Thomas Ricks on the Wisdom of the Classics and Balancing Power | This Is What It Means To Be “Well-Read”

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and speaks with author and historian Thomas Ricks about his newest book First Principles, the founding fathers familiarity with the ancient Stoics, the wisdom that was embedded into the constitution, how America’s 3 part system was meant to reflect the wisdom of the Classics, and more. Thomas Ricks is an American journalist and author who has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting multiple times. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and A Soldier's Duty. For a limited time, the Daily Stoic ebook is $1.99 in the US and UK this week only. We have a premium leather bound version available at dailystoic.com/leather. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout. Reframe is a neuroscience based smartphone app that helps users cut-back or quit drinking alcohol. Using evidence-based tools, techniques and content, Reframe guides users through a personalized program to help them reach their goals. To learn more go to JOINREFRAMEAPP. COM/stoic and use the code STOIC for 25% off your first month or annual subscription. Download Reframe on the App Store today. Stamps.com makes it easy to mail and ship right from your computer. When you use our promo code, STOIC, you get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC. Never go to the Post Office again. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Thomas Ricks: Twitter, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  This is what it means to be well-read. You may have missed it, but in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius quotes dozens and dozens of other writers and philosophers. He rarely attributes these quotes, and presumably, that's because he was writing it in a tent in the middle of a battlefield. And so, he didn't have his books beside him when he was quoting Socrates, or Epictetus, or Homer, or Plato. No, he was transcribing it from memory. And this capacity for recall is indicative of the ancients' approach to reading. The philosopher Mortimer Adler has talked about how the phrase "well-read" has lost its original meaning. We hear someone referred to as "well-read" today, and we think of

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  someone who has read lots of books. But the ancients would have thought of someone who really knows their stuff, who has dived deeply into a few classic texts, to the point that they really understood them. "A person who has read widely," Mortimer says of the modern reader, "but not well, deserves to be pitied rather than praised." And the early 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes joked that, "If I were to read as many books as most people do..." I would be as dull-witted as they are. And that's why, as we talked about recently, that reading and rereading a select few works of a select few authors is so powerful.

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  The insights that come from their minds gradually get permanently implanted into ours. It's not about reading the Stoics once, but dozens, even hundreds of times. Which is why Marcus would say we can't be satisfied with just getting the gist of the things that we read. Read attentively, he said. Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity. That's what it means to be well-read. The test, then, is not whether you have read a lot, but what you have read a lot. And look, if you haven't read The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, I wrote the book in 2015 and 2016. It's got original translations from all the Stoics. I think it's worked for a reason.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  I'd love to have you check it out. It's $1.99 on Amazon, as I said, as an ebook. Ibooks too. Anywhere you get ebooks in the US, it's discounted in the UK also. But we also have a leather-bound edition. If you've read the book a couple of times and you want to invest in something a little more heavy-duty that'll stand the test of time, you can check out the leather edition at dailystoic.com/leather. Or if you just want the cloth-bound, lay-flat version, the standard hardcover, you can pick that up anywhere books are sold, and also at stuart.dailystoic.com, and I'll sign your edition as well. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  I got a cool surprise the other day. Adriana, the manager of the Painted Porch bookstore, came up and said, "Hey, Ryan, Tom Ricks is downstairs." And I was like, "What? That's crazy." Because he and I had just recorded the day before. A remote interview for the podcast. I assumed he lived in Washington or somewhere on the Atlantic coast. I don't, I don't know why it got set up that we recorded remote, but it happens that he spends half the year here in Austin. And so he stopped by and signed a, our stock of one of my favorite books that I've read in the last couple of years. First Principles, What America's Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  And How That Shaped Our Country. And, and I love the book so much. Not only did I interview Tom, I think we had a great interview almost exactly a year ago on the, on the podcast, which you should listen to. But now that the book is out in paperback, I absolutely had to have him on again. It's, it's a fantastic book. Look, I'll just give you this blurb from, from General Mattis. He says, Tom Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page, I learn something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country. I don't know if it so much restores my faith, but it reminds me what philosophy meant, specifically the Stoics meant at the founding of America.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  And we've, we've talked about, about this before, but the, the links between the founders and the Stoics are, are myriad. George Washington is introduced to the Stoics as a young man. Jefferson dies with a copy of Seneca in French on his nightstand. So the, the founders were deeply schooled in the ideas that we're talking about here on the Daily Stoic Podcast. And that's what I wanted to talk to Tom about. It was a great interview. I, again, I very much enjoy this book. You can check it out, The Painted Porch, anywhere books are sold. Listen to our first interview. Tom is a legit dude. He's a military historian for the New York Times Book Review.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  He's a visiting fellow of history at Bowden College. He's written everywhere from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for 17 years. And look, he's received two Pulitzer Prizes and is the author of seven books, including Fiasco, The American Military Adventure in Iraq. And then Churchill and Orwell, The Fight for Freedom, his fourth consecutive New York Times bestseller. I enjoyed this book so much. I enjoyed talking to Tom so much, and I'm so glad that he came out and visited us at the Painted Porch, which I hope you will at some point, too. So here's my interview with Tom Ricks.

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  I love the book so much, I wanted to talk about it again. I wanted to start, because so much has happened since we talked last, instead of getting into the politics at first, let's talk one of my favorite little opening passages in the book. You basically talk about how, in the middle of the American Revolution, if you went up to some average Revolutionary War soldier and tried to talk to them about Cato, some Roman figure from 2,000 years earlier, they wouldn't have been surprised by this at all. You say they would have known exactly who you're talking about, and almost certainly been able to engage

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  with you in some sort of extended philosophical discussion about this Stoic figure. Let's start there. How did that come to pass?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  It came to pass because the play about Cato by Addison, I believe, was one of the most popular dramas of the 18th century. It had been put on several times in America. And this is, remember, at a time when there weren't movies, there wasn't television, there wasn't radio. And so dancing, music, and drama were basically the three forms of public entertainment. And I would add sermons to that, though they wouldn't. They raised their eyebrows and called that entertainment.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  They knew about this play, and as I wrote that, I was thinking about a fictional soldier we might approach at the edge of the perimeter of Valley Forge, who would say, "Yes, I saw the play last night. It was put on in the bakery." But not only was this figure of Cato important to them in the play, remember also that the American Army, that this soldier was led by the American Cato, that...

• 8:19Speaker 01

  George Washington emulates Cato, the Roman statesman. And the characteristics that we associate with Washington were the characteristics that his contemporaries associated with Cato. That is to say prudent, just, wise, and reserved. Self-sacrificing, putting the state before personal interest. And it's intriguing to me that a direct line we can draw from ancient Rome to revolutionary America to today. And that line is what we have come to expect of the presidency,

• 9:01Speaker 01

  of the way a president behaves, was set very much by George Washington in his two terms as the first president of the United States. And those characteristics are the characteristics of Cato. Prudent, wise, just, reserved. And this is one reason I think that Trump shocked people so much, because he departed from the norms of Cato. He was more a Catalan, somebody more into the mob, a bit of a pandorer to the mob in a way that Washington or Cato never would be.

• 9:36Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you just listed the four cardinal virtues, which I'm in the middle of working on a series about right now. I think what you're really talking about, though, as far as those virtues, is the power of having a hero or an ideal, a model that we try to back out our behavior from. Seneca talks about how we should each choose ourselves a Cato. Someone we're saying, well, what would they do in this situation? What is the model for a man, for a statesperson, a woman, a leader? What does that look like? Washington happened to have actually chosen Cato. But it sounds like, really, the reason that 2,000 years

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  sort of disappear there is because they were celebrating those figures as their models, trying to emulate them day to day. Across oceans and centuries and all of that.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And it was also part of their common vocabulary. When somebody talked about Cato, everybody else in the room knew what he meant. If somebody said he's like Cicero, well, that's slightly different. A bit more voluble, a bit more nakedly ambitious, yet still a respected and important figure. One of the things that really strikes me as we talk about this is

• 10:59Speaker 01

  George Washington didn't start as George Washington, the one, the person we know. It's through emulating these figures that they build themselves. They're quite conscious of the gap between the figure they want to be like and the person they are. Washington is quite conscious of a lack of education and of a volcanic temper. And he wants to learn to control that. And one of the ways you do that is through emulation of these model figures. You try to be like that, conscious all the time that you fall short of it. I mean, imagine there's a time, and I read about this in the book, when Washington loses his temper in a cabinet meeting.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I mean, he just absolutely loses his shit. And Thomas Jefferson kind of stunned.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Who'd been needling him for like eight years, basically.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Jefferson just basically transcribes what Washington says. And by God, I'd rather be back on my farm than having people write these things about me. To his credit, though, Washington does not go out and say, and let's jail those editors who criticized me. As his successor, John Adams did. And Adams, as I said, is more of a Cicero than a, than a Cato.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, doesn't, isn't that what makes it so impressive, impressive in the case of something like Washington? If, and, and Cato, at least according to Plutarch, had a bit of a temper himself. If, if they didn't have the temper, if they were just naturally reserved, naturally just, naturally courageous, et cetera.

• 12:40Ryan Holiday?

  And maybe it's still virtue, but maybe it's not. Isn't the whole point, the struggle to get there, to keep it, to keep it under wraps, to do it even though it's not maybe exactly who we are out of the womb?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I think it's because we are not out of the womb that way. And we kind of somehow know, yes, Cato was not Cato to begin with. Cato built himself into being Cato. John Adams, quite consciously, built himself into the American Cicero. And though I have real problems with John Adams, he succeeds. He becomes a great figure, a leader and instigator of the American Revolution, and the first president to turn over power to the opposition party peacefully. Now, he doesn't do so nicely. He leaves town before Jefferson's inauguration. But it's

• 13:34Speaker 01

  a very important moment in American history that John Adams turns over power and does not try to tear down the electoral process.

• 13:45Ryan Holiday?

  The other hero of Washington, I think equally important to Cato, perhaps a little bit less known, and perhaps a bit more mythological than historical, is Cincinnatus.

• 13:59Ryan Holiday?

  And maybe tell us who that is?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  You got two generals who Washington is compared to. One is Fabius, the other is Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus is kind of lost in the myths of history. It's not clear exactly how much of the myth is fact. He, early on in Roman history, he is a general, he is retired, he's gone back to his farm, and he's at his plow, literally. When word comes from Rome that his help is needed, the Roman army is facing defeat, come back into leadership. He goes, and he fights a very quick set of battles, I believe, east of Rome against

• 14:40Speaker 01

  some local tribes. And within about 10 days, he's back at his plow, his waiting plow, which is in the field where he left it. And this is important for two reasons. Historically, generals have not been so eager and willing to give up power. It's always been a problem at the end of a war, the general sticks around. And this was something that the American colonists were very conscious of because the English Civil War, just over a century earlier, you had seen Oliver Cromwell lead a revolution against the English king, cut off his head and then take power.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And so for Cincinnatus to give up power was an important model, and Washington follows it. Washington gives up power not once, but twice. First, at the end of the American Revolution, some of his officers urge him to undercut Congress and to demand payment of all the money that the officers are owed and the soldiers are owed. And Washington declines to do so. Instead, he goes to Annapolis, where the Congress is meeting. He bows to Congress. The members of Congress do not rise and bow to him because he's very conscious that

• 16:03Speaker 01

  civilian power should be superior to the military power. Then again, he becomes president, is elected president, and he voluntarily steps down after two terms and establishes this precedent of custom, which is not law until the 20th century, that the American president serves just two terms. And again, he goes back to his farm. One thing I love it when he's back in his farm, in his waning years, he becomes interested in abolition. He learns a lot from experience. He's not an educated man, but he's a reflective man, a thoughtful man. And he's looking at slavery and beginning to think, we gotta do something here.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  He never quite gets around to it, but I think it's to his credit that at least he begins to think about it.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't it fascinating, this idea of high culture versus low culture? So you talk about Cato. The founders would have been familiar with Cato from having read him in Plutarch and the ancient texts. And then perhaps that ordinary soldier you're talking about is familiar with him because there's a popular play that Washington puts on a rendition of it at Valley Forge. At the same time, we're talking about this mythological, you know, historical figure of Cincinnatus that you and I may have learned about in school or books, but... As you're telling the story, the average listener here is going to be intimately familiar with it because it's also absorbed into the plot of the movie Gladiator.

• 17:32Ryan Holiday?

  And these sort of ideas kind of are part of our culture, whether we know them or not. You know, you could either be very clear on the allusions, or you can just touch the power of the story. Either way, it's kind of part of our identity and part of the narrative that we have as Americans, and then also sort of part of the narrative now of Western civilization.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely right. One of the interesting problems I had to wrestle with, though, as I wrote the book, is the realization, and the classicists all know this, but I didn't really, that we have different classical worlds. The classical world that we 21st century Americans look at was not the classical world that 18th century colonial Americans looked at.

• 18:23Ryan Holiday?

  How do you mean?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  In a variety of different ways. They just had different, they looked to different things, to different people, to different eras. So, for example, we tend to put Greek art, Greek literature, and Greek philosophy ahead of Rome. We're taught, and at least I was taught as an undergraduate, you know, Roman literature is a bit of a joke. There are a bunch of road, there are a bunch of soldiers and engineers, but Roman literature isn't much to write home about. There's a few good speeches, a couple of poems and stuff, but it's nothing like the great Greek tragedians.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Well, the 18th century Americans generally did not read the Greek dramatist.

• 19:12Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Except for Jefferson, who was always the exception, who was more interested in the Greeks than the Romans, who kind of anticipates 19th century Romantic thought.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  In a variety of ways, the colonial Americans put Rome in front of Greece. They see Rome as the apex of Western civilization. Alexander Hamilton says the Roman Republic was really the peak of Western life. They don't see the Greeks that way. When they do look at Greece, they tend to put the Spartans ahead of the Athenians, which we don't at all today.

• 19:51Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  We see the Spartans as kind of the fascist of the time.

• 19:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  They saw the Spartans as democratic, egalitarian, law-abiding, while they saw the Athenians as flighty, turbulent, and a bit too democratic for 18th-century taste.

• 20:09Ryan Holiday?

  And I imagine so much of that has to do with just what texts were available, based on what printer had gotten what book from London and pirated it. You know, it could have just been like, today, what goes viral versus what doesn't go viral. So much of it is chance and randomness.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no. So you have the Phallus, it looks like Phyllis, but they're called the Phallus Brothers in Glasgow, who do print great editions. Thomas Jefferson always wants their editions. The Greek literature was out there. Xenophon was read by some, but it just didn't have the respect that Roman literature had. So, for example, they thought the greatest playwright of the ancient world, and I'm blanking out on his name right now, it's a Roman comic playwright that nobody reads these days.

• 21:04Ryan Holiday?

  Terence?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Terence.

• 21:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  I find Terence unreadable.

• 21:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and very, not at all popular today. Like, you know, nobody talks about Terence.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  But he was like the Seinfeld of the 18th century. Why they get the jokes and I don't, I don't know.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  They just had a different set of what they talked about in the canon. And I kind of, whenever you hear people complaining about the classical canon doesn't get respect and so on, the classical canon keeps changing.

• 21:35Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  You say you're attacking the canon. I sat down and looked comparing, when I was working on the book, what people in the 18th century read and then what Harvard put from the Greeks and Romans in its, what the Harvard Five would bookshelf of the essential books of the Western world, sort of late 19th century. And then I compared that to what the University of Chicago put in its great books of the world in the mid 20th century. Each of them is quite different. And you see in the 18th century, really a two to one ratio of Romans to Greeks. And by the 20th century, Chicago has reversed that two to one Greeks to Romans.

• 22:18Ryan Holiday?

  But there is something to be said. I mean, the idea of common language, I don't mean that literally, but the idea that there was some sense of what these allusions were or who these figures were, that sort of, it's almost as if, how we used, there used to be a handful of television shows, so we all watched the same television shows, we could make the same references.

• 22:42Ryan Holiday?

  As that falls away, even literacy with the Bible, you know, you read a Lincoln speech today, you don't get that he's riffing on this or that. I wonder how much is lost by that. It's not that they've destroyed the canon, but the canon has become so much more expansive that we're not all reading the same books and we don't all have the same familiarity with the same figures. And so the irony is you could almost certainly talk to a soldier today and reference Cato, and they'd think maybe at best that you were referencing the Cato Institute, you know, or some sort of partisan thing today.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Well, then I'd run.

• 23:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Our canon today, our popular culture canon, you know, I think it's basically Star Wars, The Wire, Seinfeld, and Breaking Bad.

• 23:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, all very inspirational stuff.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, those, you know, those will get instant responses from people. It was a much smaller world, though. Remember that the 18th century colonial America, sort of 1750, if I recall the number correctly, had something like 8,000 college graduates total.

• 23:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And these are people who tended to know each other, especially because people tended to stay in their own region. You know, Harvard students basically came from Massachusetts and New England, Yale students from Connecticut, Columbia Kings College from New York. Princeton is the big exception. Princeton, they came from all over the eastern seaboard because they consciously wanted it to be a national college, even before there was a nation. And William and Mary, again, is a, is a school for Virginians. This is one reason. It was so intriguing to me when James Madison, from a slightly younger generation, decides not to go to William and Mary and go to Princeton. That really is an departure.

• 24:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it, it's, it's easy to be sort of snooty about it, but there is value to people being steeped in these texts. Uh, and, and you, you lose something, I think, when that falls away. Even if you're self-taught like Washington.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I, I agree with that. And the interesting thing is because you had a small elite culture, even people who didn't read it, uh, knew, they picked it up. Yeah. Who, you know, Cato, Cicero, Caesar, they knew, you know, Catiline, they knew what these things were.

• 25:21Ryan Holiday?

  And that, that is what I, I like about Washington. You know, Washington's probably the only one of the founders that read these texts in English, as opposed to in the original Greek or Latin, or in Jefferson's case, sometimes in French.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Something I would emphasize more about Washington, and I wish I did, I sort of was thinking about this when I picked up the paperback, and I hadn't, hadn't looked at the book for a, a year.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Washington has one foot in both worlds. He knows the classical culture by osmosis. But Washington's education is really much more typical of America at the time. Washington learns about life on the American frontier.

• 26:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And that's a very hard school. And Washington, in one person, manages to combine these two very different strains of how to be an educated American.

• 26:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's similar to Lincoln too, where, yeah, he's very familiar with the ancient texts, but he read them on his own, not in an elite university, had to struggle to find out what they meant, not just generally, but what they meant to him. And I think that's probably why Jefferson, or by, why Washington and Lincoln both have the most interesting interpretations of those ideas, because they came to them independently as opposed to being fed them through the university system.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  And they really believe in them in ways that say Aaron Burr doesn't.

• 26:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Aaron Burr, that, you know, for him, that's just all that virtue bullshit.

• 26:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  You know, Burr is what's in it for me. It's also interesting that Washington and Lincoln, I think, have a much better grasp of what America's about and what American people are and what they want and what they were willing to die for than do, say, Adams or Jefferson or even Madison.

• 27:14Ryan Holiday?

  And that's why they were both, I think, profound leaders as opposed to intellectuals in the way that Jefferson and Adams were. Neither of them could have commanded the troops through the depths of the American Revolution in that way.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  It's intriguing. I mean, that sort of Jefferson, you know. In the play, Hamilton shows up after the revolution and says, what I'd miss.

• 27:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  It really does capture, he doesn't seem particularly interested in the American revolution. He's governor of the biggest state. He seems kind of shocked when people say, you're going to help out with this revolution thing? And Washington's kind of prodding him. Hey, Thomas, you know, I'm fighting a war here. And Jefferson's attitude is sort of, well, I'm busy designing a house. So we both have problems, George. And he doesn't seem to get it, you know, to the point at which Jefferson is standing in Monticello and he looks down the hill and there are British soldiers coming up the hill at him. And it's like, me? Why? A little me? I just wrote the Declaration of Independence. Why are they trying to capture me? And off he goes riding up Carter's

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Mountain as the British chase after him, nearly capturing him.

• 28:30Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things that I think is so interesting in the book is you manage to find over and over again how the founders were all kind of independently saying the same things in their own wording and how often, obviously, this is rooted in some sort of ancient text or philosophical idea. But the one quote that pops to me the most today, and I think we're struggling with it today, is this idea, Madison expresses it, but so do the other founders, this idea that the American system is impossible without virtue in the people. What did that mean? And why is it something that they seem to talk about so much?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  They'd all been taught that public virtue was essential, that the public man, and there were no real public women, it was not an acceptable role, the public man puts country before self. Now, Washington is also a very observant man. He sees and learns a lot from experience. He's one of the first people to begin talking about this. During the revolution, this virtue thing isn't working out. He said, it's obviously essential to have some virtue, but it's not sufficient. What are we going to do here? And he's not thought of as a great political philosopher, but he's really one of the first

• 29:49Speaker 01

  to begin talking and thinking about this. The much younger Madison is also beginning to think, you know, we're trying to rely on public virtue. The system's not working. The Articles of Confederation assumes that people will do the right thing, and they're not. So what are we gonna do? And Madison leads the way in saying, we need to have a new fundamental law of the land. One that hopes for virtue but doesn't assume it, and that balances interest with interest. How do we have a large republic when Montesquieu says that republics have to be small? How do we have a sustainable republic when there are very few instances in history of

• 30:33Speaker 01

  republics lasting a long time? And something that's very pertinent today, the third question they're facing is, we just had an insurrection in Massachusetts. Shay's Rebellion in Western Massachusetts. The national government fell on its face when it tried to help Massachusetts. It called for troops and money. Neither one came forth from the states. Finally, the insurrection is put down when the governor of Massachusetts raises private funds and pays a private militia to go out and put it down. And so they put together this constitutional convention, and one of the things they want to have is domestic tranquility with a mandate that the federal government has a role in

• 31:17Speaker 01

  ensuring domestic tranquility, which they write in. That's kind of the shout out in the Constitution to Shay's Rebellion. So yeah, I've been thinking about that over the last year. When this book came out, we had not had an insurrectionary-like riot in the Capitol Building.

• 31:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it seems like-

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Makes the constitutional writers look very prescient.

• 31:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, maybe it's that Washington knowing what it took out of him, for instance, to turn down power, to end after two terms, to keep his temper in check, to not be corrupt, to not be enriched by what happened. Maybe he understood that like, hey, most people aren't going to be able to do this. And to simply rely, to live in this fantasy world that Jefferson, or even Adams, to a certain degree Madison, lived in this sort of southern fantasy of being back in Greece or Rome, wasn't realistic that, you know, he understood the down and dirtiness of the, you know, Joe Sixpack, to use that phrase, that that wasn't the norm.

• 32:26Ryan Holiday?

  And you can't just expect people to be Cato's. We can't all be Cato's, as they used to say in Rome. It's silly to expect that.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  And that's a good point. Washington is thinking, you know, none of you fellows have ever had a hatchet, which, you know, whizzed past your head suddenly when you're walking in the woods. It really strikes me, especially with Jefferson. He lived his life within sight of the Blue Ridge, but he never crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains. Whereas Washington was fascinated by America. He's out there, you know, going out and talking to the French, who are coming down out of Canada and occupying the Ohio River Valley. Even after the revolution, his fantasy, which he never got to achieve, was to invite Lafayette to join him on a grand trip around America, you know, including well west of what the United States was.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  He wanted to go out the Ohio Valley, down the Mississippi. He really just wanted to go out and see this big place. He has a grasp on what Americans are. And I think that's reflected in the work they do on the Constitution. They disperse power across the nation in so many different ways, across the states, between the state and federal government, between the three branches of the federal government, and two branches of the legislative branch of that government, two houses of the legislative branch. And they do things like, they didn't follow the British example. They're conscious of this.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  So, for example, members of Congress do not sit in the cabinet.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  They were saying, okay, the parliament, you know, we're not going to be like the English, where the parliament also becomes the executive with the prime minister. They make these big separations. And it's something I was thinking about recently.

• 34:22Ryan Holiday?

  Even the decision to write the constitution, to have it on a piece of paper, so you can't argue about what it is or isn't.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, and they explicitly say the people are sovereign. It begins, you know, "We, the people." "We own this thing." "It is our republic." "It's the people's thing." It's very impressive. The wisdom that's embedded in little corners of the constitution. I was thinking about this coming out of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. You have these three branches of government that all react differently to the January 6th attack. Congress is divided. The executive branch for 14 days is in the hands of President Trump.

• 35:12Ryan Holiday?

  Effectively the insurrectionists.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. But there's a third branch of government out there. The judiciary, the judicial branch. And again and again, I think 49 times out of 50, the judicial branch slam dunks the allegations of fraud and says, "No, that did not happen." And you have this independent judiciary that kind of is like the cavalry riding to the rescue. With a very powerful judiciary. Now, I have real problems with the Supreme Court these days. I think it has terribly overstepped its bounds.

• 35:44Ryan Holiday?

  And politicized.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the judiciary really played an important role here. That partly was the design of the constitution, not entirely. But there's also in the constitution, these little embedded bits of wisdom that we don't even realize. Another aspect that really struck me over the last year was there's this thing in the Constitution that says the states run elections, including for the federal government. And it's kind of weird. Why would the states run elections for the federal government? Well, imagine if the federal government ran, the head of the federal government being the chief executive. If President Trump had to certify the last presidential election, he wouldn't have.

• 36:26Ryan Holiday?

  Or could cancel the election outright? Like Lincoln could have, that people just wondered if Lincoln could have done that in the Civil War, and he really couldn't. He didn't have the power.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Whereas I think Trump would have asserted, you know, if he had it in the Constitution, absolutely would have said, no, this is a fraudulent election. We're going to have another one in a couple of years. Meantime, I'm going to be interim president here in Omaha, Omaha, Omaha. And we'd be going along here, you know, it's like his healthcare plan. It'll be here in 40 days.

• 36:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, to go back to this idea of virtue and the people, it strikes me as a debate we're still having, right? So I live in Texas and, and you know, our governor has said a number of times that the way through the pandemic, he says it's not through mandates, it's through personal responsibility, right? Which time and time again has failed, right? Like Texas is one of the hardest states in the country by COVID. It has a horrendous death count, a horrendous toll. I think something like 50,000 people have died since the vaccines have been rolled out because this idea.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  50,000 unnecessary deaths, yeah.

• 37:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so this idea that you can solve something, as important as virtue is to the Stoics, to myself, the idea that you can just say, oh, it's on the people, that it's about virtue, it's about personal responsibility, you know, for 250 years now, we've struggled with the insufficiency of that idealism. And it's weird because it sounds higher. It sounds like it's closer to what the founders meant, or that it's more idealistic to say, no, you know, we should, it's about personal responsibility. But, but even in the 1700s, they were struggling with the insufficiency of those ideals, ideals in practical reality because people are people. They don't do what they should.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I disagree with that. I actually think they had the answers. I think they'd gone through this and they had, you know, these were people who faced life and death. They knew that if they lost the revolution, many of them would likely have been spent life in jail or been executed.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  What we have in this country right now is a right, an improper right wing overlay on the Constitution that has been put there a lot by the Supreme Court. The Constitution says nothing about capitalism, nothing about the market, nothing about Christianity. They, those are literally all unconstitutional ideas. What the Constitution does speak to twice is the general welfare. Yet this has been entirely neglected by ideologues like Governor Abbott. The federal government, under the Constitution, has a responsibility for the general welfare.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Governor Abbott, by, and President Trump, through rhetoric that has encouraged people not to get vaccinated, has basically violated the constitutional mandate to protect the general welfare.

• 39:32Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I, I, I agree with what I'm saying is that some of the founders thought, you know, virtue is, the way through this is virtue and through responsibility. And then I feel like you had more realistic founders like Washington, who, who sort of understood like, no, this, they're hat, like, we, I guess what I'm saying is we've been decrying federal overreach since the very beginning of, of the republic, when that federal overreach is often at its basis, trying to solve the very real problems of governing a large country.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  That I agree with, that, that, I think the biggest problem in American history frequently has been federal underreach.

• 40:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  When you see the critics of federal overreach, frequently they are also the plus pro-slavery crowd. You have the Senator, I think from Georgia, who in about 1820 said, if the federal government can build canals, it could just as easily abolish slavery. They saw the connection between big government in one area and government power in another area.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  I do think that you need to give credit to the people who wrote the Constitution. They have seen the failure of excessive reliance on virtue alone. And they're saying, in this Constitution, we're going to give you an instruction manual on how to deal with that problem. One is the Madisonian dispersal of power. So that if you want to go anywhere, you're going to have to get around gridlock. You're going to have to make compromises, deals, and so on. But another is the phraseology of the common defense and the general welfare. It appears twice. And that is a mandate to government to look out for general welfare.

• 41:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think philosophically, what's also probably missing is not only is government obligated to look out for people, but I think philosophically, we have an obligation to each other, right? And if anywhere virtue has fallen short, it's this idea of, you know, people go, I'm going to make the personal decision that's best for me. I think that's what the founders were talking about. They were saying, we're going to have this legal framework, but you have to individually, you might be able to do whatever you want with your private corporation under the law, but you have an obligation as a man or woman of virtue not to pollute the rivers or streams in the town in which you live. You know, not to abuse your fellow human beings, etc.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  If you fail in those obligations, the government has the duty and the right to intervene because the government represents the people whose interests are being harmed. But so I think the Constitution is not just the fundamental law of the land. It also is a peace treaty between the states with different interests. And as you say, it also is kind of a marching orders for the American people. In the way you've been talking about, but also in the Bill of Rights.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  You know, we, it's hard to define what a Frenchman is or what an Englishman is. I can tell you what an American is. An American is somebody who follows the first 10 amendments. Who doesn't slug a reporter when he asks a question, as a congressional candidate did. Also, under the First Amendment, an American is, it's a good American doesn't shut down free speech on campus because they find it offensive. You support the right to others to have free speech, even repugnant speech. And so on, through, through these, through the entire Bill of Rights and through the

• 43:18Speaker 01

  other amendments, like the 14th and 15th amendments. So, for example, voting is the most American of acts. It is the basic building block of this country. By the way, it also is nonviolent.

• 43:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  So when you support voting, when you encourage people to vote, that is encouraging the country. When you undermine faith in voting, when you claim the whole system is fraudulent, that is un-American and unpatriarch behavior.

• 43:47Ryan Holiday?

  Or take active steps to disenfranchise people, as, as both political parties have, have done throughout the, the history of this country, because they fear the political power of that group exercising its representations in, in government.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this goes to, I mean, I have a lot of problems with Jefferson. I think he's probably, you know, one of the biggest hypocrites in American history. But Jefferson, in addition to the Declaration of Independence, has another great document, his first inaugural address, when he take, when he becomes president in 1801.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And he gets up and he says, look, we're not going to be like John Adams. I'm not going to throw the opposition into jail. I'm not going to tell editors, you can't criticize the president. And he really establishes a norm there that we will fight each other tooth and nail peacefully and politically, but when the election's over, we go on. And he says, we are all Americans, basically.

• 44:51Ryan Holiday?

  I wonder if he learned that from Washington, because Jefferson and Washington were at such loggerheads during the presidency. And he was essentially attempting, in many cases, to undermine Washington. And Washington never really, Washington had the first team of rivals cabinet, I guess is what I would say. And that was an illustration of his temperance and restraint, to be sure.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And I think, I think that actually would be a great book, What Jefferson Learned From Washington, even though he'd never admit it. And I think he did learn that. He also had the very interesting experience of being the opposition for eight years to, or enough, for four years, to Madison. And seeing people he knew thrown into jail for expressing anti-Adams views. And so he's had both that example of Washington's tolerance and the feeling of not knowing what the knock on the door is going to be at night. And he says, as president, yeah, we're going to incorporate both those things into the way I operate as president.

• 45:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, as flawed as Jefferson is, you might argue, he's sort of the Aristotelian mean between the impossibility of Cato and the Ciceronian flaws of Adams. He's kind of right there between the two, personality-wise.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Well, also, and then you've got Aaron Burr out there, which is, if things really go bad, Aaron Burr becomes president, I think this country wouldn't have lasted past 1810. You know, there would have been a third reorganization, a breakup of the country or something.

• 46:29Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you mentioned Catalin earlier, that as heroic as Cato was to the founders, Catalin, who I talk a little bit about in my book, Lives of the Stoics, was the Cautionary tale, exactly what they didn't want, but they were trying to build a system to neutralize. And I suspect you could say that Burr doesn't manage to succeed is that it is proof that they largely succeeded. But who is Catalin and why is he so loathed by the American founders?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  He's almost their political cartoon. I don't know. I'm sorry, I haven't read what you've written about him. I'd like to. I suspect that he gets a bit of a bad rap.

• 47:12Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  I suspect that he may have simply been the first pretty successful populist in Roman politics. But putting aside whatever the facts are, and they're hard to know, what we do know is what the revolutionary generation of Americans thought Catalin was. They thought he was what happens when you have somebody who lacks virtue, who is selfish and self-indulgent, who plays to the mob. These become the characteristics that they not only don't want to emulate, but when they

• 47:56Speaker 01

  see them in others, they're deeply suspicious of. It amazes me, though, given that Aaron Burr really seems to have been the American Catalin, how close he comes to succeeding. How the guy nearly became president. You know, a couple of throws the dice different and Burr could have been president. And I just don't know what would have happened at that point.

• 48:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and it's funny, Cicero, you know, is the opponent of Catalin and...

• 48:32Ryan Holiday?

  Probably does kind of exaggerate it and makes it all about the irony of Cicero. I found out this is what I talked about in Lives of the Stoics is that he kind of wastes himself on the wrong crisis, right? He pulls out all these desperate measures, overreach, etc. to block Catalina and then is so sort of extreme about it and so proud of himself about it that he has no credibility left when the real threat of Julius Caesar comes and he has no political capital left and seems like his judgment has escaped him and then then his dreaded overthrow actually does happen and Cicero is not there to do anything about.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  That's a good point, yeah. My dream is that one day we'll discover some text hidden away somewhere in the Middle East that will change our understanding of that entire period. I just think Cicero gets a bit of a free ride in history, his account of what happened and how things went down.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  Well, he's kind of a Winston Churchill thing where he says, "History will vindicate me because I'm going to be the one that writes it."

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. The difference is we have a lot of different observers of Winston Churchill. For Churchill, what I love about him is his entire life is in many ways a failure. He just has one great year, 1940, in which he saves Western civilization. If you're going to have one good year, saving Western civilization is a pretty good, pretty good achievement.

• 50:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, as he says, "When destiny taps you on the shoulder and you're, it's your finest hour." It was a little bit longer than an hour, but, but he, he did exactly what he'd sort of prophesied.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  But not quite a year. I mean, it's really striking to me also when you read Churchill's collective speeches, he really doesn't say much after 1942 that's worth a damn.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  He's almost bored. He knows that his moment was from the spring of forty until the entry of the Americans in December forty one. And as he says, after Pearl Harbor, he says, okay, basically, we won the war. You know, now the question is just how this whole thing plays out over the next three years.

• 50:53Ryan Holiday?

  That's my favorite part of The Crown, where Lithgow's playing Churchill and he's sort of got, he's come back to power and all he can do is, all he wants is messages from the Americans or news of the Soviets and he's just bored with sort of ordinary British politics because I think he knows it'll never be as dramatic as it was in those sort of glory days.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  It's a terrible mistake in his, in his life to go back and get elected Prime Minister, whatever it was, nineteen fifty. I think the only reason he did it was because he'd never been elected Prime Minister. He'd been selected Prime Minister in May nineteen forty and he wanted to win an election. Instead, the British public threw him out in the summer of nineteen forty five and he's deeply resentful of it and he wants to show I can win the Prime Ministership, but by that point, he's senile, bored and presiding over the dissolution of the empire, exactly the job he doesn't want. And then look at what else happens with the British in the early fifties is it turns out that the establishment is rotten. Kim

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Philby and all these spies, including the Queen's advisor on art, are all these commie spies. And I mean, there's a, there's a great book to be written on Kim Philby and James Bond. You know, James Bond is invented in reaction to the Philby thing. It's a way of Ian Fleming to say, well, actually, British spies can be rather romantic and dashing. We're not just all traitors.

• 52:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so the last thing I wanted to talk to you about, because I think what's so fascinating, I wrote about this at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, Marcus Aurelius, living through the Antonine Plague, then you have the founders, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, all these different epidemics, that even at the beginning of Washington's career as a general, you know, he has to make this decision about a mandatory vaccination for the troops. And so, you know, again, we think the past is this thing that's so distant, so unrelatable, or we think these issues are settled. And then here we are, all these years later, litigating the very same issues. The quote I keep coming back to from Marcus Aurelius, he says, "Look, there's two

• 53:09Ryan Holiday?

  kinds of plagues. There's the plague that can take your life, and the plague that can affect your character, destroy your character." And I suspect he was reacting to the types of radicalization and extreme insane depths we've seen some of our fellow Americans go in the face of this virulent pandemic that's killed so many people.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  You remind me of a conversation I had with Danielle Allen, who actually would make a good guest for you. You know, she has a double PhD, teaches at Harvard, I think a PhD in philosophy, and I think a PhD in the classics, if I recall. One from Harvard, I think one from Cambridge. And she was talking to me about Cicero's On Duty. And she said, "The dirty little secret," as a classicist, well, she found it really boring. She could never, just sort of, you know, she had to teach it a couple of times, it was just sort of a drag. And then she said she picked it up in a moment of crisis in American politics, I think it was after, just after January

• 54:13Speaker 01

  6. And she said, "Suddenly, the words blazed on the page." And she realized Cicero's writing in a moment of crisis. What is your duty when the world's coming down around you?" And she said, "Suddenly, it felt very different." I think the Constitution is worth rereading in that context, and also in the context of classicism. One thing that really struck me in the last year is how resilient the Constitution is.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  I've had some really depressing moments in the last year. This latest thing with Kyle Rittenhouse is just one more. I just think that's going to lead to violence in American streets. And we seem too accepting of political violence in this country right now.

• 55:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, menacing. The idea of menacing strikes me as an interesting interplay between the First and Second Amendments that we are struggling to grapple with.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, you know, the famous statement that your right to swing your arms ends at the beginning of my nose. Right now, we seem to have, the Second Amendment seems to have run roughshod over the First here.

• 55:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  And we've lost our balance on it. So I've had these depressing moments over the last year, yet I come back again and again to the thought that the US Constitution has a resiliency built into it that I don't always remember, and I think as a country, we can appreciate better. The Constitution took some rough punches in the last year, but it came back. It never got knocked out. The system has worked. It has been herky-jerky. It's been scary. It's had hiccups, but the American system has worked. Now, has all of it worked at all times? No. I think Congress is still reeling and is not sure of what its role is or how it works.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And the presidency under Trump has some self-inflicted problems. I think under Biden, there are some genuine problems with the presidency. But the judiciary, as I said, stepped up, and this three-part system, which is meant to reflect what they learned from the classics, has the resiliency in it that goes, but takes us back to Aristotle, when Aristotle says you want these three aspects of aristocracy, a monarchy, and the people. And if they can balance, then you can have a sustainable system.

• 56:50Ryan Holiday?

  And I think so much of that is rooted in the fact that whether you're talking about Aristotle's time, or Cato's time, or Marx and Realist's time, or Jefferson's time, or FDR's time, or our time, is that people are people and we've been struggling with the same perennial and timeless problems. I was, I read this Washington Post piece that I never, I never thought of, and when you read Franklin's autobiography, it sort of feels out of place in retrospect. But the piece basically posits that Jeffrey, Franklin has sort of a scientific mindset, was very interested in this newfound technology of inoculation, and his wife was very skeptical of it. And they have this spousal argument, they decide not to inoculate

• 57:35Ryan Holiday?

  their son, who shortly thereafter dies of smallpox. And, and he, this is something he calls out in his autobiography and says, hey, please learn from my example. I wish I'd taken this risk. I, we were afraid of something, and we made the wrong call. And just to think, you know, three weeks ago, my wife and I, my son turned five, and had to think about, what decision are we going to make here? And just as, as, as Washington had to think about, as, as Biden had to think about, you know, a mandatory vaccine mandate for all the members of the, of the federal government, or, or the armed forces. It's just like, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  And as you mentioned, George Washington, I don't think we would have won the war, Revolutionary War, without George Washington. The one reason George Washington wins and survives the war, is he had had smallpox on his only trip outside the United States to the Caribbean. What other aspect of this that's quite striking, we haven't talked about race in America, and I think it's crucial always.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  The smallpox inoculation in America is credited to a Dr. William Boylston, who is a relative of, I think, an uncle of Abigail Adams, John Adams' wife. What is insufficiently credited is that Boylston probably learned the method of smallpox inoculation from an African enslaved man in Boston, who knew how to do it and told Boylston about it.

• 59:21Ryan Holiday?

  It's pretty incredible. And to think, yeah, basically at two pivotal moments in American history, the original colonists, and then with the inoculations, you know, we are gifted knowledge from first indigenous peoples and then the enslaved peoples. These breakthroughs, this way, how to do stuff, that we would probably not be here without. And yet, it's considered, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever, to acknowledge these things, that it's somehow taking the shine off American history to acknowledge and credit the real reasons we're here in a lot of cases.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. You've put it that beautifully.

• 1:00:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's terrifying to think not only did we struggle with these things 200 years later, but we can't have, the issue can't be settled, you know, whether the government has the power to force people to take an obvious

• 1:00:23Ryan Holiday?

  medical procedure to benefit not just themselves, but the common good. And we're not just litigating these things, but people are throwing themselves in front of the barricades to prevent that from happening. It's maddening to me.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  I think there's always going to be this tension in American history between...

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Our past and our aspirations. Yeah, this is something that has really come home to me in this conversation with you. The Constitution embodies all these things that they're looking at these contradictions. They're trying to figure them out. They're trying to deal with them. What I love about the Constitution is they wrote it to be a living, changing document, to be amended, as they called it.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  They gave us this open-ended document based on their experience of all the greatnesses and all the evils of the human being and all the weaknesses and all the... And they, they, they say in the Declaration of Independence that all people are created equal.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  And we're still trying to figure out how to actually make that a reality. This is not entirely a bad thing. This is this dynamic tension in American history. It feels to me like almost turning the ignition key of the country.

• 1:01:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Turning on the motor. Who are we? What are we going to be? How are we going to do it? It's a... James Mattis, retired Marine general, former Secretary of Defense.

• 1:01:54Ryan Holiday?

  Mutual friend of both of us.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yes, and he loves to talk about, and actually a big fan of the Stoics. He used to carry Marcus Aurelius into battle in his backpack. He loves to talk about the American experiment. And if there's anything that the last years brought home to me is the... It is still an experiment. It still can fail. And it's our responsibility to try to make sure it doesn't.

• 1:02:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that was the, the place I wanted to end with you. I was, as I was prepping for this, I pulled up my copy of your book. And every time I finish a book and then I go through it, I mark when I did it. So this is December 2020. You and I talked, the election had already happened. But I remember we were talking about what people were then referring to as, as Trump's attempts to undermine our faith in the electoral process, right? And I, I remember there's a video of us that's sort of gone viral where I said, he's not attempting to undermine faith in the election. This is a slow-moving coup attempt. And and as it as it turns out, that's what it was.

• 1:02:59Ryan Holiday?

  Not since 1812 had had had the the Capitol of America been attacked in that way as it was on as on January 6. I'd be curious as as we wrap up, what do you think the founders would have thought about those events from November to January 2020? And what what advice or tools do you think they have for us as we as we dig out of the wreckage of this, I think, what will be studied in hundreds of years if if America is lucky enough to continue the experiment, as a as a pretty dark moment in American history?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  First of all, I think they would have been appalled at the attack on the Capitol. Jefferson, the Romantic, said the US Capitol Building, it wasn't just the headquarters for American politics, it was to be a temple of liberty. And so this was not just a political attack, it was an insult to America's secular religion of liberty. The second thing, I think, that really would have bothered them, many others of them, was the flag of the Confederacy was carried into the Capitol. It was flown there, and it had never flown there during the Civil War, it never made it in there.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  And also, the Capitol was supposed to be attacked on 9/11. It was the third target. The that plane instead, as I understand it, went down to Pennsylvania. That plane was going to go into the Capitol Building. And so, in many ways, what the terrorists failed to do on 9/11, the insurrectionists, the right-wing anarchists, I would call them more accurately, the right-wing anarchists on January 6, succeeded in doing, and that would also appall.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  The founders, but most of all, I think what everybody who was at the Constitutional Convention would say is this is exactly what we are talking about with the mob. This is Shea's Rebellion. This is what we saw, the need for a stronger federal government. The people forget, in all the sort of the atmosphere of libertarianism we have these days, the United States Constitution was explicitly written in response to a sense that the central government of the United States was too weak.

• 1:05:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  That it was unable to deal with the mob. It was unable to ensure domestic tranquility.

• 1:05:36Ryan Holiday?

  To solve the problems of everyday people's lives.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  And one of the purposes of the Constitution was to make for a stronger central government that would help ensure domestic tranquility. These are phrases, but there are some phrases in the Second Amendment that are paid, I think, a lot of attention to. But I think if there's anything I wish my fellow Americans would do more of is pay attention to some of the other phrases in the Constitution. And domestic tranquility, internal welfare are two of those phrases.

• 1:06:06Ryan Holiday?

  And coming out of that, what do you feel like our obligations? There's politicians and military figures who listen to this podcast, and then also just everyday voters and citizens. What is our obligation for the people who watched that event on television or online as I did? And you're just sort of stunned to see the collapse of, or to see that the temple of democracy be desecrated. What's our obligation or duty, to go to Cicero's term? What's our duty coming out of this? What do we need to think about, do, talk about to make sure tragedy like that never happens again?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  In one way, I want to point out my book, in another way, I don't. I think first principles is important.

• 1:06:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  That said, I think the weakest part of my book was the epilogue. If I could rewrite the epilogue today, I think I would. And the two things I really would emphasize are the importance of nonviolent politics. I am, I think we all have the duty to vigorously oppose domestic political violence in any form.

• 1:07:19Ryan Holiday?

  From any party, for any cause.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. Those who support political violence, I am against, left or right.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  My support for them is a, I'm a First Amendment fundamentalist. People have the right to say what they need to say. They have the right to gather peace- peaceably. Peaceable assembly and nonviolent speech are essential. The other thing, the, the other shoe of our system is the vote.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  People who impede the right to vote are acting in an un-American way. People who support and help voting are acting in a patriotic way. And I wish that politicians would get up on their high legs and talk about the vote as the basic building block of this country. And if you try to stop people from voting, you are acting in an unpatriotic way. And this needs to be hit in a nonpartisan way. And any attempts to disenfranchise people, I think, are also, especially through false claims of fraudulence. I would like to see some people punished for asserting fraud when it's not there.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  It undermines faith in the system. Right now, I think one-third of all Republicans think the election was stolen. And it wasn't. We've had court after court. We've had examinations of, of the evidence independently in two score.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  To fifty courts, there is no evidence. And I think the failure of our leadership to shut that down and say, look, you need to stop talking about fraud and start talking about voting. The sense that we've lost the hold of first principles. And here I would fault the Democratic Party more than the Republican. The Democrats don't seem to have a handle on how to talk about this, and I don't understand why.

• 1:09:22Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's right. And I would maybe add on top of that also, when we think about the disenfranchisement we put on ourselves, right? Too many people don't vote. They don't participate in the political process. And then when they do, when I look at, you know, what happened in Virginia, put partisan, put what candidate was better aside, it's remarkable and disappointing to me to see that as a country, as a state adjacent to Washington DC, that the Republican Party did not suffer the consequences for their refusal to adequately condemn, distance themselves, separate themselves from the acts on January 6th.

• 1:10:05Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, the Democrats ran bad campaigns, they should be faulted for that. But the idea that we're just going to go back to politics as normal when something like this has happened just a few months before is unfathomable to me.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't understand why. I thought that the Republican Party would repudiate white right-wing anarchism and white supremacism, and instead it seems to be bending over backwards to make homes for both those things in the, inside the party.

• 1:10:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and then to go to your point, I think this is a good place to wrap. But the political violence on both sides, menacing on both sides. I remember I was at a, I was at a, I walked by a political protest in Portland and I saw Antifa dressed in essentially stormtrooper gear, carrying bats, ready to go fight people in a crowd, and I felt a chill go down my spine. You know, this is not what America is about. And I was at some of the George Ford protests here in Texas and saw, you know, people walking around with assault rifles and dressed like they were occupying soldiers in Iraq and was equally appalled. This is not what The political process looks like the whole point of the invention of the political

• 1:11:21Ryan Holiday?

  process was to separate the solving of day-to-day issues from the deployment or the threat of violence. And both parties have to do, and all people have to do a better job distancing themselves from the Catalines and the violence, because it is not who we are, and it's not what Cato would want from us.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  I think you should write a book about American duty.

• 1:11:48Ryan Holiday?

  That would be a great idea.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And using the Constitution and the background of the classical text to talk about that.

• 1:11:58Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was just, as I was going back through the book, because I'm doing this series on Four Virtues, I noted you talked about that prudence or wisdom being one of the two of the cardinal virtues that appears explicitly in the Constitution, justice and wisdom being the two parts of it. And I'm hoping this series works as an example of that. But I think your book here, the idea of going to first principles, what are the core ideas behind our system, is a key part to understanding what our duty is as well.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. This has been a real pleasure.

• 1:12:36Ryan Holiday?

  Well, likewise, and I love the book, and hopefully we'll talk again soon, and that things will get worse after this conversation like they did last time we talked.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  I hope not. Thank you.

• 1:12:49Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochille, the painted porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place. First off, because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts, is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of

• 1:13:32Ryan Holiday?

  our Best of meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year. Including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.