James Clear, Robert Greene, Brad Stulberg, Tom Nichols, and Julia Baird on the Writer’s Process

Today’s episode features some of the best interviews with authors from 2021. Ryan talks to James Clear about how to begin and maintain productive habitual action, Robert Greene about the process of writing some of his bestselling books and his newest book The Daily Laws, Brad Stulberg about practical steps to alleviate the anxiety that comes with the lifelong pursuit of greatness, Tom Nichols about what it means to take your responsibilities as a responsible citizen seriously, and Julia Baird about how the journey towards achieving stillness requires incremental progress. → We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up before sign ups end on January 1st! 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. Trade Coffee will match you to coffees you’ll love from 400+ craft coffees, and will send you a freshly roasted bag as often as you’d like. Trade is offering your first bag free and $5 off your bundle at checkout. And, this holiday season, give the coffee lover in your life the gift of better coffee too, with their own personalized gift coffee subscription from Trade. To get yours, go to drinktrade.com/DAILYSTOIC and use promo code DAILYSTOIC. Take the quiz to start your journey to the perfect cup. 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, FacebookSee 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I love books. They're what I make, what I do for fun. And then, of course, if that wasn't enough, I also have this bookstore, The Painted Porch, here in Bastrop, Texas, which all of you are welcome at, and I'd love to see you at some time. But one of the perks, of course, of the Daily Stoic Podcast is that I get to talk to authors of books that I like. I get to, now, as I'm reading particularly new books that have just come out,

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  I'm thinking like, oh, I want to ask the author about this, right? Or that reminds me of this. I want to talk to so and so about that. And so, one of the perks of doing the podcast now for two years, three years, I don't know, doing these interviews, is that I get to talk to authors I admire about the books, and I get to bring that to you. And in this special bonus episode, it's a compilation episode. It's one of the best interviews I think I've ever done with authors, talking about some big ideas from their books. James Clear is going to be talking to us about how to get 1% better every day. Robert Greene, for his part, is going to be talking about the power of daily

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Practice Brad Stuhlerberg on the practice of groundedness. Tom Nichols on the assault on modern thinking, right? Misinformation, disinformation. And Julia Baird is talking to us about the idea of phosphorescence, which I think is so important and so beautiful. Really happy to bring you this compilation episode. And this is me chatting with James Clear. If you haven't read Atomic Habits, absolutely should. Fantastic book. I think it was actually the first book that we sold at the Painted Porch. Click the link in the show notes or pick it up at the Painted Porch or wherever you buy books.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  A new year's resolution, the problem with that is that you are focusing, you're starting with the result. I want to lose 40 pounds. I want to learn, I want to know Spanish, you know? Like you're picking a thing and you're saying, I want to get that result. When really what you're talking about identity, you're also talking about process. It should be, I want to, I want to eat better meals on a daily basis as opposed to I want to get a certain thing. Or I want to write a book is, is not the right goal. It should be, I'm, I'm going to start writing. Like, you know, it's the doing the thing versus focusing on the outcome.

• 3:23James Clear?

  Well, and this is kind of one of the, I don't know, discoveries I had as I was working on the book and writing about the topic more is that when you stick to the process, like you're saying right now, when you like perform habits consistently, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And so by doing those habits, you're casting these little votes for the type of person that you are, the identity that you believe you have. You're sort of reinforcing that internal narrative. And so by building small habits, by sticking to the process, you are in that moment reinforcing that identity. And ultimately, once you get to that point where you say, hey, actually, you know, I've done this enough times. I think this is part of my story. Like I am a basketball player or I am a meditator. I am a writer or whatever it is.

• 4:10James Clear?

  You're no longer pursuing behavior change at that point because you're already, you're not trying to be someone new. You're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be. And you know, like, take, you know, you're a great example of this as, say, someone who has the identity of a writer or an author. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the task of writing is easy for you, or that it doesn't require any effort. But the act of writing every day is in alignment with how you view yourself. The, the internal narrative of I'm an author, I'm a writer, you're not like trying to convince yourself, or in the case of many habits or New Year's resolutions, people say things like, I need to get motivated, or I need to get amped up, or like, I need the willpower to do it. And like, you don't necessarily need to get motivated to be a writer. You already view yourself in that

• 4:54James Clear?

  way. Now, you still need to stick to the habit, you still need to do the work. But I think it's the, the work takes on a different characteristic at that point. Once you start to identify as the type of person who does that consistently.

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  And it's, it's sort of paradoxical. So I get why it's, it's hard for people to understand. Like, you, you hear Bill Belichick or someone talk about the process and you're like, but you've won the most games out of anyone. Or, or in Zen and the Art of Archery, you know, he talks about, you know, put the target out of your mind, you know, what's the point of archery if you're not aiming at the target, right? So it feels insane. And that's probably why people have resistance to it. And I, I think where I've come down is like, okay, obviously, having goals is better than someone who has no goals. But then it's like, once you have the goal, philosophically, you get to a place where the goal becomes not important. So it's, it's a weird contradiction that you're asking people to wrap their heads around.

• 5:47James Clear?

  Well, and I kind of feel like if you really care about the goal, you'll focus on the system. You know, like, if you, if you actually care about getting the result, which supposedly is what we all are doing this for, the archer is trying to hit the bullseye, the football player is trying to win the championship and so on. Supposedly, results matter so much, and we care so much about them. And this is coming, by the way, from someone who is very results oriented. Like, I've kind of had to, you know, like, do therapy on myself or whatever, to get myself to focus on the process more and not be so hung up on the outcome. But if you do care about the outcome so much, then you need to focus on the system and the process because that's how you actually achieve it. And furthermore, being outcome focused will help you achieve a goal one time. But if you want to keep winning again and again,

• 6:31James Clear?

  you have to be focused on the system. And so, uh, goals are good for, uh, one-time wins. Systems are for people who want to win repeatedly. And I feel like that's kind of where I, um, how I think about the distinction between the two.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. What's that? What's that joke where it's like, uh, once you're lucky, twice you have good systems, you know, or twice you're good, you know? It's like doing it once is easy, or it can be random. But if you're trying to replicate it, there needs to be some sort of process.

• 6:57James Clear?

  Right.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  And I'd be curious too, as an author, like, again, this goes to the sports thing is you have, you want your book to be successful. No one writes a book and then they hope nobody reads it. But then they also, the place this, this, uh, process comes in, Marcus Rilis talks about this. He goes like sanity is tying your happiness to your own actions. You know, like if your goal on your book, it like, you can't really have a system that guarantees you too much of the external results. Like you can't have a system that is going to make your book a number one New York Times, you sell it. You can have a system that should generate a good book, you know, like you can have the system to focus on the parts that are in your control. And then you also have to get to a place where you write off

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  the parts that are not in your control as being much less consequential.

• 7:45James Clear?

  Yeah. I kind of think about it like you have things that you don't control at all. The weather, for example. Then you have things that you influence, but you don't control them. You know, like if you're playing someone in tennis, you can influence the outcome. You can't control how they play or where they shoot, they hit their shots or whatever. Um, and then you have things that you're like fully under your control, you know, what you choose to wear today or whatever. Um, and most of the things that really matter in life fall in the middle category. You can influence them, but you can't totally control them. And so at some point, at least for myself, like with writing Atomic Habits, I had to kind of be at peace with. The effort that I put in or something like I didn't want to get to the end of it,

• 8:26James Clear?

  you know, depending on how you measure it, it took somewhere between three to five years to finish the book.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  Your whole life.

• 8:32James Clear?

  I didn't want to get to the end of that process and feel like I hadn't given the best effort I could. Now, I hoped it would do well and hit a bestsellers list and sell a bunch of copies and all that, but I can't control that. But I just wanted to feel like I had influenced every bit of that process that I could. And then, you know, then we'll see what happens. And, um, you know, there's always something more you could have done, but I'm at peace with the effort I gave, you know, and I feel like that's, uh, that was probably the most important thing for me. And then the fact that it has worked out well, you know, just makes it all feel much better afterward.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's, that's the extra. But I mean, imagine if you'd gotten the results, but you knew that it wasn't as like, you know, like that's, that's a weird position to be in that I've been in at different times in my life. And I'm sure you've seen it with articles or something where you did a pretty good job, but it wasn't like your best.

• 9:26James Clear?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Ryan Holiday?

  There's a, there's a weirdness to it. I mean, you still enjoy it.

• 9:29James Clear?

  There's something about the, um, there's something about the struggle that makes the outcome more, uh, you know, enjoyable. Like I think about, imagine if you had spent your whole career, you played football as a kid and through high school and college, and you're finally like the kicker on the Superbowl winning team and you kicked the field goal to win the game. And how that would feel after spending 25 years of your life dedicated toward that, that goal versus being like a professional soccer player. And then you retire and you're like, hey, you know what? I might try out for a team and then you, turns out you can be the kicker and then the starter gets hurt and you end up kicking the game winning field goal in the Superbowl. And it's like, it would still be really cool, but I don't know that it would be the same because you don't have the struggle before it. And so there needs to be some kind of.

• 10:15James Clear?

  Yeah, the height of your joy is tied to the depth of your sorrow in that sense. And the more that you, the more effort that you put in, the better it feels when you do have some success.

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  There's a, there's a story I just found and you can't steal it because it's going to be in my next book. But Jimmy Carter was a, was a nuclear engineer before he was a politician and before, I guess, before he was a peanut farmer. But he, he, he went to the naval academy and he was sort of up for this promotion as a naval officer. And he was, he was interviewed by Admiral Rickover, who single-handedly basically invents the idea of a nuclear submarine. And anyways, he's in this, he's in this long interview and these are these notoriously like insane interviews. He was like a really difficult guy to please. And so he's asking Jimmy Carter about all his accomplishments and he goes, you know, you know, how did you, how did you do in your class at, at, at the naval academy?

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, oh, I was 59th in my class of 400, which is extremely difficult. And he said, how did you do on this posting? And he goes through and he's like sort of beaming, listing all his accomplishments. And Rickover looks at him and he just goes, did you always do your best? And he was like, he was going to be like, yes, you know, look at all my accomplishments. And then, and then he, he thought about it and he said, no, I didn't always do my best. And then Rickover just got up and left the room. And Jimmy Carter said, the rest of his life was trying to provide a better answer to that question. And so it was interesting to me to go like, he'd had this incredible career as one of the top people in the Navy, top of his class.

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  But as soon as he had to look at it from the side of like, was it actually the best he was capable of doing? The accomplishment became totally meaningless. And I think that's a good, that's a good microcosm of life.

• 12:05James Clear?

  Yeah, that's fantastic. That's a, yeah, that's a wonderful example of this idea. And it also.

• 12:11James Clear?

  Encourages you to measure outcomes in a different way. You know, like, we spend so much time measuring outcomes on how they are relative to everyone else. You know, how much money am I making relative to the person next to me? Or what is the number on the scale relative to the other people in, you know, on the team or in my class or whatever? All these other things that are like, status symbols of some sort. And this is like, an internal measure, which is, um, also, interestingly, both of those are about feelings. One is about how you feel compared to others. And one is about how you feel with like, your self-esteem and reputation with yourself. And, um, I don't know, there's, I think there's probably a strong encouragement to measure it more in the second way than the first.

• 12:52Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's funny, because both our mutual friend, Mark Manson, and I use this, the story of Dave Mustaine in, in our, I did an Ego's the Enemy, and he did it in, uh, The Subtle Art. But, you know, here's this guy, he gets, he, he's the lead guitarist and founder of Megadeth. That seems like a great accomplishment. But in light of the fact that he was kicked out of Metallica, that's a, not an accomplishment. And it's like, so many people would kill to have sold the amount of books that you've sold. But then, you, so you can, and if I told you at the beginning of, of your book, this is what you're gonna have, you'd be like, that's an unmitigated success. But you can still, but, but that's the problem with comparison and, and focusing on things that are outside your control, is you can immediately render your own accomplishment

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  meaningless by, by looking at someone who's sold one more than you. And that's like, the shitty thing we do to ourselves.

• 13:42James Clear?

  I don't know why we do that. You know, like, I fall into that just as much as everybody else. You could get like, whatever your current level of, uh, output is, or success is, that becomes your new baseline. And then you just look at whoever is slightly above that. And then you, you feel the way you did before. And it's like, you need to remind yourself when you wanted what you currently have. You know, like, there are so many things about my current lifestyle that I have spent the last decade working toward. And like, I thought that was the thing I really wanted. You know, and then you get to here, and, uh, you feel differently. So, I don't know, I, um, There's some kind of recalibration that goes on there. There's some kind of encouraging type of encouragement that we all need to like focus on those good bits that we have earned already, rather than looking, always looking toward

• 14:27James Clear?

  the next milestone. And I think this also connects back to what we were talking about a minute ago with process versus goals or systems versus outcomes, which is that this is one of the downsides of being goal oriented, is that you're always looking at the next milestone versus being process oriented or system oriented, which is, you know, I can feel really good about myself right now because I got two good hours of writing in this morning and that was an accomplishment and it felt like a good day already. You know, like the day has already been a victory. I don't need to like be thinking about all these other huge goals and then all of a sudden turn it into a failure.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  And here is my interview with the one and only Robert Greene. I got to talk to him a couple of times this year, twice in person, which was just incredible for me. And I got to work on, help bring into existence his wonderful new book, The Daily Laws: Meditations on Power, Strategy, Seduction, and Mastery. It's actually the second bestselling book in the painted porch this year. Check that out and here is my interview with Robert Greene on The Daily Laws. This is the new book, The Daily Laws. I see it as kind of a greatest hits album, a best of Robert Greene. Because to me, I feel like it's a question people ask me a lot.

• 15:43Ryan Holiday?

  They, they'll hear me or someone else talk about you and then they'll go, what Robert Greene book should I start with? And it's kind of a tricky thing because if you go 40 Laws of Power, maybe they get turned off because it's dark. If you went with Seduction, maybe they're, that's not what they're in. To me, it's actually a question I get with the Stoics too, like who should you start with? It feels really hard, but this is to me, perfect because it's basically the best of all of your stuff in the most digestible way. Like I was talking to a football player, actually. He plays at Alabama and he was, he had heard that The Laws of Human Nature was really good.

• 16:24Ryan Holiday?

  And I thought, that's probably, to me, that's like advanced class Robert Greene. Maybe not where I would start if I was 19 years old.

• 16:34Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it depends. It depends on your background and if you've read a lot of books on psychology and if you can stomach going through a nearly six hundred page book. But it's, you know, I have a lot of people who you wouldn't think would be reading The Laws of Human Nature, but who read it slowly and bit by bit. And particularly if you're in a situation where you're dealing with a lot of difficult people. But the way I look at the book is a little bit differently in that I sort of see like it embodying kind of two main lessons that I've derived in life. The first, yeah, the first one was, um, you know, unlike you, I did not have any success in my life until I was essentially thirty eight years old. And prior to that, I had a lot of very painful experiences.

• 17:19Robert Greene?

  I kind of wandered my way through the work world. And I was sort of entered the work world out of college with all of these silly illusions about people, about success, about who I was. And slowly, they all got knocked down one by one. It was very painful and very emotional and it caused me a lot of drama and it probably set me back several years. Although in the end, it gave me all the material for The Forty Eight Laws of Power. And what I sort of learned from all of that crap that occurred to me was that really what I needed to forge was kind of this realistic outlook on life. Where I get rid of all the bullshit, all the things that you learned in university,

• 18:01Robert Greene?

  all the bad ideas that you got from your parents, all the bad ideas that you get from your peers. And you're able to look at the world relatively objectively, and I mean relatively. And it doesn't mean that life becomes this kind of boring gray world of just, it actually becomes more exciting and fulfilling. And so I learned that the hard way with that kind of realistic attitude, which I was forged through a lot of battles. It's really, really what allowed me to write The Forty Eight Laws of Power. And the second thing was the power of daily practice, of habits. Now, I've been meditating for about eleven, exactly eleven years now. Every single day, don't miss a single day. I miss one day, I make sure the next day I do it two times.

• 18:45Robert Greene?

  And the habit of doing it every day is just very fulfilling. It becomes something I haven't forward to and it's really helped have a profound effect. But habits of work and discipline where every day you attack something is where our the power of our brain operates maximally. So this is a book that every day is gonna make you meditate on something and it's gonna infuse you with that realistic outlook that I think kind of actually literally saved my life.

• 19:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think I think that's right because and what I found with the daily stoic is you read it once and you're getting the sort of greatest hits survey course of the works and thinking of Robert Reed. And there is a lot of value in that and that's more than the twenty six dollars or whatever the book costs. But it's it's really on read number two and three.

• 19:36Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 19:37Ryan Holiday?

  Or fifty, depending on how young you are when you buy the book. That's where the value of the daily practice is like, I imagine your meditation is relatively the same as it was ten years ago, fifteen years ago. And the power is the groove you get into doing the same thing over and over again.

• 19:54Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 19:55Ryan Holiday?

  And I think, as you so you mentioned that the laws of human nature is six hundred pages. So there's a percentage of the population that could read a six hundred page book. But how many people are gonna take time to read a six hundred page book two or three times? And the books that have really influenced me have been books that I've interacted with over the course of my life.

• 20:14Robert Greene?

  Right, right.

• 20:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think there's something really special about the daily practice. This is what like, for instance, daily or nightly Bible study is for certain people. It's again, the words are the same, but you're different and what you just went through or are going to go through that day is different. This is that Herakles idea that you never step in the same river twice. I think there's something really cool about revisiting the same ideas over and over again.

• 20:41Robert Greene?

  Well, the thing is, I my plus has always been you have to make ideas your own. You have to take what somebody teaches and you have to put it into your own experience. It can't just be. These dead words.

• 20:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 20:53Robert Greene?

  That you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience. You have to take them, they have to come to life within you, within your own experience. So you read a passage and uh it's not maybe what I'm really going through right now, but you kind of maybe recall some experiences in the past that might be relevant. And then the second day you come upon something that is maybe a little bit closer. And then as you go through it more and more and more, the kind of soaks in and you see more and more access points to your daily experience. And then it can kind of become something that you internalize.

• 21:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I talk about sort of using the confirmation bias like against itself or using the confirmation bias to your advantage. So like I'll hear from people and they'll be like, how did you know on today's entry, the daily stoic, that this is exactly what I needed? Well, the truth is I didn't, right? I wrote it five years ago. And you might be in Australia and someone in America might be reading different entries on the same day. So it's really that we bring to the text exactly what we need. It's why fortune cookies and horoscopes seem to have power is that we see in them what we already knew, but couldn't articulate to ourselves.

• 22:06Ryan Holiday?

  And there's sort of a Delphic quality there where like it's just vague, like your passages are just short enough, just general enough that whatever you're going through, it could feel like that was exactly the advice that you needed that morning.

• 22:22Robert Greene?

  I had the experience, very weird experience with the forty eight laws of power when it first came out. I would go, it was my very first book tour and I would go to, I was in Washington. And I went to the, um, what was it called? Voice of America.

• 22:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Robert Greene?

  And this woman comes running up to me in the hallway saying, God, that book that you just described exactly what I'm going through. Everything is just so perfect. You must have, you must know Washington really well. And the same thing happened to someone who's in the um, in the, what's the word? The charitable world, what do you call that?

• 22:55Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, the non-profit, yeah.

• 22:56Robert Greene?

  The non-profit world. It's the same thing than athletes will say it. So yeah, you kind of project and you, your own emotions, your own experiences of the moment into what you're reading. That's totally viable.

• 23:07Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's also what happens when, it's why Buddhism and Stoicism and Christianity often feel very aligned, even though they didn't particularly influence each other. Because also, when you boil something down to its essence, like in the way that in comedy, the really specific becomes universal, because it's actually not that specific, it's tapped into something uniquely human that everyone can relate to, even if the experiences are very different.

• 23:33Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, very much so.

• 23:35Ryan Holiday?

  I was also thinking when I was, when we were talking about this book, that in a way, maybe, maybe not everyone knows this, but I actually think the daily concept is slightly, it goes back to the very beginning for you, because if I remember correctly, you told me once that the original plan for the forty laws of power was fifty-two laws.

• 23:56Ryan Holiday?

  Which could have been a week, you know, of reading a passage a week, although you, if I remember correctly, you got, you got rid of that specifically, so people didn't do that.

• 24:07Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it was also like playing cards, which there are fifty-two, uh,

• 24:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 24:11Robert Greene?

  No, no, no, I mean, but the calendar, fifty-two weeks. But I mean, what happened was, I mean, I've told the story before, is the publisher, normally, my relationship to publishers is, "Don't tread on me, hands off, get as far away from my material as possible. Do not edit it, I don't trust you." But in this instance, I'm open to their ideas, and in this instance, they said, "Fifty-two laws of power doesn't sound so great. What we really want is forty-eight, and the fifty-two sounded too much like a gimmick."

• 24:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:39Robert Greene?

  And I agree, because I can't be rigid about things.

• 24:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:42Robert Greene?

  So what I did was, I took four of the laws, combined them with other ones. So I didn't get rid of anything, I just kind of made into forty-eight, I just sort of fitted it in.

• 24:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that is the forty-eighth law. The formlessness, right? That actually, they can be moved around and combined with each other.

• 25:01Robert Greene?

  But also violating a law, it seems, don't show your own tricks, but...

• 25:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's true.

• 25:06Robert Greene?

  But it's twenty-three years later, so I don't really care anymore.

• 25:10Ryan Holiday?

  But, and isn't it also funny that, like, so when it's, when you're working on it, it's like, "Could be forty-two, could be forty-eight", um, and then, uh, then, once it's done and in the world, it's like forty-eight is obviously the right number, like, no other number could work.

• 25:27Robert Greene?

  Yeah, people always say, what's the forty-ninth law of power? I said, there's no such thing. It's only forty-eight.

• 25:33Robert Greene?

  Everything in the universe. But you know, numbers have a kind of a feel to them. You know, and so the word for the number forty-eight has a kind of power already in it, which is whereas forty-seven or forty-six doesn't have that kind of resonance.

• 25:49Ryan Holiday?

  Although if it had been the forty-seven laws of power and it had sold millions of copies and had the influence, I think everyone would be saying, obviously, there's no forty-eighth law. There's only forty-seven laws.

• 26:00Robert Greene?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 26:02Ryan Holiday?

  So we sort of looked backwards and we're like, it could have only been the way that it was. But in reality, there was, it was more malleable than.

• 26:10Robert Greene?

  It was. It was. And you know, to be honest with you, when I first started doing the research for God, so many years ago, I had like seventy-two laws.

• 26:19Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 26:19Robert Greene?

  I mean, the original concept was I was going through all my research and Yos, the man who kind of packages my material, did the cover of this book. He said, well, Robert, what do you, how's it coming? And I said, well, I'm working on these kind of laws of power. And he goes, wow, that sounds great.

• 26:37Ryan Holiday?

  Just that phrase, you know?

• 26:38Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Yeah. He goes, I said, yeah, I kind of have like seventy-two. He goes, well, just go with it. And then I sort of like kept reducing and reducing and reducing until it came to forty-eight. So overall, fifty-two, whatever.

• 26:53Ryan Holiday?

  Here is me chatting with Brad Stulberg. His new book, The Practice of Groundedness, is wonderful. I also like his book, Peak Performance. So here's me talking with Brad. Yeah, and I was thinking about this idea of groundedness, which is the new book. Like, I was thinking about how much more literally grounded my life is. Like, I was walking on a dirt road this morning instead of concrete. There were no cars going by. I was outside. Like, I think there's also, you know, none of, almost nowhere you can live in the United States at this point is like sort of pristine nature. But I do think the. Even the suburbs are more natural than the sort of concrete jungle busy city

• 27:37Ryan Holiday?

  life, which I find like, I think it wasn't until I moved out of New York City that I was quite, and then I went back, like I moved out and then I, now when I travel there, particularly as I've gotten older, how much, how viscerally the noise pollution affects me, like, you go through your life not hearing large trucks or horns or jackhammers, and then you hear them and you're like, oh wow, this is awful, like, this isn't natural to hear all the time. And you can get really used to hearing it, so you're not aware of the harm, the percussive harm that's having on your body, but it is there.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, the biologist E. O. Wilson has done fascinating research that basically shows that if you think of our species on a 24-hour clock, for about 23 hours and, I don't know, 57, 56 minutes, we lived in these open spaces in bands and tribes of between 10 and 150 people. So the frenetic tumult of city living, to an extent even suburban living, is very unnatural to how our mind and bodies evolved. Now, are we evolving with it? In some ways, yes, but I think that a lot of modern illnesses, anxiety, depression, you can throw burnout in there, are very much because, like, the pace of cultural

• 28:58Speaker 03

  evolution has outpaced what our mind-body systems can do. And if you put someone in an environment that is extremely frenetic, then it's not surprising that that person will have a tendency to become more frenetic themselves.

• 29:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, although one thing I struggle with, and I talk about this at the beginning of Stillness is the Key, I sort of tell this scene of Seneca in his, in his apartment in Rome, there's all, like, shockingly modern, sort of busy noises. And, and he says, you know, "I force my mind to concentrate and I keep it from straying to things outside itself. All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within." I don't want to say it's guilt, but there is a part of me that thinks, like, you know, if you really are Zen, or you really are Stoic, or you really have done the philosophical work, you should be able to have stillness, or peace, or quiet, or happiness in any environment. And so is there...

• 29:55Ryan Holiday?

  Again, it's not weakness, but is it somewhat of a cheat to just opt out of all that entirely and live a sort of an artificially isolated or, you know, protected or privileged lifestyle? Do you know what I mean?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  For sure. And I think there's a huge spectrum. And perhaps one extreme is living in a monastery where the outside world is completely kept at bay. And then on the other extreme might be living in, you know, Manhattan, excuse me, living in Manhattan. And is either right or wrong? No, I don't like to put a value judgment around it. I think what I am saying, and certainly what my research and reporting has showed, is that for most people, your temperament can get you so far, doing your individual work can get you so far, and environment matters a lot, too. Are there people that have achieved tranquility of mind and calm and, as you would call, stillness, that can be in the

• 31:03Speaker 03

  midst of just total circus and remain at ease and calm? For sure. Are those people few and far between? And is that harder than what most people have the capacity for? Yes, I think so. And then it's like, if you have a choice, why not make it a little bit easier on yourself? I mean, I'd certainly find myself more creative, more calm, more grounded, living outside of a big city than in it. And, you know, life is, for me, more than just like a big self-improvement project, so I might as well be happy here.

• 31:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right. No, it's sort of like, I think this is something you see in meditations a lot. Marcus Aurelius doesn't want to be emperor. It's sort of forced upon him. And so he's writing to himself about, you know, how you can be happy anywhere, you know, how you should focus on, you can retreat inside your soul at any moment, which is all well and good, but it- If he actually, if, if there actually was a path in, in which he could not be emperor and it wasn't an abdication of duty, then, you know, I, I guess I don't see anything philosophically wrong with taking it. So yeah, if you're fleeing to a monastery to escape

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Bingo.

• 32:16Ryan Holiday?

  problems or responsibilities, then, you know, that's, that's not what we're talking about. If, if you're doing it to optimize or refine, or you're doing it because you have a spectrum of options and you're choosing the best option for you, there's probably no problem with that.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I said bingo, cause I think you hit the nail on the head there, man. I think in general, not just when it comes to a place to live, but if you're running away from something or trying to escape something, generally speaking, that's going to come back to butt you in the ass. If you are moving towards something, generally speaking, that's a good decision. And it's a, it's a subtle nuanced difference, but I think that it, it takes you either all the way in a route towards avoidance and diminishing your life, or all the way in a route towards enlarging your life.

• 33:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's well said. Is, are you stepping towards the challenge or are you running away from the challenge?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yep. Or, or in, in, you know, in groundedness, the framework that I use is like core values. So what are your core values? What do you really value? And are you escaping something that's scary? Or are you moving to be in greater alignment with those core values? There's all kinds of extreme examples. Somebody that's in recovery might make the decision to leave a community where there are users, or even just where the physical environment triggers use.

• 33:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Now, is that person weak? I guess it depends on who you're asking, but if that person's core value of sobriety or clear mindedness trumps their core value of community, then of course they're going to leave their community. And I think that so many people, myself included, I think it's almost impossible to live in the 21st century and not be a little bit addicted to conventional definitions of success and all the striving that comes with it. I think place for me plays a big role in that. So if I could get out of a place that felt like I was more in this conventional success, you're defined by what you have, everything is super expensive, to a place more where success is like, you know, I actually

• 34:20Speaker 03

  spent two and a half hours working on my garden, I just feel better as a result.

• 34:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think, I think if you're

• 34:32Ryan Holiday?

  is running, is moving away because it triggers you or, you know, makes it hard to be sober, is that a move of weakness or is it just as easily a move of strength? Because it's coming from a place of self-awareness. So it's, you're saying, look, I had this sort of problem, I don't want to, I don't want to say addiction is self-discipline, but you're saying, I have a problem being disciplined about something. So I'm going to, to make a giant move out of discipline to, to reduce my exposure to potential lapses in discipline, right? So I like that.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, are you, are you resisting the peanut M&Ms on your counter? Or are you not buying them at the grocery store?

• 35:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  And for a lot of people, it's easier not to buy them at the grocery store. And I think it's important too, to call out, like, the ability to move does require a certain set of like, I don't love to use the word privilege broadly, but I'll use it here, a certain amount of privilege. And I think it's really funny, because I first started tinkering with this idea back in 2017, in a story I wrote for Outside Magazine, when my family was getting serious about leaving the Bay Area. And I got all these notes saying, well, you know, how could you ever suggest that people move? It takes so much privilege. You're just another person that is out of touch. And of course, all those notes were coming from people that lived in like, New York City, LA, or San Francisco.

• 35:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  So this isn't necessarily for everyone, but I think probably for lots of people that tune into this podcast, I think that it's often not a lack of privilege or a lack of autonomy, it's a lack of imagination to make decisions like this.

• 36:12Ryan Holiday?

  No, I talk about moving and immigration a little bit in the, in the new book on courage. And, and it's interesting, people, some people use sort of lack of resources as a reason to move, and some people use it as an excuse not to move. But I'm always amazed when people, you know, they find out that I live on a farm, or that I moved to Texas, or whatever, they're sort of like, how did you, like, how could you do that? And it's like, by making a lot less money than you do, right? Like, the people that are often amazed that one could do something like that are actually not Are not impressed or surprised by the lack of, by the privilege that made it possible.

• 36:54Ryan Holiday?

  It's mostly about the commitment or the actual want or desire or sort of, again, it sounds like an overstatement, but also courage. Like, I guarantee you that what I purchased my farm for is less than many people I know's apartment in New York City. So, so it's often not so much an issue of resources, but about determination, commitment, or as you said, sort of core values. If it's important to you, you can figure it out. Again, this is not true, someone who's trapped in a, in a, you know, in a projects in an inner city or something.

• 37:35Ryan Holiday?

  There are obviously some people who are, who are unable to change circumstances or environment for, for a bunch of reasons that are outside their control. But I think you tend to find the people who are most, who are quickest with the, oh, I could never do that, actually could very easily do it. They've just decided not to.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 37:58Ryan Holiday?

  So you, you, you do open the book pretty early on, you get into the Stoics, you, you talk about sort of acceptance and you talk about like, like life is not, which I think is a sort of very core Stoic principle, which is like, life is not easy, life is not always fun. And if you don't understand this, you will suffer on top of that because you will be surprised, you will be resentful, you will be, but you will bemoan it. You will, you will suffer doubly as opposed to the person who simply comes to terms with the reality of existence, which both the Stoics and the Buddhists say is not without suffering.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Right, and the Taoist too. I mean, that's a theme throughout the book is, you know, my whole model is to go after truth. I call it truth with a capital T. So principles that I can be damn near certain are broadly applicable and reliably play out the same for people in different situations. So I'm interested in like, what does the modern science have to say? What is ancient wisdom? Not necessarily just one tradition, but where is there convergence? And then what's like real life practice? In here on acceptance, all the ancient wisdom traditions point towards this truth in the same way. Stoicism, you said there's that quote in the book, if you're going to use your, the exact quote might be a little bit different, but if you're going to use your hands and your feet, like your hands and your feet are going to get sore and calloused. Right. And what that means, if you're going to live a life, you're going to get beat up.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  And Buddhism, there's the parable of the second arrow, which says that the first arrow, which is something that you can't necessarily control, either internally illness, externally, something in a relationship, in your work, whatever it might be, that hurts. But the second arrow, which is your judgment, your repression, your delusion, your magical thinking, that ends up hurting worse. And then in Taoism, the whole notion of the way is dancing in the flow of life and not resisting the dance. So yeah, it's such a powerful thing. And something that the traditional model of, you know, success, pretty much like swings

• 40:07Speaker 03

  the entire opposite way on. You know, if something's going wrong, like you buy stuff and tweet, or you numb it with substance, or you go on social media and you airbrush whatever image is wrong so it looks better. So that's a theme throughout the book. I know it's core to your writing too, is that so much of what we're doing in modern society and really is causing so many of our modern ailments, because we're wired away from these values that ultimately lead to like a deeper, more fulfilling kind of success.

• 40:40Ryan Holiday?

  I was very glad to talk with Tom Nichols on The Assault on Modern Thinking. His book, The Death of Expertise, is a must, must read. Definitely a book for and of these times, so check that out.

• 40:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a great Richard Feynman quote where he's talking about how hard it is to really know something and the work that it goes into truly, deeply understand an idea or a concept or a field of study. And when you see these people making sort of glib assumptions or quips or remarks or sweeping sort of generalizations, you know, he was saying, I know it's that true because they couldn't have done the work to possibly have the certainty that they're having.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Scott, in the book, I quote the utterly ridiculous human being, Scott Adams, who unfortunately, and I was really, I mean, I really like his cartooning and, you know, he's good at cartooning. I mean, his punchlines are funny and the drawings are amusing, but this is also a guy who said, give me an hour with, you know, any subject matter expert and I can become an expert on a thing.

• 41:49Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so I know Scott a little bit and I've spent some time with him and like you, I, obviously everyone's familiar with Dilbert. That's almost like the extreme end of the spectrum of this where you bait, it's almost like you have narcissism and then you combine it with the feedback loop of social media and you get a person who's basically become untethered from reality that I think any thinking person immediately goes like, what is wrong with this guy? And yet the irony is there's, there's a huge percentage or a huge number of people cumulatively who are, who are not only like not suspicious, they're like, this guy fucking gets it.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, because, again, it's, you know, it's being in the, it's being in the treehouse with the cool kids saying, "We're all the smart kids, you know, not those stupid nerds, you know, down in the lab." And, and it's reassuring, right? It's like, this guy's very rich, and he's famous, and he's in the entertainment world, and, you know, and obviously, you know, he must really know what's what. Part of that, too, is that we have become obsessive about the idea that if you're good at one thing, you're good at anything. Yeah. It's like, "Well, this guy's an award-winning cartoonist. He must know a lot about foreign

• 43:08Speaker 04

  policy," you know, which is inane and silly. But I, I mean, you talk about the feedback loop of social media, and that's a big part of it, of people saying, "Wow," you know, I mean, I guess I kind of like the fact that a lot of my Twitter presence is people telling me how much, how wrong I am and how much they disagree. But it really is important to understand some of the limitations here. And I'll give you an example. I kind of surprised, I was in Switzerland, and a graduate student who was just finished her dissertation on Russian politics said, "You know, I really want your opinion about this because I, you know, I, I'm curious about the better sources, and did I use the right stuff?" And I said,

• 43:52Speaker 04

  "Look, I wrote my dissertation 33 years ago. You wrote yours yesterday, and on this, you're the new expert. It's okay to turn it over. It's okay to say, 'Look, I have a lot of accumulated knowledge, and I can help you with some things.'" But it's also okay to say, "You know, I'm not required to be this, this omnipotent and omniscient 24 hours a day." I, I love the fact that in some environments I've been in, sub-years ago, about 12 years ago, I went on a fellowship to the Kennedy School, and I was immediately the dumbest guy in the room, and it was invigorating. The problem is, people don't like that feeling anymore. Everybody has to say, "Well, you're not smarter than I am. I know all about nuclear weapons.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  I understand Iranian centrifuge inspections. You can't talk down to me." And all of that comes from... I mean, I have a pretty healthy ego about the things I'm good at, about my writing, about the work I've done. But it's almost a relief to be able to say, "Wow, someone smarter than me is helping me out here." People don't feel that way anymore. They take it because they are narcissistic and childlike about this. Anytime someone says, "Let me explain something to you," they say, "What are you saying? I'm stupid?"

• 45:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean...

• 45:07Speaker 04

  Maybe I am, a little bit.

• 45:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think this goes back to Socrates, that the essence of wisdom is what you don't know. And the Socratic method is based on what? It's the asking of questions, not the making of statements. And I think social media in particular prioritizes assertions of fact and opinion compared to questions or uncertainties.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  And it prioritizes negativity.

• 45:35Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Nobody comes on to Twitter or to Facebook to say, "Hey, I really liked this." And it's funny, because people, they will even zero in on the negativity and strain out the positivity. Every Saturday, I get together with my friend Dennis Herring, who's a Grammy, you know, humble brag, my friend, the Grammy-winning music producer. And we sit around and shoot the breeze about bad 1970s music while we're listening to old Casey Kasem recordings, old Casey Kasem replays on XM Radio. And about half the time, I'll say, "Oh, I really remember this song, and I really love this song, and I have fond memories of this song." But the minute I say, "Man, this song is crap,"

• 46:21Speaker 04

  people will zero in and say, "You're negative about everything." Because it's almost like our brains are wired now on social media only to see the negative comment. Because it's a challenge. No one takes a positive comment as a challenge. No one takes a comment that, hey, I really like, you know, the Allman Brothers as a, you know, as a challenge to say, oh, yeah, well, what about, you know, Marshall Tucker? But if you say, I don't like the Allman Brothers, people say, aha, now I have something to fight about. And this is why you're wrong. And this is why you should do this. And, and I think it's just, you know, Facebook admitted this recently, and it's in the book, in my, my new book, Facebook admitted, our algorithm appeals to a basic human attraction to division and conflict.

• 47:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, you know, it's funny that you brought up that, you know, some people think that the book is about the failures of expertise, because there, there have been failures of expertise, which is precisely what people seize upon to undermine expertise generally. Like, I think about how many, you know, in retrospect, ridiculous or incorrect takes, there must, you're sort of dating this back to the 70s. I think about like, what health or diet advice must have been like in the 70s. And then, then we wonder, like, why people don't trust the medical establishment or the FDA now. It is problematic. But, but it's, it's interesting that we, the failures of expertise have not, have

• 47:51Ryan Holiday?

  made us more likely to accept dubious information from even less credible people.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Because they're an excuse. And this is the problem with the failures of expertise. And this is where experts, I think, have to own some of this. Because the public has been so rough on them about the failures rather than the successes, that experts now don't want to engage with the public and don't want to own their failures. Look at the beginning of the pandemic, where Fauci and, you know, CDC, they admit, and they said, look, we didn't want to cause a run on masks. We screwed up the mask advice. We're owning that. We're sorry. And they're saying, aha, so you admit that you're just a bunch of lying charlatans that we should never listen to about anything.

• 48:32Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  And that makes experts gun shy to say, you know, if we ever admit a mistake, that means we have to just, like, everything else we ever say becomes irrelevant. I had someone say to me, for example, when I was doing a talk on, a book talk in person on the death of expertise. And I pointed out how I had given my own Dr. Hell about. Eggs, right? Yeah. I said, Doc, you told me not to eat eggs. And he, he sort of shrugged and he said, yeah, we got that wrong. Okay, well, first of all, who figured out that eggs were okay for you? Other doctors doing other studies that fact checked. You know, this is called peer review and science, which is a process. But a guy in the audience said, well, I think it's very clear that this shows that doctors

• 49:17Speaker 04

  don't know anything about heart disease. In other words, I want to drink a bottle of scotch and eat a cheeseburger for breakfast. And now I can, because I caught you out on this one thing that now invalidates that you don't know anything about anything. And this is really a problem of, again, I keep coming back to this description of childlike, but you know, adults understand that other well-meaning adults will occasionally make mistakes and get things wrong. What children do is to say, aha, I caught you and now I'm going to dunk on you and you never, I never have to listen to you again because this one time, you know, you were wrong about something. And people extend that even to cases where experts were not wrong.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Someone pointed out the other day that when talking about the vaccine, you know, the anti-vaxxers saying, well, this is the same FDA that approved thalidomide, the, the drug that caused birth defects. And of course, the FDA, in fact, did not approve thalidomide and saved millions of Americans from potentially deadly effects because the FDA said, we looked at this and we don't think it's safe. And yet people have got it into their head because an expert somewhere in Europe failed. All experts failed. Interesting. Yeah. And that, and that this thing that happened over 60 years ago, like is, is immediately, you know, if you say, look, you should really trust experts, they say, oh yeah? Well, what about thalidomide in the space shuttle?

• 50:42Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's funny too, because there's this weird kind of double standard where like there's this great graphic, it was like Joe Rogan, and I know that, actually know the owners of this company, so it was extra funny to me, but it was like Joe Rogan questioning, you know, a bunch of peer review, you know, all this data, like, let's say about vaccines or whatever, and then it was like, meanwhile, Joe Rogan endorsing Onnit AlphaBrain product, which has, you know, one study with 60 participants that found a minor, you know, bit of a positive correlation, and that's sufficient. So it's, I think your point about being childlike,

• 51:22Ryan Holiday?

  what we see in this is actually not a rejection of expertise at all, but a cherry picking of expertise that fits what one wants, and then ironically, holding those experts to the most preposterously loose standards I've ever, to go back to Scott Adams, that Scott Adams' really only credibility is that this guy makes a newspaper cartoon that's been popular and is wealthy because of it, but his predictions are like overwhelmingly incorrect and wrong all the time, you know, objectively so. If this is gonna happen, that doesn't happen, this is gonna happen, that doesn't happen. And of course-

• 51:57Speaker 04

  Jenny McCarthy, Jenny McCarthy and the anti-vax movement. What are your qualifications? Well, I'm beautiful, and I was in Playboy, and I'm an actress, and I did, she literally said at one point, "I went to Google University."

• 52:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right. No, and that's what I think is interesting about Scott Adams, is like, if he were to be held to the skepticism or scrutiny that the things that are being tossed out were held to, I mean, he would, he would crumble like a, like a house of cards, right? So it's this weird picking and choosing of expertise, and then a moving of the goalposts or the standards by which one judges the experts, and it really all comes back down to, well, here's what I want to do, and I'm looking, or what I'm afraid to do or not do, or whatever it is, and how can I pick and choose information that either allows me to do this, absolves me of responsibility, or blame, and then therefore I can be whoever

• 52:55Ryan Holiday?

  I want to be. That's, so it's, it's this weird, not rejection of expertise, but, but a misuse of expertise, so one does not have to be changed or challenged.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  And this is why when people say, "Well, you know, I did my research." I always come back at them and say, "No, you didn't do research. You surfed around the internet until you found the thing that agreed with what you wanted to think in the first place."

• 53:19Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah, did you do your own peer-reviewed study?

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:23Ryan Holiday?

  You went to medical school? No, you Googled around and you looked at, you know, healthinfo, mindbody.com and you found...

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Even worse, even worse than that, you started by saying, "I think vaccines are unsafe." So you went and typed in "vaccines are unsafe," and of course, it brought up, you know, 100 sludgy websites that will, that are run by, you know, kooks and charlatans who will tell you that vaccines are unsafe. Well, okay, you found what you were looking for. And then, after you've spent all afternoon going down that rabbit hole and watching, you know, YouTube videos and looking at Facebook memes, you start walking around and saying, "Well, you know, I'm very informed on this. I did my research." A guy asked a question during one of my talks about this where he said, "Why should I have to listen to these experts when the journals, like The Lancet

• 54:13Speaker 04

  or the New England Journal of Medicine are online and I can read them anyway?" And I said, and he got very, you know, I mean, I won't say upset, but he was offended. I said, "They're not written for you."

• 54:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  "You don't even know what you're looking at." I said, "That's like reading Architectural Digest, thinking you're gonna build a house." They're written by experts for experts, based on foundational knowledge that all of them already have. They are not there to peruse the back issues. I mean, you know, I was like, "Medical students and researchers spend years trolling through these..." "Trolling," I shouldn't say trolling, "trolling through these articles to assemble them so that then they can be judged and tested against each other." And then a new paper, this is, again, this is called science. This is how it's done. But again, I had that weird feeling of, "How did this happen?"

• 55:09Speaker 04

  That the ordinary citizen, and you know, when it comes to medical stuff, I'm as ordinary as it gets. Why don't anybody think that they could just like, say, "Well, I'll just go read The Lancet." And that'll, you know, and I'll be up to snuff on this stuff.

• 55:23Ryan Holiday?

  Today is the last day, the last day to sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge. I'd love to have you join me. I'll be doing it alongside you. It's 21 actionable challenges, one per day, built around the best Stoic wisdom, but for what? How to be better in the new year. This is the time when we start to think about what we're going to do next, where all the time went, what we wish had gone differently or better, how we're still struggling with this or that, how we'd like to stop doing this or that. And that's what the New Year, New Year Challenge is all about. It's my favorite thing that we do, and it's three weeks of actionable challenges presented in one email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It should help

• 56:07Ryan Holiday?

  you snap out of this trance we've all found ourselves in and help make 2022 your best year yet, no matter what's happening in the world around you. Go to dailystoic.com/challenge to join us. I'd love to have you. I'm challenging you to join me. I can't wait to see you. Dailystoic.com/challenge.

• 56:28Ryan Holiday?

  And then, talking to Julia Baird, her book on Queen Victoria is spectacular, a biography everyone should read. And her new book, Phosphorescence, was just a joy for me to read, one of my favorite books this year. So here's me talking to Julia Baird.

• 56:46Ryan Holiday?

  There's a, there's a river in Texas. It starts from a natural spring. It's in San Marcos. And there's this sort of rare species of, I think it might be the only place. It's like a, it's like an underwater rice. I forget what it's called, but it's this sort of wavy, like tall grass. And the river is, it's like millions of gallons are just coming up. You see where the river starts. It just starts out of nowhere. And, and it's, you know, millions of gallons are just pouring out. And you get underwater, you can kind of swim against the current, like almost like a treadmill or one of those infinity pools. And you're just watching these like waves of grass, you know, go sway into the current like it's,

• 57:29Ryan Holiday?

  you know, you're in the middle of the prairie somewhere, but you're underwater. And it's one of the most sort of incredible rhythmic things that I've ever experienced in my life.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:38Ryan Holiday?

  And you, yeah, I think you go and you experience one of those things and then you leave. To me, what the idea of the book, your book is, is like that energy that you bring back into the world, we need more of that.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Yes, I think that's right. And it's almost hard to put your finger on. And that's what I was trying to to grasp. Like, what is that? When you're sitting on a hill in some area where there's no light pollution, you're looking at the stars, like, what is that? We all know that that soothes us. We all know that it makes us feel better, but but but why? And and that's why I think, you know, scientists are trying to get to it.

• 58:20Ryan Holiday?

  And why have we designed life to be literally the opposite of that and to have as little of that as humanly possible? That is the strange, strange thing about the modern world.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  The infinite distraction. I think that's, yeah, that's right.

• 58:36Ryan Holiday?

  But even just environmentally, right? Like, like, for instance, on the Gulf Coast in America, they it's somewhat recently, there's this like law that because turtles are attracted to light, you can't have lights on any building that faces the ocean. So it's pretty incredible.

• 58:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:54Ryan Holiday?

  But you're sort of walking along the ocean, it's completely dark. And it's you can actually see the stars and it's wonderful. But to think that, like, this was a thing they had to this, it's this incredible gift. Anyone that experiences experiences it loves it, just as if, you know, you you get out of the city and you're away from the light pollution, you can actually see the stars, you're like, this is incredible. And then you're like, this only exists by accident, or this only exists because they rammed this unpopular law down people's throats. If people had their, if people had the freedom to choose, they would choose not this, even though they love it when they have it. It's insane.

• 59:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's so true. It's like, it's almost like we're becoming toddlers again that need to relearn attention. I don't know about you, but when I write, I download, I think, the Freedom App, so it locks all of my other internet access on my computer. And I don't get it, because otherwise I'm back. And then sometimes I have to go and put my phone like the other end of the house or something. So I'm not looking at that. I have to. I have to really fight for my attention. And that's why I have eco resorts where they promise you, you can't get wifi. Um, because we get distracted, but the more the world, you know, has become urbanized. And we only tipped over a few years ago into more people living in urban than regional centres.

• 1:00:16Speaker 05

  The more we're going to have to be reminded of these mountain, growing mountain of evidence about how good green is for us. The side of green, even in plants, even in our house, like in our neighbourhoods, in our communities, how crucial that is. I was just reading an article this morning about the shrinking backyard in Australia. Um, and what that's going to mean in terms of climate and creating kind of little heat pools. So, um, yeah, it's, um, I was reminded of this too. When the, so I'm not sure if you're aware of this, like this, this growing, um, forest therapy movement. And I went and met, um, uh, Professor King Lee in Tokyo to talk to him about it. And he is a very busy and in-demand man.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  Um, um, Shinrin Yoko is, uh, Yoko is what it's, um, called this. So, and, and people are being taught around the world to be forest therapists. And also to go on these, uh, you know, um, walks into natural areas and use all their five senses. And take it in slowly. And, and I find that wonderful in the sense that that's what people do. And obviously it's not too expensive and all tied up with eco resorts that they, you know, that not everyone can access. That's a great thing to be doing, but there's also strikes me at the same time that it's, it's almost sad that we have to be taught how to do that again.

• 1:01:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yeah, like that, uh, you mentioned indigenous peoples. It's like we're paying, we're rediscovering a thing that was, has been well-known for, uh, thousands of years by people that we not only didn't listen to, but tried to take away. Not only do we take the stuff away from them, we took them away from it and tried to indoctrinate them with our understanding of reality. To their detriment and our detriment.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  That's right. And, and I mean, when you think about one of the central tenets, as, as a non-indigenous person, I won't, won't e- explain it as well as it should be explained. But the central tenet. Um, that Aboriginal people in Australia always talk about is listening to country. You listen to country and in a way that's a, it's a psychologically soothing thing for a person to be, take time out and be still and get off your devices and listen to country. But there's a second part of that, which is, is, is country sick now? Like, what are we doing to country?

• 1:02:41Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  Are, are we, um, caring for it? And are, are we disconnected from it? Are we taming it and conquering it and plundering it and mining it? Or are we nurturing it? Um, and Aboriginal people have always been custodians of the land. That's what we, um, you know, the phrase that we always use. And that's caretakers and that's a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be human.

• 1:03:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and I mean, there's also this sort of myth making or revisionism that we can tell about, you know, first peoples where they also had problems with overhunting and not, uh, sort of burning large swaths of land to do what they want. I mean, human beings, I think, just generally have this tendency of, of like, sort of, there's the part of us that appreciates land and wants to be a custodian of it. Then there's the other part of us that wants something for it. And so we exploit it and we ravage it and we steal from it. And we don't realize that what we're really doing is stealing from ourselves and stealing from the people that we claim to care about, which is our family and, you know, subsequent generations.

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

  Right, exactly, for everyone. Um, yeah, I mean, I haven't seen evidence of that, you, you know, in, in Australian history. And we have the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, sixty five thousand years. And one of the big things that actually has been an issue is, um, that Aboriginal people always,

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  did burning as a way of controlling the climate and controlling the, um,

• 1:04:15Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  The, the bushfires. So we, we're having, we have, like, having a lot of discussions around the times of these, like, horrific bushfires about whether, whether we've not. Like.

• 1:04:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, we're rejecting their ancient wisdom on how, you know, if you sort of take over certain functions from nature, then you also have to take over some of the destructive functions of nature, or you make yourself super, super vulnerable.

• 1:04:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:43Ryan Holiday?

  It's like in California, like a million acres a year would burn on its own. And then now, nobody burns anything. And then the whole state catches on fire and people go, how could this happen? It's like, this has been happening for a million years.

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Exactly. We just have so much to learn on that front, I think. We'd better do it quickly.

• 1:05:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, or, or there won't be anything, anything left to learn. One of the things I was going to ask you, I have some Victoria questions, which we'll loop back to, but I was curious, you know, like, going through what you went through, I was struck when I, and obviously before I knew what you had gone through, one of the things I was struck by when I was reading about her life, was just how much pain she must have been in as a human being, or just throughout her life. Not just the pain of the loss of her husband and the pain of childbirth, but it sounded like when they, when they sort of looked at her body after death, they were like, how did this woman stand this?

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  I know. And that was one of those things I was awkward about, because I realized that too. That's why she wanted to be carried around by strong servants a lot of the time. I mean, childbirth had literally kind of ravaged her body in a way that, and she would never be examined by doctors and, you know, so she, and she never received any help for what must have been, you know, an ongoing, very difficult physical condition. So that gave me a lot more insight and compassion into the fact that she was not physically mobile. If you're not physically mobile, you're going to have other attendant health issues and so on. So, yeah, and that was that the doctor found that she, yeah, that she'd had a prolapse

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  on her. On her um on her deathbed when he examined her and it's a thing of like, do we tell that story when we tell a queen? Is that like too much um you know, like you know, going into her her privacy? Is it something we should know, we shouldn't know? And you don't want to be prurient about it, but we also need to understand that in, you know, centuries past and and still today, what what childbirth can do to women and what they endure silently. Um, and

• 1:06:57Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, I I think it is important to talk about it. As you think about someone like Queen Elizabeth, we sort of marvel at her decades and decades of service. But then you're like, what if you found out she was also in chronic pain every single moment of that service? You realize like, oh, this wasn't like an impressive person. This was like a superhero. Like, this is this is incomprehensible that a person could have done this.

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, but they talk about the veins of iron that went through Victoria's character. That's right. And they didn't have, you know, the the pain relief in the in the way that they did now. And a lot of her uncles had been addicted to opium and had gout and like had done, you know, like were massively in debt and indulged every, you know, kind of gambling and like dozens of mistresses and all the rest of it. And she was so upright. Um, and but also, but think about another thing that she was constantly um attacked for, which was her reclusiveness. She worked. She worked very hard, but she didn't want to go out into public. And she um didn't want to leave the comfort of her carriage a lot of the time. Um, towards the end of her life, when she had a big jubilee, she

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  didn't get out. The it drew up in front of the um abbey or the cathedral, and she stayed in there for the rest of the ceremony. But now we would understand that if we know, again, that you're right, that she was in chronic pain.

• 1:08:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know Churchill had that joke about, I forget who he's talking about, but he's like, "They're a modest man who has much to be modest about." It's sort of funny, you know, we admire sort of modesty or humility or restraint, but then you look at someone like Queen Elizabeth, or you look at Queen Victoria and you're like, "Oh, but this person, this person is that way." But they could get, if you look at their predecessors, particularly their male predecessors, or, you know, kings and royalty of any nationality in any country, you're like, think of what you could get away with that you have chosen not to let yourself get away with. That, I'm always very impressed, the sort of voluntary regulation.

• 1:09:05Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, she could have done whatever she wanted, instead she chose to work very hard.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know. I mean, she did stretch the limits of constitutionality. She did, you know, have a visceral dislike of William Gladstone, tried to prevent him from coming Prime Minister. She corresponded with generals in the field directly about how to conduct their wars. So, I mean, when there was overreach, that was the kind of thing she did, but you're, but you're right. I mean, she conducted herself in a way, she didn't, she burst into tears upon discovering how close she was to the throne. And I think we know it's a heavy burden, and inherited power is a very peculiar thing. I think we kind of can fundamentally recognize that. But she grasped it and she performed her duty.

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  And so England has had the Victorian and the current, you know, Elizabethan eras of these women who should never be underestimated as, you know, decorative or functional because of how hard they work. And the fact that, you know, that both of them have been the most famous working women of their time.

• 1:10:17Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things, there's a couple of things in that book that you just sort of threw off offhandedly that really hit me. And one of them connects to the new book also. And I ended up doing a bunch of research on it when I read it. But you sort of threw out this weird thing about William Gladstone, how he liked to just go cut down trees as a hobby. And that strikes me as a, I mean, it's a form of, I guess, forest bathing, but also just sort of hobby and getting lost in the flow state of doing a thing. Kind of an unusual hobby, but I just, I love the peculiarity of it.

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. That's so smart. I've not had anyone weave together these two books before. So that's quite a delightful insight for me. That's right. I mean, and he would do it for months at a time.

• 1:11:02Ryan Holiday?

  Thousands of trees he chopped down in his lifetime.

• 1:11:05Speaker 05

  Three months. And then go off and really, I don't know, think about what to do about Ireland. Read a few like, you know, heavy tomes. And he would, you know, conduct a few sermons. He was like, he gave a few sermons for his servants, which I'm sure they were thrilled about every week. I mean, Victoria said she spoke to him, he speaks to me as if it was a public meeting. And that was part of his problem with the awkwardness of his relationship with her is that, you know, he was kind of strict and booming and very, very smart and but possibly charmless. Whereas, you know, Benjamin Disraeli was so elegant in prose and manner and constantly complimenting her. And she was utterly charmed by it. I

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  think he was, you know, really great company. So that was part of that. But no, I think that's it. He did get into, that's how he got into flow. And this is a man who gave four to five hour speeches, you know, on the stump, which itself is hard to fathom as well.

• 1:12:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right. He must have been practicing them in his head as he was doing this.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, the dot points for his work. But, you know, imagine the luxury of being able to do that now. Like, we don't all get a day off, let alone a weekend.

• 1:12:19Ryan Holiday?

  Demand more of yourself in 2022. And one of the ways you can do that is by joining us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. All you have to do is go to dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. Remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this challenge and all our challenges for free. But sign up, seriously. Think about what one positive change, one good new habit is worth to you. Think about what could be possible if you handed yourself over to a little bit of a program. We all pushed ourselves together. That's what we're going to do in the challenge. I'm going to be doing it. I do the challenges, all of them, alongside everyone else. I'm looking forward to connecting with everyone in the Discord challenge, all the other bonuses. Anyways, check it out. New

• 1:13:02Ryan Holiday?

  Year, New You, the Daily Stoic Challenge. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge.