Daily Stoic Sundays: Should I Watch The News

Ryan discusses the merits of watching the news, and how to tune out distractions, with Steven Pressfield. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Sunday edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My name is Ryan Holiday. For over a decade, I've been writing and thinking and talking about Stoicism. And so each Sunday now, we're going to be rolling out a special episode that will be either me riffing on a number of topics, maybe me riffing or expanding on an article that I've written, or deep diving into an idea that I think's important, that I think you'll benefit from. So I hope you like it. Support our sponsors who make this episode possible. And of course, keep studying, keep reading, and thank you. I'm here with Stephen Pressfield, the amazing author of The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite moments in The War of Art, I think it's in The War of Art, you tell this story about your hard at work in a novel, I think you were like living in a trailer in central California, or something like this, and you finish the novel and you go over to your friend's house, who's also an author, you like for congratulations or something. And as you're telling this to him, you can hear on the radio that Nixon has been impeached. And you said you'd missed all of Watergate. And I love that, and I honestly, I probably think about that once a week, because we live in times that are as equally tumultuous and divisive, and there's more news than ever. And so this idea of like, you should be focused on your work, you should be focused on big

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  picture, you should be focused on your own self-improvement, not monitoring the news in real time. How do you, as someone whose work requires so much concentration and focus, how do you tune out those kinds of distractions?

• 1:45Steven Pressfield?

  That's a great question, because it's like, I'm like an MSNBC junkie.

• 1:49Ryan Holiday?

  I know, I was on MSNBC once, and you emailed me like two minutes after, you're like, "I just saw you." And I was like, "No, what's he doing?"

• 1:56Steven Pressfield?

  That's right. You were on with the other person named Holiday, whatever her name is, I forgot it. Anyway, I do believe in being a citizen. We're in a democracy, and you do have to kind of, you don't want to tune it out. It's a tough... You know, compartmentalization exercise. When I was doing that other thing, I was, you know, we talked before, you and I, about how my bugaboo was never finishing something.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Steven Pressfield?

  And when I was working, I was living in this little house and I was like, I had to finish this book, come hell or high water.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Steven Pressfield?

  And I just, I tuned everything out. And I think back on that year, it was a great year to have that.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Steven Pressfield?

  I just wrote and read and did nothing else. But I think you do have to sort of balance it because we are citizens.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 2:41Steven Pressfield?

  As you know, and you know this from the ancient world, in ancient Athens, if there was a revolution in the city and you didn't take part, when the revolution was over, they fined you.

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 2:52Steven Pressfield?

  Because, a heavy fine.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Steven Pressfield?

  Because they thought, we don't want guys sitting on the sidelines. In fact, the word in ancient Greek or Greek for a person who does not participate is idiotes, you know? And so they wanted, we're in a democracy. At least we once were in a democracy.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  Not to push back, but I think the problem is, and it doesn't surprise me that we internalize this, but people now confuse watching the news with participating.

• 3:21Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm not sure they're the same thing.

• 3:23Steven Pressfield?

  That's true, yeah. That's true.

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  But, but I totally agree. You know what's interesting? I bet more people watch the news than vote.

• 3:31Steven Pressfield?

  I bet, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Which is, you know, sort of a sign of, in the ancient world, the big distinction between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicureans believed you should attend to your own self-improvement. And the Stoics believed you should attend to your own self-improvement, but you had to be active in politics. And so I totally agree that we have to be active. I think the problem is, people have just become news junkies. I'm just not sure watching the news equals being informed.

• 3:58Steven Pressfield?

  True. Which is, leads to another question of, what can you do as a citizen these days? You know, it's really flaws in our system where, you know, they say that the American people want A, B, C, D.

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Steven Pressfield?

  And then you look at what Congress and the president have delivering, which is none of that. So it's really... How do you participate? You know, there's not marches in the streets anymore.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, I mean, yeah. Maybe it's like we need more people running for office than, you know, complaining about people who are currently in office. And I think the Stoics would certainly agree that it's about actually, you know, having some skin in the game. I read this fascinating article a couple of months ago that was like in the State Department. The State Department has the access to the best intelligence in the world, right? And we're facing, you know, we got a Russia problem, we got a China problem. But one of the books that they're passing to the State Department is Thucydides. Like they're reading history of the Peloponnesian War.

• 4:56Steven Pressfield?

  Good for them, they should.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Because Spartan and Athens, you know, America, China, the ascendant power, the dominant power. So I think that that's maybe something else I would sort of want the listener to think about here is like, getting real time information is not necessarily the best way to be informed. And that perhaps what we need, or what I would urge people to think about is like go to the deeper, like I could probably learn more about wrapping my head around China by reading your novel, Tides of War, than angry tweets from a bunch of misinformed journalists. Do you know what I mean?

• 5:30Steven Pressfield?

  This is why I salute you for doing your reading list every month.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, thank you.

• 5:34Steven Pressfield?

  You know, if it, if people could, you know, I can do it. If other people could do it, it would be great.

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  But the, but the really hard part is there is, especially if you have smart friends or you're in well-educated circles, there is an immense amount of peer pressure to show that you are up on things.

• 5:50Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  And one of my favorite quotes from epic teens, he says, "If you wish to improve," and I think this goes to your point about finishing that novel, "Just be content to be seen as clueless or ignorant on some matters."

• 6:02Steven Pressfield?

  Ah, that's a great one. I never heard that before.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Can you go, I didn't, I didn't hear about that. Tell me, you know, like, I don't know.

• 6:11Steven Pressfield?

  Well, I certainly missed Watergate completely, I can tell you that, yeah.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And here's the thing, you following Watergate, I'm not sure it would have changed Watergate.

• 6:20Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  And I was thinking about this too, it's like, if you don't know who you're gonna vote for, then you should watch the debates. If you do know who you're gonna vote for, watching the debates is just crappy entertainment. But it somehow feels like you're contributing. You know, this isn't American Idol, you're not voting, you know, on the phone as the process goes.

• 6:39Steven Pressfield?

  The other thing, in all seriousness, is that... When I watch the news or those shows, a lot of it for me is a reality check. Because we're bombarded with so many lies.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:50Steven Pressfield?

  And so many spun interpretations. That if you're not careful, you can start to think to yourself, gee, is that right? Is that really the way to look at this thing?

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:00Steven Pressfield?

  And so it's great for me to hear certain people articulate a political point of view. And I go, yeah, that's, I agree with that. That's what, you know, the reality is. It's hard to know what the reality is. I'm sure if we lived in Soviet Russia, that you'd be so bombarded by Pravda and Izvesti and all that stuff, that you just, you have no choice, but you know.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:22Steven Pressfield?

  And which I'm kind of worried that we're getting to that state.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, it's like, information is abundant and truth is increasingly rare.

• 7:31Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  And I think, yeah, the philosopher's job is to find truth. Wherever you can.

• 7:36Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  But to make sure, yeah, you're not consuming so much information that you you lose sight of truth.

• 7:41Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. If you're looking for some way to wrench some good out of this strange surreal experience that has been the quarantine and the social distancing situation that many of us are stuck in, I invite you to join us in the Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge. It's 14 days of Stoic-inspired challenges and exercises that will help you seize this moment and turn it into some positive. And on top of that, $5 from every order goes to support frontline first responders, people who are not as fortunate as us and are struggling to make ends meet in this difficult time. So check it out, dailystoic.com/alive time. You can do it with me, starting March 30th. Of course, you can sign up after as well. But we're going to be doing this over the next two weeks.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's going to be wonderful. Check it out, dailystoic.com/alive time.