for it, I don't think.

• 1:06:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, because patterns are clear retroactively, right? Like, I think about some of the people that I worked for and with, Dev Charny being one. And so that's why I'm reluctant to sort of judge other people for their attractions or their time and other people's work, because in retrospect, it makes very little sense to me. But in the moment, it not just made sense, it was like exciting and exhilarating. And I thought I was doing mostly good stuff. And I remember one time I was talking to my aunt and she was like, "It's interesting that you and your sister both ended up working for like this certain personality type." My sister at one point had a boss not that dissimilar to mine. And I was like, "Yeah, whoa, what does that say?" Like, here I am, thinking I'm making rational or self-interested career decisions.

• 1:07:21Ryan Holiday?

  And then I'm like, "Actually, in this Freudian."

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  You're in story.

• 1:07:26Ryan Holiday?

  Psycho drama, for instance. And then, and then I'm like, "Whoa, I wish I'd..." There probably no amount of pointing that out would have prevented me from doing it. But it's so, it's so obvious in retrospect that it's just like, "Ugh, whoa, what was that?" Have you thought about that for you at all?

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And even like over the last, we were talking about the kind of present chaos externally. And I was thinking like, "Okay, why am I back here?" Because it does feel like all of a sudden I'm back here.

• 1:07:52Ryan Holiday?

  The one common variable in all these situations is you.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. It's like, I am the common denominator. And, you know, I walked through the door and like I was back at the welcome mat. And I was, you know, it was sort of disorienting. And I was thinking, "Well, what did I not learn last time, right? What do I need to learn this time?" Because I, whether you think there's some sort of divine organization to all of this, or it's an accident of the universe, wherever you fall along those lines, like materialist, metaphysical, I just, it struck me that...

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  It was a loop, right? And so why am I at the start of the track again? And I theoretically, I should know better how to be here this time.

• 1:08:35Ryan Holiday?

  Are you like, I want to get off this ride?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  At first, yes. At first I was like, I did not like, I didn't sign up for a round, a round trip. But then now I'm kind of like, wait, why am I back on this? How did I get on this ride again? And do I like the ride?

• 1:08:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Like, what do I not understand about how the ride works? Like, I'm more, I guess, on balance, I'm more curious about what's happening than I am devastated by it. And I have to assume, or there needs to be for my survival, a, some utility, right? And I felt like the whole time with the scandal around the affair, that it was like, if I, again, if I didn't waste the opportunity of the public shaming and the private shame, that it would be like my new capacity for empathy, if that makes any sense. It felt like this kind of wrecking ball had like hit me in the chest. And that the size of the blast radius would be my new capacity for empathy

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  if I did not react from ego or from fear.

• 1:09:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  And that it would make me better at what I do, and it would make me a better chronicler of people if I let it.

• 1:09:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:09:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. If you have any sort of history of making bad decisions, or you're definitely, people in recovery deal with this, where you're like, how do I trust my self, my instincts going forward? When the one thing I know is that I shouldn't trust my instincts, or what I'm attracted to, or what I feel inclined to do.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  No, like, I need a conservatorship, right? And so like, what does my judgment count for then? Right? If I could admit that there are some serious gaps here, how do I regain trust with myself, right? And I guess part of like, working through those things and assessing, you know, there's a lot in this book that I reveal that like, Does not, that nobody knew about, that makes me look terrible, right? Like, um, and I felt, part of it just felt like that was my penance for having made mistakes.

• 1:10:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  And, and you know, if I lied, I put it in the book and like, I explained that I lied and, or I just did something like totally boneheaded that was wrong in retrospect, right? But for me, it was less about like, um, it was like, I think I, I thought it didn't matter a lot of those things in real time.

• 1:10:54Ryan Holiday?

  What you were doing.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  In real time, yeah. Like it felt so peripheral and so, um, private.

• 1:11:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Right? It's just hilarious now that we're talking about it here, but like, it just didn't feel important. And then part of like the realization was just like, no, of course, like every little thing matters so much.

• 1:11:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  Right? Like everything that happens here.

• 1:11:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  Matters and every choice I make matters and it's, and whether or not I can appreciate it in the moment, or whether or not it ever looks that way in retrospect, every little decision I make could be kind of like the flap of the wing that knocks you off your path or, or puts you onto a better path or the, right? And that realization was really important part of the process.

• 1:11:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I find that the excuses and rationalizations that made sense in the moment, they don't age well. So you tell yourself it doesn't matter. You tell yourself no one's looking. You tell yourself, everybody does it, whatever it is. And then, you know, if you get caught a year later, that's bad. The harder thing I found is like, what if you never get caught?

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:11:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Like, and you obviously talk about some stuff in the book, but I think there's this line from Epictetus, one of the Stoics. He says, um, you know, whenever you find yourself criticized or attacked by someone, tell yourself, if they really knew me, they'd say something much worse. And like, like oftentimes you're not caught for the worst thing that you've ever done.

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:15Ryan Holiday?

  Or they're not able to ever fully understand what happened. So there's this part of you that just doesn't know what to do with the things that you told yourself didn't matter. And maybe they didn't matter, but they matter to you and you carry them with you.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Also, I mean, there just was very little conscious thought about a lot of it. Right? Like I fell in love with someone.

• 1:12:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  As unbelievable as the facts of it may seem to a lot of people, which I understand, like there was no real rational thought process around it. Like I just loved someone and cared about them and suspended certain critical faculties the way that people do when they're. Caught up in how they feel about someone else.

• 1:12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  And that's not to like, say that there's no, you know, free will involved in any of that. Not to like, activate the free will doesn't exist crowd. But um, do you think it exists?

• 1:13:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, I don't know what we're doing here if it doesn't.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  Well, I know you want it to exist, right? Because it's hard to be a stoic.

• 1:13:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  It doesn't exist, but like, how open are you to the idea that it doesn't?

• 1:13:17Ryan Holiday?

  Some philosopher said once, and I, it's kind of how I try to live my life, which is to assume that you have free will and nobody else does. So, so it's like, all your choices of great moral consequence.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then everyone else's choice, they didn't have a say in it. And there's a kind of, not pity, but an understanding and an empathy.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Ryan Holiday?

  For like, it couldn't have gone any other way. Which is kind of what I took out of, by Grand Central Station, I sat down with, and even your book, which is you go like, man, love is like a hell of a drug. It's blinding, it's, uh, it can be deranging. And sometimes it's for the best and other times, you know, I'm glad that didn't happen to me. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, that's kind of, that's kind of how I try to think about it. Obviously, there, there's different scandals where it's like, the person is sort of overtly a, I don't know, when the, the person is victimizing another person. When it's less that and more just like a error in judgment or of, uh, an overwhelming

• 1:14:15Ryan Holiday?

  of one's facilities, I, I tend to be a little bit like, there but for the grace of God go I.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I felt like, I guess I felt a little liberated to right of his character as I experienced it and as I kind of watched it progress or devolve, right? And because he had maligned me and lied about my character, right? And so I felt like I owed him fairness and I owed myself affording him fairness. Right? But on balance, the public interest in offering my context for what occurred and where it fit within this broader story of this tenure period of Trump's rise to dominance and like the distortion of reality, that outweighed any like, any feelings of, oh, well, I can't

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  do that, you know, I can't do that. And like, because I was no longer violating. The contract had been violated, right? Like, and that doesn't mean that I felt like I had, um, you know, there were no rules and I, you know, didn't have to abide by my own code of honor around it. But I did feel like I had total freedom to sort out exactly what I felt like was useful for this story and for explaining, explaining what had happened and who he was to me and how I saw him. Right? And it's a weird story.

• 1:15:37Ryan Holiday?

  It is. It is weird. It's all, it's weird all the way around.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Weird story. Yeah.

• 1:15:44Ryan Holiday?

  There was a scandal in the Truman administration and he had some sort of old cronies that, you know, did some stuff. There's this famous exchange between him and Secretary of State Dean Axon, who says like, you know, Mr. President, I think you've been loyal to people who have not been loyal to you. And I, there's something about that that strikes us as very unfair. And then I've come to go like, loyalty is not supposed to be a two-way street.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  No, I mean, that's how, on balance, you know, one of the things I kept coming back to was like, my standards for myself are not affected by other people's standards for themselves or for others or for, you know, what they might be willing to tolerate from me, right? Like what, what is justified is not the same as what is right. And, you know, the definition of having a principle is that it's unaffected by external stimuli. Right? Like your behavior is not going to change, like how I feel about, you know, X matter. And that was like an important guiding principle for this and just for this entire era of my life. No one ever talks about young cronies.

• 1:16:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's true. Cause usually they're, they're somebody you go way back with.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:52Ryan Holiday?

  That's true.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Well, we apply like, um, we attach terms related to age in funny ways. Like, uh, you always hear about ancient grains or like a young coconut.

• 1:17:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So much of this is marketing to get people to care about one thing or see it differently than another thing. And I mean, I don't mean marketing so much as like it's coming from corporate interest, but there is just this endless amount. Everything is covered in euphemisms and qualifying and hedging. And that's part of, I think, wisdom is the ability to sort of strip those things out and be able to see them for what they are.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. I've been thinking a lot in preparing to come here, thinking a lot about Marcus Aurelius, obviously, right? And part of what was interesting about writing through the experience of the affair was just like, okay, were my feelings ever real if he was ever real?

• 1:17:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  Right? And I still don't have a satisfying answer for that. Right? Like, but I felt like I had to kind of document with as much integrity as possible, like what it was and what it felt like and what, you know, I was experiencing at the time and what it looked like at the time. And like, I'm sure my feelings about it and my assessments will be really different in five years or 10 years, you know, or God willing, 25 years or something. But it was interesting, but I also, it's like, if we judge Aurelius over like who he was privately to himself, right? And we do broadly, right? Like I do, you seem to, right? It's, I'm not going to weigh whatever rumors or legend

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  about his personal life and taste for vengeance, right?

• 1:18:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, where also a lot of people think he was like repeatedly cheated on by his wife. And I go like, is that a real thing? Or is that a 2000 year old rumor?

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Exactly. Right. It's tough to, and so it's like, I'm not going to weigh that against the body of evidence about his character or his intentions that we have, right?

• 1:18:52Ryan Holiday?

  What about Commodus? His son sucks.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:55Ryan Holiday?

  And he does give him the-

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  But a lot of great people have less great children. Why is that? And are you really great if your legacy, your most direct-

• 1:19:04Ryan Holiday?

  One of them is profiled in your-

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Um, one of, uh, one of the like, is if your legacy, your most direct legacy, if that's a

• 1:19:16Ryan Holiday?

  Are you responsible? Are your kids a reflection of you and your character? It's like, it's like yes and no.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean,

• 1:19:22Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's yes and no. No, no, I'm saying it's a yes and no. It's, it's both, right?

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  How?

• 1:19:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I mean, obviously you're, they're learning their values from you. And if you're a horrendous hypocrite, that will have some effect on them. And at the same time, they're their own people who make their own choices. And like, you know, we, we obviously, we both hold parents responsible for their actions, their kids, and then understand their kids are doing their own thing.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Ryan Holiday?

  It's a tricky business. It's a, it's tricky business is what I'm saying.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  It is. And it's like, it strikes me just like anecdotally in my mind, there's like really conflicting in like our courts of law, right? Like sometimes a parent's held responsible for a child's crime, right? And sometimes they're not. And it's interesting. I mean, one of the, one of Donald Trump's great, one of the only cases for him having a good character was always like, well, his kids seem to love him and are in his life and are not dead or in jail, right? Like early on, that was like a

• 1:20:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Hillary says this in the debate. I thought it was one of the dumbest things that she ever said, but okay.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Right. It's like, how bad could this guy be if his kids are all functioning and seem like at least moderately and sometimes extremely employed?

• 1:20:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  And I never found that super compelling as it related to him. So is the inverse that compelling?

• 1:20:36Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Maybe not. I think you said once, so it's just like, great men are often really busy.

• 1:20:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, they're just gone a lot. I think that, that would, if your dad was, if you're like, why is that kid the way that they are? You'd be like, well, his dad was president, empire billionaire, whatever. You'd be like, that explains it, you know, good or bad.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Although it's like, I also just really believe in how powerful individual choices are, right?

• 1:20:58Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I mean.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  And I really believe that like what happens privately within a context between two people or within a family or a classroom or a big institution, very well may change the course of human history, right? It has. And so it's hard to kind of reconcile those two ideas, but

• 1:21:16Ryan Holiday?

  No, it is.

• 1:21:29Ryan Holiday?

  I've had this unique experience of not just going through some of the stuff myself, but then because I wrote a book about, it's kind of about media scandals. And then also I wrote this book about stoicism. Like weirdly, I get calls from people when their life blows up. Right?

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I called you.

• 1:21:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yours was like, hey, I'm writing a book. Do you have any advice? Yours wasn't like, what do I do? I've gotten some like, oh, I'm very worried about this. This person is calling me out, whether they deserve it or not.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Ryan Holiday?

  Like they're a leaf blowing in the wind and it could go in a bad direction. So I've just talked to people who are in the middle of these public shamings. And we could talk about it a bunch of different ways, but one of the things I have found interesting is the kind of support network that pops up. Like James Fry is interesting. He is like taking it upon himself to reach out to people who are in the middle of those things. I think it's part of his recovery. He's just like, hey, I know what it feels like to know that the world thinks you're a piece of shit and is rooting for this to get worse for you. Right?

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Ryan Holiday?

  And, and like, so I've been fascinated by like, in the moments where that's happening, the people that lean in and the people that go away. I imagine you learned a little bit about that.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this one, this one was interesting. There are some people who it's like grief where some people are just really frightened.

• 1:22:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  And don't know what to say and don't want to think about it because it's just scary. It's like, wait, but my whole existence is about denying mortality. Like, I can't come near you right now. And that I don't fault anyone for ever. It's just like, you know, you can't like, people aren't accountable for their limitations. I don't think. And no one really surprised me. I mean, some people have had really good advice. Some of the advice is kind of infuriating in its own way, but they mean well. And so you can't, you know, judge it, I don't think. But, no, but you know, someone had said to me early, early on, like, you don't have a constituency, so this is going to be really hard. I was like, what do you mean? It was like, oh, well, you're not aligned with the.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  Right wing or the left wing and various factions within those factions hate you.

• 1:23:36Ryan Holiday?

  And also, I would say your audience is intermediated by a publication as opposed to like.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Totally, right? Yeah, and I like that.

• 1:23:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  You know, like, I like a barrier, like, and I like some distance and there's a lot of space in the book. And I think maybe in some way it was like, to me, it just feels like kind of the charitable thing to do for a reader. And like, I don't want to tell anyone how to think. But it's also maybe a way for me to like, fabricate some space for myself too, right? Like, this goes in both directions.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  But the lack of that was interesting and people who've really, who've been through it or who've been through it. I found that like, sometimes people who are public people in some capacity and understand something of being publicly shamed. Still, it's not like, not everyone's reached like, total, I don't know what the term for it would be, like, the point at which they kind of like, turn the dial from AM to FM, like, the break, right? The, the Carlin break or the Dylan break, like, the point at which like, they just baseline, like, don't believe a lot of what they read. Or it infects their, like, that distrust sparked by their own experience.

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  And the distortions related to it, or their perceived distortions related to it, creates this more general distrust. Like, my brother on the phone earlier was saying to me, like, reading certain things about me in the press and something in particular today, I guess. He was like, it's just making me like, have less faith in general with what I read. Because I know so like, viscerally that this is so untrue.

• 1:25:12Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know about the Gale amnesia effect?

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:25:14Ryan Holiday?

  So, Gale amnesia effect, I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it's basically like, when you read an article or you watch something from the press about something you know a lot about. You see all the problems and, you know, inaccuracies and insufficiencies and then.

• 1:25:31Ryan Holiday?

  Then you turn to its coverage of the Middle East or the stock market, or whatever the thing you don't know about is, and you're like, sure, that seems true. The amnesia effect is our willingness to see how terribly wrong it is and unfair or biased, or the weaknesses in the area that we have the expertise. And then we conveniently forget that elsewhere, or with time, we forget it elsewhere. You could argue AI has a similar effect where it's like, if you ask it something you really know about, it's woefully insufficient, but then you're like, you're planning my vacation.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. Yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, I write in the book about how in this time period, this 10-year period, it's like, anything seemed possible. And like, on the one hand, that is a literal inspirational slogan, anything's possible, but it also landed as a threat, right? It was like, anything could be believed.

• 1:26:18Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Because anything was possible, and there were no boundaries all of a sudden. Because there are no standards, because there's no consensus, because we're not living in a consensus reality.

• 1:26:27Ryan Holiday?

  And there's no consistency either. It's wildly...

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  None, because consistency requires boundaries and consensus. And there has to be some shared understanding of value, and those things no longer exist, right? And that is fascinating to me, right? And that's sort of what I have personal responsibility for it, and like, I have free will, I think.

• 1:26:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  But like, nevertheless, it was in that environment, and assessing all of that closely in which I made a mistake, right? And that was interesting to me.

• 1:26:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the reason I was asking about, you know, who reached out, is not that I'm not looking for names, but there's a beautiful scene in Oscar Wilde's book, Day Profundis, where he talks about this moment, he's being transferred from one prison to another. He's, you know, his life is ruined over, you know, what we would now say are, you know, nobody's business. But at the time, you know, everything is taken from him, his wife, his family, his money, his reputation, and he's being transferred from this one prison to another. And a friend, something Robertson, I'm forgetting his name, his friend, he walks down the hall, and his friend's just standing there, and he just kind of like smiles and nods his head. And he's just like, in this moment, that is everything that Jesus was supposed to represent. Like, that is the Christian tradition there, that like, in your...

• 1:27:42Ryan Holiday?

  Darkest, most abject public humiliation, the, the person who says like, I see you and I haven't forsaken you. And I do think, obviously, public shaming is bad and inexcusable. And we can't do so much about it as a, as a society, but we can as individuals decide to be that person when someone we know.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Ryan Holiday?

  Is going through something like that.

• 1:28:07Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel like I've been really fortunate in a million different ways. And that's one of them. Like I, someone asked me recently, like, oh, like, did you lose a lot of friends during? I was like, no, what? Right? Like, I was shocked by the question that I thought like, oh, wow. Like my great fortune that it didn't even occur to me that people with whom I'm, I'm consider myself really close friends, that there might be any doubt, right? Like, and I thought that was, it was like, I felt stupid and then just so lucky that.

• 1:28:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that's more unusual than you think it is.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess, you know, or it's just like, my friends know how stupid I am.

• 1:28:45Ryan Holiday?

  Were there people that in the moment were like, what are you doing? Like before it happened, like, like I sometimes go like, I wish someone would have told me.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  Nobody knew. It was a secret.

• 1:28:54Ryan Holiday?

  But did they see a direction you were going? Like, I just think about moments and I go, I wish someone told me. And then they're like, we did try to tell you.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  I also was just making myself scarce, you know? And it's like, I think when you're keeping any kind of secret, you, you keep a lot of other secrets, right? In, in the process and like.

• 1:29:11Ryan Holiday?

  We're sick as our secrets.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And something, I mean, something I write about in the book, because my mother and like the dynamics of the house that I grew up in, on the, on the one hand, they're like honest people. And on the other hand, we're all sort of keeping, living in this weird, within this weird secret of her mental illness and her alcoholism. And it was, a lot of my existence was about the upkeep of lies, right? To, to protect her and, and protect, I don't know what, but I was spending, I just remember it being exhausting, right? But there's something sort of comforting about that too. And it's like, oh, with, you know, my replicating this pattern of like, falling back into a dynamic such as that and like, seems so, right? And I, I think I write about, like, to my mind, there is this, um,

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  there's this sort of like paradise within the privacy of a lie. And in preparing to roll out this book, I remember I was meeting with a PR person. I was anticipating a crisis. And um.

• 1:30:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you really, it's quite a prediction.

• 1:30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they said something to the effect of like, oh, like you want to fix, I assume you want to fix your like Google results. It's a lot of, you know, crazy stuff in there. And I was like, I kind of felt terrified by the notion of that because there's a sort of anonymity in having a lot of bullshit about you out there, right? Like, there's a, in some ways, that's much less scary to me at this point than like this, right? Or, um, yeah, I don't know. It's, I can't remember what the question was.

• 1:30:44Ryan Holiday?

  No, I just, I wonder sometimes when I know people that are like twisting in the wind, what the obligation is, you know, like, like, because it's, it's obviously there's a spectrum, right? There's like, uh, they're totally innocent and they don't deserve this. And then there's the like, they really did it to themselves. And then there's the, bro, I think there was a time to stop emailing Epstein. Okay. You know, like, like, there's the broad spectrum of like, how you decide to deal with someone who is in the hot seat.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, although, actually, I was gonna say something about Epstein.

• 1:31:23Ryan Holiday?

  Always safe territory.

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, safe territory. I wanted to change the narrative. So I wanted to talk about Israel and Jeffrey Epstein. That's okay. But I, you know, I don't know. I kind of think it's like grief, though, where it's like, my view is that whatever private judgments I may have about anyone's behavior, you can always be a human being, right? And that doesn't mean that you have to defend them, either privately or publicly, but I'm going to be a human being first, right? And form criticisms once I have enough information. But usually, there's nothing close to a complete set of facts available, right? When someone's first, you know, in a public shaming. And that's, you know, usually been my point of view about it.

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  And sometimes I'll get like a message and I'll think like, oh. Guess it looks that bad, huh? That like.

• 1:32:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, would you say like when Monica Lewinsky is checking in on you?

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  She's bad. But you know, it's interesting because so many people have brought her up to me and she's so lovely. And like, I'm just, I really am just like awed by her ability to come out of that with just all of this kindness and grace intact. And all of this empathy and because you could see very easily how it could have gone another way.

• 1:32:38Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  But I felt very much like, okay, well, because people keep mentioning her to me and it's like, well, what happened to her happened to her.

• 1:32:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Speaker 03

  Right. Her prefrontal cortex is now developed, like there is an enormous power imbalance. Whatever else was true about that, like it happened to her.

• 1:32:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  And I happened to me, right? So it feels very different.

• 1:33:00Ryan Holiday?

  It does, although I would say, looking back on, you know, a couple centuries of scandals, it is very rare to find one historically contemporary where you look back and you go, we were not hard enough on that woman. Like.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, we need a witch to burn. Yeah, we always need a witch to burn.

• 1:33:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  And, um, but I also like, I can withstand burning. It's all right by me, you know?

• 1:33:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that makes sense. That's a rule I try to think about as a person when I'm four. I go like, hey, how is this? Now that we have some distance on any number of them, are we like, that, that instinct, whatever that is in the human tribe, does not age, it does not age well. It ages like.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  Not typically. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. We're consistent about something.

• 1:33:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yeah. Conversely, it's not so true the other direction. We often do let certain men off with a slap on the wrist and then come to regret it. You know, we're like, I mean, look, generally probably public shamings are not good. But I would just say like, when you look at things that we get upset about, we're usually like, yeah, we were too, too hard, not too.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the kind of like sexual fervor animating the the public discourse is is interesting. And that just sort of feels like, OK, I'm in a very old story here, right? Like, I am it right now in this story, or I'm back, I guess, for like, season two. And that's interesting. And it doesn't, even though it feels violating, it doesn't feel personal, because it's not, right? It has almost nothing to do with me, like, and the actual facts of anything. But that, you know, I don't know, I kind of, I get it, and I'm interested enough in it to, again, like, to not be cowering about it. And I mean, it's complicated, because it's like, I get why, you know, I get why it's a tough one for

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  people to to process. And I also, I'm orbiting pretty close to Earth, right? Like, I'm a nearer villain to like, treat like a pinata versus like, anyone like in the federal government. Or, you know, it's just, it's easier to.

• 1:35:04Ryan Holiday?

  Right, like, one of the people that that sort of went through the both books for me, that it was always, it was like, Billy Bush read both of both of my books, like, back to back, The Stoicism, one of them, and the media ones. And you go, yeah, like, in retrospect, we sort of came down on on the dude who didn't do the thing.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he's a translator for, right, like, he is the middle man, and I was the

• 1:35:26Ryan Holiday?

  He's more accessible.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  the middle woman, like, translating these people, like, the great privilege of what you do is, as a journalist, it's like, you go places and you step in rooms and talk to people who are of interest and consequence to the general public, but most of the general public doesn't have the time, interest, desire, ability to go and do that. And you must report back, like, for them. And you've got to be thinking about, like, well, what do they need to know, right? And it's a privilege to do that. And I, you know, fucked up in such a way that I put that kind of contract in doubt. And so I understood the last time, last year, like, I understood the kind of, you know, general.

• 1:36:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, access is a tricky thing, right? Because

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  I'll say.

• 1:36:11Ryan Holiday?

  Maintaining the access, using the access, knowing when to make the break, when to, when to do what Janet Malcolm says is the sort of dishonor, like, when do you, when do you, when is the betrayal?

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  Well, I always think about Janet Malcolm and I always reread The Journalist and the Murderer. And but I also think of, I think it's Jean Marie Laskis, who said, when I report, I fall in love. When I sit down to write, I get divorced. And I never have felt that way. Like, I don't, I always felt like if, I think it's like, really the gay to least model. If the subject is surprised, that means I have failed in some way. But I like to argue. And like, if I disagree with someone's philosophy or something, or something they've stated, like, I want to talk about it because I want to understand the nature of the disagreement, like, why they feel that way. And that's what, to me, what the access is for. But also, it's like, as much as this was about my mistake within the context of this election, it was this isolated thing where I just fell in love with the wrong person.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  Right? And so it wasn't like a broad, my work has never been in doubt, right? Like, for whatever it's worth, and maybe not much, like, you know, the magazine I was working for, New York Magazine, like, you know, had some scary law firm, like, conduct their review of it. And like, it's not like my broad coverage and like, the 10-year period that we're talking about here has ever been in doubt, right? Like, nothing's ever been retracted. Like, there's no. So that's been a little frustrating, just seeing kind of like, the, but trust and respect are fragile things, right?

• 1:37:42Ryan Holiday?

  In retrospect, do you see that you have a tendency to compartmentalize? Like, that's kind of what I noticed. It's like, you love this person, but what this person is doing, not just to you, but like, their, their actual stated, sort of like, policy goals, like, they're seen to, those seem to be, again, disintegrated. Or even like, some of the people that you're like, talking to in the book, after it's all happening, I'm like, oh, okay, like, I, I don't know. That it seems, is that the journalist part of you that is able to like?

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  Probably, probably. But also, it's like, I mean, parsing this, like, is probably stupid. But for whatever it's worth, like, in the period of time that we're talking about, it's not as if, you know, This was like a kind of peripheral third-party effort. Certainly, he was not under the impression that it was going to end up how it ended up for a very long time, nor was I, right, nor was anyone else. And it wasn't as if we sat around and talked about the MMR vaccine.

• 1:38:39Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  Right? So.

• 1:38:42Ryan Holiday?

  But his negative impact on the world predates and would exist without becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  On vaccines, I understand what you're talking about, but then it's also like, and part of this is, you know, operating under the delusion of just like wanting to assume the best of someone that you love, right? But it's like, I do see that, you know, on the environment, on Monsanto alone, right? Like, those are big, important things that like I valued and like I thought were admirable, right? And I also just like, I think because I was so good at compartmentalizing, like, my job is to talk to people with whom I have, in most cases, enormous differences, right? And to be able to have a productive human conversation and try and understand something of them as a human being, understand their psychology, you can't really go into that just with judgment, right?

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  You can hold your disagreements, and those don't go away. But like, if you're just sitting there vibrating with contempt because of the differences of opinion, it's never going to work. And I got really used to that, right? And I think it made it much easier to kind of like, just focus on the human being and discount the rest. But I also like, I wasn't sure for like, you know, what he, we didn't talk, you know, we talked about music and poetry and, you know.

• 1:39:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and this sounds more judgy than it is, but it's like that expression, your mind so open, your brain fell out, like.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair, but it's also just like that, you know, it's not a rational thing to fall in love in general. This is perhaps particularly irrational.

• 1:40:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:40:13Speaker 03

  But like, it's going to end in some sort of immense pain.

• 1:40:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  Right? And so no matter what the premise is, or the premise of just like counting on another human being, all of these things are baseline irrational, but also essential to the human experience, right?

• 1:40:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:40:33Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I don't know where to land this thing. I don't know where, if I missed anything.

• 1:40:36Speaker 03

  I think I didn't.

• 1:40:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, no, I'm just being general. You want to go check out some books?

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  I would love to.

• 1:40:41Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, we'll go on the books turn.

• 1:40:48Ryan 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.